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The Drunken Odyssey

~ A Podcast About the Writing Life

The Drunken Odyssey

Tag Archives: The Force Awakens

Episode 293: A Star Wars Roundtable (Happy Life Day!)

23 Saturday Dec 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Science Fiction, Star Wars

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Episode 8, Porgs, Rian Johnson, Star Wars, The 1978 Christmas Special, The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi

Episode 293 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Episode 293

In this week’s episode, Tod Caviness, Julian Chambliss, Dianne Turgeon Richardson, and Jared Silvia join me in a roundtable discussion of the Star Wars Christmas Special of 1978 and maybe got a few other topics in there as well.

Star Wars roundtable


Episode 293 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Episode 258: A Star Wars Roundtable!

04 Thursday May 2017

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Star Wars

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Dianne Turgeon Richardson, George Lucas: A Life, Julian Chambliss, Kevin Hutchinson, Rogue One A Star Wars Story, The Force Awakens, Tod Caviness

Episode 258 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Banner SW show 1

In this week’s episode, Julian Chambliss, Dianne Turgeon Richardson, Tod Caviness, and Kevin Hutchinson join me in a roundtable discussion of Star Wars. We talk about the questionable genius of George Lucas, the role of Disney in anticipating the needs and desires of the SW audience, the imposition of romance in war narratives, and the profound role of play in our development of self. A lot of beer was drunk. We made fun of each other.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

George Lucas A Life

Rogue One Blu RayThe Force Awakens Blu Ray

Check out Kevin Hutchinson’s podcast, Nerding Out About.


Episode 258 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #26: Strange Brew [Hamlet] (1983)

22 Sunday May 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Shakespeare, The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film

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Tags

Dave Thomas, Elsinore Beer, Game of Thrones, Hamlet, Max Von Sydow, Rick Moranis, Strange Brew, The Force Awakens, The Seventh Seal

Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film

26. Strange Brew [Hamlet] (1983)

Ever since I noticed that Jon Finch, who played the title role in Polanski’s Macbeth, looked like Max Von Sydow, I’ve been suffering from some degree of Sydowmania.

The Seventh Seal

The Swedish actor who played chess with Death in The Seventh Seal has recently lent his gravitas to The Force Awakens and Game of Thrones. He has played Ming the Merciless, Jesus Christ, and one of the incarnations of Bond villain Ernest Stavro Blofeld. He is 87 years old, and a titanic talent.

What shocked me is that he has never actually been in a Shakespeare film, as far as I could remember. Is this possible?

strange brew

Oh, right. He starred in Strange Brew, the zany comedy starring the lowbrow hijinks of two dimwitted Canadian brothers, Bob and Doug McKenzie, whose lives are devoted to the consumption of beer, not that this consumption has any bearing on their general moronitude.

Strange-Brew 1

When Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas transferred these clownish characters from the small screen to the big screen, they decided that these two buffoons could best serve a larger, more epic story than a silly one of their own. At first, Strange Brew seems to be a metacinematic experience about Bob and Doug McKenzie’s failure to produce a Hollywood film. The plot takes a turn, however, when they make a visit to the Elsinore brewery to try and cadge free beer, and find themselves, like Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, in a tragic story of a family broken by betrayal.

Strange Brew 9

Max Von Sydow plays a part that should be familiar to any fan of Hamlet: the mad scientist.

Strange Brew 1

So Elsinore is transferred to a brewery, the way so many modern productions of Shakespeare’s work reinterpret his settings. And the brewery just happens to adjoin a mental institution run by the brewmeister of Elsinore beer.

Strange Brew 2

You know he has to be evil, because, you know, the turtleneck sweater.

Strange Brew 8

Because scientists often practice in separate disciplines of science, such as beer-making and psychiatry, no one was curious when aggression and mind-control experiments were performed involving chemically-treated beer and hockey players.

Strange Brew 6

Okay, so maybe the thread leading our way back to Hamlet happens to be rather slender, but then why have the scene in which Claude cajoles his daughter-in-law Pam (presumably short for Pamlet) for being mean to her mother, Gertrude, and holding on too hard to her grief over her father’s death?

Strange Brew 12CLAUDE

You know, Pamela, I don’t want you to think that your mother and I don’t understand how you feel about losing your father.

GERTRUDE

If it had been ME, you’d have been over it by now.

CLAUDE

It’s easy to wallow in self pity–the hard thing is to go on living….

PAM

Don’t you think it’s a little unusual to get married so soon after the funeral?

I find this moment touching, since Strange Brew follows a classic Marx Brothers plot scheme, which is to say that the clowns subvert the story of straight, serious characters around them, and the existence of these straight plots is merely to provide a comic armature and maybe some eye candy. (I am looking at you, Zeppo Marx.)

Marx BrothersThat the seriousness of the A plot becomes momentarily real and Shakespearean is moving. The implication later on that Pam will be perpetually drugged into an unresponsive state is also an odd touch of bona fide storytelling. (Basic catatonia is what Gertrude wanted for her son, isn’t it?)

Strange Brew 13Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis wrote and directed this movie, and while this appropriation of Hamlet is more of an in-joke than a real engagement with the text, nevertheless, the dynamics between the Elsinore family were thought out carefully. The film would have been more memorable if there was just a little bit more tension between telling a real story and relishing in a comedic romp.

In Shakespearean comedy, the rougher clowns tend to be clearly secondary characters who do threaten to steal the show, but ultimately never quite do.

One of the interesting implications is that in this retelling of Hamlet, Claude is a boob, whereas the truly dangerous person is Polonius. The part, though, is written as boilerplate 1970s TV show villain. Max Von Sydow, nevertheless, seems to have had a good attitude about the work.

Strange Brew 3

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

 

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