The Sunday Paper – Even My Cane Fornicates
Weekend Reading – Take That, Hitchcock!
Monday Morning Staff Meeting – Forgiveness
Midnight Movie: ‘Flash Gordon’
Last weekend’s midnight movie at the E Street Cinema was the 1980 classic, Flash Gordon.
And it freaking rocked. Here are just a few reasons why:
It stars Max Von Sydow, prancing around in a pink satin pantsuit and a haze of psychosexual weirdness that would have made Ingmar Bergman commit ritual suicide, had he seen it.
Topol, best known for Fiddler on the Roof, never known for understated performances, clearly prepared for this role by locking himself in sterile white room, empty save for a pencil, a ream of virgin paper, a vast quantity of LSD, and the script. He then based his performance on the notes he wrote to himself while locked in that room.
Brian Blessed wears wings and a scaled leather speedo. He also attacks the role of King of the Hawkmen with the sort of gusto one normally associates with bath salt sniffing cannibals. A gifted Shakespearean, he nonetheless believes that a failure to mug the camera and overact will result in a live car battery being clamped to his aged father’s withered testicles.
It’s got an alien princess who looks, dresses, and talks like a notably slurry Bond girl. And speaking of Bond, Timothy Dalton plays Prince Barin of Arborea. And his second in command is played by Riff Raff. Riff Raff, people.
Every costume was latter pilfered by George Lucas for The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
It advocates the little known theory that the most deadly martial art ever created is, in fact, the ground game advocated by legendary college football coach, Bear Bryant.
The score is by Queen, at their most bombastic. But in between Freddy Mercury doing whatever it is he does to sing those lines with a complete lack of irony (‘Flash… Ah Ahh… He’s a miracle’), Brian May is an awesome guitarist and they put some great, propulsive beats into the music.
And, for the first time since 1980, I got to see it on the big screen.
Argo
I finally saw Argo the other night. It was still playing at the E Street Cinema in downtown DC.
And it was good.
I hadn’t seen any of the Oscar nominated films at that point, but I did see the awards and knew that Argo had won best picture and, having finally seen it, I had to ask, ‘was this a mediocre year for film?’
Because Argo is not a best picture winner, least ways not in any sort of a halfway decent year for movies. While watching it, I was enjoying myself, but whenever my mind went to that best picture prize, all I could think of was the eminently superior spy flick of a year or so back, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which not only didn’t win best picture, but possibly wasn’t even the best filmed version of the novel.
Flash Gordon: An Underappreciated Masterpiece
Flash Gordon is the greatest comic book movie ever made. It also contains one of the finest action sequences ever put to celluloid.
Yes, it’s high camp, but the strong actors (Max Von Sydow, Topol, Brian Blessed) chew the scenery appropriately and the merely adequate ones take the movie just seriously enough, but not too seriously (all in the proper spirit, is what I’m saying) that it doesn’t degenerate into something too ridiculous to watch.
And I will put the early action set piece where Flash defeats the elite guard of Emperor Ming using his skills as a running quarterback (with intergalactic fabrege eggs as footballs). No big stunts or wires or special effects needed. Just good ole American gridiron ingenuity.
Almost is good is when the hawkmen attack the space ship. Yeah, hawkmen, led by Brian Blessed, no less. Imagine the Battle of Agincourt from Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V, except that instead of playing of the Duke of Exeter, he’s king of the hawkmen, and that instead of wearing armor, he’s wearing leather hot pants and has wings. It’s that freaking cool.
Oh, and Queen did all the music. (‘Flash!! Ooohhoohh…’)
The Sunday Paper – Roman A Clef
Reviewed: Henry V At The Folger Shakespeare Library
Last night, I got my Christmas present – a night at the theater with a lovely lady.
She took me to see the Folger’s production of Henry V.
Back in the day (well, back in 1989), my friend Matt and I were taken by Beverly and Joe, two grown ups (Matt and I being in junior high) from my church (that was during an interlude in my longstanding atheism/agnosticism), to see the Kenneth Branagh movie of the play. It was definitely one of those defining moments in my life: the classics were freaking cool! People were executed, slaughtered in the field, hung from the neck until dead (I was a fourteen year old boy, so this was the kind of stuff that impressed me).
This Henry V was something very different.
The entire production emphasized the stage bound aspect of the play. The set itself was a series of scaffoldings which were set with beams on ropes that were partially lowered at various times to indicate various locales, but which still served to emphasize the artificiality of the set. Actors also played multiple roles, which, again, brought the audience’s gaze onto the fact that this was a play and not real. It wasn’t as explicit as that moment in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (the book, not the movie, people) when the author pulls up short and flat out tells the reader that this is just a book s/he is reading and that the characters aren’t real and none of this really happened, but it was pretty explicit. Though, of course, the broad sweep of events in Henry V actually happened.
Henry himself was played by Andrew Schwartz, instead of the usual actor, who was, apparently, ill last night. While he was at times uncertain and stumbled over a line or two, that also served the purpose. While still making clear the artificiality of the entire act of staging a play, it also really pushed the costs of war. This Henry was callow and uncertain and didn’t truly understand the cost of his actions to others around him. It’s actually hard to imagine anyone else playing the part in this production.
The notes in the playbill talked a good bit about how the quagmire-ish conflict in Ireland informed Shakespeare’s play. I don’t know whether it was intentional, but having read that, I can’t help but think of this and the Iraq War. The staged aspect brought to mind the political staging of the war by neocons for our consumption. At the end of the play, the Chorus reminds the audience that things went to hell in a hand basket almost immediately after the events depicted, what with the disastrous, brief reign of Henry’s son (Henry VI) and the whole War of the Roses thing. So the entire episode could be viewed as the initial, made for television, stage of the Iraq War, when the statue toppled, before… the entire rest of the war and occupation.
Anyway, the run of Henry V has been extended, so go see it or something.
Richard III
So, the body found beneath a car park in Leicester is, in fact, Richard the Third.
When I was fourteen or so, I developed an odd obsession with the Shakespeare play about Richard. I bought a beautiful little hardback, blue cloth bound copy and memorized the opening soliloquy (I can still do a great deal of it today) and stayed up late to record on VHS, Laurence Olivier’s movie version of the play from WEDU (our PBS affiliate).
Rest in peace, Your Grace.
the coffee philosopher 