|
Mark Schweickart
Dave – Sorry if I steered you wrong on the "Romeo and Juliet" recommendation. I guess I know the play well enough not to have been thrown by the difficulty inherent in understanding the Shakespearean language, which admittedly is often quite the challenge. So to be fair to the actors, and the sound recordist, I think your frustration stemmed more from the difficulty of the language itself, than the enunciation delivering it, or the recording of it. I guess, when I said the piece was "brilliant," what I was really saying was that I thought it was brillaint how they rose to the occasion, when their production cancelled, and rather than shelving their work, they launched into filming the piece using just the backstage of the theater as the setting. And even though their director had absolutely no fillmmaking experience, he found interesting ways to make the piece flow cinematically. Nonetheless, I certainly know what you mean. When Shakepeare gets rolling verbally, it feels rather maddening if you can't keep up. The only good news is that, if the the actors do their job well, at least we have more of a chance hanging in there than we do if just trying to read the text.
By the way, regarding your query, "Where are the Westerns?" there was one Oscar-nominated Western this year, "The News of the World," starring Tom Hanks. I haven't seen it, but I did read a copy of the script, and a few years ago read the book it was based on. It has an interesting premise. It is hard for us to imagine what things were like before mass communication, but in this case, the Tom Hanks character, oddly enough, makes his living by travelling throughout our post-Civil War country visiting smaller towns where he charges listeners 10 cents a piece to listen to him read from various newspapers (relatively currrent ones) that he carries with him so that he can bring them "the news of the world." Then the plot veers off into a more typical Western direction with badguys chasing the good guy (Hanks) who has taken it upon himself to return a young girl (who had been captured and raised by Indians) to her original relatives in Texas. So if it's a Western you're hankering for, there you go podner. I assume it is pretty good since it got nominated in four categories.
On a completely different note, this is for Dr, Jim. Since you seem to be not too averse to us pestering you with medical questions, here's one: is their any reason to believe the claims of various supplement products that they can reduce or reverse short term memory loss? I certainly have begun to feel the effects of this unwarranted old-age symptom. Or should one...should one what? I'm sorry, what was I talking about?
|
.
