The_Triple_Lindy

I think when it comes to modernized Shakespeare adaptations, the far-out ones can be built around a solid core concept (ie. McKellan's Richard III as a Nazi allegory, or the hyper-stylized Luhrman R&J) but can become exhausting in terms of the viewing experience, which is exacerbated by the fact that the shortest of W.Sh. plays is 90 mins. Somehow, the adaptations that are a bit truer to historical context, like Branagh's Othello (with Lawrence Fishbourne) or even the more recent Merchant of Venice with the woefully miscast Al Pacino as Shylock, don't wear me out the way that some (not all) "updated" versions can feel. If you want an updated version of Shakespeare, I think you'll have a better time going with the 10 Things I Hate About You or Lion King route -- same story but new characters, setting, and language. Although, the best counterargument to this might be, ironically, the updated of Othello of O with Mekhi Pfiffer. Along these lines, I just recently watched Spike Lee's Chi-Raq, which is a very interesting retelling of Lysistrata. It's not the original text, but it is written in verse with contemporary vernacular, so the whole movie has a battle-rap feel. Again, gets a bit exhausting toward the end, but it's built around an interesting central conceit.

It's just soooooo over-the-top and heavy-handed. And the final scene, with Ian/Richard screaming across the battlefield in a panzer screaming, "A horse! A horse!" -- it's unintentional comedy gold.

I don't know ... Ethan Hawke's Hamlet was pretty bad. And if there's one that is truly worthy of this show, I'd say it was Ian McKellan's Richard III.

I've been out of the musicals loop for a while. No need to put me back into the MM rotation but I would love to get the Classics watch parties going again.

............................. something something "taste is relative"? Something something "cross-species cultural difference in beauty standards"? Fair enough, I guess.

I don't know. For me, the word "glamour" will forever be tainted by its association with "Glamour Shots," which are decidedly "lower-class-aping-upper-class." Taking your point about what "jellicle" means, I don't think that precludes the possibility that Grizzabella was the most "glamour-shottiest" of all the jellicle cats.

Not just human-size, but above-average humans. I'm 6'8" which translates to 2.1m, roughly ... I only know that because I learned my metric height before touring Germany because literally any time I meet a stranger, they remark about how tall I am. So a cat that's 2.16 meters tall is slightly taller than the tallest person your average person has ever met in real life (if we go by what I'm told during these conversations). See ... we were having a nice little chat about poetry and prostitution, and you had to bring math into this.

Obviously everyone has read "Prufrock," but who else here has read XJ Kennedy's "A Prominent Bar is Secaucus, NJ"? It's a narrative poem about an old woman -- who could be seen as either a prostitute or maybe just an old floozy -- who talks about how she used to live the high-life before she became an old junkie. The speaker in the poem made her life sound pretty glamorous in her youth, but the climax of the poem is her being led away by police as she says: "For when time takes you out for a spin in his car You'll be hard-pressed to stop him from going too far And be left by the roadside, for all your good deeds, Two toadstools for tits and a face full of weeds." The woman in the poem sounds like she could be a Grizzabella- type ... once a gorgeous dame who in her prime had money and attention, smoked cigarettes rolled in gold, bet on the horses, and stayed at the best hotels. Now, she's an old woman who causes a scene at the bar and gets arrested. Maybe a sex-worker, or maybe a girl who took all advantage of her lot in life to party hard while she could. Of course, the main difference is that while the speaker in "Prominent Bar" lived the high life in her story, Grizzabella's song tells a different tale: "She haunted many a low resort Near the grimy road of Tottenham Court She flitted about the No Man's Land From "The Rising Sun" to "The Friend at Hand" So Grizzabella is not from the same side of town, it would seem. But that doesn't automatically make her a sex worker -- perhaps she was just aping upperclass glamour, and now that she's been brought low by time and age, everyone around her takes a certain schadenfreude in her current state.

I'm not sure that this was mentioned in the episode but -- there actually is a Heaviside Layer. The Kennelly-Heaviside Layer, to be exact. Apparently this layer is reflective of radio waves, and bouncing these waves off the sky makes it possible for them to reach beyond the horizon. I suppose this could mean that sending a Jellicle to the Heaviside Layer for a new life could literally mean just sending them into the stratosphere so that they'll land somewhere far away, thereby beginning a "new" life? The layer was discovered by British physicists in the 1920s, which is around the time Eliot started writing poetry, so odds are this was a word he overheard at a tea party sometime, and 20 years later, he used it in his cat poems. EDIT TO ADD: the dumbest thing about this is that it was named for the guy who discovered it -- Oliver Heaviside.

I'll admit that I like "Prufrock" -- not because it's a particularly great poem, which it isn't, but because that post-war nihilistic stuff is what I most enjoy reading. It's basically the only thing Eliot wrote that I ever enjoyed reading ("Wasteland"? More like "waste" of time, amirite?). I put Eliot in the same category as Matthew Arnold -- their poems are pretentious and melodramatic and pedantic because they're critics on top of being poets, so all their work has the air of self-gratification and certainty in how brilliant they are. Their poems are so much "uncontainable expression of self" and more "flexing what I know about good poetry." Eliot reminds me of what I remember someone saying about Axl Rose during the Use Your Illusion records -- every song has to do everything that that Axl Rose knows how to do as a musician, just to show that he knows about great music.

Twice while listening to this episode, I checked my phone to make sure the podcast wasn't playing at 1.5x speed. Anyone else think that Paul was talking like he was awarded free cafe lattes for life from Java World?

Shout out your favorite plagiarized lines from Velocipastor! My top two were: 1. "War is hell, and hell never changes" -- pretty much straight ripped off from every game in the Fallout franchise. 2. "I want you to have 11 kids and spend 15 minutes with each of them" -- very reminiscent of something Danny Kaye says to Bing Crosby at the start of White Christmas. Is that reaching? Maybe ... what else is there to say about a movie that's so in on its own joke, every thing we might point out could be shrugged off as touch-in-cheek. I guess I mainly think that the schvitz duvet thing sounds cool. I love a good sweat. But also Catholics don't wear their rosaries as necklaces, the cross with flame logo that's on the outside of the church is actually a Methodist symbol, and blah blah blah.

Just sat down to watch this tripe, and my wife actually just as the credits were rolling, "So, this isn't some kind of Kirk Cameron movie, is it?" EDIT to add: 30 secs in, and I already hate it.

As someone who shares walls with noisy neighbors whom I hate, I feel this in my heart.

Can I say that I've listened to this episode three times now and think it is one of the funniest they've done in a while and that I've laughed harder this week than I have in months? Also, Paul, please ... we just GOT to hear more about June's self-reincarnation theories -- who she's reincarnated from, how her system works, when she started to believe this, the works. We "put it over there for a minute", but it's been many minutes now, so dish.

So again, maybe just evidence that his soul is grandma-aged? Saves and reuses aluminum, signs his texts, works out on rings like Charles Atlas, and scribbles his notes on old parchment rolls.

Or that maybe you can get one through a flight simulator? I don't know. It's almost as if the logic of 2:22 is flawed.

The woman who conducts his review and suspends him says that he's already gotten his pilot's license. Clearly he had to be able to fly at some point. I know there are different types of pilot licenses, but how long would it take between license and employment?

That reminds me: When Dylan decides to start writing everything down, the first thing he grabs is a roll of paper (wax paper? shelving paper?) from what looks like a kitchen drawer. Among the items in the drawer is a random piece of oddly folded aluminum foil ... ... and is that a hat? Is that a tinfoil hat? Is there any other plausible explanation for pre-worn, previously-crinkled tinfoil kept in a drawer like that? And if he's the kind of person who is prone to tinfoil-wearing to keep the satellites from reading his thoughts or whatever, then is this movie telling us upfront that Dylan's about to go totally off the deep end? That would call into question his entire reliability as a narrator and, I daresay, tosses the ending of this movie into Jacob's Ladder territory.

This movie should've just been called "Red Flags Ignored" ... Sarah becomes immediately invested in a guy she's known less than a week, and when he totally makes a sense at her place of work, and then starts talking crazy about letters, and she becomes convinced he's gone mad, she should have said, "to hell with this ... I just got out of a too-intense relationship with a long-haired moody psycho model asshat -- I don't need this shit in my life."

Don't forget that although Dylan's body is 30 years old, his soul is at least sixty. Which makes sense because signing your name to your texts is a total boomer thing to do.

So the three people who died in 1987 were reincarnated because their souls left their bodies when they were killed in entered the bodies of babies born that same day. Ergo, this movie is positing that babies don't have souls until they are born. Fetuses must not have souls. Which makes this the most pro-choice movie ever. Interesting how a movie that's all about fate is REALLY all about the right to choose.

Joan is the superior Cusack

............... silently?

Two questions: 1. Where is Sam Shepherd's security detail at the moment that he is shot while fly-fishing? I know that his personal bodyguard/lackey is busy getting himself blown up (again with a ball-bearing shrapnel body, which for a solo-target car bomb -- why?) but if he's really a senator, shouldn't he have Secret Service on him too? Seems like someone at Homeland Security dropped the ball. 2. Why does Hugh Jackman have to be American in this film? Why can't Stan be Australian so that Hugh Jackman doesn't have to put on a fake accent? Vinnie Jones is there speaking with his normal cockney voice, which I'd argue makes even less sense because why would a British man care about American homeland security interests ... but there is nothing in the script that demands Stan be American. Sure he has an American child but she's barely ever been around him so she wouldn't have picked up his jargon. That kind of thing get explained away all the time in movies: Why is Sandy Australian in Grease? Because her family moved to the states last summer for her dad's work. Easy -- one line explains it away and it never has to be brought up again.