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Concept Shakespeare, in which plays by William Shakespeare are made contemporary or presented in stylized, potentially more accessible ways, are nothing new to theater, though it’s an unusual quality for motion pictures.
There are a few examples of motion pictures that tackled William Shakespeare’s work in an unorthodox, novel or gimmicky manner.
Jean-Luc Godard’s bonkers 1987 “King Lear” is barely interested in the source material, offers none other than Woody Allen, Molly Ringwald, Burgess Meredith and Godard himself giving half-invested performances and plays like a private joke that only made Godard laugh.
Far more mainstream, if unique for its time, was Baz Luhrman’s “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet” (1996), in which Shakespeare’s character and dialog are interspersed with a modern setting and a kaleidoscopic, hyper-stylized MTV approach.
When it comes to “Hamlet,” arguably Shakespeare’s masterpiece and most performed work, most filmmakers either stick faithfully to the original text or use the narrative blueprint as a means to unfaithfully update the material and lose its beautiful language.
What Michael Almereyda’s 2000 film version of “Hamlet” has to offer is not a definitive interpretation of Shakespeare’s play. In fact, this is far from the most ideal, faithful version of the Bard’s two-act drama and is best viewed by those familiar with the story.
Newcomers may find the film perplexing and frustrating. For everyone else, particularly those familiar with “poor Yorick,” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and infinitely quotable dialog like “The Play’s The Thing, Where Upon I’ll Catch the Conscience of the King,” this is something refreshing.
Opening in “New York City, 2000,” this “Hamlet” maintains the iambic pentameter (meaning, Shakespearean dialog) but is set in the last year of the 20th century. Taking place at “Hotel Elsinore” and portraying the events at “Denmark Corporation,” the tale of the Danish Prince is now an American yarn of businessmen who, literally, get blood on their hands.
Ethan Hawke plays Hamlet, now a tortured young amateur filmmaker whose wealthy mother Gertrude (Diane Venora) has re-married after the death of her husband (Sam Shepard). The Ghost of Hamlet’s father appears and informs his son that he was murdered by his wife’s new husband (Kyle MacLachlan).
Hamlet plots his revenge, dragging his secret love, Ophelia (Julia Stiles), down with him.
The cast is excellent. While this is Concept Shakespeare, no one is playing it that way, as everyone here is giving sincere, dedicated turns. Hawke is perfect, bringing his youthful, Gen-X teen angst to his portrayal.
Stiles is stronger than I expected as Ophelia and Liev Schrieber is first-rate as her brother, Laertes. Shepard is ideally cast and so is Steve Zahn, playing Rosencrantz as a barfly slacker.
Michael Almereyda’s HAMLET (2000) Starring Ethan Hawke, Julia Stiles, Sam Shepard, Kyle MacLachlan, Diane Venora, Bill Murray, and so many others.
Now playing on @criterionchannl in our Pop Shakespeare collection! https://t.co/vQzGa3zdVo pic.twitter.com/cHeoykl6Wu
— Criterion Collection (@Criterion) July 9, 2024
The biggest surprise is Bill Murray as Polonius: Murray isn’t a natural with Shakespearean prose and it shows. Instead, his self-styled performance, in which he plays the role as a bureaucratic suck-up, feels like Murray is adapting the language to his familiar persona.
It’s odd at first but fascinating to watch. Murray makes the role his own, even capping the “Look to it, I charge you” soliloquy by tying his daughter’s shoe.
There are other weird, post-modernist touches that bear mentioning. Hamlet gives his “To Be or Not To Be” speech while walking through the aisles of Blockbuster Video. As he broods from aisle to aisle, “The Crow: City of Angels” plays in the background.
The famous soliloquy has frequently been interpreted as a question of suicidal contemplation, something Hawke literalizes by opening the speech with a gun to his temple.
The Ghost of Hamlet’s Father vanishes into a Pepsi vending machine and, in a brilliant touch, “The Mouse Trap,” the play-within-the-play about Hamlet’s stepfather, is now a cheeky film-within-the-film.
Almereyda has made an experimental, weird but purposeful re-imagining. It has similarly deconstructive goals as Godard’s “King Lear” but maintains a clarity of theme and a fidelity to the source.
This low-budget and truncated yet still effective “Hamlet” is full of beauty and arrestingly different choices. Almereyda’s style is subtle, but he manages to find gorgeous imagery in unlikely places.
The one misstep is the climactic sword fight, which is now a rooftop sword match. It makes no sense having Hamlet brandish a gun but take on his opponent in a classical duel. While well-acted, this sequence is a dud and is the only one that could have used another unorthodox rethinking.
The artistic value of this “Hamlet” is that it’s distinctly Warhol-like, a reflection and dissection of established ideas and iconography of the source material, not a mere reproduction. Like a Warhol painting of an instantly recognizable individual, this begins with the expected, takes it apart and finds new ideas and a fresh staging of a durable, essential work of theater.
Kenneth Branagh’s three-hour, word-for-word 1996 adaptation, Laurence Olivier’s classic interpretation from 1948 or even Franco Zeffirelli’s exciting but questionable 1990 Mel Gibson version (where scenes were added) are better examples of faithful stage-to-screen adaptations that maintain the essence of the story.
Only Almereyda’s “Hamlet” offers the odd but one-of-a-kind pleasure of hearing Murray declare, “This Above All Else: To Thyself Be True.”
The post This Wasn’t Your Typical Take on ‘Hamlet’ appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.
This morning, we got news of yet another ICE murder of an observer in Minneapolis. I already covered the completely unjustified shooting of Renee Good. Now we have another man shot to death by federal agents.
We only have some of the recordings of this so far, but here’s what I’ve been able to piece together. The man was standing, holding his phone, recording federal immigration agents, when he is approached by them. And they start swarming him, about six guys trying to tackle him down to the ground. One of the agents shoots him, then another shoots him. And here’s the worst thing. As he’s lying on the pavement motionless, they stand back and fire more shots into his body. That’s what looks to me like—it’s just an execution.
The federal government claims the victim was carrying a gun. From the video, it is extremely clear that when they approach him, he is holding a phone, not a gun. We only have their say-so that he was armed, and look, ICE, Border Patrol—this administration has a long pattern of lying through their teeth. So I’ll believe them when I get some independent confirmation.
We’ve seen multiple stories recently about people filming ICE agents being told to stop—but this is something people absolutely have a right to do. And after the shooting of Renee Good, they are told, “Haven’t you learned anything from the past few days.” These are people who are recording from 30 feet away, and ICE agents are walking to come up to them, so they’re not interfering or impeding. ICE and Border Patrol have just been itching to use extreme and deadly force against observers. And now they’ve done it—again.
Why are these observers there? You’ve probably seen a lot of stories recently about the brutal and abusive tactics of ICE agents—and if you haven’t, my brother, you need to turn off Fox News or Newsmax and broaden your media diet. This is stuff like rounding up five-year-olds, or breaking down the door and dragging an old man in his underwear out into the freezing temperatures—and it turns out he’s a U.S. citizen.
But the only reason we know about this stuff is because people have been filming it. That’s why the observers are there. So these shootings amount to: “If you try to let the world know what we’re doing, we’ll kill you.” That’s the approach of secret police in a dictatorship.
You’re gonna find people trying to spin this to make it sound OK. And what I want you to notice is that they keep trying to tell you that your government has the right to use extreme and deadly force against you without warning, at a moment’s notice, the second you stick a single toe out of line. That’s not how things work in a free society. That’s how things work in a police state.
As a veteran of the Tea Party movement, what I find saddest and most shocking about this is how many people seem to have gone from “don’t tread on me” to “obey or die.”
But all of this comes just days after the House of Representatives passed a bill approving more funding for the Department of Homeland Security and ICE. Seven Democrats voted for that funding, and the Democratic leadership in the House refused to punish anyone who voted for it.
We don’t just need a Democrat to represent our district in Congress. We need a Democrat with principles and guts, somebody who recognizes the fight we’re in and won’t flinch from it. Because that’s not the Democratic Party establishment right now.
Now, if I were in Congress—if you vote for me—what do I think we should do?
I think we need to wake up and realize that “Abolish ICE” is now the moderate position. Of course we should abolish ICE. We should zero out their funding and shut the whole agency down.
We have a pattern. They’re supposed to arrest “criminal illegal aliens,” the “worst of the worst.” But they have repeatedly arrested and beaten US citizens. Most of the immigrants they round up and put in camps have no criminal records. A lot of the people they grabbed were going through the system, doing all the paperwork, and they found some excuse to throw them in jail, anyway.
Their tactics are brutal and inhumane and just plain illegal. We just found out there is a secret memo circulating at ICE saying it’s OK to break into houses without a warrant, which is a total violation of the Fourth Amendment. This is literally one of the things our Founders fought a revolution to stop.
When you have an abuse of power so widespread, so systematic, so thoroughly a part of the organization—you can’t reform it away. You have to shut down the whole thing.
It’s not just ICE. We need to get rid of the Department of Homeland Security, because creating that department was the big mistake that got us here. The DHS is not very old, we didn’t always have it. It was created in a moment of panic after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and that’s the problem. What “homeland security” did was, it took a bunch of stuff that wasn’t really about terrorism and put it under agency that treated it like it’s terrorism.
So flash forward 20 years, and no wonder they’re acting as if the busboy at El Ranchero is Osama Bin Laden, and they’re rolling out into the streets of Minneapolis in full battle rattle like it’s Fallujah in Iraq.
The mistakes of the War on Terror are coming home, like some kind of curse, and we’re now occupying our own cities and treating our own citizens like they’re the enemy.
We can get rid of ICE, we can get rid of the Department of Homeland Security. It would just reset us to 2002. Anything we actually need these agencies to do, they can be done the way they were before. What we can’t afford is to have lawless out-of-control goon squads going out across the country to kill people. And we can’t afford to have an agency created to fight terrorism that now thinks everything we citizens do in our own damn country is terrorism.
This was a big mistake we made 20 years ago, and we’re paying a big price for it, in our freedoms and now in lives. It is absolutely urgent to fix that mistake.
Dismantle the Department of Homeland Security, move its legitimate functions back to other agencies, and make sure we never build another rotten agency like this again.
Abolish ICE. This is the sane, sensible, moderate position. It’s the pro-American, pro-Constitution position.
So let’s just do it. That’s what I’m asking you to vote for.
Support my campaign so we can take this fight to the US Congress!
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Download audio: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/185678877/539e96554c981fa42a68db3020898567.mp3
I have a new working paper with Bart Wilson titled: “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car: Moral Intuition for Intellectual Property.”
The title of this post, “everyone take copies,” comes from a conversation between the human subjects in an experiment in our lab, on which the paper is based. The experiment was studying how and when people take resources from one another.
The people in the game each control a round avatar in a virtual environment, as you can see in this screenshot below.
In the experiment, “seeds” represent a rivalrous resource, meaning multiple people can’t possess and use them at once. In other words, they operate like most physical goods. If the Almond colored player in the picture takes a seed from the Blue player, then Blue will be deprived of the seed, in the same way that if someone’s car is stolen, they don’t have it anymore.
Thus, it is unsurprising that the players called the taking of seeds “stealing,” as you can see from the speech bubble in the picture. This result was expected, and it is in line with Bart Wilson’s previous work on the origins of physical property.
Our research question considers whether similar claims will emerge after the taking of non-rivalrous goods that we call “discs.” Non-rivalrous goods are goods that can be used by multiple people without any loss to the other users. If participants exercise the ability to take a disc, then the original disc holder still has a disc and can still consume the full value of it.
The human subjects are not forced to interact via the chat function, but they often choose to form a community and use language to try to obtain the available surplus in the environment. The following quote from our paper indicates that the subjects do not label or conceptualize the taking of digital goods (discs) as “stealing.”
In our paper, we write:
Participants discuss discs often enough to reveal how they conceptualize the resource. In many instances, they articulate the positive-sum logic of zero-marginal-cost copying. For example, … farmer Almond reasons, “ok so disks cant be stolen so everyone take copies,” explicitly rejecting the application of “stolen” to discs.
Participants never instruct one another to stop taking disc copies, yet they frequently urge others to stop taking seeds. The objection targets the taking away of rivalrous goods, not the act of copying per se. As farmer Almond explains in noSeedPR2, “cuz if u give a disc u still keep it,” emphasizing that artists can replicate discs at zero marginal cost.
We encourage you to read the manuscript if you are interested in the details of how we set up the environment and mechanisms of exchange. We conclude that, contrary to the desired comparison in the “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car” advertising campaign attempted by the Motion Picture Association of America in the early 2000s, people do not intuitively view piracy as a crime.
Humans can state that digital piracy is illegal and take measures to prevent it. However, it will be difficult to cause an individual engaging in piracy to feel guilty as they do when they believe they are directly harming another human.
This has implications for how the modern information economy will be structured. Consider the model recently labeled “the subscription economy.” Increasingly, consumers pay recurring fees for ongoing access to products/services (like Netflix, Adobe software) instead of one-time purchases. Gen Z has been complaining on TikTok that they feel trapped with so many recurring payments and lack a sense of ownership.
In a recent interview on a talk show called The Stream, I speculated that part of the reason companies are moving to the subscription model is that they do not trust consumers with “ownership” of digital goods. People will share copies of songs and software, if given the opportunity, to the point where creators cannot monetize their work by selling the full rights to digital goods anymore. “Everyone take copies.”
A feature of our experimental design is that, when a disc was shared, even though the creator was rarely compensated directly, the attribution of who originally created the disc was secure. A disc made by the Blue player is blue, so all can see who gets credit for providing it. The reason for this design choice was to allow the Blue player to easily see their work being passed around.
A recent development in information technology, that of large language models, means that many idea creators are not getting credit when their original work informs the answers users are getting from tools like ChatGPT. In a recent settlement, Anthropic agreed to pay for some of the written training material that went into making Claude. The way in which human creators are (or are not) compensated for providing inputs to AI models will shape the future ideas landscape. Understanding how people think about those inputs illuminates our thinking about that process.
The post Everyone Take Copies appeared first on Econlib.
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