Friday Ephemera (835)
Vertical filing solution, 1937. || You want one and you know it. || Hosing is hard. || Hello, children. || Shakespeare’s horror story. || Hitachi K-88 portable television, 1978. || Place in food chain negotiation. || A minimum of 30 seconds. Because keeping one eye on your watch is just what you want. || Bach in the rain. || In a bun. || Vibrancy and enrichment. || Value added. || The thrill of having kidneys. || Question asked. || Coquettish stance adopted. || A stroll around Castleton, not too far from here. || It’s all in the hips. Though I’m not sure about the colour. || On choosing a TV set, 1964. || His is bigger. || Keyboard configuration. || For those so inclined, only $13,000. || It says “Portland sports bra riot.” || This tale of a puppy’s encounters with human beings starts in a dark place, but it does get better.
And as this is fundraising week, which keeps this place here, do feel free to make use of the tip jar.
Because she’s a tender-hearted woman who just wanted to create a safe space for the most marginalized?
Well, OK, we can stipulate that, but we also need to recognize that her judgment is abysmal. She took out a loan for 50 large with two flaky people who left her holding the bag, she neglected to account for freeloading, and she also neglected to recognize that her chosen customer base included people who were more predatory and obnoxious than vulnerable.
Come to think of it, the world IS full of people like Jackie Matellian, and that’s exactly the problem.
Yes, interesting, that.
White guilt remains undefeated.
The thing with Shakespeare, though, is that there’s a long tradition of staging it with all manner of variants.
Setting it in Nazi Germany, during Prohibition, Samurai Japan, reversing the colors in Othello, etc.
The idea is that Shakespeare depicts such universal human themes that you can transpose the setting and actors to other times and places, and it still works.
Well, that and theater people are tired of the same old thing, so they want to shake things up a bit.
So historical verisimilitude isn’t a requirement for good Shakespeare any more than performing in the Globe theater is.
So I can’t be upset with Morgan Freeman in Macbeth, even if they’re preserving the Scottish setting.
However, doing a biopic on Ann Boleyn with a black actress is pretty jarring. Retconning English history to put more color in the casting is long-term damaging, because it creates the false impression that there was never any racial hierarchy in the past.
OTOH, the British passion for period pieces means fewer good roles for certain actors.
And then there’s the Guardian‘s Lucy Mangan praising Channel 5’s race-swapped Anne Boleyn, dismissing those who failed to enthuse as by implication racist, and somehow failing to notice the bizarre historical implications that viewers found distracting and alienating. To say nothing of the cack-handed rewriting of characters’ motives in order to match the weird casting choices.
Zinger
If you’re going to do stunt casting, you need to make sure the production hits on all cylinders such that the audience forgets the incongruity and falls in love with the artistic decision.
As we’ve seen, though, those who do the stunt casting don’t have the talent to sharpen up the entire project. An all-female Ghostbusters is going to work only if the producers have a brilliant vision of the story that fairly demands female casting.
Alas, no. They figure it’s enough to provoke controversy, hence interest, and the bucks will flow.
Morons.
A notable lack of ‘she’ and ‘her’.
On the plus side it does undercut the whole ‘woe is me, my umpty-ump grand-whosis was subject to withering remarks’ mummery.