The Scottish Play?

Not really!  Nope, not at all (well, okay... there was this one guy who had a very short part...)
In my new job working in a secondary school library, I now have access to a variety of plays by Shakespeare (some that I have not seen yet), so I chose a version of Macbeth featuring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench.  Why?  I like to study something thoroughly and I have been studying Macbeth all year (trying to pace myself between viewings and essays about the play).  There are only a few movies left to see and I have been surprised by a bonus showing of the play on CBC from the Stratford Festival, Ontario (which to my mind is the best one I have seen yet... Macbeth and his lady had serious chemistry, and the witches gave me  the shivers!).  But I'm digressing here...

This play, whilst performed by excellent actors, was not Scottish.  As a matter of fact their perfect, well-spoken British accents just threw me off completely and it was only when Judi Dench entered the scene that things began to come together into something that interested me.  Judi Dench was perfect... despite the accent, I could look past that into her performance which was chilling to the bone and nothing I have ever seen her do before.  When she lost her mind it was disturbingly convincing... she is a master of her craft.

 I love Ian McKellen, but I don't feel that Macbeth was his best role.

Despite this, it is a good story, and at the end of every play I have ever seen attributed to William Shakespeare I have been entertained, even if I did't like the format very much.

The form of this play was very simple; a room with lighting and a few props to indicate different scenes, it was very effective in presenting this version of the play as a psychological thriller, making it suspenseful, honing it's focus to the language of the play and it's participants.  With that purpose in mind, of making this something to mess with the mind  some things became truly worse, like the drooling and frothing at the mouth of the prophetic witch and the gore that was on Mabeth's hands (it's not a play to watch while snacking!).
It's not my favourite version, but just watching Judi Dench's Lady Macbeth is worth putting up with the rest.

A Reading Vacation

This past week I needed to read, but not too hard so I had a look at some of Joanne Fluke's cozy mysteries.

 I had seen some movies on television, the Murder She Baked Mysteries, and liked them (sometimes you just want to watch something on television that is itself another sort of vacation from the norm... Hallmark is good at those, though I didn't like their whitewashing of Charlaine Harris' Aurora Teagarden Mysteries).

 I thought the books might be interesting too.  "Not really though..."  if you have read some of them you would get my little pun there.  Hannah Swensen, our protagonist, was working on getting a masters degree in English Literature but gave it up to to take care of her family after her father had passed away.  She loves to bake so she opened up a cookie bakery and coffee shop, and solves murders on the side.  She has sisters that she helped to raise, a mother that nags her to get married (because Hannah is close to her thirties) and a cat she rescued who has specific needs.  There is also a love triangle between her, a cop and a dentist.  At the end of most chapters is a recipe for a cookie or dessert that was mentioned in the previous chapter.
So there you have your formula.  Presently I think there are twenty-one books, but I decided to stop at the Peach Cobbler Murder (#7) after Fluke made what I consider a colossal blunder.  Not that I wasn't already bored with the love triangle, the nagging mother, Hannah's endless mental grammatical corrections of the people around her (which just smacks of her personal sense of superiority) and these endless recipes ( it's just really boring for a vegan who has no intentions of making them, and I also think it's a hinky way to fill out an otherwise too-short chapter).  
Back to the colossal blunder (with comments from me in parentheses) :

    "Methinks the lady doth protest too much."   (says Hannah)
    "That's Shakespeare, " Andrea ( little-not-as-smart-as-Hannah-sister) announced, stopping at the curb to wait for a car that was driving by.
    "I know.  It's from MacBeth. "  (says all-knowing almost-a-masters-degree-in-English-literature Hannah!)
    "Do you really think Vanessa Reads Shakespeare?"  Andrea asked, missing the point entirely     (yeah... because big sis is just so much smarter!).
    "Not without moving her lips," Hannah said.

Aargh!  I stopped, did a triple take (yep I went back and re-read it three times to make sure I had read what I thought I had read), and decided to stop reading this particular author.  I want to point out right away that this quote is a blunder because it is from the play Hamlet not Macbeth (and since I have read the play Macbeth twice in the past year and seen two of the movies and got an A+ in grade twelve English for my essay on Hamlet) I think I have a firm grasp of who says what, and where.  I would also like to point out that I don't feel superior to anyone else for knowing that.  This is not the first thing that bugged me of course.  But after reading that, I thought back a little over the other books I had read and there are quite a lot of character flaws in this character.  Of course, I also wondered how many other examples like this I may have missed because I was just skimming these books without really paying too much attention to the content?  Which introduces some other questions of which some are really paranoid so I won't mention them here!  There is a reason why I don't spend a lot of time reading this formulaic type of book.  They get boring fast, and in these days of easy publishing I don't think they are edited as rigorously as they ought to be.

It was a vacation from reading anything too challenging, but it was like one of those holidays you take in Mexico where you eat or drink the wrong piece of food and end up with Montezuma's Revenge!

Brontemania!

Last weekend the television show To Walk Invisible: The Lives of the Bronte Sisters was shown on Masterpiece.  I was enraptured!  I loved the show so much I watched it again the the very same day and then again on Monday.  Each viewing gave me more to love and appreciate of the work and skill that was put into this production.  After seeing it the first time I wanted to get out my Bronte collection and read them again!    Last night I just contented myself with flipping through Jane Eyre and stopping to read at random places.  It is the beauty of this particular book that you can do that and be entertained wherever you open up your book!
The scenery was astounding.  Emily quoting her poetry on the moor just sent shivers down my spine.
Of the sisters in the show I loved Emily the best,  she was so fierce and passionate.  Anne and Charlotte were wonderful too, but Emily inspired me the most and I would like to believe that these amazing, wonderful women were really like what was portrayed in this production.  I wondered how I could possibly find out, but then I realized that I already knew!  You just have to read their books to know who they really were and then you can see that To Walk Invisible was faithful to them.    A love letter on a grand scale!

The Only Doctor I will Ever Love…

…was the one that I watched every afternoon on ABC (Australian Broadcasting Network) when I was a kid. 
  The monsters, strange aliens (Oh My Gosh…the Daleks!), that awesome music that started every episode, the freaky electronic ‘scream’ at the end of each episode which, even when I knew it was coming, always made me jump because I was already scared silly from watching the show.  When I was in primary school, the library had a great collection of the Target novelisations of the Doctor Who television series.  I read them all, naturally, and they kept me company when I was in school (as I was quite the introvert),  Before school, recess and lunchtimes in the library were never lonely for me with a Doctor Who book in my hand.

 I can clearly remember the book covers (more so I think than the television episodes themselves). 

I have had ever since a young age a long abiding love for science fiction, and I can date it back to when I was a little girl eagerly waiting to watch the next instalment of Doctor Who.

 

 So my plan is to read the whole collection of Target Novelisations, starting at the very beginning with the first doctor.  Since this year is the fiftieth anniversary of the show, I can’t see what else I would do, but watch it from the beginning and have some fun with it (I even have my vanishing TARDIS coffee mug to use while I am reading/watching… naturally that is a must!)

 I don’t know him very well, this first doctor (because when I started watching the show John Pertwee was the current doctor), and after reading this first season of books (and watching the television shows), I think he was quite the arrogant jerk, but it was easy to like him despite that.  Here were the beginnings of the ethics I had come to admire in other doctors when I was older, teaching a tolerance for what was new and different. His incurable curiosity and respect for the world, wherever and when ever he was, and because he would show these unexpected spurts of affection for his companions (Barbara and Ian), revealing a vulnerability that I don’t think anyone could resist.  The stories themselves were quite original, and for the times were good enough to carry on for another season.  I couldn’t help but laugh (a lot!) at the hokey special effects, but that just adds to the original charm.  I look forward to reading and seeing what happens in season two, because even though William Hartnell wasn’t my doctor, I still care about him and his companions a great deal, and I am full of my own incurable curiosity to see how this character evolves into the doctors I am more familiar with.