The global appeal of Shakespeare

The radio program On The Media aired a superb program about the appeal of Shakespeare that transcends his English origins and conquered the world.

In the first part of the show, host Brooke Gladstone discussed with James Shapiro, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and author of Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future, about how and why Shakespeare became so central to US literature that America now considers him as their own and how the political, social, and cultural dimensions of his work resonates so widely. Shapiro is a droll speaker and his anecdotes made for riveting listening. (32 minutes)


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The joy of watching Foley artists

What goes on behind the scenes in films has as much fascination for me as the story I see on the screen. And some of those people whom I find particularly fascinating are the Foley artists, who provide almost all the ambient sounds that we hear, such as footsteps, water flowing, doors opening, keys clicking, and pretty much everything other than the spoken words of the actors.

I have written about Foley artists previously and came across this video of a group of three people in the profession who walk us through the steps of how they do what they do, which involves collecting what looks like a whole lot of junk and having a sharp ear for the sources of sounds and then being able to exactly synchronize the sounds they create using this junk with the action they see on a screen.

The enduring appeal of the genteel murder mystery

Long time readers of this blog know of my partiality to the detective story, especially of the British variety made famous by Agatha Christie and a host of other writers. No one would claim that they represent serious literature. They are utterly formulaic and do not aspire to great literary heights. They are the book equivalent of comfort food, where the pleasure comes from the familiarity, where you know what to expect and always get it. We readers know all the faults of the genre and love it anyway.

In a long essay, Breanna Rennix describes the formula.
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When an unscripted interview goes wildly wrong

Some interviewers of authors have not read the books prior to broadcast and depend on the authors to drive the interview. In this clip from the comedy show Newhart, Bob Newhart plays Dick Loudon who runs a B&B with his wife in rural Vermont but also hosts a local TV show about books. We see an interview that goes wildly wrong because he and his staff have not read the book. But his guest would not be considered that unusual today.

Alfred Hitchcock preferred suspense over shock

I do not like violent films with a lot of blood and gore but am a big fan of the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock was rightly called the ‘master of suspense’ and in this brief interview he explains the difference with what he tried to do and what one sees in some other films.

He said that he wanted the audience to use their imaginations about what is going on rather than telling them and so he did not actually show the violence. For example, in the famous shower scene in Psycho, one does not actually see the victim being stabbed and blood spurting all over the place. One sees her screaming, one sees the assailant in silhouette making stabbing motions, one hears the screeching music rise to a crescendo, and one sees dark fluid representing blood swirling down the drain. All that is more than enough for the viewer to imagine what happened.

Kate Winslet is comfortable with who she is

The actor has rejected offers by the people behind the scenes in the TV series Mare of Easttown to adjust how she is seen in order to make her look more conventionally attractive.

Kate Winslet has said she refused a director’s offer to edit a sex scene in which she showed a “bulgy bit of belly” for her latest television series.

The actor claimed Craig Zobel, the director of her new HBO series Mare of Easttown, had offered to show her body in a more flattering light.

Winslet, who plays detective and a grandmother Mare Sheehan in a Pennsylvania town in the programme, the finale of which was broadcast in the UK on Monday, said she had refused and told Zobel: “Don’t you dare.”
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TV review: Columbo

Long time readers of this blog know that I am a big fan of murder mysteries. Starting in the early 1970s, there was a TV crime procedural set in Los Angeles featuring Peter Falk as a homicide detective named Columbo. Wearing a crumpled beige raincoat, tie askew, a cigar, and a perpetual puzzled expression on his face, he became a cultural icon. I wrote a brief appreciation of the show and Falk when he died in 2011

What made this show distinctive from other crime shows is that there was no mystery at all. The opening sequence showed the murderer committing the crime and covering it up. The rest of the show was about how Columbo identified the murderer and pinned it on them. The stories always seemed to take place with the wealthiest of people in high society living in opulent houses and driving expensive cars, a stark contrast in class to the clearly blue collar Columbo who drove a beaten up and unwashed Peugeot convertible. We never saw his own home and although he frequently talked about his wife and other family members, they were never shown. I liked the fact that his personal life was not a part of the show. In some modern shows, the drama in the detectives’ personal lives sometimes overshadows the crime story. I also liked the fact that any violence was always off-screen and there was no blood and gore, no chases, or any of the other tropes of police shows.
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Film review: The Day Shall Come (2019) and FBI entrapment

Back in 2019, I wrote about a comedy film that had just been released that I wanted to see. Unfortunately, because of the Balkanization of offerings that streaming has created, a problem that I wrote about recently, I could not because it was being streamed on Hulu for which I had no subscription. But my daughter visited me recently (we are both vaccinated) and she subscribes to that service so we watched it.
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New documentary on opioid drug profiteering

Alex Gibney has a new documentary The Crime of the Century that looks at the opioid drug crisis and the shameless role played by the big pharmaceutical companies like Purdue and the Sackler family who profited greatly from the deaths of many people and the destruction of families and communities, topics that I have covered many times before. They were aided and abetted in their crimes by government officials and lawmakers who cut deals with the Sacklers and top Purdue executives to allow them to escape the consequences of their actions and retain their ill-gotten billions.

Here is a detailed review by Saloni Gajjar.
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How James Bond got his name

I was recently watching the TV series Marple (2013) based on the stories of Agatha Christie and one episode A Caribbean Mystery had her on holiday on an island in that region. One evening she is seated for a lecture on tropical birds next to a dapper visitor from Jamaica who introduces himself to her as Ian Fleming. When she asks him what he does, he says that he is working on a novel but is stuck on finding a good name for his lead character. At that point, the ornithologist speaker begins his lecture by saying “Good evening, my name is Bond, James Bond.” Fleming quickly takes out his notebook and jots something down.

The Fleming character disappeared after that so it is clear that the writers inserted him into the show purely for that one joke but I was curious whether there was some truth to it and it turns out that there is.

The name James Bond came from that of the American ornithologist James Bond, a Caribbean bird expert and author of the definitive field guide Birds of the West Indies. Fleming, a keen birdwatcher himself, had a copy of Bond’s guide and he later explained to the ornithologist’s wife that “It struck me that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name was just what I needed, and so a second James Bond was born”.
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On another occasion, Fleming said: “I wanted the simplest, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find, ‘James Bond’ was much better than something more interesting, like ‘Peregrine Carruthers’. Exotic things would happen to and around him, but he would be a neutral figure—an anonymous, blunt instrument wielded by a government department.”

That plain name, and the way it is said, has become iconic.