Saturday, September 18, 2010

From the archives - 15-minute Hamlet

I wonder if this video clip is too long for blogger to let me post it here?

Anyway, it's from an "Evening of Theatre" in June, 2007. I've been clearing files off hard drives and cleaning up old tapes and things lately, and when I ran across this it reminded me of why I like the piece.

I think they needed a little more guidance/rehearsal, but at least the mispronunciations show they really did put this together on their own. It's actually supposed to be a 14-minute Hamlet with a one-minute reprise of the whole show; and it comes in pretty close to those times.


Thursday, September 16, 2010

The Kid Who Sits Behind You Explains High School Literature

Of Mice and Men

So there's these two dudes, George and Lenny, and George is kinda this smaller smart guy, while Lenny's the big stupid guy. At the beginning they're runnin' away from some town called Weed, which is kinda funny, cause on account of when I was reading that part I... well, it was just funny.

Anyway, George kinda babysits Lenny, cause Lenny's pretty stupid and mostly harmless 'cept when he goes all spazzy about rabbits or slutty chicks.

Then there's this guy Curly, I think, and he lost a glove so he only wears one or something and he's a jerk and his wife is kinda the skank of the camp and Lenny thinks she's a rabbit and pets her hair and then, oops.

I totally give this book five stars 'cause the teacher said we could read this or Grapes of Wrath and this one was like 80 pages or something and that one was hella long.

Oh, and later after George was on his own he fought in Vietnam with Forrest Gump and had his legs cut off and had to get surgery so he could walk again and be a CSI in New York.

Friday, September 10, 2010

The Cynical Career Counselor Explains Your Future as a

Movie Critic

Hey, I remember you--you're the one who wrote that great review for No Country for Old Men. You could've saved me some time if you had mentioned they don't bother to finish the damn movie.

Oh really? I guess practicing on the school paper is a natural starting point for a movie reviewer. Your professional career will probably be pretty straightforward.

You'll hit up little community newspapers, looking for an opportunity to share your film thoughts, and perhaps you'll find some who are receptive. It will be a tough road, though--most of those won't really pay anything, and you'll have to work a real job for years.

Maybe you'll review movies for a college paper if you choose to go that route, or maybe one of your pieces will impress just the right editor who decides your writing is good enough to replace the previous guy who killed himself because he was tired of living on dog food.

When you finally reach the pinnacle of your dreams--and I'm being generous in thinking it might happen--you'll get to review for a major national paper. Problem is, you'll be stuck writing about the crap movies most of the populace loves, not the art films you feel are worth the effort of watching. Soon you'll grow to despise your generation's version of Jennifer Aniston as that actress sleeps through one template-produced romantic comedy after another.

Eventually you can't take it any more, and an alternative, independent magazine hires you to write about more avant garde films. Problem is, they go broke after six months and you find yourself unemployed. Your first piece for that paper was a scathing repudiation of the tripe you'd been forced to review for your previous employer, so now you're unemployed, you've little chance of mending that bridge.

Just as you're about to become desperate and take that Walmart greeter job, you get an offer from an on-line company--Netflix have ventured into alternative films, and they want you to give authentic reviews for the fans of cutting edge cinema. You love it, and the next four months are the best of your life.

Then it happens. You're invited to adjudicate a film festival in Brazil, but on the way there, your plane is forced to land in remote mountain country in Venezuela. Before you and the other survivors can make it to the cockpit to try to radio for help, you're surrounded by machine-gun wielding guerrilla forces who take six of you captive. You're later separated from the others and accompanied to a base where you meet a few other kidnap victims.

One of them explains that this particular rebel group finances most of their operations through the kidnap of wealthy foreigners. Many of your fellow prisoners have been held by the rebels for over a year--a couple for over two. Then you're dragged away from that compound and marched to another one even higher in the mountains. There you're kept on a length of chain in a tiny shack.

Your captors know that foreigners accustomed to creature comforts can lose the will to live if deprived of everything familiar for too long, so they've equipped this remote little prison with an old VHS player that runs on a diesel generator. There you get to spend every evening watching one of the only three tapes in the shack--all from the "Jennifer Lopez Cinema Collection". After six weeks of Maid in Manhattan, Gigli and Jersey Girl, one of your guards falls asleep just long enough to let you hang yourself.

Hey, maybe they'll make a movie about it!