Dashin'

[handful_ofdust]

It's been a while and a half, hasn't it? Blame Christmas, amongst other things. It's not that I don't have things to talk about, because I do, but right now I'm waiting on the plumber to come and finally--finally--replace our toilet and fix that leak in the kitchen sink faucet. Hoping this'll go okay, but you never know...at any rate, I'll be back with something "real" afterwards, hopefully.

Comments

[sovay]

but right now I'm waiting on the plumber to come and finally--finally--replace our toilet

That's never a good sentence to have to type!

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

We were literally having to stick our hands into the tank in order to flush it (for two months previous, BTW), and the multiple cracks we'd plastered over were just starting to leak again, so...yeah, I'm pretty fucking happy it's done.;)

In other news, I finally watched the Michael Radford film adaptation of The Merchant of Venice. Really amazing, and painful, and interesting. Also, Jocelyn Pook soundtrack. Have you seen it?

[sovay]

Really amazing, and painful, and interesting. Also, Jocelyn Pook soundtrack. Have you seen it?

No! Tell me about it.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Beautifully mounted. Lynn Collins is a superb Portia, but her smartness is a bit scary--she's been secluded on an island all this time, so you really have this sense of her as a prodigy who doesn't understand the effect she's having on other people--and driven by her desire for Bassanio (Joseph Fiennes, go-to hot guy who gets other people in trouble), too; she's crazy-rich and she's never had to not have it her way. So when she turns things back on Shylock it's really shocking, because you realize that this person you want to like--that you do like, quite a lot--has a core problem with not seeing Shylock as a person at all. ("What say you, Jew?") You have to wonder if she even knows Jessica's his daughter, or if she sees her as the human equivalent of the monkey Jessica supposed swapped her mother's ring for in Genoa. And at the end, you can see Jessica wondering, too.

Meanwhile, Shylock and Antonio are both men on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Jeremy Irons plays Antonio as Bassanio's explicit sugar daddy--they obviously had something going on, and he knows he has to let go, but it hurts. So he gets deep into debt to someone he doesn't understand genuinely hates him, recklessly betting on his ships coming in, and when they don't the cracks show really quick and deep. When he thinks he's about to be flensed he faints, then pukes, then braces himself, a livid white-green to the gills. You feel for him. but once more, this is an otherwise cultured, feeling, reasonable man who says to Bassanio, sadly: "Listen to yourself. You argue with a Jew." And his "mercy" ends with the demand that Shylock become Christian on pain of death and beggarhood...because really, he's just being silly not converting, in the first place! Who would really want to live as an upright-walking dog in a red hat?

So then you come to Shylock, who's Al Pacino. I'd heard he was chewing the scenery, but--no, not so much. He's just had enough, after a lifetime of offhand discourtesy and contempt, other people's rheum in the beard and all manner of similar shit. Almost accidentally, he's gotten hold of this one tiny loophole he thinks he's found which will allow him to fuck the Christians and walk away, and he's going after it like a true zealot. You can see Shylock looking around at the city of whores and jesters, these Christians walking 'round in masks with their boobs hanging out, and thinking: This is what my daughter left me for. He even knows on some level that the way he dealt with Jessica was wrong, but again, it's so painful he can't even look at it head-on. So he translates it into money in his head, instead--obsesses over how much she's thrown away in one night, roams the streets crying on "my daughter!" and "my ducats!", as though the latter were slang for the former.

And man, at the end--he's destroyed. All he had was his money and his community, and they're both gone. There's nothing funny about it, and all the teasing about rings and mistaken identities between Portia and Nerissa and their husbands is like salt rubbed in the wound. You really do think he's going to go home and hang himself, and you'd rather find out if that happens, or what. And Radford never tells you.

[sovay]

You really do think he's going to go home and hang himself, and you'd rather find out if that happens, or what. And Radford never tells you.

All right, that sounds excellent; and awful to watch. I will check it out.