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  • EADD Moderators: Pissed_and_messed | Shinji Ikari

EADD Movie Recommendations Thread v.4...not for TV series and stuff Dan...

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Ha! How can I turn down an offer like that? If you are able to give and take time itself then you probably know a thing or two about decent drama - it's added to my ToWatch list. Co-written (well, adapted) by McKellen too I see. Will get back to you as and when with my verdict. Not sure exactly when cos it depends when I'm in the mood for it - I tend to watch things as whims take me. Does sound very promising though - I've always liked Macbeth as a story and setting it the way they have in this adaptation does sound rather intriguing.

And I'm sure you're right about the "see it, don't read it" thing. Have heard it said many times. I've not really had the opportunity to see any Shakespeare on stage (nor anything else really) for one reason and another. One day. Till then it's screen versions of which I'm sure there are plenty good ones.
 
I went to see the film adaptation of Coriolanus without doing any research. I assumed it would be "dumbed down" into modern English. Bad assumption. I could barely understand a word of it, it's two hours long and I watched in an "arthouse" cinema with uncomfortable seats.

It's beautifully shot but I left very confused and with a sore arse (Cruel anus! fnarr fnarr). I think I was on drugs at the time so that probably made it bearable.

We did Shakespeare (Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet) at school, but we weren't taught the language, and English has changed a lot since the early 17th century.
Hear you this Triton of the minnows? Mark you
His absolute “shall”? (3.1.99)

Whut? I don't think understanding Shakespeare involves being clever, as such, but it definitely helps if you went to Eton.
 
Whut? I don't think understanding Shakespeare involves being clever, as such, but it definitely helps if you went to Eton.

does thoust mean in understanding ye oldee englysh langywagyue ?

well i certainly didnt go to eton, but it seems to me that out of the only Shakespeare play i made a proper attempt to study, that being King Lear, there are so many different levels to it, our teacher took it to a level each of us was individually capable of grasping. Im sure if it we'd studied that play at O level or degree level or phd level it would have been taught at different levels obviously. Im a bit confused as to whether thats the same thing as being clever or not, but you have to have an inate abilty to grasp the different levels, or not. :?
 
does thoust mean in understanding ye oldee englysh langywagyue ?

well i certainly didnt go to eton, but it seems to me that out of the only Shakespeare play i made a proper attempt to study, that being King Lear, there are so many different levels to it, our teacher took it to a level each of us was individually capable of grasping. Im sure if it we'd studied that play at O level or degree level or phd level it would have been taught at different levels obviously. Im a bit confused as to whether thats the same thing as being clever or not, but you have to have an inate abilty to grasp the different levels, or not. :?

The quote I gave is noteable in that there is no "dost thou" or "I beseech thee" type stuff. :D

So I don't mean it in that sense.
Hear you this Triton of the minnows? Mark you
His absolute “shall”? (3.1.99)

Who the fuck is Triton? Who are the minnows? What is someone's absolute "shall"?


Triton is:

"a mythological Greek god, the messenger of the sea. He is the son of Poseidon and Amphitrite, god and goddess of the sea respectively, and is herald for his father. He is usually represented as a merman, having the upper body of a human and the tail of a fish, "sea-hued", according to Ovid[1] "his shoulders barnacled with sea-shells"

Classics were not on the menu at my state comprehensive (or "high school" as we call them here).

Triton, god of the sea, but this Triiton is a god of minnows. So a big fish in a small pond. I can work that out. But I had to look up Triton. Because they didn't teach Scottish working class children about Greek mythology in the 1980s. I am confident these minnows are on the menu at Eton.

edit re "his absolute shall" coming up.

edit: My absolute "shall" is that I'm not going to get into this any deeper :) My point is simply that Shakespeare is inaccessible to me, not because I'm thick but because I am not imbued in the cultural references required to "get it". And what exactly is the point of getting Shakespeare? As an outsider, it seems to me that it's about belonging to an exclusive club... pinnacle of English literature my arse.

Emma Goldman said:
Every society has the criminals it deserves.

Better than 100 words of Shakespeare.
 
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Strange, we had to study fucking Miltons Paradise Lost, it was totally over all of our heads, that was at a county high school or comprehensive, we all hated the play thoroughly, that bastard book was responsible for me not getting a better grade and into a better uni. 8(

Maybe you'd prefer the poem ;)

That aside, I agree with Knock. It's simply the fact that we haven't spoken Elizabethan English since... well... since Liz 1 was on the throne. Many of the words and phrases simply do not exist any more. And there are just so many references to things that - as Knock points out - more or less anybody these days would have to research before they could decipher any meaning at all. I can live with thees and thous but Shakespeare is hard work purely because it's from such a very different time and place.
 
does thoust mean in understanding ye oldee englysh langywagyue
Nah, that's Chaucer that's like that, the Bard reads much more easily than that. It's interesting, Shakespeare lived sooner to Chaucer than to us, but Chaucer barely seems like English, Shakespeare seems more like the English we speak today. Probably 'cos when Chaucer did it, writing things in English at all rather than French or Latin was pretty novel (there's not even spelling, he spells the same word differently on different occasions).
I went to see the film adaptation of Coriolanus
"Good-looking but hard to understand" is how it was described to me when I asked a knowledgeable friend to recommend adaptations of plays for my little project. That's in the obscure end of the scale, something like that Ricky 3 or the Romeo and Juliet with Leo can be grasped much more intuitively. If it's done well, seeing a play really helps you understand the text, I've seen plays where an actor who knows what they want to convey when they say a line totally changes and advances my understanding of what I'd read.
It's simply the fact that we haven't spoken Elizabethan English since... well... since Liz 1 was on the throne. Many of the words and phrases simply do not exist any more.
On the other hand, there's all the phrases we're used to but were introduced by Shakespeare and would have been new to his audiences. And there's an awful lot of them:

A dish fit for the gods

A fool's paradise

A foregone conclusion

A sea change

A sorry sight

All corners of the world

All of a sudden

All that glitters is not gold

All's well that ends well

As dead as a doornail

As good luck would have it

As pure as the driven snow

At one fell swoop

Bag and baggage

Be all and end all

Beast with two backs

Come what come may

Dash to pieces

Discretion is the better part of valour

Eaten out of house and home

Fair play

Fancy free

Fight fire with fire

For ever and a day

Good riddance

Green eyed monster

Heart's content

High time

Hoist by your own petard

Hot-blooded

I have not slept one wink

I will wear my heart upon my sleeve

In a pickle

In stitches

Lie low

Lily-livered

Love is blind

Make your hair stand on end

Lily-livered

Love is blind

Make your hair stand on end

Night owl

Off with his head

Sea change

Send him packing

Set your teeth on edge

Short shrift

The be all and end all

The game is up

There's method in my madness

This is the short and the long of it

Too much of a good thing

Up in arms

Vanish into thin air

Up in arms

Vanish into thin air

This thread is a bit highbrow and unmovieish all of a sudden, no? Someone tell me something good with tits and explosions, please.
 
If he actually invented them all, then thats all the proof of his genius that i need,

Except he didn't.

vanished into thin air
It seems clear that Shakespeare coined the terms thin air (which has been widely used since the 17th century by a diverse collection of authors, including John Milton (1671), William Blake (1800) and Ed McBain (1977) and vanish into air, used by lesser-known author; James Hogg, in his work Mountain Bard, 1807. Shakespeare didn't put the two together to make vanish into thin air though. The first use I can find of that phrase, which is clearly an adaptation of Shakespeare's terms, is in The Edinburgh Advertiser, April 1822, in a piece about the imminent conflict between Russia and Turkey:



in a pickle
The figurative version of the phrase, meaning simply 'in a fix' or, in the almost identical 19th century phrase 'in a stew', arrives during the next century. Thomas Tusser's Five Hundreth Pointes of Good Husbandrie, 1573, contains this useful advice:

Reape barlie with sickle, that lies in ill pickle.

Presumably, barley that wasn't in ill pickle, that is, the corn that was standing up straight, would be cut with the larger and more efficient scythe.

I'm sure shakespeare did coin a few phrases, of course. But it was sort of his job!

burns said:
“The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley.”

burns said:
“While Europe's eye is fix'd on mighty things,
The fate of empires and the fall of kings;
While quacks of State must each produce his plan,
And even children lisp the Rights of Man;
Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention,
The Rights of Woman merit some attention.”

knock said:
fuck your bard! Your man "shakespeare",
he was a knob, and you're all queer!
 
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I'm sure shakespeare did coin a few phrases, of course. But it was sort of his job!

Since everyone is so clever on this thread :p :) i wonder if he knew he would be widely regarded as the greatest writer in the english language about 400 years later. I wonder if it was appreciated and recognised at the time. It must have been quite an exciting time, Im not sure if his plays were made for the elite or for the people. I dunno how old the recognisable English language is, 5 or 600 years old ? Its about time we had another Shakespeare, another immensely talented genius is what im trying to get at.
 
i wonder if he knew he would be widely regarded as the greatest writer in the english language about 400 years later.

I kinda doubt it. Although I'm sure he was as much of a cocky cunt as any actor/writer/director today is :D

And now to the conspiracies... did William Shakespeare of Stratford actually write the plays attributed to him or was it one of the other contenders? :sus:

His handwriting was pretty frikkin bad - how did he get his (quite likely illiterate) actors to read his lines? :sus:

I'm making a really bad fist of trying to put forth the conspiratorial theories cos I frankly don't believe a word of 'em (if nothing else cos I simply don't see any reason for a conspiracy) but it's a hotly debated subject even amongst properly poncey critics and the like.

Shakespeare FACT! - (bear with me, I may not remember this 100% accurately cos... my memory - but look it up if interested cos I'm not just making shit up) I saw a documentary recently where they scanned peoples' brains whilst reading Shakespearean passages compared to... was either just "other text" or (I think) Shakespearesque text. Details shmetails, the end result was that Shakespeare has the brain lighting up like an Xmas tree whilst other stuff doesn't. Or I've totally misremembered the whole thing which is also possible. Google is your friend if your really wanna know :p
 
hmmm, id have thought reading shakespeare to people would have peoples brains clouded with puzzlement rather than lighting up, i guess it depends on exactly which passages were read out though, some of the famous and well known bits would obviously be better received than an obscure particularly inpenetrable wall of shakesperean schmerian.

As for the conspiracy theories; ive caught glimpses of documentaries about such things but wasnt interested at the time, if somesuch thing comes up again I'll watch it next time. Or find something on youtube if i get very bored or something.
 
I think I've remembered another detail or two from that study I mentioned... It was relating specifically to words/phrases he's credited with creating. The way words that are new and unexpected to us affect our thinking. I do believe the word "Godded" was focussed on particularly. I really wish I could recall where it was I saw this programme or what it was called so I could actually linky it or summat. It wasn't about clouded brains, nor exactly puzzlement, more about making new connections I think.

EDIT: Here you go...

Shakespeare good for the brain

SYDNEY: Shakespearean language excites positive brain activity, according to a new British study, adding another layer of drama to the works of the bard.

“The brain reacts to reading a phrase such as ‘he godded me’ from the Tragedy of Coriolanus, in a similar way to putting a jigsaw puzzle together,” said author Philip Davis, from the University of Liverpool in England. “If it is easy to see which pieces slot together you become bored of the game, but if the pieces don’t appear to fit … the brain becomes excited.”

“By throwing odd words into seemingly normal sentences, Shakespeare surprises the brain and catches it off guard in a manner that produces a sudden burst of activity – a sense of drama created out of the simplest of things.”

Davis’ team believes that this heightened brain activity may be one of the reasons why Shakespeare’s plays have such a dramatic impact on their readers.

Shakespeare used a linguistic technique known as ‘functional shift’ that involves, for example, using a noun to serve as a verb (‘he godded me’). The researchers found that this technique allows the brain to understand what a word means before it figures out the word’s role in the sentence. This process causes a sudden peak in brain activity and forces the brain to work backwards in order to fully understand the sentence.

In the study, the team used an electroencephalogram (EEG) to monitor the brain activity of 20 participants as they read excerpts from Shakespeare’s plays. In this technique, electrodes were placed on each subject’s scalp to measure brain responses.

“The effect [of Shakespeare] on the brain is a bit like a magic trick; we know what the trick means but not how it happened. Instead of being confused by this in a negative sense, the brain is positively excited,” explained co-author Neil Roberts, also from the University of Liverpool.

“The brain signature is relatively uneventful when we understand the meaning of a word, but when the word changes the grammar of the whole sentence, brain readings suddenly peak,” he said. “The brain is then forced to retrace its thinking process in order to understand what it is supposed to make of this unusual word.”

According to Roberts, when the brain reads a sentence that does not make semantic sense, the EEG registers what is called an N400 effect – a negative wave modulation. When the brain reads a grammatically incorrect sentence it registers a P600 effect, which continues well after the trigger word has been read.

The group found that when participants read the word producing the functional shift there was no N400 effect, indicating that the meaning was accepted. However, a P600 effect was observed, indicating that the brain was reevaluating the grammatical role of the word.

The team is now using magnetoencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test which areas of the brain are most affected. They are also exploring the role that exposure to Shakespeare could play in maintaining healthy brain activity.

Davis added, “This interdisciplinary work is good for brain science because it offers permanent scripts of the human mind working moment-to-moment … [through this research] we may discover new insights into the very motions of the mind.”

(source)
 
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this has kind of piqued my interest a bit, quite strange if id seen a documentary about all this advertised as fortmcoming on BBC4 id have given it a miss before now, a bit more interested now for some reason.

EDIT: I'll have to read that tomorrow mate, nightime etiz has kicked in big time. Goodnight fella !
 
See edit for memoryfail update. Can't think of a decent doc on the conspiracy stuff cos have never been that into it really. I know there are plenty (as in literally hundreds) of books on the subject though. Including ones by famous Shakesperean Lovey-type actors and stuff
 
yeah thats what i meant, it looked to long and comolicated after 9mg of etiz has kicked in. Thanks for posting it though I'll read it tomorrow.

If you get chance could have you have a look at my latest post on the opi support thread about my mini blaze of glory idea, and see what you reckon ?

Over and out for tonight i think, catch you tomorow, hopefully !
 
Ray. Starring Jamie Foxx.

The story of Ray Charles, Ive mentioned this a couple of times allready but for anyone who might have missed it, its an absolutely brilliant film about that mans life story, coming of age in an era of black segregation, thats what made his name when he took a stand, it was a huge story, plus his extremely controversial for the time entirely new merging of gospel music with rythym and blues, the record companies wanted him to find his own voice and sound so thats what he did. Hit the road jack. Fucking awesome. Also deals with his H problems, all the sharks around him, his sheer musical genius, his blindness, his womanising. Christ there are so many themes to this film i dunno how they fitted them all in. 10/10. Very inspiring film.

Won 2 oscars. Oscar films are sometimes a bit worthy and serious, but this is fucking exciting and entyertaining too.

Won
Oscar Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
Jamie Foxx
Best Achievement in Sound Mixing
Scott Millan
Greg Orloff
Bob Beemer
Steve Cantamessa
 
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