I Had The Same Thought. After All, What’s The Fun Of Patroning An Artist If You Don’t Make Them Suffer?

Man, Ophelia gets even more screwed in this version.

Hamlet, Scooby-Doo Style

[This is one of the funniest, most brilliant damn things I’ve ever read.  It dates from very early Internet days and I thought it deserved resurrection to Le Tumble]

This recently discovered folio edition of “Hamlet” follows other known versions closely until Act V, Scene II, where it begins to diverge at line 232, as will be seen:

KING: …`Now the king drinks to Hamlet.’ Come, begin, And you the judges, bear a wary eye.

Trumpets sound. HAMLET and LAERTES take their stations

HAMLET: Come on, sir.

LAERTES: Come, my lord.

Enter FRED, DAPHNE, VELMA, SHAGGY, AND SCOOBY

DAPHNE: Wait!

SHAGGY: Stop the fight!

HAMLET and LAERTES put up their foils

KING: I like this not. Say wherefore you do speak?

FRED: Good lord, I pray thee, let thy anger wait. For we, in seeking clues, have found the truth Behind the strange events of latter days.

VELMA: The first clue came from Elsinore’s high walls, Where, so said Hamlet, Hamlet’s ghost did walk. Yet though the elder Hamlet met his death, And perforce hath been buried in the ground, ‘Tis yet true one would not expect a ghost To carry mud upon his spectral boots. Yet mud didst Shaggy and his faithful hound Espy, with footprints leading to a drop. This might, at first, indeed bespeak a ghost… Until, when I did seek for other answers, I found a great, wide cloth of deepest black Discarded in the moat of Elsinore. ‘Tis clear, the “ghost” used this to slow his fall While darkness rendered him invisible.

FRED: The second clue we found, my lord, was this.

KING: It seems to me a portrait of my brother In staine’d glass, that sunlight may shine through.

FRED: But see, my lord, when placed before a lantern–

KING: My brother’s ghost!

HAMLET: My father!

VELMA: Nay, his image.

FRED: In sooth, that image caught the Prince’s eye When he went to confront his lady mother. Nor did his sword pierce poor Polonius. For Hamlet’s blade did mark the castle wall Behind the rent made in the tapestry. Polonius was murdered by another. The knife which killed him entered from behind.

LAERTES: But who?

FRED: Indeed my lords, that you shall see.

HAMLET: And if this ghost was naught but light and air, Then what of that which I did touch and speak to?

The GHOST enters.

GHOST: Indeed, my son.

SHAGGY: Zoinks!

DAPHNE: Jenkies!

GHOST: Mark them not. Thou hast neglected duty far too long. Shall this, my murderer, live on unharmed? Must I remain forever unavenged?

SCOOBY and SHAGGY run away from the GHOST. SCOOBY, looking backward, runs into a tapestry, tearing it down. As a result, tapestries around the walls collapse, one surrounding the GHOST.

GHOST: What?

FRED: Good Osric, pray restrain that “ghost”, That we may reach the bottom of the matter. Now let us see who truly walked tonight.

FRED removes the helm and the disguise from the GHOST’S face.

ALL: Tis Fortinbras!

FRED: The valiant prince of Norway!

FORTINBRAS: Indeed it is, and curses on you all! This Hamlet’s father brought my own to death, And cost me all my rightful heritage. And so I killed this king, and hoped his son Would prove no obstacle to Norway’s crown. Then Claudius bethought himself the killer (As if one might be poisoned through the ear!) The brother, not the son, took Denmark’s throne, And held to Norway with a tighter grip. I swore an end to Denmark’s royal house. I spoke to Hamlet of his uncle’s crimes. Then killed Polonius to spark Laertes. This day, with poison’s aid, all might have died, And Denmark might have come to me as well As my beloved Norway and revenge. My scheme blinded them all, as if by fog But for these medd'ling kids and this their dog.

KING: The villain stands confessed. Now let us go. For much remains to us to be discussed. And suitable reward must needs be found For these, our young detectives and their hound.

EXEUNT OMNES. Copyright 1993 Michael S. Schiffer

[Not the anon, but I'd be interested in your answer to these objections.]

I don't have any problem whatsoever with the ideas in the episode - conceptually, it's brilliant. "The Moon is an egg" is a contender for the best premise Doctor Who has ever had. Playing it out against a backdrop of a humanity that has lost interest in space exploration and, in the process, in its own future gives the story real weight and resonance. And putting the fate of the Moon's life and humanity's future in the hands of three women of wildly different generations and experiences is terrific, giving a fantastically feminist spin to a golden-age yarn.

But I've watched it three times, and every time, I found the execution in both the writing and directing badly lacking, and despite some lovely moments (particularly the last scene), it feels like a near-miss to me.

To begin with, the entire thing is set up by the Doctor telling Courtney she's "not special", which Clara suggests will impact her entire life, and Courtney responds with, "You can’t just take me away like that! It’s like you kicked a big hole in the side of my life! You really think it? I’m nothing? I’m not special?"

Admittedly, it’s been a while since I was a young disruptive influence myself, but I don't buy this. At all. I mean, a rebellious 15-year-old responds to getting told they're "not special" basically by rejecting it and forgetting that person exists, assuming they care in the first place. And if they do go into a deep funk and freak out about it, honestly, they're probably immature and spoiled, which certainly isn't how Courtney's been built up. Her entire reaction rings completely false, and, worse, it basically means she spends the entire episode moping around. It feels like those artificial Hollywood stories about parents who are evil for missing the kid's baseball game because they were making a living and, you know, putting food on the kid's table when they get back from the game. The drama falls flat, and Courtney, who I really liked in The Caretaker, ends up being written like an obnoxious TV 10-year-old. Ellis George is appealing when given the chance, but she can't sell this guano. This failure is especially egregious in a season that excels at building the stories on vividly real drama and characterizations.

(I do love the bit where the Doctor suggests the astronauts shoot her first, though.)

And this sort of thing comes from a script that delivers its ideas in an incredibly sloppy way. The clearest example is probably the spidery death of Red Shirt Astronaut #2. He gets all of two lines before getting spidered to death 1/3 of the way in, at which point Lundvik stops to give a eulogy about how he was the guy who trained her, and apparently his name was Duke, and she’s really upset about all this, and I’m just mildly surprised the astronauts actually knew each others’ names for all they’ve actually acknowledged each other at this point. Maybe if the script had cared to develop any of the astronauts at all, this might have some impact, but it doesn’t even get around to telling us Lundvik’s name before the end credits, let alone give her any sort of apparent personality beyond the intensity Hermione Norris gives her. Of course it doesn’t bother with the red shirts. I mean, were we really supposed to care when she delivers her eulogy?

Or there's little details like Courtney taking a big antibacterial bottle with her in her spacesuit. Even the Doctor’s advanced spacesuits look large and cumbersome, and seem unlikely to have pockets large enough for that. But even if they do, does Ms Disruptive Influence really seem like the kind of girl to go through the hassle of carrying around a full-size bottle of Windex in her spacesuit?

Even the climactic debate between Lundvik, Clara, and Courtney has moments that feel off. When Lundvik proclaims, “It is killing people. It is destroying the Earth,” Clara responds with “You cannot blame a baby for kicking.” All the coastal cities were flooded. Lundvik rightly calls it “the greatest natural disaster in history.” The baby kicking metaphor kinda breaks down once you’ve broken the 100 million mark on your death slate. All this sloppy writing climaxes, of course, with the moment where Clara asks the world to vote, but they only get 45 minutes, meaning we actually only get the votes of Europe, whoever actually has lights in Africa, and the American East Coast. That 45 minutes is completely arbitrary, just to put a bit of faux-cleverness in the cold open. Changing the deadline to 24 hours wouldn't impact the story in any negative way, and would allow the entire world to actually vote.

None of this is helped by the directing; the color is badly washed out, removing any sense of wonder to the moon, but that's the only limp attempt at atmosphere in the thing. None of the horror builds tension. The action sequences, while thankfully not the point, are poorly done. Rather than papering over the flaws of the script, the directing only exacerbates the parts that don't work, and don't help the bits that do.

Which brings me to the backdrop. The idea of the world having abandoned space travel, only recovering it when shown something truly beautiful, and thus embracing its future, has a powerful relevance. But this idea is basically mentioned offhandedly in a couple of lines. We never see this world, and the few mentions of it by the astronauts aren't enough for it to really sink in emotionally. The Doctor's speech at the end almost seems to come out of nowhere.

As I say, I love the idea conceptually. I snarked about the science on my blog, but I don't actually have a problem with that; I'm not going to object an awesome idea like "the Moon is an egg", and if I'm not going to object to that, who cares about the fact that the Space Shuttle had no ability to make it to the moon and its landing is ludicrous? It's all in fun, and complaining about it really isn't much more than snarking. I mean, yes, when you can say with a straight face that Michael Bay’s Armageddon had a superior grasp on astronomy, physics, and how the space program actually works, you could probably at least check the first paragraph of the corresponding Wikipedia pages before filming. But Moffat’s fairy tale approach hasn't bothered me before, and I love it more often than not. I mean, if you don’t like the moon hatching into a dragonfly, you’re probably watching the wrong show.

But the characterizations, atmosphere, and world-building all feel sloppy and dashed-off, leaving it to stand strictly on its ideas (which are admittedly grand) and some magnificent Doctorishness. That's enough that I certainly don't hate it, but it's very much the mess the Anon claims it to be.

Poppycock, sir! Kill the Moon is a mess.

I mean, I assume you’ve read my review of it, so where do you disagree?

🤔🤔🤔

Each new thing I see I get closer and closer to making a Sweded version of Goncharov

When Katya said “Of course we’re in love. That’s why i tried to shoot you.” And Goncharov said “If we really were in love you wouldn’t have missed.” 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

Independence Day Marathon Part 1: Maleficent

To honor my country's existence, I decided to spend the entire day in the theater.  I mapped out to spend a solid ten hours staring at just about everything Hollywood could throw at me, and came out mostly unscathed. I feel like it was a good way to celebrate Independence Day.

I started with Maleficent, a fairly shallow but enjoyable-enough Disney fantasy galvanized by Angelina Jolie's amazing performance. She's always had an otherworldly look about her, but nothing has taken advantage of it like this, and few roles have let her dig so far into such a fascinating character. Writer Linda Woolverton does a great job expanding on the character, giving Jolie a rich character arc to traverse, and building a lovely twist around the nature of True Love's Kiss. And with that to work with, Jolie ignites the screen every moment she's on it, and it's absolutely worth seeing just for her.

If she wasn't in it, though... it would be about like Snow White and the Huntsman - watchable and pretty, but there's not much else to it. No one can chew the scenery like Sharlto Copley, but his villain is pretty flat. His backstory has him go from a guy who gives up the only thing he has to be with his love, then show up years later totally evil. The narration suggests he was corrupted by the greed of mankind, which sounds fine, but burying it in the narration makes it abstract, and we never see any evidence of Man's Greed elsewhere in the film. Elle Fanning is perfectly likable as Aurora, but all she's asked to do is smile pleasantly.

And the three fairies are simply obnoxious. That's one of my favorite elements of the original Sleeping Beauty - the heroes are three bickering old ladies instead of the straight-arrow prince. But here, all they do is bicker endlessly, without ever accomplishing anything. I never thought I'd see Imelda Staunton or Juno Temple give performances I didn't enjoy, but I couldn't stand them here. (I'm not as familiar with Lesley Manville, but she was perfectly wonderful in An Adventure in Time And Space, so I'm disappointed there as well.) I really do blame the script here - making them incompetent and not giving them any non-bickering scenes really doesn't give the actors any room. And the hideous visual effects for the fairies are no help - they look like rubber masks of the actors pasted over awful CGI. (The effects are otherwise fine if overabundant - they're pretty to look at, but it feels like we're watching pretty special effects rather than a real, living world.)

I'm not really convinced the Mega-Happy Ending was earned, either. Maleficent's story is so laced with tragedy and Aurora is so underdeveloped that neither of their endings really worked for me.

But Jolie makes it all worthwhile, and Woolverton's take on the story is interesting enough to carry it through its weak spots.

I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year — palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away — they’d cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or they’d pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then we’d hear that they died.

And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle what’s happened in my lifetime.

It is almost five centuries ago, and the girl who will one day be a swordswoman is lying in the red-tinged mud. She can't get up—broken bone? severed tendon? She can't tell. She's yet to cultivate her palate for pain. Her enemy towers over her, a cataphract mailed in screaming steel and poisoned light. His warhammer falls, and it is death, forever death, death unconquered and unconquerable.

"No," says a part of her. She is not even seventeen years old. Her body is mangled and broken, wound piled upon wound piled upon wound. A dull kitchen knife is her only weapon, though she lost that in the mud the second her grip faltered. Her enemy is no thing of this earth. And yet—

"No. It is not death, forever death, death unconquered and unconquerable. It is only a hammer, falling. It is only 'an attack.'"

And the girl understood.

~~~

It is the better part of three centuries ago, as best the swordswoman can reckon, and she is beset on all sides by foes. They are not monsters—just mountain bandits, or highland rebels, as one cares to see it. But they outnumber her by dozens, and even an exceptional swordswoman might struggle against but two opponents of lesser skill.

From in front of her, beside her, behind her they advance, striking from every angle with spears and blades and axes. Others fill the air with arrows, sling stones, firepots. It would be effortless, to parry any single blow. It would be impossible, physically impossible, to defend against them all.

"No," says a part of her.

"You are not outnumbered. You do not face 'multiple' foes. It would be impossible to defend against every attack — but there is no 'every' attack. Only one."

"Oh," the swordswoman said. And it was, in fact, effortless.

~~~

It is eighty years ago, or thereabouts. A coiling spire of stony flesh and verdigrised copper throbs like a tumor on the horizon, coaxed from the earth by spell and sacrifice. It is the tower of a sorcerer-prince, and a birthing place of abominations.

Seven locks of rune-etched metal are opened with her single key. Wretched shapelings beasts, grown by sorcery in vitreous nodules, flee wailing from her, absconding before she even draws her blade. Demons sworn to thousand-year pacts of guardianship find the binding provisions of such agreements unexpectedly severed.

These things dissatisfy the sorcerer-prince. Waxing wroth, he makes signs and chants incantations. With a flask of godling's blood, he draws the binding sigil inscribed upon the moon's dark face. With cold fire burning in his eyes, he speaks the secret name of Death. It is a king among curses, all-corrupting, all-consuming, and it falls from his lips upon the swordswoman.

"No," she says, and she turns it aside with her blade.

The sorcerer-prince's brow furrows. How did she even do that?

"Parried it."

But—

"With my sword."

No—

"See, like this."

Stop—

"Well," the swordswoman finally says, "I figured that if I just...looked at it right, and thought about it, and construed your curse as a kind of attack...then I could block it."

That's not how it works at all!

"If you insist," says the swordswoman, shrugging, and decapitates him.

~~~

It is now. It is the end. Death couldn't take the swordswoman, not when she'd spent all her life cutting it up. At times, Death might sidle up to one of her friends, or peer down into a grandchild's crib, and she'd just give it a look. That's all it took, by then.

Heartache couldn't take her, either. Bad things happened to her, and they hurt, and she lived in that hurt, but if it was ever more than she could take...she'd just, move her sword in a way that's difficult to describe. And she'd keep going.

Kingdoms fell, and she kept going. Continents crumbled and sank into the sea. Her planet's star faded and froze. She started carrying a lantern. Universes were torn apart and scattered, until all that had been matter was redistributed in thermodynamic equilibrium. With one exception.

But now it is the end. There is no time left; time is already dead. The swordswoman has outlived reality, but there is simply no further she can go. This is not a thing that can be blocked. This is the absence of anything further to block.

"No," says the girl who will one day be a swordswoman. "This isn't the ending. And even if it was, it's not the ending that matters."

The swordswoman looks back at who she was, at the countless selves she's been between them. She looks forward, at the rapidly contracting point that remains of the future. She grasps the all of linear time in her mind, and sees that it is shaped like a spear.

So a free tool called GLAZE has been developed that allows artists to cloak their artwork so it can't be mimicked by AI art tools.

AI art bros are big mad about it.