Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider, set in 1995 Kashmir, is not the best Hamlet film I've seen, but it's top five, easy. Maybe top three. It takes the seemingly radical but brilliant step of spending almost the entire first half of the film establishing the situation -- Haider's father, a doctor, is fingered by an unknown informant for sheltering a militant ( Read more... )

My good pal and esteemed colleague frabjousdave has an interview with me up on his site, in which I talk The Nazi Occult, Stuff I Talk (and Write) About, the horrifying human-ness of Nazis, why I watch film, and cosmic horror in film ( Read more... )

Man, I'm bad at this multiple-social-media-platform business. It's like I was born in 1965 or something! Anyway, for those who don't follow my Facebook or friend my Twitter (@kennethhite), let's have a catch-up session of Smatterings and Announcements! (Admit it, this fire-drill is still better than having to see an LJ post every day with my ( Read more... )

So the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has decided that the "Cobbe Portrait" is an authentic painting from life of William Shakespeare in 1610.

I don't think so. It doesn't look much like the Droeshout First Folio engraving that we know has to be an authentic likeness (since about 25 people who knew W.S. personally signed off on it), and even less ( Read more... )

Back from London, jet lag slept off, and only needing to bring everyone up to speed on the last day or so of the trip. (Strangely, jet lag the other way -- from US to UK -- apparently turns me into a real boy. On this trip, at least, I was up with the larks' immediate associates and nodding off at midnight or one every night ( Read more... )

Many thanks to jnutley, who from the infinite goodness of his heart sent me a copy of A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits, compiled by Meric Casaubon in 1659 from Dee's manuscript diaries, and as (slightly more recently) displayed on my Amazon wish list, from whence jnutley plucked it to wend its way ( Read more... )

On Friday night, along with mollpeartree, lhn, prilicla, luckymarty, and ladysophis2k8, I had what is probably the closest to an authentically Shakespearean experience you can have without the plague and boy-actors. To wit: a rewrite of an already familiar play; in colloquial contemporary language; in iambic pentameter; with lots of in-jokes and references cultural, political, and sexual; and ( Read more... )

Tonight, kaynorr, gnosticpi, luckymarty, ladys0phistic8 and myself finished up the Shakespearean Dramaturgy Game. Much fun was had by all, and more will be revealed in the next "Suppressed Transmission" After-Action Report, but I worked too bloody hard on this not to brag here -- I wrote a lost Shakespeare play. Complete with the reason it was suppressed, which appears in the last scene ( Read more... )

Earlier tonight, mollpeartree and I went to the Hindi Film Society screening of Omkara, which is Othello set in modern-day Uttar Pradesh. This may be the best screen Othello I've ever seen, although to be perfectly fair I haven't seen the Branagh one, not that I have any great hopes for it. This despite one or two liberties Vishal Bharadwaj (the scenarist- ( Read more... )

* Turns out Karl Marx and Ivan Turgenev were exact contemporaries. (Born 1818, died 1883.) They both attended the University of Berlin between 1838 and 1841, to boot ( Read more... )