A Biker Gang Version of Shakespeare's Cymbeline is Coming Out?

Yesterday I was on IMDB and wondered, for whatever reason, what Anton Yelchin was up to, and was shocked to find there's a movie version of unpopular Shakespeare play Cymbeline coming out! I'm usually pretty on it with these things, so this was exciting and upsetting at the same time. But yes, there's a movie version of Cymbeline, and it's about motorcycle gangs (Shakespeare's play is not about motorcycle gangs).

And it comes out...sometime. It's not terribly clear from the IMDB page what distribution plans are, but it is at least getting shown at the Venice Film Festival in a month or so. Hope you make a splash, Cymbeline! Shakespeare movie adaptations have had a rough time lately. Julie Taymor's 2010 The Tempest flopped (and also kinda sucked, despite having Alan Cumming), Ralph Fiennes's 2011 Coriolanus barely got shown, and apparently a crappy Romeo and Juliet came out last year. At least Josie Rourke's stage production of Coriolanus, buoyed by Tom Hiddleston, was a hit simulcast in theaters around the globe. Maybe that bodes well for Taymor's film of her stage production of A Midsummer Night's Dream?

Anyhoo, back to Cymbeline. Like Winter's Tale and Troilus and Cressida, Cymbeline is no one's favorite Shakespeare play (although the Oregon Shakespeare Festival did a fun production of it last year). Sample conversation about Cymbeline:

"How did you like Cymbeline?"
"Oh, it was fine. I guess."

Which is why I feel both snarky and intrigued that the trailer for this movie calls it an "undiscovered masterpiece." That's a pretty bold statement (though not necessarily in Shakespeare scholarship, where you have to pretend you "discovered" something new and exciting about Shakespeare a lot), and the premise is certainly bold too: the setting is not the kingdom of Britain but a biker gang. A drug-dealing biker gang. "Like Sons of Anarchy!" the press release begs, while also bringing up Baz Luhrmann's 1996 Romeo + Juliet. Luhrmann made this gritty, flashy aesthetic work for him in that adaptation, so it will be interesting to see how and if director Michael Almereyda pulls this off (he also did a modern Hamlet in 2000). Although there are ridiculous cases of mistaken identity and implausible schemes, there is also a lot of darkness for a biker drama to play up: threats of murder and rape, a beheading, death sentences, etc.

I have a folder full of Romeo + Juliet screenshots.

Plot Summary:

Cymbeline sounds like a girl's name, but it's actually the name of the king. Imogen, his only heir after the long-ago kidnapping of his two sons, secretly marries Posthumus, a noble but not royal orphan who has been raised in the palace. This angers her father and stepmother (especially the stepmother, who who wants her son from a previous marriage, Cloten, to marry Imogen and become king). Posthumus is banished and obviously, since this is a play from early 1600s England, Imogen has to go on a journey disguised as a boy. Spoilers for a 400-year-old play after this!

Casting:

Main character and pretty great Shakespearean lady Imogen is played by Dakota Johnson, who is about to become famous for 50 Shakes of Grey, which I'm not touching with a ten-foot-whip. Apparently she got the news that she got that part while filming Cymbeline. Milla Jovovich plays her stepmother, who is classically evil, and that could be a really fun role.

Ed Harris plays King Cymbeline. I have no thoughts on this other than that Harris is also in Snowpiercer, which you should check out if you haven't already.

Tom Hiddleston won the 2008 "Best Newcomer" Olivier for his turn as both hero-lite Posthumus and villain-lite Cloten (it's an important plot point that they look similar...especially their thighs), but here Posthumus will be played by Gossip Girl's Penn Badgley and Cloten will be the more dramatically tested Anton Yelchin (to return to the beginning of this long sentence, Yelchin and Hiddleston co-starred in chill vampire family drama Only Lovers Left Alive). TBH, Yelchin is looking pretty damn hot in promo pics. Too bad his character's an inept mama's boy wannabe rapist.

Are those...Hersey Kisses?

For some reason the casting isn't complete on IMDB. Although I hoped it was John Leguizamo, my guess is that Bill Pullman is Belarius, a nobleman who, when wrongfully banished by Cymbeline, took the dude's kids and high-tailed it with the toddlers to Wales, where he turned out to be a pretty good dad. Spencer Treat Clark, a secondary villain in Joss Whedon's excellent Much Ado About Nothing, will be the elder son and rightful heir of Britain. I'm anxious to see Clark in this role. His acting in Much Ado was very low-key and droll, and this role suggests more range and action.

After finding photos taken of Jovovich and Leguizamo filming together, I think he's probably Cornelius, the doctor/druggist/potion maker (a role which should actually translate well to this version).

More Romeo + Juliet. How great was Leguizamo as Tybalt?

Vondie Curtis-Hall (hey, he was in Romeo + Juliet too!) is Caius Lucius, who in the play is the Roman general sent to forcefully obtain tribute from puny colony Britain. From the trailer, it looks like he'll be a cop demanding bribes here.

And Ethan Hawke is Iachimo, the scummy dude who tries to be Iago.

So Anyways:

Even if this turns out to be terrible, I obviously will watch it. But I hope it isn't terrible, and kudos to Almereyda for taking a chance on Cymbeline.

Oddly Precious Melancholy: Music and Writing

Nikolai Roerich's backdrop for Rite of Spring.

I don't usually listen to music while writing. Some writers have huge, hugely specific playlists for when they're working. Sometimes they're obvious; sometimes they're counter-intuitive. Bubblegum pop for horror? Metal for young adult angst? I've tried, but I find it distracting. It's fine in the background if I'm in a cafe or other public place, but if I'm writing at home...it just doesn't work for me. I end up making up music videos for the songs in my head. But I say "usually" because music became necessary for a particular project.

In my short story "Oddly Precious Melancholy," out in The Rag #6, the title refers to, among other things, a flavor of contemporary alternative/pop music I've defined loosely and inexpertly. Music that's weird and sweet and introspective. Music that doesn't always seem sure if it's being ironic or earnest with its DIY aesthetic and offbeatness, and yet is delicate and beautiful. The cutesy ennui of a sincere hipster or someone mistaken for one. Music that defined and was listened to by my characters, a group of flippant millennials in timely timeless peril.

I started making a playlist. The first songs were added when I started writing, somewhere around 3-4 years ago (this included Gotye...before it was universally and unambiguously decided that we didn't want to hear "Somebody that I Used to Know" again for at least a decade or so). Other songs got added much later, during the drawn-out editing, submitting, editing, and waiting portion, when I tried to be brave and tell myself that my protagonist, Kimber, would take care of shit. The songs below aren't a complete list, and the order has nothing to with when the songs were added, but it is a kind of thematic soundtrack for my story. This might not be interesting to anyone else, but I thought at the very least I'd share and give credit to the music that got me through this story, from scribbled notes to publication.

Screenshot from The Lumineers' "Ho Hey" video.

Opening

Ho Hey - The Lumineers: anguished and low-energy and plaintive but charming. So, a perfect introduction.

A Change of Days - Smith's Cloud: I know this song because I heard it on a cat video have an encyclopedic knowledge of cool indie music.

Internet Killed the Video Star - The Limousines

Screenshot from Alpine's "Villages" video.

Middle

The Cigarette Duet - Princess Chelsea

Just a Boy - Pikachunes

Villages - Alpine: early on in writing this story I went on a YouTube binge, trying to establish its "sound." It was on this binge that I found Alpine, Pikachunes, and Princess Chelsea.

New Slang - The Shins

Dashboard - Modest Mouse

We Are Young - Fun

Shake it Out - Florence + The Machine

Born to Die - Lana Del Rey

The Gulag Orkestar - Beirut

All These Things That I Have Done - The Killers

Screenshot from Grouplove's "Tongue Tied" video.

Ending

The Rite of Spring, Sacrificial Dance - Stravinsky: breaking from twee alt-rock/pop, here's the finale to Igor Stravinsky's 1913 composition about human sacrifice in ancient Russia. I was properly introduced to this piece in spring 2013 when San Francisco Ballet performed it (despite watching Fantasia a billion times as a kid, it never struck me then - sorry, battling dinosaurs). By the time I saw the ballet, I had finished the story, but this episode kept me inspired through the work that followed. Besides relating thematically, it also has the horrible, breathtaking tension I wanted to emulate.

Tongue Tied - Grouplove

Young Blood - The Naked and Famous





Image sources:
Roerich's Rite of Spring backdrop
All screenshots taken by me from linked videos.

Shakespeare at 450: Birthday Party Post

Puck's ruling the dance floor!

Today* is Shakespeare's 450th birthday. Four and a half centuries. A tiny amount of time in the universe, but time enough to make an undeniable impact on Western society. So let's party!

*Possibly. We know he was baptized on April 26, 1564, but Trump hasn't been able to bully the birth certificate out of anyone. So April 23 is celebrated (which was also the day of his death in 1616).

Oops. Partied too hard on the party boat. Damn it, Trinculo.

There is no way I can sum up Shakespeare in a blog post, not even by navel-gazing and trying to explain my own love of his work. I realize it's fair - even necessary - to question the idolization of him, to ask why this white male who is among any number of writers thorough human history has become "the Bard."

Ms. Bernhardt dons her Danish best for the bash.

But then I read or watch, and cannot deny the power of his creations. Language and society change (often for the better with the latter), but the humanity in Shakespeare's works remains as true as ever. I even love the works I hate. Recently I was talking with my mom about our upcoming Oregon Shakespeare Festival trip, and I was going on and on like, "blah, blah, blah, I hate The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but when we see it at Ashland -" "Wait," my mom said. "Why are we seeing a play you hate?" Even the plays that aren't my favorites I enjoy watching: seeing what decisions directors made regarding them, thinking over the problematic aspects, marveling at the perfect moments within them, questioning why I feel the way I do, wondering what contemporary theater-goers would have thought of them...

Shit, Ophelia's tripping. Someone get her out of there.

Sometime in childhood, I saw A Midsummer Night's Dream outside on a warm evening, and that was that. So today I'll be wearing a locket in which I put fragments of my favorite Shakespeare passages, including Oberon's description of Titania's bower in A Midsummer Night's Dream, act II, scene I:

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:

There sleeps Titania sometime of the night

Shakespeare Stuff:

Oregon Shakespeare Festival: As good as the hype. Even better. Excellent, thoughtful productions in a lovely town.

MIT's Complete Works of William Shakespeare: All of Shakespeare's work, online with simplicity and readability. A great public service. No, I don't know why Troilus and Cressida is in comedy. It's more like a relationship sad-trombone.

Talk Like Shakespeare Day: Can't say I'll be calling people sirrah today, but this site has some fun resources. My personal favorite Shakespearean insult is from act I, scene I of Coriolanus: "Who deserves greatness/ Deserves your hate, and your affections are/ A sick man's appetite". Damn, Martius.

Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood: Pre-Raphaelites and Shakespeare: A series of blog posts by Stephanie Pina focusing on some of the beautiful art Shakespeare's canon has inspired.

Folger Library Digital Image Collection: You want illustrations of your favorite play throughout history? A manuscript page? A costume worn by the famous actor brother of the guy who became more famous for assassinating Lincoln? Look here.

No one blames you, man. Join the party.

Previous Shakespeare Stuff on this blog:
A Young Dragon: Tom Hiddleston as Coriolanus
A Party at the Whedons': Much Ado About Nothing
Much Ado About Whedon
Occupy Shakespeare: Coriolanus


Image Info:
Puck being a dork
Party boat
Mucha Sarah
MDMA Ophelia
Sad Edwin