Dogma

Listen up everybody! I'm flying to Augusta for Thanksgiving. There might be a Scrabble game and probably no Wi-fi service. So unless we all get together and get Mom hooked up then you can expect frequent phone calls asking for an Internet search in order to verify a word. Wait, maybe I could just bring a Scrabble dictionary. It was nice of Tish to buy one last summer but it was also a lot of fun to call people and ask them to check a word for us. Keep your lines open.

 

Dogma

 

"I need you three to shuffle her loose the mortal coil..."

 

Ok, reading Hamlet last summer meant that I started seeing Hamlet in everything, hence my incredibly brillant connection with the Will Smith Hancock movie. Speaking of which, according to  the admissions officer at Macalester who is a friend of mine, the tank top t-shirt that Charlize Theron wears to bed and which says "Macalester" on the front is a big seller at the Macalester bookstore.

 

Now, I watched the Hamlet movie last night and this afternoon the elder resident teenager comes home with a borrowed copy of Dogma which contains the above reference from Hamlet. I may have laughed a little too hard in the first half then got tired of it for awhile then got back into it. One of the many fun parts of this movie are all the references to movies and one major play. It is a fun movie even though one critic said "in spite of all the gratuitous violence and bad language, it's still a fun movie."

 

It has a very similar theme to the Surrealist Spanish movie I reviewed last year called Milky Way. I liked that one a lot and this one in the same way. They both try very hard to criticize the Catholic Church but both come out saying some very deep spiritual things in the process and somehow showing the good things about Catholic spirituality. Alainis Morrisette plays a very provocative role. Provocative in the sense of really having to think about what it means.

 

What Dreams May Come

As long as we're on the subject of Hamlet, I'll mention this movie that we saw a few years ago. The title comes from Hamlet's suicidal "to be or not to be" musing. I thought it was a beautiful movie. Robin Williams, Annabelle Sciorra, and Cube Gooding Jr.. Heaven and hell. Incredibly sad but beautiful.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

 

Another Hamlet connection. A very strange movie but one I remember liking although it's been long enough that I really don't remember much except how interesting it was that a movie was made about what might have happened to two minor characters from a major play.

 

Here's a poem:

 

They All Want To Play Hamlet

They all want to play Hamlet.
They have not exactly seen their fathers killed
Nor their mothers in a frame-up to kill,
Nor an Ophelia dying with a dust gagging the heart,
Not exactly the spinning circles of singing golden spiders,
Not exactly this have they got at nor the meaning of flowers - O flowers,
     flowers slung by a dancing girl - in the saddest play the
     inkfish, Shakespeare, ever wrote;
Yet they all want to play Hamlet because it is sad like all actors are sad
     and to stand by an open grave with a joker's skull in the hand and
     then to say over slow and say over slow wise, keen, beautiful words
     masking a heart that's breaking, breaking,
This is something that calls and calls to their blood.
They are acting when they talk about it and they know it is acting to be
     particular about it and yet: They all want to play Hamlet.


Carl Sandburg a