Six Degrees of Separation

Six Degrees of Separation

 

I got this one after seeing The Defiant Ones with Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis. This movie is the one based on the stage production which was based on the true story of a man who pretended to be Poitier's son. Fascinating movie. Wonderfully purposeful overacting as a way to show how everybody is really pretending to be someone else. I found this interesting bit about the director on Wikipedia.

 

"John Guare, (the screenwriter and original playwriter for the stage play version), was born in New York City and raised in Jackson Heights, Queens. He was raised a Roman Catholic, but now seems to be lapsed [1]. He was educated at Georgetown University, (BA, 1960), where in 1958 he contributed a song to an original musical revue entitled The Natives Are Restless and presented by the Mask and Bauble Dramatic Society. The song humorously attributed the success of many famous people to the syllable “O” in their names."-- from Wikipedia. Now fifty years later we have an "O" on the brink of being presidentially famous.

The Taming of the Shrew (the 1966 Taylor/Burton version)

Check out this real Bosley Crowther review: http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9504E2D71E3BE63ABC4153DFB566838C679EDE

Liz and Dick divorced after this movie if that makes any difference. I loved it. Great sets and costumes. Great overacting. And, as Bosley says, great cleavage. Well, I don't think he says "great." Liz as Kate is great. Interesting  trivia: Laurence Olivier played Kate when he was 15.

 

 

Hamlet

 

I'm on a Shakespeare kick since I started developing my own list of books to read before I die or get too tired to stay up past 8pm. I read almost half of his plays last summer (more daylight hours). This version of Hamlet was the 4-hour 1996 version  with Kenneth Branagh. Wonderful but really need to know the language. Very fast dialogue and hard to keep up but the staging and casting and everything else is wonderful. Look at the cast list. A note on IMDb says Robin Williams and Billy Crystal were not allowed on the set together as they would get everyone laughing too hard.

 

Housekeeping

 

I read the book when it was first published in 1980 then saw the movie in 1987. Loved them both. Now the author, Marilyn Robinson, has a new book out and is getting a lot of attention for it. I don't think the DVD for Housekeeping ever came out, but I thought I would mention it in case enough people request it on their DVD rental service.