orson welles

macbeth

For a long time, I would have said Hamlet was my favorite Shakespearean play. It’s got some of the best lines, it has a powerhouse performance at its center, and it has one gnarly finale. But somewhere along the line, I’ve come to love Macbeth more. It has some great lines as well, but I find the storyline more nuanced and satisfying.

I’ve seen (and reviewed) multiple cinematic adaptations and I recently got to watch a Blu-ray of Orson Welles’ take on the Scottish Play. He filmed it on a shoestring budget and it more or less bombed at the box office and is generally considered one of his lesser efforts. I thought it was better than its reputation, but still not my favorite adaptation of the play.

You can read my full review here.

I am already re-editing my 2001 review. That’s quite a movie to get just right.

Not a lot going on today to talk about. In doing a little laundry I discovered I am missing two pair of blue jeans! Because laundry is so expensive, and our inability to do laundry and Daniel and Tammy’s, we have been rather behind on our laundry for many weeks. Our tendency has been to do the necessary items when needed and to throw an odd pair of pants/shirt in with those. We haven’t actually laundered all of our clothes in well over a month!

This being true, I have no idea when my jeans went missing. I could have left them at Daniels or the boys, but my suspicion is somebody swiped them when we did laundry at one laundromat. There is one mat we went to a few times that has a person on duty who supposedly watches the clothes so that you don’t have to stay there.

This person also moves the clothes from the washer to the dryer and folds them when everything is done. All of that and it is actually a little cheaper than most of the do-it-yourself laundromats. However, the last time we went I noticed that the person on duty doesn’t really watch the clothes all that well. In fact, several times that we have come in, there was no one out front at all. So in one of those absences, I suspect someone may have seen my pants and ran with them. Who knows, maybe I’ll find them under the couch!

We are going to see Touch of Evil tonight. It is playing in VO which means it retains the original English soundtrack with French subtitles. I have only seen this film off of cable so I am quite excited to watch it again on the big screen. I’m not sure if it is the original version or the recent “director’s cut.”

Apparently, the studio made a number of changes to Orson Welles’ version of the release. Welles wrote a 58-page memo detailing the changes he wanted to make to the version actually released. The studio paid him no mind. However, in 1998 some folks took the memo and tried to re-edit the film according to that memo. That version is quite a movie. Next week we get to see Casablanca at the same theatre! Cool beans! They actually show quite a few older movies and have some pretty neat “festivals” showing the films of a particular actor or director or theme. Needless to say, I am excited.