selenak

You haven't? It's quite the revelation. The two most famous scenes the young Brando ever did which made him an icon back then were:

a) From "A Streetcar Named Desire", Stanley calling for Stella. The raw sexuality in this early 50s clip is still incredible and better than many a thing that came decades later:

b) "I could have been a contender" from "On the Waterfront". The other guy playing his brother is Rod Steiger.

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as stupid as trying to rewrite the Tilbury speech. *glare in the direction of a certain movie released this year*

So I take it the Elizabeth sequel has been just as historically correct as the first?

Thank you for linking the Caesar/Mark Antony clips, both very fascinating. And the DW vid was lovely!

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Enough said (http://history-spork.livejournal.com/7816.html).

And you're welcome. Youtube is ever so useful!

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I still wonder whether the teachers who managed to produce not one, not two but three brilliant Timelord renegades all became the Gallifreyan equivalent of alcoholics later, or whether they did it intentionally.

I wonder that, too. (And I can't stop watching that vid of

calapine's.)

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Enough said.

LOL. Good god...

(I actually like the first movie. It's like a Dumas adaptation on crack... of course it really helps that my knowledge of the Elizabethan age is minimal, so the thing that disturbed me most was the soundtrack. And probably Daniel Craig's Sith lord robes.)

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I mean, one can be misfortune, but three doesn't just look like carelessness, it looks like intention.*g* More seriously, I could see some of the older generation foreseeing the need for timelords who don't follow the established path and deliberately pushing the cleverest children to rebellion, and I believe you've written a story with that premise, yes?

...of course, it's the old Lucifer conundrum, as interpreted by Neil Gaiman (and Mike Carey). Did God need someone to rebel and deliberately created the circumstances so a rebel would emerge, etc.

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butterflykiki.livejournal.com

I adore that Who vid. Really great overview of a zillion years of backstory.

I am going squee over Marlon Brando. Never saw that one before, although I'd seen the Waterfront and parts of Streetcar. God, the man had chops when he chose to employ them. And I just adore the Shakespearean speech; these days, we'd think it too obvious, in some ways, too much a crowd-baiting, and yet... the beauty of the language, and the truth of what happened, might still carry an event like this, given the right mood, the right orator, the wrong day.

That drabble cracks me the hell up. I suspect that while some of their teachers may have thought, "Oh yes, good idea to have a safety valve with these renegades providing flexibility through unpredictable chaos which we can use to our advantage", that others were pretty much, "Dear Rassilon the latest generation is so insane it must be a sign of the breakdown and time and space and I shall resolve the conundrum by personally adjusting my time and space to intoxication, so there."

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Ah. I am somewhat a fan of the Elizabethan age. Mind you, I can disregard facts if the fiction delivered instead is compelling enough, no problem. But what they did to Elizabeth in that movie is unforgivable. When a prematurely present Walsingham said "my queen does not rule with her head but with her heart" - about ELIZABETH TUDOR, OF ALL THE PEOPLE!!!!! - I wanted to throw things on the screen.

Anyway, Tilbury speech. Here's how Helen Mirren does it, playing Elizabeth in the recent BBC two parter. Jeremy Irons is Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.

Same speech, earlier production (a few decades earlier), Glenda Jackson as Elizabeth:

And I'm sure Cate Blanchett could have given a stirring rendition, too, but she wasn't allowed because Shepur K. thought he could write better propaganda than Elizabeth Tudor.

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More seriously, I could see some of the older generation foreseeing the need for timelords who don't follow the established path and deliberately pushing the cleverest children to rebellion, and I believe you've written a story with that premise, yes?

I can definitely see that too, and yes, I did write a couple of things along those lines. (I'm pleased you remember!) I'm re-watching "The Five Doctors" at the moment, and I'm always struck by the Castellan telling the Master he's no good to them dead. And he doesn't seem to mean just in that situation.

It is the Lucifer conundrum. *nods* I'd be *really* interested to know how far ahead of time they suspected that the Time War was coming.

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The Brando-as-Antony clip is from the same Julius Caesar that has James Mason as Brutus and John Gielgud as Cassius, so watch it in its entirety, if you can! And yes, he could act so well if he wanted to. Which makes it such a tragedy that he wasted so much of that talent later, post Godfather at any rate.

I suspect that while some of their teachers may have thought, "Oh yes, good idea to have a safety valve with these renegades providing flexibility through unpredictable chaos which we can use to our advantage", that others were pretty much, "Dear Rassilon the latest generation is so insane it must be a sign of the breakdown and time and space and I shall resolve the conundrum by personally adjusting my time and space to intoxication, so there."

LOL. Yes, I suspect both reactions happened in the Academy teaching circle. With a big sigh of relief when the three had their fallout, because I'm sure EVERYONE was afraid of what would happen if they procreated with each other...

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More Glenda Jackson, as she was my favourite Elizabeth of them all.

One clip from Elizabeth R (post-Armada; that's Robert Hardy as Leicester):

One clip from Mary, Queen of Scots, with Vanessa Redgrave as Mary Stuart. See, I'm not against invented scenes, and I like this one better than the meeting Schiller invented for them:

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But what they did to Elizabeth in that movie is unforgivable. When a prematurely present Walsingham said "my queen does not rule with her head but with her heart" - about ELIZABETH TUDOR, OF ALL THE PEOPLE!!!!! - I wanted to throw things on the screen.

Yeah, that seemed highly unlikely even to me. Not to mention her period as a carefree maiden in flowery gowns. Or the fact that they neglected to mention poor Edward.

because Shepur K. thought he could write better propaganda than Elizabeth Tudor.

I really have nothing to add to that. (Both interpretations you've linked are very fascinating, although I prefer Mirren's. It's sneakier. (And of course rather modern political drama with her using Dudley's images.))

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More Glenda Jackson, as she was my favourite Elizabeth of them all.

She's awesome. And both Robert Hardy and Jeremy Irons, and the way Elizabeth's relationship with Dudley is portrayed in both versions, are way beyond Joseph Fiennes (of course, Jeremy Irons was probably better in Dungeons and Dragons than Fiennes in pretty much anything, so this is a somewhat backhanded compliment).

In which year was the film made?

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Yes, Mirren's is the more modern political drama one, and I prefer it, too. (Though as an overall interpretation, I'm slightly more in favour of Jackson - not in this scene, I mean, for the entire series they both played - but it's a close race, and mostly I like Elizabeth R the series better than Elizabeth because the older series starts with Elizabeth at 15 fighting for her life in the aftermath of the Seymour disaster, i.e. showcases her as a survivor first before it gets into the matter of her love life, and most of the other interpretations go the other route around.

Carefree maiden: that's the most ridiculous thing of all. She never even was a carefree child, what with the dead mothers and stepmothers and the constant changes in status, and her teenage years were if anything worse. But that was why she became a survivor as opposed to Mary Stuart who had a spoiled, safe childhood and adolescence.

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I actually saw Joseph Fiennes on stage (years before Shakespeare in Love), and he was good in a tricky role (Jesus, no less, in a play for the RSC which basically took the liberation theology approach), but yes, Jeremy Irons can act circles around him. And the dead-wrongness of the Elizabeth/Robin Dudley relationship in the Cate Blanchett movie is one of many things I hold against it. It's an interesting relationship precisely because it was anything but a Hollywoodian romance. They knew each other since they were eight years old (Dudley told a French ambassador once that she told him then she would never marry, and that he had never reason to doubt it since - when Elizabeth was eight, her father had his fifth wife, Katharine Howard executed, as biographers quickly deduced), and knew each other's flaws all too well; and though she had other favourites, and he had two wives, he was the one who remained through the decades until his death, and she had that last letter with her until hers. In terms of gender roles, it's fascinating because she was the one with the power, and that simply isn't how male/female relationships used to play out (nor do now, for the most part). But he was far from the male bimbo Joseph Fiennes played. For starters, he did something useful with the influence and positions he had gained through his relationship with her. Records show attended more council and parliamentary sessions than anyone else safe Burghley, he was the first and later still one of the chief patrons for actors in the country, and the main patron for what we would today call non-fiction writers, and as chancellor of Oxford did his bit to encourage Elizabethan learning. (Though Roger Asham chided him for liking mathematics best.)

The Glenda Jackson series was made in 1971, the Helen Mirren one in 2005. And here's a last clip featuring neither of them, but an excerpt from an documentary about Elizabeth:

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The Five Doctors also shows the Time Lords were ready to offer the Master a full bodily restoration (with new 12 generations life cycle) early on - though of course we don't know whether they'd have made good of their offer had he succeeded. Considering that the Doctor got years of exile on Earth and his mind messed with just because he stole a TARDIS (for all we know, at least), one wonders why they never tried something like that with the Master before he went totally psychotic? Or maybe they did, and that only contributed to the state...

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*nods a lot* Yes, exactly. Ooh, though--I'd wondered why they didn't do something, but it never occurred to me that they might've tried and just made it worse. Yeow.

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kakodaimon.livejournal.com

I'd only seen the first season of Rome, so I loved this; Brutus is my favourite figure from the Late Republic, and - well, I love how the "and you, my child?" is subsumed in the expressions on their faces. Brutus is definitely hearing it, even if Caesar isn't saying the words (or perhaps not even meaning to communicate anything beyond "ow ow ow").

As well, that James Mason production is fantastic; I was completely obsessed with it as a kid. The only thing not to like about it is the slight reduction in Portia's part. Thanks so much for the post!

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Well, consider again what happened to the Doctor. Three, who was the one whose mind got messed with, was followed by the far more ~~crazy~~ excentric Four, and arguably it spiralled out from there for each regeneration, but because the Doctor is at his core life-preserving, he didn't become a universal menace. But his running away issues got ever more pronounced. I could see the Master reacting to mind control by getting his control issues heightened to the nth degree, and the very thing they wanted to avoid, the sociopath tendencies of regarding every other life form as something to be used, shootiong up on a similar scale.

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I love how the "and you, my child?" is subsumed in the expressions on their faces. Brutus is definitely hearing it, even if Caesar isn't saying the words (or perhaps not even meaning to communicate anything beyond "ow ow ow").

Yes. They didn't go for the quote, which actually heightened the realism of the scene, but it was inherent in the expression on both their faces. And yes, that James Mason production is superb. But you must watch the second season!

Have two tastes. Since you're a Brutus fan, this is Brutus and Antony negotiating after Caesar's death:

and here's Antony's death (and Cleopatra's death, though the scenes are half an episode apart) from the finale:

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Very lovely. Thanks! Wouldn't it be great if Hollywood just tried to elaborate on complex historical relationships instead of flattening them into worn-out patterns?

Joseph Fiennes and acting: maybe he's really more someone for the stage and film doesn't do him any favours. Or it's the roles, because he is commonly cast as some sort of romantic lover without any depth (and yes, I do think that even goes for his Luther, as bizarre as that is), presumably because of his looks.

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You know, I remember seeing Richard Beymer on Twin Peaks and needing quite a while until it dawned on me where I had seen him before. Because Tony in West Side Story is basically Young Romantic Lead (tm), and while it's possible to make more of the role, young Beymer did not. Flash forward, and he had immense fun as Benjamin Horne, who is as unlike as a young male romantic lead as you can get.

Luther - oh, don't remind me. I stopped suspending my disbelief when Luther went all compassionate and defiant about a suicidee. SOMEONE should have pointed out during research that this is not one of the issues the Protestant/Catholic divide was about. And maybe should have remembered reading Goethe's Werther at school, with the last sentence being "kein Geistlicher hat ihn begleitet".

Now, someone should hire Philip Seymour Hoffman to play Luther in a script written by the guys who wrote "Capote". Then I'm so there!

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You are making all kinds of sense here. Whoa.

(And giving me plot bunnies. Well, mine are more like introspection bunnies, but still.)

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