"A perfumier designed the aroma to contain hints of 'pus, blood, faecal matter and sweat' so [Jude] Law could imagine himself as [Henry VIII]...."

"At the start of filming Law said he made sure 'very subtly' to use a dab or two of the stomach-turning scent. However, when he found that the smell aided his performance, 'it became a spray-fest.' "When Jude walked in on set,” the director, Karim Aïnouz, said, 'it was just horrible.' [Alicia] Vikander, who performed sex scenes with Law, gave a look of disgust as the actor [said] 'Even the camera operators were gagging. My memory is that we were laughing a lot.... [I'd] read several interesting accounts that you could smell Henry three rooms away. His leg was rotting so badly. He hid it with rose oil. I thought it would have a great impact if I smelt awful.'"

From "Jude Law has more than a whiff of Henry VIII in Firebrand/The film received an eight-minute standing ovation after its premiere at the Cannes film festival on Sunday" (London Times).

Watch Ms. Vikander approach the putrid actor:

I asked ChatGPT, "Can you tell me about other actors who have used smelliness to enhance their performance?" In classic ChatGPT form, I got a list of 5 items:

"Students said they sat in stunned silence as [Laurence] Olivier appeared onscreen in thickly painted blackface makeup."

"Even before class ended 90 minutes later, group chat messages were flying, along with at least one email of complaint to the department reporting that many students were 'incredibly offended both by this video and by the lack of explanation as to why this was selected for our class.' Within hours, Professor Sheng had sent a terse email issuing the first of what would be two apologies. Then, after weeks of emails, open letters and canceled classes, it was announced on Oct. 1 that Professor Sheng — a two-time Pulitzer finalist and winner of a MacArthur 'genius' grant— was voluntarily stepping back from the class entirely, in order to allow for a 'positive learning environment.'...  'Of course, facing criticism for my misjudgment as a professor here is nothing like the experience that many Chinese professors faced during the Cultural Revolution,' he wrote. 'But it feels uncomfortable that we live in an era where people can attempt to destroy the career and reputation of others with public denunciation. I am not too old to learn, and this mistake has taught me much.'...  The Olivier film was controversial even when it was new. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Bosley Crowther expressed shock that Olivier 'plays Othello in blackface,' noting his 'wig of kinky black hair,' his lips 'smeared and thickened with a startling raspberry red' and his exaggerated accent, which he described as reminiscent of 'Amos ‘n’ Andy.' (To 'the sensitive American viewer,' Crowther wrote, Olivier looked like someone in a 'minstrel show.')"

From "A Blackface ‘Othello’ Shocks, and a Professor Steps Back From Class//Students objected after the composer Bright Sheng showed the 1965 film of Laurence Olivier’s 'Othello' to his class at the University of Michigan" (NYT).

See for yourself:

"When you’re younger, Lear doesn’t feel real. When you get to my age, you are Lear in every nerve of your body."

Said Laurence Olivier, some years back. He's quoted today in "At 82, Glenda Jackson Commands the Most Powerful Role in Theater/'King Lear' has long been the crowning performance for actors who know how to dominate a stage. As a longstanding member of Parliament, Jackson has unique insight into authority" (NYT).

Remember Glenda Jackson, half a century ago, in "Women in Love"?



Are you excited to see her now, as King Lear? I'd love to see this in the theater. I saw "King Lear" in the theater half a century ago. Playing King Lear was Lee J. Cobb. Remember Lee J. Cobb?

4th of July movie watched last night.

On Turner Classic Movies.



Some nice lines in there about following or not following the law, and I'd quote them here if I could copy and paste them from the text of the original play (by George Bernard Shaw), but I can't, even though — searching for "law" in text — I discovered that the play is much more about law than the movie.

Anyway, the movie unleashes 3 actors — Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and Laurence Olivier — to emote against each other on the subject of revolution. And there's one woman — Janette Scott — whose task is to decide not whether to join the revolution but which hunky male she likes best. Spoiler alert: Initially her husband Burt leaves her cold and the devilish Kirk Douglas turns her on, but later when Kirk gets virtuous and Burt joins the revolution — and changes from clerical garb into a buckskin jacket — she goes running to Burt who hoists her up on his big horse.

The movie is "The Devil's Disciple," and here's the full text of the Shaw play. I'd like to see the stage play, and I think the movie could be remade. There's a lot of potential to redo the big fight scene in which the Burt Lancaster character single-handedly takes on a bunch of British officers in a room. With no weapons on him, he uses what he can, including a big flaming log he grabs out of the fireplace. How can he hold a flaming log? He swathes the metaphor in a metaphor — his black priestly coat — the one that had previously insulated him from what his smoldering wife had to give.

Ah! I see there is a version of the play with Patrick Stewart and Ian Richardson, available on Amazon Prime. That's a 1987 TV film, so... it's not likely to include a more convincing and exciting wielding of the flaming log. A quick search of the text of the play, however, makes me doubt that glaring phallic symbol was Shaw's idea.

"How is that a haunting question? Of course they would."

Said Freeman Hunt, reacting to the headline "Neil deGrasse Tyson Has A Haunting Question About Bears,"* blogged here yesterday.

I said, "The word 'haunt' is way overused. I should do a post about that." So this is that post.

The first thing I see is that 14 years ago, in the early months of this blog, I wrote a substantial post about the word "haunted" and the way it is overused.**

Next, I see that the verb "to haunt" did not begin as a powerful, ghost-related word. It simply referred to frequency and habit, such as going to a particular place. The OED has very old quotes — as old as the 13th century — that speak of ships haunting harbors and people haunting taverns.

In the 16th century, there was talk of thoughts, memories, and feelings that frequently occurred and thus "haunted" a person. Shakespeare wrote: "Your beauty which did haunt me in my sleepe: To vndertake the death of all the world" ("Richard III" 1597). And Shakespeare used the word to speak of the habitual visits of ghosts:

1597 Shakespeare Richard II iii. ii. 154 Some haunted by the ghosts they haue deposed.
1600 Shakespeare Midsummer Night's Dream iii. i. 99 O monstrous! O strange! We are haunted. Pray masters: fly masters: helpe.

Reading the OED makes the word feel much weaker to me. A "haunting question" is nothing more than a question that keeps coming back to you, not necessarily anything spooky. Is it no different from a "nagging question"?

But I see ghosts in "haunting." Are there horses in "nagging"? No, "nag" (the verb) comes from Scandinavia — "nagga" — to gnaw, irritate, grumble. "Nag" the horse comes from Dutch — "negge" —  a small horse. Oh! And I see that in this horse lineage, "nag" was once a slang word for "penis":

1598 J. Marston Scourge of Villanie B2 Hence lewd nags away, Goe read each poast,..Then to Priapus gardens.
1655 Mercurius Fumigosus xxxvi. 284 He by his Eloquence Converted her Gleab into pasture, and put his Nagg to grasse in her Coppice.
1707 in H. Playford Wit & Mirth (new ed.) III. 56 What is this so stiff and warm... 'Tis Ball my Nag he will do you no harm.

Goe read each poast... that's what I always say.
__________________

* Freeman Hunt continued, riffing on deGrasse Tyson's tweet, "If Bears were in charge, after they hunted us to near-extinction, I wonder if they’d invent a candy called Gummy Human":

Apparently, the term "alt-right" has become unusable unless you actually mean to say "neo-Nazi."

So they were making this Cadillac ad:

And the casting notice said they were looking for:

Social media pounced. There were tweets like:

Super horrified that @Cadillac is planning on including neo-nazis in a "feel good" campaign featuring "all walks of life." Unacceptable.

Cadillac reacted quickly:

“The notice was drafted by an employee, who was immediately terminated for her actions,” the statement said. “Additionally an outside third party further altered the breakdown without our knowledge and posted it on social media. Cadillac unequivocally did not authorize this notice or anything like it, and we apologize to Cadillac for the ex-employee’s actions.”

If you're operating in the mainstream commercial world, take a lesson. You can't use "alt-right" as shorthand for guys with does-this-haircut-make-me-look-like-a-Nazi hair.

But quite aside from whether advertisers use the word "alt-right" in their casting calls, I think they are going for this look. I was watching the Packers game with Meade last night, and as the various car and beer and fast-food restaurant ads came on, I found myself quipping "Does this haircut make me look like a Nazi?"

And it's only looks that matter in these ads. No one will be expressing any political opinions in a Cadillac ad. And if they were, the opinions would be scripted, not the actual opinions of the actors. What does it mean to do a casting call asking for "REAL Alt-Right believers/thinkers"? It can only mean that you look like that sort of real person, not that you really are one.

No one cares what's actually in the actor's head.

"It’s undeniable that non-American actors are a lot more comfortable with American accents than their predecessors were a generation or two ago."

"Listen, for example, to Laurence Olivier—who was a gifted mimic—struggling to sound like a Midwestern businessman in The Betsy (1978)... For Olivier’s generation, the function of an English actor in an American movie was generally to lend a touch of class to studio costume dramas...  Lord Larry and his contemporaries and their immediate successors were, for the most part, perfectly content to sound like the Englishmen they were, except when, as was frequently the case, they were playing Nazis. They just didn’t get much practice talking American. That’s all changed. The Brits have now become so good at imitating Americans that there’s hardly an American role you can’t imagine them in...."

From "The Decline of the American Actor/Why the under-40 generation of leading men in the U.S. is struggling—and what to do about it."



In that clip, Lord Larry is bellyaching about Congress interfering with capitalism. I like the way he lays heavily into the word "cope" at 7:38, "cope" being a key word on the blog yesterday. Yesterday was all about coping, hoping, and poping.

"In place of the WWII aviator who narrated the book, the film’s hero is a little girl in a headband, plagued by her math homework in the modern day."

"The core story of the book—which has the pilot wandering the desert for eight days with the Prince, basically hearing all about the ecosystem of his home asteroid and his love for a rose that grows there—is sent to her by an eccentric, lonely older neighbor. This new, modern spin emphasizes that these bits are magically realist—they are shot with what looks like computer-rendered Claymation—and develops a new emotional plot, which has a friendship unfolding between old man and young girl."

Hmmm.



IN THE COMMENTS: Birches said: "I was prepared to hate the trailer. But I think it could work. Obviously, the movie is not Le Petit Prince. It's a movie about how reading Le Petit Prince can change your heart. Perhaps they should have named it The Prince and I."

The Prince and I? Isn't that this?



To President Taft!

"A team of archaeologists confirmed Monday that ancient remains found under a parking lot belong to long-lost King Richard III..."

"The verification came after scientific tests were used to match DNA samples taken from Canadian-born Michael Ibsen, a direct descendent of Anne of York, Richard’s elder sister."

Richard III supporters such as Philippa Langley, a screenwriter and member of the Richard III Society, were driven to find the lost king’s remains by a desire to reopen the debate over his place in history....

“I think the discovery brought the real Richard into sharp focus,” Langley said. “People are realizing that a lot of what they thought they knew about Richard III was pretty much propaganda and myth building.”

Why does finding the body have anything to do with the historical project of finding out what really happened in the past? There's something in the human psyche that makes us care about an ancient controversy because we are confronted with the man's bones. But there is also some relevant evidence:

Trauma analysis of the skeleton found 10 battle wounds, eight on the skull and two on the body, which were inflicted around the time of death, according to Jo Appleby, project osteologist of the University of Leicester. Many of the wounds provided evidence of “post-mortem humiliation injuries,” exacted on Richard III after death by his adversaries.

It looked a little something like this:



Warning: That was propaganda. And Class A scenery chewing.

By the way: As I was setting up that clip for the embed, Meade came over and said: "From just the audio, I couldn't tell if that was Laurence Olivier or a Monty Python parody."

ADDED: There's a Richard III ward in the Hospital for Overacting:

Tony Curtis, RIP.

He was 85.

As a performer, Mr. Curtis drew first and foremost on his startlingly good looks. With his dark, curly hair, worn in a sculptural style later imitated by Elvis Presley, and plucked eyebrows framing pale blue eyes and wide, full lips, Mr. Curtis embodied a new kind of feminized male beauty that came into vogue in the early 1950s. A vigorous heterosexual in his widely publicized (not least by himself) private life, he was often cast in roles that drew on a perceived ambiguity: his full-drag impersonation of a female jazz musician in “Some Like It Hot,” a slave who attracts the interest of a Roman senator (Laurence Olivier) in Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus” (1960), a man attracted to a mysterious blond (Debbie Reynolds) who turns out to be the reincarnation of his male best friend in Vincente Minnelli’s “Goodbye Charlie” (1964).

Tony Curtis was great. I recently watched the second-rate movie "Sex and the Single Girl" and noticed how funny Curtis made lines that were really not very good. But "Some Like It Hot" is as good as a movie can be and Tony Curtis is part of what makes it fabulous. Here's one of my favorites scenes, where Tony sets up an encounter with Marilyn in which he's not dressed in women's clothes, he's pretending to be a millionaire:

Poladroid... Polaroid...

Jen Bradford emails about Poladroid, freeware that turns a digital photo file into an image that resembles an SX-70 type Polaroid photograph.

Here, you can see Jen's adorable doggie, Louise. (Does she also have a dog named Thelma? Or perhaps George?)

Now, I watched the little video demonstration here. It's sort of charming the way the software gives the impression of the image coming out of an SX-70 type Polaroid and developing in stages, but I got annoyed by the simulated shaking of the photographs. I know the song. (It was "spazzy with electrifying multiplicity" -- 5 long years ago.) But you're not supposed to shake SX-70 Polaroid pictures:

"In fact, shaking or waving can actually damage the image. Rapid movement during development can cause portions of the film to separate prematurely, or can cause 'blobs' in the picture."...

Polaroid said its film should be laid on a flat surface and shielded from the wind, and that users should avoid bending or twisting their pictures. Of course, "lay it on a flat surface like a Polaroid picture," doesn't sound nearly as cool.

Before the SX-70, the rectangle that emerged from the camera was not a sealed packet containing the chemicals that developed the photograph. It looked like standard photographic paper, and you had to wipe a wet chemical across it to make it develop. [CORRECTION: The wiped-on chemical was the fixer.] People shook it to try to dry it off. But if it's an SX-70 photograph, there's nothing to dry. You look like an idiot shaking it. It's like drying off your hands after splashing around in Koi Pond.

I remember the original SX-70 commercials, with Laurence Olivier, acting like the new device was a landmark in the culture of the western world. I still have the SX-7o camera my parents bought. I haven't opened it up since long before Polaroid stopped making the film.

By the way, Polaroid filed for bankruptcy -- again -- yesterday.

And then there's this guy who started taking a Polaroid picture every day and kept going until the day he died:

Yesterday I came across a slightly mysterious website — a collection of Polaroids, one per day, from March 31, 1979 through October 25, 1997. There’s no author listed, no contact info, and no other indication as to where these came from. So, naturally, I started looking through the photos. I was stunned by what I found.In 1979 the photos start casually, with pictures of friends, picnics, dinners, and so on....

Here's the website with all the pictures. Random example:



There must be thousands of people these days who make a point of taking a photograph every day. I'll bet there are thousands of blogs that have a photo of the day -- even thousands that have a self-portrait of the day every day -- which would be especially easy using Photo Booth on a Macintosh.

But there was a time when the Polaroid camera was the epitome of easiness....