'NAUSE!

Some time ago I posted about my thrilling plans for my new DVD player, and then pretty much failed to post about anything that I’ve watched ever since, probably because so many of the things I’ve been watching are actually rewatches. Had a great time rewatching Chernobyl and the 2006 Jane Eyre miniseries, but don’t necessarily have a ton to say about them.

As per my plans in the linked entry, I did give Abbott Elementary a try, but after a few episodes it still hadn’t clicked for me and I decided life was too short of TV you aren’t loving. I also gave up on A Fine Romance after a few episodes, for the same reason. And I still haven’t rewatched Brideshead Revisited, even though I own the DVD set! But I did just rewatch it in 2020.

But I did rewatch the 2008 miniseries of Sense and Sensibility, one of the great miniseries of all time (their seaside cottage is so idyllic!), which I loved so much that it inspired me to look up other work by the same screenplay writer, Andrew Davies. (Davies is apparently very famous and littlerhymes laughed at me for just now discovering him, but hey, better late than never.)

This at last led me to a series I haven’t seen before, the 1998 Vanity Fair, which is fantastic. Amazing portrayal of Becky Sharp - the show never forgets that Becky is in many ways in a very vulnerable position, but also never forgets that Becky is a wheeler and dealer, capable of using her wit, charm, and sex appeal to deal with any situation that arises. Also, sterling decision to shift the focus largely to Becky once her storyline diverges from Amelia’s post-Waterloo - Amelia’s mostly sitting around mourning her awful dead husband who doesn’t deserve it, while Becky never just sits around. Becky Sharp gets shit DONE.

I also came away from this adaptation with a possibly somewhat crack theory: Becky Sharp, a lesbian? This is based entirely on two facts. One, she clearly doesn’t give a toenail about any of the men in her life. Even for her husband Rawdon, the only one where you might argue she cares about him a little, she’s conspicuously unconcerned when he rides off to possible death at Waterloo. (Amelia meanwhile is prostrate over the departure of her horrible husband, who just the night before was trying to convince Becky to run away with him.)

Two, the usually entirely selfish Becky commits one unselfish act in the story, and it’s for Amelia. Near the end, she triumphantly routs Amelia’s pining suitor Major Dobbin, who suspects (correctly, based on 100% of Becky’s past behavior) that Becky will bleed both Amelia and Amelia’s brother Jos dry if allowed back into their hearts and home. He begs Amelia to drop Becky, and Amelia drops Dobbin instead.

Except for once in her life, Becky doesn’t milk the situation for every last drop of advantage. She tosses away her commanding position, and opts instead to ensure Amelia’s happiness. Stop pining for your awful husband, Becky tells Amelia, he’s not worth it. Here’s the note where he asked me to run away with him the very night before he died. Forget him and marry Dobbin, whom I can tell you love.

…Now admittedly enabling Amelia to marry a guy may not sound like compelling proof of lesbianism. But Amelia is one of the straightest characters ever written, so it’s not like Becky could keep her for herself if she wanted to. And this unwonted selflessness at very least shows that Becky, who is otherwise always looking out for number one, has enough of a soft spot for Amelia that she can be moved to look out for Amelia instead.

***

I had planned to get through all the adaptations in this one post, but I’ve decided that would make the post way too long. So I’ll have a separate post about Austen adaptations, and will instead wrap up with the comment that I’m planning to watch a few more Andrew Davies adaptations.

I’m looking at adaptations of books I’ve already read, so currently the contenders are the 1994 Middlemarch, 2016 War and Peace, and 2018 Les Miserables. Any recommendations between those three?

I am about to plunge into a busy new theater season, so I’m rounding up the last few months of shows here.

Richard III. “Wow,” I told the brunch bunch, as we exited Richard III. “You know, I really think I could bring a lot to this community theater. I would know my lines, I would say them loud enough that the audience could hear me, AND I might even manage to bring some emotion into the words.”

Sadly this particular community theater is an hour and a half away, so I will not have the opportunity to test this theory. But I really think that if they’d just given me a script and a cape and let me read some of the lines, I could have injected a lot of life into that night’s production of Richard III.

Our Town. God, this play is boring. I read it in high school English and forgot most everything about it except that it was famous and well-regarded, so when the Purdue Theater Department was putting it on in spring I cried “Oh I must go see it!”

But during the course of the interminable first act, I remembered that I had not, in fact, much cared for the play in high school. So heteronormative. And it just goes on and on and ON till it hits the last act, and then it does finally, briefly get interesting, but that doesn’t make the endless first two acts worth it.

“You’re pretty enough for all normal purposes” is still a line that lives rent-free in my head, though.

The circus. This is not a stage play, but the community circus in Peru Indiana, which used to be famous as the place where many traveling circuses wintered. The community circus features unicyclists, jugglers (including fire jugglers!), tumblers, tightrope walkers, hair hangers, and of course the flying trapeze! A fabulous time. A particular highlight is that they have children at all ages and levels of training taking part, so in one ring you’ll have the beginners doing somersaults while a couple of rings over the expert tumblers are throwing off a seemingly effortless triple cartwheel rounded off with an aerial - except because you can see the beginners right over there, you know how much effort went into perfecting this routine.

The Play That Goes Wrong. FANTASTIC. So funny. I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe. The concept is that an incompetent community theater company is putting on a murder mystery, but everything Goes Wrong: one actor keeps mispronouncing words, another gesticulates wildly on every single line, the set keeps falling apart, another actor gets knocked out so they draft a stage hand in to play her part… amazing. Highly recommended if you ever get a chance to see a production!

There’s also a TV show, The Goes Wrong Show, which I watched a few years ago with genarti and skygiants. Same basic concept cycling through a thrilling array of different genres. Also highly recommended!

As part of Year of Sail, I watched the 1951 film Captain Horatio Hornblower, a delightful adaptation of the first three Hornblower books in publication order. C. S. Forester worked on the screenplay, which may account for its extraordinary faithfulness. Yes, he did have to cut a few incidents in order to fit three whole books into one movie, and yes, he did have to make Hornblower talk to his officers just a little bit more than in the books, in order to convey certain aspects of his character which in the book were conveyed by internal monologue.

But the core of the character is there, the brilliant but self-doubting strategist, the guy who is constantly analyzing himself but can’t see his own most obvious qualities. He believes that he’s always putting up a front and he thinks he’s taking everyone in, but in fact they see right through him – and love him anyway.

The screenplay is great, but props also to Gregory Peck for embodying the character so perfectly. I think this is my first Peck movie - no, this can’t be true. I saw him in To Kill a Mockingbird. (We watched this in ninth grade English after we read the book, and I must confess I was not impressed, but perhaps I should give it another try?) Oh, and in Roman Holiday! I loved Roman Holiday! But although Peck is good, that’s definitely Audrey Hepburn’s movie. (This reminds me that I’m also always meaning to see more Audrey Hepburn. Does SHE have any sail-related movies?)

Anyway, I’m definitely going to explore more of his filmography now. Maybe try The Blue and the Gray?

ANYWAY. Returning to Captain Horatio Hornblower. Lady Barbara was also great - love the scene where she first meets Captain Hornblower and firmly talks down all his objections to having her on board. A captain’s word is law on his ship, so Hornblower is NOT used to being contradicted, but you can see it does him good.

I also thought that the movie even improved on the book in one respect: after helping with the wounded following a sea battle, Lady Barbara herself falls ill, and then Captain Hornblower nurses her solo for seventy-two hours so no one else will run the risk of infection. Does it make any sense for the captain of a ship to take on this job? Absolutely not. Is it romantic as hell? Oh yes.

(Another improvement on the books, IMO: in Maria’s final letter to Hornblower, written just before her death, she tells him that she knows he never loved her. TWIST THAT KNIFE, MARIA. You know that will haunt Hornblower till he dies, and he deserves it.)

Also greatly enjoyed Lieutenant Bush. (Although, heads up, the movie is way less slashy than the Ioan Gruffudd films.) There’s a running gag where Bush keeps making bets with a newer officer about what Hornblower is going to do next, and Bush always wins. He knows his Hornblower!

Altogether an excellent movie. Highly recommended!

littlerhymes and I are back at sea! Specifically, we are sailing again with Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, who are having a bad time in The Fortune of War.

After the events of Desolation Island (fight with terrifying ship that won't stop hunting them, hitting an iceberg and nearly sinking, etc), they are finally on their way home to England. OR SO THEY THINK. First, the ship that is taking them home catches fire. They nearly die of thirst in the lifeboat, but are picked up by another man of war, only for the man of war to get into a fight with an American warship, the Constitution.

I visited the Constitution last March in Boston and was (with all due respect to our heroes) rooting for its victory, so I am pleased to report that it won! However, unfortunately, this did mean that Jack and Stephen were taken captive and imprisoned in Boston.

Yes, the War of 1812 has begun, and to the shame and despair of the entire Royal Navy, their warships have been repeatedly defeated by the ships of the puny American Navy. In fact, the Royal Navy does not have a SINGLE victory to its credit to offset these defeats! I regret to say that this filled me with patriotic pride, so that every time our heroes despaired over these defeats I cackled "How do you like them apples?" It's almost like ships sailed by willing volunteers can outfight ships sailed by men kidnapped off the streets of Portsmouth and/or American ships.

(I must confess that the Aubrey-Maturin and Hornblower books have really revised my opinion of the War of 1812: actually America WAS right to go to war to prevent her sailors from being kidnapped and forced to work in the ships of another power! It would have been embarrassing NOT to go to war about it! And admittedly it was also a trifle embarrassing that we declared war technically AFTER Parliament also decided that the Royal Navy really had to stop impressing American sailors, but listen, communications being what they were, this sort of misunderstanding happened all the time.)

Leaving politics behind! This diversion to Boston reunites us with our friends from the previous book, Louisa Wogan (American spy) and her paramour Michael Herapath (cat's-paw), as well as introducing us to Michael's father (kind of a jerk, but DID forgive Michael for stealing a ton of money to spend on Louisa). But most importantly - drumroll, please -

DIANA VILLIERS IS BACK.

She is in the United States as the paramour of Mr. Johnson, an American spymaster who appears to be falling out of love with her, but is nonetheless the sort of man who will never let go of anything or anyone that he considers his. Diana is desperate to escape. Stephen offers to marry her. Awkwardly, however, he makes this offer just as he discovers that he's fallen out of love with her... or has he???

Really enjoyed this book. Thrilled that my visit to the Constitution turned out to be so applicable!