#favorite play

[fshoulders]

Just saw someone on here say the Baz Luhrmann Romeo & Juliet is “considered the most faithful movie version of Romeo and Juliet” and had to stop myself from chasing them down the internet like the meme goose going “BY WHO?! BY WHO!?????” Don’t start internet beef over this, self! They didn’t say THEY liked it best! They might be an innocent bystander! Also you are weirdly aggressive about Shakespeare!

Okay, deep breath, short post. Short post! We can do this!

Romeo and Juliet has an oddly small cinematic footprint, compared to its cultural impact. That’s probably why Luhrmann’s version can still hold any primacy. (Gods, are there English teachers showing this in class? Because they don’t have to fast-forward through the Zefferelli nudity? What a thought. Stay on target.) I can only theorize that other Shakespeare plays get more adaptations because they’re centered on a huge male role, so they can be a Serious Showpiece for a single male actor. R&J doesn’t operate that way.

And in my experience (having seen four or five live productions, off the top of my head) it’s a play that really lives in the theater. Stupid as it sounds, every time I see Romeo and Juliet live, some part of me feels like this time, it might end happy. The letter might not go astray: the messenger won’t get caught in a quarantine, Romeo will know Juliet isn’t dead, and everything will turn out fine. It’s so often noted that the play isn’t structured as a tragedy, but as a New Comedy (like Midsummer Night’s Dream, et c. — a story about young people defying their parents for love) that goes wrong: somehow this works on me, in person, such that I really think maybe we’ll pull it off! The kids will be all right, the parents will be chastened, and all will end well. It breaks my heart, every time, when it doesn’t.

I have small quibbles with the Luhrmann R&J, but I won’t enumerate them here. I simply want to point out that Luhrmann makes the most appalling directorial choice he possibly could. And he’s not the only one! This choice was in vogue during the 19th century in England (which is also when Bowdler took the naughty bits out of Shakespeare, so…yeah. Not very concerned with being faithful to the text.) Luhrmann, and the rest of the 19th century text-criminals, have Juliet wake up while Romeo is still dying.

I suppose some of you are now going, “why is that such a terrible thing? It allows for more acting!” Well, yeah, that’s why the hams of the London stage liked to do it in Romantic and Victorian times. Everything for more melodrama!

But it’s a sin against the text, and I’ll tell you why. That breathless stupid hope I talked about above, that the entire play’s structure induces? The hope that everything will turn out right? It builds up in you like a flood, and everything goes wrong again, and the entire weight of your hope is penned up in your heart, and they came so close! It was so close to being all right, but Romeo kills himself, and nothing will be all right.

And Juliet wakes up, still a citizen of the Country of Hope where this trick is so clever and Romeo’s going to save her, and she finds him there. And nothing makes sense to her. He was supposed to be here, but he was supposed to be alive. It’s a cruel inversion of her hopes, it’s her love made Death at last, it’s her whole world collapsing. We know how close it came to being all right, but she doesn’t know. She despairs. She sees he poisoned himself. And then she kisses him. And she says,

“Thy lips are warm.”

Now she knows as clearly as we do how nearly they were together, how close they came to a happy ending. Total understanding crashes over her, and crashes out of us. It’s the perfectly weighted moment of catharsis for the entire play. No lie: just typing her words above, I started crying with no warning. It’s the sharpened point of the play in Juliet’s heart, and ours. Those four words are the most devastating, understated thing. They are the cold, uncaring touch of Death.

And if she saw him die, they don’t work. They make no sense. She sounds like a fool saying them. And the whole weight of the play lands wrong, because some director thought he knew better than William Shakespeare how to wring the salt tears from human hearts.

[theanxiousbookdevourer]

A Collection of My Favorite Parenthetical Asides in Disco Elysium:

[frownyalfred]

thinking about the expert masseuse Alfred hired for the family that is paid a small fortune annually to provide massage services and ignore so, so many things. No questions, no remarks, just quality service and an ironclad NDA that, if broken, would probably topple said masseuse’s entire family line.

Things Alfred is paying them to ignore, in no specific order:

Bruce’s spinal hardware courtesy of Bane :)

weird amounts of muscle on everyone, even the kids (despite them allegedly not working physical jobs)

scars

FRESH scars

the fact that every joint in Bruce’s body clicks when moved/manipulated at the tender age of 42

Olympic athlete level physiques

rotator cuff injuries across the whole family

scars that are definitely from bullets and/or acid splashes

old signs of what looks like torture (Bruce)

Dick’s entire left arm is basically screws and plates (he “fell really bad” once)

every single family member takes deep tissue massage with max pressure with 0 complaints

calluses

no really, the weirdest fucking calluses

[proxycrit]

Day 26- Lanayru Mountain

Perhaps dragon song sounds familiar. No matter; it’s time to get to business.

On that note, magnesis is reacquired! Purah’s still working on the other glyphs.

(“We’ll find a cure by the end of this year, I promise.”

“I hope we do, Mimi. I really, really hope we do.”)

((This is a totk au called familiar familiar! Zelda doesn’t go back in time, history is forever changed, and link is beset by ghost memories from his magic arm as per usual.))

(Want to throw a coin to an exhausted art hermit? Check out my patreon!)

[calmlb]

“Chuuya wasn’t in Dark Era, why is he in this art??”

wdym, he’s right here 🤨

[bheska]

In Brazil people were like this waiting to see across the spiderverse

Source

[blueskittlesart]

i hope everyone in nintendo’s management department dies and goes to hell no matter what and i’m not kidding

[egophiliac]

he did it! 🐍 and it only took...uhhh...well, there probably could've been less punches, but why hold back!

PUNCHES FOR EVERYONE

[pucksandpower]

There’s no way 😭

[wingscription]

feral dogtops in muzzles. feral dogtops snarling and growling as they rut into you harder and faster, nearly bruising your cervix because they're so frustrated they can't bite you as they fuck you into oblivion. feral dogtops pressing the muzzle into your neck because it's the closest they can get to having their mouth on your skin.

muzzled feral dogtops.

[diviedrawn]

Coping with the fact that I can’t get re 6 atm sob

[captivatedbyurhubris]

the fact that at "never once has he cheated on his wife" literally everyone turned to Zeus' actor & his reaction to it is sending me

[marisashinx]

Basketball! Basketball! We love basketball!!!

[galaxylover06]

" I won't obey! "

This was made for a trend on the bird app but I found out it's the dreamcast anniversary. So congrats to the cast and much love towards Sonic Adventure!!