Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Last night I finally watched an old Orson Welles film noir flick that I'd been curious about for years. It's called "Touch of Evil," and I wanted to see it as it had been featured in the film noir section of "Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography," which is a fantastic video I used in my old Media Lit class. It included a scene of a a fat, crazed Welles, jowls shaking in the blinking light, attacking some unnamed villain. The Noir was striking, with the sparse hotel room full of dark corners, lit intermittently by some outside blinking light source coming through half-opened blinds.

Well, it took me two tries before I got through this film, and after staying awake the second time, I'll report that it's a pretty good film. Except Welles isn't the hero, which is one of the good things about this film--Welles plays the baddie with his typical scene chewing presence. The hero is a character named Vargas, a Mexican cop. See, the hero is the reason I had trouble watching the movie the first time around, because he's played by Charlton Heston. In makeup.

Even writing that sentence gives me the creeps.

No prying a gun
from Heston's dark-skinned hero
no accent either

This morning Zoey woke up humming the Toreador song from Carmen. Her love for the Little Einsteins often introduces her to snippets of some of the more famous classical music pieces, and on the one hand it's wonderful to hear her embrace these works. On the other hand, she really watches too much TV. But then, so did I, only at her age there weren't nearly as many choices--and they weren't all paired with massive marketing machines pushing plastic, lead-covered toys. In any case, I happily started singing along (who doesn't love the music from Carmen?). Only instead of the words to the actual song (which I honestly don't really know aside from "Toreador, en guarde"), I sang this:

"Do not forget, stay out of debt.
Think twice, and take this good advice from me,
Neither a lender nor borrower be.

And there's just one more thing,
I say to you,
To thine own self be true."

Whoever guesses where that's from will win a prize.

Okay, no prize. Just an electronic gold star.

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Is it Shakespeare? I could well be mistaken. I'm going on the "To thine own self be true" bit.

10:07 PM  
Blogger Found in the Alley said...

what made you combine french opera and english theater?

I loved Toreador when I was Zoey's age. My dad would sing it around the house but he sang "toreador, don't spit on the floor, use the cuspidor, that's what it's for."

I know that Bart sang the cuspidor lyrics on the Simpsons but I wonder where it's originally from.

I think I could watch that flick. "who killed the electric car" is already in the netflix queue. I'll hold my tongue on the conspiracy thing 'til I've seen it but it hardly would take a conspiracy to keep it down in our times.

10:17 PM  
Blogger Mari said...

Well, it's definitely Shakespeare's words. From Hamlet, to be precise. But try and dig a little deeper down into your TV roots and see if you can remember who actually combined the two. It wasn't me. I was just repeating what I'd heard.

10:29 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Gilligan's Island???

(ok, so I googled it...is that cheating? or resourcefulness?)

3:03 PM  
Blogger Mari said...

okay, deb gets the gold star, but only half of a star because she did "cheat" a little bit. I was hoping I wasn't the only one who hasn't forgotten the "Gilligan's Island" episode where the theater producer gets stranded on the island, and the cast gets to do their musical version of "Hamlet," only to have the producer get off the island, steal their musical, and put it on Broadway.

11:07 AM  

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