7 Years of Bad Luck

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOjpvNPr3JU
Act III Scene iv

In this scene Hamlet is incriminating his mother of murdering his father and as he grabs her by the hair and screams in her hear there is a broken mirror in the background which caught my attention more than once (3:11-3:37). The mirror represents the broken relationship between Hamlet and his mother, Hamlet loosing his cool upon finding out and the effect the mother's crime had on her family and the kingdom. It reflects the whole scene in mismatched pieces and it is large and noticeable but at the same time shoved in the back of the room.
In the scene Hamlet is wearing a white shirt, which marks him as the "good" character in the scene, but at the same time and undone black bow-tie hangs, like his burdens, from his neck.
I also noticed the columns in the back that stand in a vertical pattern which indicates and active scene where something climatic is bound to happen... an indeed it does.

"To Boo or not to Boo"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY-QL_HJBCc&feature=related


Act III Scene i

"To be or not to be, that is the question" (00:10-00:15) is probably one of the most quoted and parodied lines from Shakespeare's plays. I found this (adorable) example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGdCJeSu82Q

In this screen shot, Hamlet is looking away from the camera and the lighting won't show his face, you can only see his outline which isn't even on the centre, but on the right. The attention is taken away from the subject, leaving only his voice to take the spotlight, making the audience focus on what he is saying and only on what he is saying. The colours are also bleak: black, gray and tan with very little white makes the visual even less appealing.
The colours may play second roll in reflecting the character's feelings, at this point in play Hamlet is in the worst of emotional states.

Banana Blues

The man has an increasingly hard time listening to the tape, as if the more he is reminded of his younger years the more regrets he harbours and the more he misses the company of his lady. You can see he was in love with her deeply, and now he is a lonely senile man with a desk.
The voice seems soothing, the type of thing I’d play before going to bed but that soft cooing voice is tormenting this man, paining him like I never expected such a sweet voice to pain someone. The voice clearly is not his since in the end the man records his own bit and he seems to crow rather than speak.
At the begging the man was happily eating away his bananas and counting boxes and spoons, and at the end there flipside personality, blue and angry. The light swingin from left to right doesn’t help bring up the mood, either.

Spoons

The entire time I was watching this I kept thinking back to a video I saw some time ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrStENrKZa8
Don’t watch if you’re allergic to stupid.
The immediate link I made from Krapp’s Last Tape to the course was the simplicity theme and how so little can say so much like we saw in McCarthy’s The Road. The old man sitting at his desk with a set of boxes talking to himself brings me to one of my biggest fears: growing old and bored. I can stand being old, but I could not stand having to live the last years of my life bored an lonely like this man, counting spoons somewhere and eating tiny bananas.
He’s so senile it’s rather endearing, he repeats himself plenty and wonders perhaps a bit too much.
I listened carefully to what the man was reading off the book but I couldn’t make sense of the list of phrases no matter how much I tried, I know… sad. It is obviously a simplistic play and I have just discovered this is the kind of play I hate the most since there is so little to grab on to make sense and analyze the author’s work and it seems so sad that the author has wasted a lot of time writing something I’ll simply drool at idiotically.
“Did I ever sing?...No” definitely my favorite part.
I though it was creative and witty how the tape mutters the man’s thoughts, his memories, like he is listening to his autobiography written by someone else. The voice from the tape was grasping since it was very detailed and you could even heard the tongue moving inside the voice’s mouth (yet it was not even close to Alan Rickman’s).

Last Thoughts

I wonder if McCarthy writes like this in all his novels, is it a novel thing or an author thing?
Usually I bring all my questions to mighty ol’ Google… but this time it has failed me.
Now onto the real thing:
The ending was awful!
I don’t mean awful like it was badly written but it was so sad and frustrating, I keep thinking that the family that picked up the boy at the end were all cannibals in disguise and I just wished so hard for the boy to shoot himself and end it. I know it sounds terrible.
Another thing I would like to point out was the baby roasting. I’m scared enough of babies as it is but roasted babies simply freaks me out, I can stand the Hannibal trilogy but I don’t think I’d be able to watch a cooking infant on film which I think is a strong enough reason not to watch the movie.
Is the baby shown? I need to know.

A Bad Beggining

To be honest I dreaded the first fifty pages or so of the book. I’m not saying the book had a bad beginning but if it was up to me I would’ve put the book down and moved on to the next, it simply didn’t leave me wanting to read more. I knew it was going to get better since some of my classmates were ahead of me and said the action started further ahead but I had to drag myself into picking up the book again which is something I’ve never done before. The only reason I did it is because you, Mr. Tangen, said it was one of the “best novels ever written!”… or something like that I honestly can’t remember (forgive me for putting word in your mouth).
I don’t want to move on to the post-bring era of the book yet, as for the pre-bring era:
I love the language McCarthy uses and I know I say this a lot about book but I thought it was beautiful (if it was possible I’d marry words, all of them). The character are pretty basic, it’s a father-son relationship where the father is really concerned about what future lies ahead and the kid merely tags along aimlessly, still embracing his infantile ignorance. I hate kids.
I don’t think there were many memorable bits in just this section of the book but out of the ones I managed to capture I think the one that got to me the most was the image of the son taking a bath in the lake and the description of how thin an frail he is. The image immediately made me think of those disturbing pictures you see pretty much everywhere of the starving kids in Africa, with their bloated bellies and heads at least four sized too big for their tiny bodies. To me they always looked like unborn babies, like they weren’t supposed to be alive yet and that’s the reason why they suck at being alive. It’s not their fault. Neither is the son’s.

Wandering on The Raven

I’ve always like Poe and I have read the poem before, to me the obvious meaning of the bird was death and it was most likely related to a lost love of the protagonist name Lenore which lead me to think she was dead and he was mourning her. Now that I’ve come to calmly analyze it I realized that even if it is decided that raven symbolizes death there could still be many possibilities gathered around that fact in terms of plot.
I. The bird could be death “himself” (herself?) coming to take the narrator with him, and therefore kill him
II. The protagonist could be facing the threat/fear of death and it bother him
III. Lenore is dead and has come to visit him
IV. The bird has come to tell him Lenore is dead
V. The author’s conscience is nudging him since he has committed murder, maybe even killed Lenore herself
I could go on forever… but I wont.
It’s hard to pin a single plot to the poem since it is rather vague but I can say that I truly believe the meaning of the bird is death and nothing more.

Pardoner's Tale: Pardoner Shmardoner

Out of all the tales we read I think this one is my favorite. Yes it is ironic and yes it is witty but what I loved the most about it is how it makes fun of religion by making a sort of black humor parody of a biblical story. From all the Bible stories I have read (two or maybe three… maybe) I get the sense that they all go in chronological order, in third person and they all have a message at the end. The story talks about three guys that try to trick each other and two of the end up dead from the use of gambling, drinking and swearing (ok, they don’t die from it but it’s part of irony). The Pardoner has already confessed that his only interest in preaching is money an that he sells fake relics by the time he start to tell the story and goes on to tell a PG 13 story with rather ambiguous ending.
The more-than-flawed character is a part of the mocking himself by being the complete opposite of the morally correct holy man we expect to see preaching for the love of God in church. The story then ends up being completely inappropriate contrasting from the typical characters like seeds and sheep and to add the cherry on top he ends it with a rather flawed message since the third guy did get the entire pile of gold in the end…
I don’t know what to think. The story is not a fairy tale but at the same time it does turn out to feel more real to the reader and less like an unrealistic romance.