As I was watching it, I couldn’t help but notice the similarity in names between Prince Amleth, the hero of The Northman, and a certain other famous prince in world literature, namely Hamlet. As the story began to unfold in the new film from director Robert Eggers, who brought us the deeply researched and meticulously crafted films The Witch and The Lighthouse, I saw other similarities. There is a king who is betrayed and slain by his own brother. The young prince, his mother taken as a spoil of victory by the new king, vows revenge on his treacherous uncle.
I thought that Eggers and his cowriter, the Icelandic poet, novelist, and lyricist who goes by Sjón, might have taken inspiration from the Bard for their tale of Nordic kings and Viking berserkers. Turns out – as I’m sure more than a few of you already knew – that I had it backwards. It was Shakespeare who took inspiration from young Amleth for his own Prince of Denmark. As I should have suspected after seeing his first two films, Eggers took inspiration for his movie from and adapted the 13th century version of the Nordic legend of Amleth as memorialized by Saxo Grammaticus, in his Gesta Danorum.
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It’s serendipitous that I came across the film Passing when I did. I happened to screen it as I’m almost half way through a staggering book about race – and so much more – in America by Isabel Wilkerson titled Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. I’ve been making my way through Caste for about two months now. I’m a notoriously slow reader, and I’ve found myself only able to read so much of this particular book in one sitting. Wilkerson includes gut-wrenching, disturbing examples of the rigid hierarchical system in place in America to keep Black people at the bottom of society, known as a caste system.
The serendipity comes in one text informing and unlocking nuance in the other. It’s easier to recognize, because of what I’ve read in Caste, that everything you see and hear in Passing is a result of white supremacy. The very idea that some members of the subordinated – read: Black – group could gain the privileges and respect of the dominant – read: white – group because their skin is light enough to pass for a white person speaks to the ugly and destructively nonsensical idea of white supremacy and using skin color as a way to asses human worth.
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And so, in Godzilla vs. Kong, we come to a natural culmination of Legendary Entertainment’s stab at a Marvelesque shared cinematic universe. I phrase it that way not because we actually have come to an end to the MonsterVerse, but because a movie centered around the two biggest draws of that universe, squaring off like Ali and Frazier, seems like a logical end point. Fans can take heart. The pocketbooks behind the franchise have assured us that if enough money rolls in, we’ll be getting more stories featuring MUTOs – Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms. A brief bit of research reveals that a Skull Island series is in development over at Netflix, and Guillermo Del Toro has expressed interest in the MonsterVerse crossing over with his Pacific Rim franchise.
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