• Badger-riffic.
• A little while ago, I ran a piece on the play Angels in America: Millennium Approaches.  I recently rented the HBO miniseries which adapted Angels, including the second play of the cycle, Perestroika.   Before I talk about the film adaptation, here's what I had to say about the play:  The plot is mainly concerned with four gay men, two of whom are dying of AIDS, the other two reeling with the guilt of abandoning their partners in a time of need.  In their pain and grief, these characters say some terrible things to each other, and their negativity makes them seem more human.  We usually insist that our terminal patients in fiction act saintly and wisely loving, but this is more authentic.  Angels in America functions as a Fantasia, a series of scenes and characters that do not always come together to form a complete forward-moving plot, but are tied thematically.  The play is concerned with all the intricacies of faith, religious visions (there's a nice scene where a woman having a drug-fueled hallucination and a man having a prophetic dream find themselves in the same vision), death, politics, oppression, abandonment... all of the scenes tie together thematically.  The plot resists adherence to traditional structure, though it still progresses clearly and at a good pace, and the thematic ties hold the play together well in places where the plot wanders.  The ending did feel abrupt, but Millennium Approaches is only the first part of the story; another play called Perestroika completes the cycle.  Now after seeing Perestroika, I can see how all the threads come together, and how the "fantasia" feel coalesced into a more well-rounded play.  Angels in America is, as a whole, a great piece of work.  The mystical elements can be jarring and a bit off-putting, especially in the film version where their intentional theatricality just comes off as cheesy and melodramatic.  But in the end the mysticism is redeemed, and we discover the main message which ties together the story:  in coming together to resist bigotry and religious dogma, we have vetoed the apocalypse.  We stand together as a group that does NOT want the world to end (through war, through the second coming of a vengeful lord) but wants to go on living, to fight against death and keep the world moving forever forward.  It's a nice message, and a fine counterpoint to the apocalypse cults of organized religion (Mormonism is heavily involved in the story, being a group that believes the end times are already upon us, and also being a vaguely indigenous American religion).  The miniseries is generally quite good, with some very fine acting (and some bad acting too, unfortunately from a main character...).  As I said, the mystical elements are a bit weirder here than they are in the play.  You might be a bit weirded out by it, but in the end it all becomes clear.  In the end, Angels in America is not only worth seeing, but must be seen. 
• Last night I finished reading the 1000 year-old Japanese novel The Tale of Genji.  Which is actually not quite true.  The Tale of Genji is a large six-part novel, and my small Dover Thrift Edition contained only the first part, which is ALSO called The Tale of Genji.  So I did read The Tale of Genji, but I did not read The Tale of Genji.  You see how it is.  In terms of plot, Genji is basically a court romance.  Genji is the emperor's son, and he falls in love with the emperor's mistress.  Unable to have her, he proceeds to fuck EVERYONE.  This is basically the story of him sneaking around, fucking everyone behind everyone else's back, and trying to keep them all from finding out.  Needless to say, it doesn't end well for him.  The novel is considered a classic because of the sheer intricacy of its plot and the relative realism of its characters.  Classic western works rarely attribute this much emotional complexity to its cast, and its also a nice change from some of the western literature I've been reading lately with its "don't mention sex or the devil will kill us all!" attitude.  Still, the book had some definite weak points, especially toward the beginning.  Lady Murasaki was really finding her voice as she wrote the book, and this darkly intricate epic really does begin as basically a clever romance novel.  It's about halfway through this first book that she begins to unfold her wings and instill some consequence into the course of events.  If I ever find a copy of the complete six-part novel, I'll definitely pick it up.  I'm not absolutely thrilled with what I read, but I liked where it was going.  The most interesting subplot had to do with a ten year-old girl that Genji basically abducts from her father.  The girl is the niece of the emperor's mistress, and he takes the girl to live with him and raises her as a kind of daughter, with the intention that he'll marry her when she comes of age.  Neither Genji's servants nor the girl's feel good about this arrangement, and everyone tries to talk him out of it.  They do everything they can to subtly stop him, caught between the immorality of his actions and the sheer amount of his political power which enables him to do whatever he wants.  The fact that this novel is written by a woman brings a rare feminine perspective to the occasion (reading the book's footnotes, it appears that female writers were not at all uncommon in medieval Japan) and makes it ring true.  Genji's treatment of women is very much an issue throughout the story, and that's something else that makes this more valuable than many books of its time.
• One of the most enjoyable plays of the 1960s was John Goldman's The Lion in Winter, which was of course made into a film and that's why we're here today.  Goldman's play was a naturalistic (and mostly fictional) depiction of King Henry II in the year 1183, preparing for death and deciding which of his completely unworthy sons should inherit the throne.  I call it naturalistic because the characters are treated as normal human beings:  squabbling, backbiting, joking around, and speaking in everyday language.  It takes regality out of the equation and asks us to see these people as they might really have been, in private, away from public eyes.  The character work is pitch perfect:  Henry as a brash and brutish father, Eleanor the victimized and vengeful mother, and the three sons, Richard the warlike rightful heir, Geoffrey the brilliant and oft-ignored, and John the daddy's boy and simpering adolescent.  The plot centers around a Christmas meeting of the family, as the children all work to manipulate their father into letting them become king, while their mother fights to protect herself and her children from the king's own schemes.  For all the intricate double-dealings and familial dueling, it's also alarmingly funny, filled with quips and quick-witted insults.  So does the film live up to the promise of its script?  Mostly.  Visually, it's a superb work.  The set design is just flawless, dirty and crumbling, stray dogs roaming the castle halls.  If I were to design my own production, I would want it to look just like this.  If there is a problem, it lies in the acting.  No fault to the actors, they all do a fine job, but the acting style of films in 1968 was not naturalistic.  It was an improvement on the 1940s and the unbearable 1950s, but there's still a falseness of intonation and inflection, a Hollywood affectation that works against the realism of the script.  Another script and it wouldn't have bothered me so much, but when the dialogue is designed to be so realistic this acting style creates an obvious clash.  Peter O'Toole is still generally magnificent as Henry, he gets it and plays his scenes with near-perfection.  Katharine Hepburn is similarly strong in most scenes, but falters into old habits in scenes with her three sons, who are uniformly over-the-top (and Henry's mistress is even worse).  Anthony Hopkins appears here in his first film role, and he is not merely acting, he is ACTING!  The film's composer similarly misses the point, filling the soundtrack with ominous chanting and furious horns.  It's a somewhat stilted adaptation of very strong source material, though when things take a dramatic turn toward the end it finishes strong.  A very worthwhile film, just not as strong as it could be.
• American Film Badger:  Continuing down the list of the AFI Top 100, on the 1998 list we have On the Waterfront at #8.  Can't say much, I sadly haven't actually seen this one.  As I was reading yesterday, though, Marlon Brando's work on this film (along with James Dean and Montgomery Clift in other films) helped to change the standard of acting in Hollywood, moving toward naturalistic delivery and away from... well, that kind of stuff I was just talking about up above.  That's something to be thankful for.  On the 2007 list the #8 spot goes to Schindler's List, and what the hell could I possibly say about this film that hasn't been said?  Its blend of cinema and real video from the Holocaust is harrowing.  Liam Neeson is perfect in the lead role.  Steven Speilberg proved that he could make a staggering drama just as well as he could make blockbusters.  It is everything critics say it is.
• This week's reading:  Just shy of 700 pages, Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities is a heavy dose or urban realism, class warfare, and social satire.  I think I'm on page 40... so this one will be occupying the bottom of my write-ups for a little while.