More Summer So Far

Crap, summer's almost over, isn't it? I'm going to resist the urge to open my work email on my home computer. I've already slept in late, watched excessive amounts of cartoons, and sat about the apartment in my own filth like an aged cat--I'm not about to start being responsible just yet.

Maybe I could read more Game of Thrones for an hour or four...

I did make it back down to New Jersey to pick berries, but there were no berries to be found. I did see an excessive amount of little wild rabbits, though. Appropriate, since I re-read "Watership Down" this summer.

Oh, and R sent me the pictures of our July hike in Wawayanda State Park!

I'm never going to wear the band shirts I own to an actual performance, so here I am wearing one out in the wilderness where no one can see me buy the bears. And bears are into dubstep anyway, so who cares what they think?

The BF and I had some time off together, so we took Metronorth up to New Haven, Connecticut. Metronorth is pretty fun. You get to leave from Grand Central Station, not Penn Station, and if you don't know what that means, let's just say there's a reason the evil aliens in "The Avengers" trashed the beautiful, elegant edifice of Grand Central instead of the dank, dystopian tunnels of Penn Station.

Aliens: "We're destroying this!" Everyone else: "Good."

Yale University is in New Haven. The campus and its immediate surroundings are quite nice, a bit like Cobble Hill with the little restaurants and bookstores and outrageously priced fair trade clothing and accessories. The rest of New Haven is like Spokane but with slightly better-dressed pedestrians.

I don't have pictures of them. The BF was camera-master that day and he took over 100 pictures of buildings, but nary a one of unfashionable townies.

Yes, so much more interesting than that guy with the top hat and the feather vest.

So that is the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which the BF would have me tell you was designed by Gordon Bunshaft and completed in 1963. I would make a crude joke about the architect's last name, and was thinking up a pretty good one, but then we went inside and--

Guh...

Beinecke Library is this hollow white cube. In the center of the cube is a smaller glass cube full of books. 

Spu...

The building is make of these slabs of marble that are thin enough for sunlight to leak through, but there are no windows or skylights. 
 

It's a little like being underwater.

The rare and ancient tomes, which include a complete and intact Gutenberg Bible, are protected from excessive light, heat and humidity in their glittering glass tower. 

nuh...!

There are these cool Mad Men-era seating areas with low leather chairs and marble tables, where you can sit at the foot of the tower and just stare up at the books resting behind the glass, like the jewelry box of some enormous, nerdy Titan.

I'm spent.

I don't want to read them. I don't even want to touch them. I just want to sit there forever in their presence.

Mostly because they're classics, so they'll be really slow and boring and have those "s" letters that look like "f" letters, which give me a headache. And that right there is why I'll never be a classics scholar. What else is going on in New Haven?

Smash cut!

The BF took this picture from across the street. As soon as he lowered the camera, I disappeared inside without even waiting for him to join me. When he finally made it across and came inside, I was already handing my money over and ready to leave. I found a Catwoman book. It made me happy.

Speaking of cats, the BF and I went to the Brooklyn Museum at MY request (gasp!) to see the Divine Feline exhibit in the Egyptian wing. It's a small exhibit in a side gallery, featuring cats and lions from their permanent collection.

awww...

The BF liked the bronze mother cat with kittens the best.

AWWW...

 You can't see it in this picture, but that little one looking into Mom's face has an open mouth. He's meowing at her! It's so cute, I can't stand it!

I went to the dentist yesterday and got my teeth spackled. Then I went to the farmer's market in Grand Army Plaza, because I'd hate to have a summer where I didn't go at least once to the biggest farmer's market in Brooklyn. But I had to make the trip into Manhattan to the Union Square farmer's market, because nobody in Grand Army Plaza was selling purple potatoes.

I got to Union Square just as the vendors were starting to load up their trucks and take down tents. But most were still open and about three booths in, I spotted a laminated sign with some authentic frontier gibberish name for what we in Hawaii call Okinawan sweet potatoes. A heavily bearded man with a waxed gray mustache took my money and said, "You're looking happy." I replied, "It's because I found my purple potatoes!"

I cooked some last night with fancy purple and yellow carrots in a curry paste I bought at Pearl River. The curry paste kind of covered up the flavor of the funny-colored roots, but I have lots more of each and will make many delicious dishes with them.

And when I go back to work tomorrow, I will sit on the lawn in the rose garden and eat cold purple potatoes and purple carrots from my pink Hello Kitty lunchbox. Like a proper grown-up.

Bruising your bits on the Rodent Hour

Tuesday nights are for Rachel pretending to be cool.

You are listening to the Rodent Hour on Pratt Radio!

I know my life  may look like a glamorous whirlwind of wild hedonism and vice, but it's all a clever ruse, because the truth is I'm the kind of person who uses words like "ruse" and gets her microphone cut off when she goes on too long about X-Men. (In my defense if you listen to the broadcast on the Rodent Hour's soundcloud account, you'll hear the guitarist raising the topic. I just ran with it.)

So this is my side project, co-hosting a live music show on college radio. Which would be a LOT cooler if I didn't, in fact, graduate from college half a decade ago, and also if I actually went out to clubs and concerts to see the bands who play for us every week.

After Slim Wray played their set and my co-host Matt thwarted me and guitarist Hauser from talking about X-Men, we all gathered in the green room for the team photo. As you can see, I'm doing all right so far. At least I'm not trying to wear that sea foam green guitar with the avocado trim. I know my limits.

Here's what happened right after that picture was taken.

I offered to take the picture of the band and our sound techs with L's professional camera, which weights about seven pounds and is the size of a puppy. He put the strap around my neck and gently tried to guide my stubby fingers to the big "take picture" button. The enormous camera slips out of my creepy little child hands and falls.

My first thought was, Shit, my student's camera is going to shatter into a million expensive pieces on the floor! My second thought was, No, it'll be fine, the strap is around my neck.

I didn't have a third thought because at that point, the strap went taut and the camera swung right into my vagina.

I crumpled to my knees. Yelling "Fuck I bruised my pussy!" seemed inappropriate, so instead I squeaked, "If I was a guy, I'd be throwing up right now."

Had there been even one other woman in that room, I would have had a cold bottle of water on my vag and an arm to help me to the couch before you could say "why is that camera so fucking big?!"

But alas, there were only men. So immediately someone yelled, "Take her picture now!"

As you can see by the lack of a picture of Rachel crouching on the floor with her hands on her crotch, I ran away before that could happen.

There are many fun ways you can bruise your lady-bits at a rock show. I wouldn't recommend this one.

Monkey!

Last Sunday, I went to Lincoln Center to see "Monkey: Journey to the West," a mixed-media stage show blending animation and music with live action. It's an adaptation of the classic Chinese novel "Journey to the West" by Wu Cheng'en, which is the epic tale of the Monkey King and his friends traveling to India to find  the true teachings of Buddha and bring them back to China.

Road trip!

This show is a collaboration between Chinese and English artists. Chen Shi-Zheng wrote the text and directed, Damon Albarn composed the music, and Jamie Hewlett did the animation and the costumes. I became interested in the show because I saw some of Hewlett's concept art for "Monkey" on one of my comic book websites. He drew the indie comic "Tank Girl" back in the 90s, so he pops up on my nerdy radar every now and again. 

There's a movie, but don't watch it. You still have so much to live for.

However, watching "Monkey," I wasn't reminded of "Tank Girl," or even Hewlett and Albarn's other famous collaboration, the band Gorillaz. This show tripped some unexpected memory triggers from way back in my small-kid time that had nothing to do with indie comics or animated musical collectives.

Fun fact: Albarn and Hewlett were both born in the Year of the Monkey.

One movie that had a great impact on me as a child was "Farewell My Concubine." It's the story of two Peking opera stars who meet as children in an opera school, rise to stardom together, and come crashing back down under the rising tide of the Cultural Revolution. There's some gay stuff, too, but that's a little too complicated to get into right now. 

In Peking opera, all parts are played by males, even the female roles, and an actor who specializes in the female roles is called a dan, and the dan in this story is in love with the jing actor, who specializes in playing generals and kings, but the jing doesn't love the dan because he's straight and instead marries a prostitute who--fuck it, just watch the movie.

I've only seen it once in my life, but certain scenes remain vivid and arresting in my imagination: a mother cutting off her little boy's finger in a snowy alley; two aging actors burning their costumes in a public square while the Red Guard of Chairman Mao jeer at them; a young man in a silk gown throwing a pair of slippers at the feet of a prostitute. 

I couldn't possibly have understood this movie as a child, considering it's subject matter. For a long time it was one of those movies whose name and plot I couldn't remember, and sometimes I wondered if I made it up. It was this mysterious childhood artifact that I carried around in my mind, like a one of those ancient tables covered in writing that historians can't decipher. 

And then came the Internet. All I had to do was Google "Chinese movie little boy finger cut off" and boom! "Farewell My Concubine."

I'm not a technophobe and I don't long for a time when I couldn't spend six hours on my couch watching cartoons on my laptop while I cruise my tumblr feed on my tablet. But sometimes I am nostalgic for a time when there were still mysteries that couldn't be solved in nanoseconds by our boxes of light that hold all the information in the universe. 

Anyway, I discovered that "Farewell My Concubine" was adapted from a novel of the same name by Lilian Lee. I read it for the first time in the summer of 2007 during my first trip to New York. I bought a copy of "Farewell" during my touristy visit to the famous Strand bookstore, along with a novel by Maxine Hong Kingston called "Tripmaster Monkey," which was about a theater troupe in 1960s San Francisco putting on a performance of--wait for it--"Journey to the West." 

Monkey!

I've long lost both of those books. They were probably abandoned at some point in my journeying, as I am wont to pick up books on the road and then leave them by the wayside because books are fucking heavy to lug around in a rolly-suitcase. 

BUT--watching "Monkey: Journey to the West" reminded me very strongly of all these works and clarified a lot that was unclear or confusing about them, especially the opera scenes in "Farewell My Concubine." There's only so much words can do to convey the feeling of watching a stage show, and the movie focused more on the lives of the performers than the performances, so I was always a little fuzzy on what Peking opera was like and how it differed from Western styles of musical theater. As soon as Monkey stepped out onto the stage, stamped his feet and sang "I am Monkey!", I got it. There's so much meaning and character development conveyed in how the performers move and speak, and you can tell what type of character they are--trickster, drunken lout, aging general, goddess, demon--by these rather minimalist markers. I suppose the word to use is "stylized," because the characters are archetypes that are revealed through their styles of speech and movement. 

Guess which one is the trickster Monkey King who stole the peaches of Heaven and pissed on the Buddha's palm.

Now I've been jazzed up for a while about going to see "Monkey: Journey to the West" because of the aforementioned Jamie Hewlett connection (and also because acrobats!). I told everyone at work I was going, since I tend to get excited about things and then not shut up about them because I am apparently a four-year-old. Anyway, my Tall Boss mentioned that his wife, who is a Beijing native, hated this show. I don't know if she saw it during of its first runs or if she just heard about it and disliked it on principal, but it didn't lessen my enjoyment of it. In fact, I can see why she might hate it. If you grew up knowing a bit about Peking opera, a show like this might seem like a gaudy, tasteless spectacle designed for a dumbed-down, Westernized audience without patience or appreciation for the purer traditional form. 

And that's fine. It's a valid opinion to have. I don't like hula 'auana. I think it's haolified and lacks the underlying power and majesty of hula kahiko, so I understand traditionalist objections to a work like "Monkey: Journey to the West." I wouldn't agree with them in this case, because I enjoyed myself immensely at "Monkey", but on the other hand, I know nothing about Peking opera except that I think they allow women on the stage these days. 

I bring this up because both "Farewell My Concubine" and "Tripmaster Monkey" dealt with the preservation of traditional performance styles, and traditional values, in the face of sweeping societal upheavals. Do you change the show when your audience changes in order to remain relevant in a modern world? Or do you preserve the show as it was in the past, even at the risk of losing your audience, so the audience doesn't lose or forget something about themselves? 

Of course there's no right answer. Or rather, the right answer is somewhere in between. The tricky part is that you can't tell whether the answer was right nor not until several generations down the road, when your descendants look at your decisions and either praise or curse you for the history you made for them. 

You just have to leap, and hope for the best. 

Summer so far

It's an on-time post! A rare occurrence this summer, which is weird because I'm actually doing a lot of activities. I just get to post day and think, "No one wants to read about that." Somehow I think my life is actually less interesting when I'm being social.

For example, so far this summer I've been to three dinners with the BF's family--once for the Fourth of July, once for some English cousins moving to the city in the fall--and just last Friday, a dinner with cousins that live in the city but we literally never see except at Passover. New York is weird that way. Your relatives can live 20 minutes away on the subway and you'll see them maybe three times a year. Is it like this other places?

Also this summer, the BF and I went to see a South African stand-up comedian at The Culture Project on Bleeker Street. I love stand-up, and this guy was great. His name is Trevor Noah. You should follow him on twitter or facebook or whatever platform you use to avoid reality (I prefer tumblr).

A couple weekends back, R and I went hiking in Wawayanda State Park in New Jersey, and she still hasn't sent me any pictures of that hike except for this one. Hopefully that will change in the near future.

It's a turtle.

And on Bastille Day, the BF and I celebrated our 6 year anniversary. We each got to pick an activity, and I don't mean to brag, but my activity pick was amazing. We took the free ferry to Governor's Island to ride on 19th century carnival equipment.

I am killing summer.

That is a bicycle carousel. You turn it by pedaling (the BF says there's a motor in the center, too, but I prefer to think that it turns by the power of imagination and joy!), and it goes both backward and forward. BF says it's much easier to pedal backward than it is to pedal forward, oddly enough. I wouldn't know, because I sat in one of the red velvet seats and put my feet up like a princess while he sat on one of the dinky bike seats and did all the hard work.

I just hotted up the place.

I love Governor's Island. It's a car-free national park, and the free ferry leaves every half-hour from the park by my apartment. They moved the ferry docking this year; it used to be right across the East River from me, and the Battery Tunnel vent shaft, but now it's about a quarter of a mile down stream. The ride there is longer, so there's time to admire the scenery and watch the containers getting unloaded on the docks in front of of my building (which I can juuuust see over the big pile of salt).

The city has been doing a lot of refurbishment on the island the last couple of years, turning the old army base buildings into gift shops and pop-up art galleries and museum. There's art installations on the lawns, tree houses, playgrounds, bike paths and barnyards.

Barnyards designed by Rene Magritte.

The BF's activity turned out to be a walking tour of Jewish heritage sites on the Lower East Side that lasted for three hours in the 95 degree heat. But y'know--heritage, and I got to meet a kitty in an old synagogue that's been turned into an art space.

Highlight of the day for me.

Also we got to eat the most amazing pickles at the end of the tour, and the BF got me bubble tea as a reward for not whining once.

Later that evening, we went out for Ethiopian food and ate spiced pastes with our hands. A good time was had by all!

And have you been listening to my radio show? We're having a short summer season. Last night, my co-host was away on vacation, so I brought in my friend J to work the soundboard (and she thought I was joking when I told her I couldn't turn on my own microphone). J hooked her computer up to the studio speakers so we got to watch the first 20 minutes of "Captain America" with the audio blaring out on the brand spanking new equipment like we were in Martin Scorsese's living room. The band Hurrah! A Bolt of Light played an amazing set and we all ate cornbread. You can listen to the whole broadcast here if you missed.

Buffalo!

Continuing the annual tradition of going to at least one wedding a year with the BF, two weekends ago we were in Buffalo. Specifically, Lockport, which is about 20 minutes south of Niagra Falls. We didn't go to the falls. Instead, we sat in a parked car outside our hotel. This was a lot more fun than it sounds.

We have more pictures of this car than we do of the actual wedding.

The wedding was fun. It was in a vineyard, so there were some very bold chickens and some ponies across the road for us to admire. Being rather distantly connected to the bride and groom, our table had to wait the longest for dinner. But we made up for it at the morning-after breakfast when the newlyweds sat at our table and we all had mimosas together. We won brunch!

We toured a house in Buffalo designed by Frank Lloyd Wright the day after the wedding. The BF very impressively got us out of Lockport, to our activity, and then to the airport entirely on Buffalo public transportation. It's weird to get out of New York and use another city's transit. There's a lot more ugly people on the buses in Buffalo than there are in New York. I don't know why this is, I'm just putting it out there.

Neil Gaiman at Brooklyn Academy of Music

 "Why are we here? Obviously it's to suffer and die and create art." Neil Gaiman, 2010.

Last Tuesday, Neil Gaiman's new novel "The Ocean at the End of the Lane" hit bookstores. I was fortunate enough to be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a live reading, followed by a Q&A with the author.

If I could go back in time and tell my wee thirteen-year-old Big Island Rachel self that she would live to see her favorite author Neil Gaiman speak not just once, but twice, I'd slap myself at the decadence of the suggestion.

And then engage in a fight to the death, because I'd watched enough scifi at 13 to know that future selves are almost always Terminators.

Regular readers remember that I saw Gaiman speak at the New Yorker Festival in 2010, which is where I got that great quote above. The format of this event was a little different. Since he was launching a book instead of just rambling on (awesomely) about things that interested him, the setting was more formal and structured. The house lights were turned off like it was a proper performance, the Q&A session was much shorter, and at the end, instead of just coming down off the stage directly into the swirling crowd of his fans, he was shunted off to a little room to sign book after book for a massive line of people that went out the door of BAM, down the front steps, and wrapped around the outside of the building.

I didn't end up staying in that massive line to get my book signed. R and I decided by 9:45 that getting up for work the next morning was more important than standing in the rain for another three hours to get three seconds of face time with the author, so we just got copies of the pre-signed books and went home. Sometimes being a grown-ass woman means you have to sacrifice your nerd-cred for your career.

My boss told me I can't wear my Catwoman outfit to the office anymore. Sorry, Past Self.

We were both kind of bummed that we couldn't stay to meet Gaiman. R even had a hand-made mask she was going to give him, because Gaiman accepts tributes from fans like he's Lord of the Nerd-Manor, and I was going to take a picture of him wearing the mask to put on tumblr so everyone would be jealous. Oh, such plans we had!

But I got to see my favorite author read from his new book, talk about writing his new book, and tell a story about a teacup in the town of Gaiman, Argentina. Nothing about the experience was spoiled because I didn't actually get within spitting distance of the poor guy, who had already done a week's worth of publicity in England before his appearance at BAM and was leaving at 4AM the next morning for the American book tour.

Besides, as Peter Aguero said when he introduced Gaiman that night, "He's just a dude who wrote a book about sand."

Speaking of which, I'm reviewing "The Sandman" series over at Big Island Rachel's Books. You can read along with me!

Movie Review: "Much Ado About Nothing"

I’m fairly certain that I was the only person at Lincoln Center who went to this movie because it was directed by the man who did “The Avengers.” Everyone else was there to see a film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.” I was there because some small part of me secretly hoped  the Hulk was going to show up.

Hulk rage against the dying of the light!

Not that I don’t like Shakespeare. What kind of English-speaking writer would I be if I presumed to have an opinion about Shakespeare other than, “He’s the greatest English-speaking writer forever and all time”? Shakespeare isn’t some damn Facebook page, his works are beyond “like” or “dislike.”

That said, you can like or dislike adaptations of Shakespeare, because some are better than others at balancing the brilliance of the (admittedly archaic) language with the universality of the characters and subject matter. It’s tricky to pull off. You need actors who feel comfortable with the language, and for movie adaptations, a director who can coax the five-act play structure into a decently-paced three-act film for the modern movie-going audience.

Joss Whedon’s “Much Ado About Nothing” is a good movie, but I actually find its flaws more interesting than its strengths, because its flaws illustrate why a good Shakespeare adaptation is so hard to achieve, and they ultimately highlight the strengths of this movie just by virtue of contrast. As strange as it may seem, this movie is good because it’s not great.

Also, everyone drinks A LOT. I don't think it's exaggeration to say that every character is hammered in every scene. Leonato passes out at the breakfast table in middle of a conversation with the Prince, it's fucking hysterical.

And it is good. I wouldn’t have guessed that Whedon, who made his mark in the science fiction genre, would even be interested in adapting a light-hearted Shakespeare comedy. But he is a master of quotable dialogue and the ensemble cast, so why the hell not? I wouldn’t have guessed that Kenneth Branagh, director of the greatest modern Shakespeare movie adaptations and Shakespearian actor himself, would ever direct a superhero action flick, and yet his “Thor” ended up being one of the best of the pre-Avengers Marvel movies.

Google "Thor" and this is the first image you get. Rightly so.

For those who don’t know the story, “Much Ado About Nothing” has a couple of plot threads running through it. The prince and a bunch of various noble-people gather at the Lord Leonato’s country estate for partying and general merriment. Leonato’s daughter Hero falls in love with Claudio and they decide to get married. This makes everyone else at the party so happy that they decide to spread the love around and see if they can’t get Leonato’s niece, Beatrice, to fall in love with the prince’s friend, Benedick.

Beatrice and Benedick are the main characters in this play. They hate each other and spend most of their time either saying to other people how much they hate each other, or just saying it to each other’s faces. Incredible feats of insults ensue.

"Jerk." "Butthole."

Whedon makes the interesting choice to show that they hate each other because they once had a disastrous one-night stand, and I say “interesting” because this is where the adaptation starts to wobble on its foundations a bit. Like Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet,” this movie uses the original Shakespearian language of the play, but places the action in a modern setting, so there are still princes and lords saying “forsooth” a lot, but they use cell phones and guns. When this technique works, as it largely does in “Much Ado About Nothing,” it achieves that tricky balancing act I mentioned earlier, keeping the magic of the language intact while updating the setting to demonstrate the timelessness of Shakespeare’s work. But the problem is sex.

Isn’t it always?

"They want how much for the swing? What if we just got the harness?"

Attitudes about sex, especially women’s sexuality, aren’t timeless. A Shakespeare adaptation with a modern sensibility can get away with showing Benedick and Beatrice, an unmarried couple, in bed together in the prologue. A chronologically-accurate adaptation couldn’t do that, because that’s not something noblewomen were allowed to do in the sixteenth century (notice I say allowed). It’s not the one-night stand that bothers me about this movie, but how it contradicts the main conflict of the original story.

Bear with me while I lay down some exposition: Claudio and Hero fall in love and they’re going to get married on the morrow with the blessing of the prince and her lord father. But the prince’s half-brother John is an asshole and he tells Claudio that Hero is a slut, just this massive ho-bag with a gaping vagina like a whale’s mouth (to summarize). John raises enough suspicions in Claudio’s mind that Claudio spies on Hero the night before the wedding and sees her fucking some random dude. Claudio is actually seeing one of John’s servants fucking Hero’s maid, who is wearing Hero’s wedding dress because of class resentment, I guess. At the wedding the next day, Claudio spurns Hero at the altar and calls her a massive whale-vagina’d slutty ho-bag in front of her father, the prince, the priest, and all the wedding guests. Hero faints, Claudio and all the guests leave, and the priest hatches a scheme with Hero’s father, Benedick and Beatrice to get revenge on Claudio. Since everyone saw Hero faint, the priest will tell everyone that Hero died of heartbreak from Claudio’s lies. As soon as either the priest, Leonato, Beatrice or Benedick can find proof that Hero came to the altar a virgin, they’ll reveal to Claudio that Hero is still alive, and then the two can get married as planned because he won’t be grossed out by her used and tattered vagina anymore.

I didn't want to search for "tattered vagina."

You know, when I’m watching Shakespeare, I understand everything that’s happening without difficulty. But when I try to summarize it afterwards, it’s always super-complicated. A topic for another post, perhaps.

The centerpiece of “Much Ado About Nothing” is the most epic slut-shaming in fiction. Slut-shaming is wrong, based as it is in male control over women’s bodies, but I’m just going to take it at face value in this instance and skip the feminist sanctimony. (Those who know me are popping their monocles right now, but seriously, criticizing this play for the characters' fixation on virginity is like criticizing the characters in "King Lear" for having a monarch instead of a democratically elected leader.) It’s a realistic scene for the time and culture in which it was written, but it feels inappropriate in a modern setting, especially after Whedon opened the movie with an example of thoroughly modern sexual behavior.

The opening scene of Beatrice and Benedick’s one-night stand, while not in the play (I don't think), is a good artistic and narrative choice because it gives context for their hostility that a modern audience can understand and relate to. At the same time, it's a bad choice because it contradicts the central conflict of the play, which can’t be updated to modern times because it reflects incredibly antiquated notions about women, sex and politics. Not that we don’t have slut-shaming in the modern world, but it’s generally accepted by mainstream society that women will have sex before they marry--and also we don’t live in a society where political power is hereditary and depends on men being reasonably certain that their children are actually theirs, which means our value of virginity is largely symbolic rather than a political and societal necessity for the peaceful transfer of power.

Values may change, but all people from across the ages can agree that incest is creepy.

However, although Whedon didn’t entirely succeed in adapting sixteenth century sexual mores to the present day, every other aspect of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” including that gorgeous language, survives and thrives in the modern update. The fact that the sexual stuff doesn’t translate well makes it all the more astounding that everything else does: the prince and Claudio giggling over a text; the bastard Prince John and his girlfriend handcuffed with plastic zip ties; the official photographer ducking through the crowd to take pictures of the lords shaking hands; and especially the castle guards re-imagined as a group of bumbling 1970s-inspired cops, with the sunglasses and the mustaches and everything. It’s a jarring moment when Claudio starts screaming at Hero for her sluttish ways, but it’s only jarring because the experience up to then had been such a pleasant immersion in beautiful imagery and beautiful language. I didn’t know I was so into the movie until I was taken out of it.

If “Much Ado About Nothing” is playing near you, you should go and see it. If you only know Whedon from his genre work, I think you'll enjoy this more intimate glimpse of his skills as a filmmaker. And if you don't know Whedon at all and just want to see a good Shakespeare movie, you'll be more than satisfied with this fun, and yes, sexy adaptation.

Plus, it's shot in black and white, and nothing makes me feel more grown up than watching a movie in black and white and actually enjoying it.

Final Grade: B+. Weird tonal problems aside, it's a good movie. Recommended for fans of Shakespeare, romantic comedies, witty repartee, and Joss Whedon.

Did I mention Nathan Fillion plays Dogberry? It takes a very particular kind of geek--one versed in scifi, online culture, and Shakespeare--to know just how awesome this is.