Tonight I found myself sitting more-or-less silently at a meeting, being uncharacteristically and inexplicably uncommunicative, before watching the rather peculiar Man United and Basle match. United letting a goal in after only 31 seconds! How weird was that? And then I talked to Marlisa and Eddie, listened to an old Ani DiFranco compilation I made at one point, and drank tea. And now I'm awake...
Last night, I should say, I watched Eddie Izzard's Definite Article with Jenny and Shaw; having previously only seen the skillfully edited Channel Four highlights of it before, I was suitably impressed with the full version. With the mice, and Rabbi Burns. The Hannibal sequence is an absolute masterpiece... admittedly, I'm biased on that one, since I did my master's on Hannibal's finest hour, but I think most people would agree. Echoes of Monty Python's 'Dead Parrot Sketch' in it, when the shopowner tells Hannibal 'Sorry, fresh out of skis...sold the last pair just a minute ago to...ur...someone....I've got some elephants!'
On which, there was a musical about Hannibal once, which amazes me. Jupiter's Darling, made by MGM in the mid-fifties at some point. Truly bizarre and wonderful. I think it was meant to have been a comedy; I certainly hope so, since few films have made me laugh so much ...Withnail and I, Ghostbusters when I was a child, Far and Away, Redneck Zombies... a few more. Yeah, anyway, the film is set in Italy in 216 BC, just after the Roman wipeout at Cannae. You may have heard me mention that skirmish at some point. Amytis, played by Esther Williams, is the wife or lover or something of Fabius Maximus, the Roman Emperor, if I recall correctly - rather anachronistic, but let it go. He's played by George Sanders. Amytis and Hannibal, unforgettably played by Howard Keel, fall in love, and Amytis tries to persuade him to cease his war with Rome.
The film is divine rubbish. Every scene with George Sanders is priceless ... basically imagine Shere Khan in a toga and you're most of the way there. For once, Esther Williams doesn't spend the whole film swimming about, which is a bit of a waste (bit of a waist! boom! boom!), though she does get to sing 'I have a Dream' and cavort about in a memorable underwater dance routine with a load of moving statues. I feel as though I've done violence to the English language by using the word 'routine' in that sentence. There's clearly nothing routine about dancing with moving statues. A possible exception might be Ireland in around 1984 or thereabouts... even then I don't think anybody danced with them. They just watched them cry. Or something. But I digress. Other fabulous bits include Hannibal singing 'I Never Trust a Woman,' and 'Hannibal's Victory March,' where Howard Keel sings: I'm so far from home / I've come to conquer Rome! and his men cheer him by singing Hannibal! Oh Hannibal! We are the men of Hannibal!
There's also a ludicrous subplot involving Hannibal's slave, who sings 'If This is Slavery (I don't want to be free)' and Amytis' handmaiden, who were in real life a husband-and-wife team. At one point she asks him in exasperation 'Haven't you any manners at all?' and he proudly replies 'No, I'm a barbarian!' Stirring stuff, eh? They have an incredible and indeed thoroughly absurd setpiece where they sing and dance along to 'The Life of an Elephant.' That's the other weird thing about the film. There were shitloads of elephants in it. Hannibal had thirty-seven to start with, and within a year all bar one were dead. Of course, that'd be pretty unspectacular, so this fim has ganseyloads of them. It's like that film in Terry Pratchett's Moving Pictures that was advertised as featuring 'One Thousand Elephants!' In Jupiter's Darling the elephants dance. And some are painted pink.
I'm rambling, amn't I? I should go to bed, and at least try once more to sleep...
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