Movie Review: "Much Ado About Nothing"

As always, this review will contain spoilers. But you really oughta read a summary of the play before you see the movie, so that's not a real problem here.

The other night, I had the opportunity to see Joss Whedon's new take on Much Ado About Nothing at the Michigan Theater (which is always the best place to see any movie, but it's especially perfect for Shakespeare). Whedon's little vacation between shooting and editing "The Avengers" was a lot of fun to watch, and I liked the homey, down-to-Earth feeling of the set and the cast. The movie was filmed entirely in the Whedons' own house, so it feels very personal and intimate. The fact that the cast are all actors who Joss Whedon has worked with in the past makes it seem more like a family reunion or a summer holiday at a friend's lakehouse than the big, sprawling spectacle that normally constitutes a Very Important And Serious Shakespeare Film.

There were parts where I felt like it kinda went on for a long time, though that might've been because I didn't get the chance to reread the play before seeing it (it was kind of a spur-of-the-moment decision). Familiarizing yourself with all the funny-sounding names and knowing the overall shape of the plot in advance can make all the difference to your enjoyment of the movie.

When I first realized that Sean Maher (Simon Tam from Firefly) would be playing the role of the wicked Don John, I had my doubts about his ability to really be a mean and underhanded jerk. But he handles the role better than I expected: rather than Keanu Reeves bombastic Saturday-morning cartoon villain in Kenneth Branagh's 1993 adaptation, Maher goes for a soft-spoken, understated sleaziness that's all the creepier for how quiet and emotionless it is.

A pleasant surprise: Nathan Fillion shows up two-thirds of the way through the movie playing a Sergeant Dogberry who has clearly made extensive use of the donuts in the police station break-room. He delivers the role with charm and unconscious wit, blundering through his malapropisms without having the slightest idea that he's just made an ass of himself.

I also liked that in Whedon's adaptation, Claudio is not a complete douchebag. Make no mistake, it is a terribly cruel thing to publicly accuse your fiancé of fornication on the altar at your own wedding, but the scathing words of Claudio flow more from hurt and betrayal than from a desire for vengeance. And that makes it much easier to like him, and to feel that his ending up with Hero is a happy ending, rather than entirely undeserved.

And of course, Benedick and Beatrice are (as always) the true stars. Their endless backbiting and witty repartee include all the best lines in the movie, possibly in all of Shakespeare's oeuvre (I'll give you ten points if you use that word in conversation correctly). The way they each flail around at the possiblity that the other might return their feelings are two of the funniest moments in the movie: Benedick listens-in on his bros while trying desperately not to be seen, dodging across the landscape like a low-rent Navy SEAL; Beatrice falls down a flight of stairs at the mention of Benedick's affection for her, and hides under a kitchen counter to eavesdrop on her girlfriends as they discuss her inability to open up emotionally. It's great stuff, and watching young lovers fumble at expressing (and failing to express) themselves is the very stuff of comedy.

So yeah, a good time was had by all. Go see it, have fun. Take your date with you: they'll think you're super-smart if you read the synopsis on Wikipedia beforehand and explain what's going on when they ask.

P.S. Film students remember: filming your movie in black-and-white will automatically make it classy.

Merchant Center Product Images

Feel free to ignore this post.

I'm making a Data Feed for my Google Merchant Center account, as part of my job. These are some of the images I'm using for my products in my made-up Data Feed. I just need a place to put them, on a website I control, so I can link to them from my Data Feed.

Cloak of Elvenkind

Ring of Invisibility 

Belt of Giant's Strength

Cloak of the Manta Ray

Crystal Orb

Halfling's Pipe

The Museum of Internet History

Recently, at a family gathering at my aunt's house, I mentioned that someday I'm gonna have to tell my kids that I'm older than the Internet, and it'd blow their minds. My cousin, who recently started driving, responded that she doesn't even remember a time without it.

Her comment also made me realize that if I were to explain what life was like before the internet, it would almost be equally difficult for me to explain what it was like in the early, untamed days of the "Information Superhighway". (By the way, if you remember hearing that phrase being used unironically, then congratulations, you're officially old now.)

Remember dial-up? Remember 56K modems? Remember Angelfire, Geocities, and Xanga? Well, if you don't, then you're kinda S.O.L. Unless you see people logging into America OnLine in a late-nineties romantic comedy, you're never gonna see how clunky those interfaces used to be. Nobody archives that shit. Who wants to remind their customers how long it used to take your program to perform the simplest tasks? Even if you were to find images of the old interfaces, you'll never really be able to appreciate how damn long they took to load, or how spotty the connection could be.

There are services out there that intentionally slow down your computer so you can run archaic programs (MS-DOS, anyone?) on modern rigs. Why not do the same with the Internet? The user would download a program that partitions their system to create a virtual PC that runs on Windows 3.2 and a simulated 56K modem. Once you're online (you might have time to go make yourself a sandwich), you could "surf the 'Net" and visit archived sites browse news articles from back in the day (sort of like how you can limit results from a Google search based on publication date).

Kids go on field-trips all the time to learn what life was like in the past. If we're gonna start preserving the early days of electronic media, now is the time to do it, before that data is lost. But we should also think about making the experience as authentic as possible. After all, how can you be grateful for what you've got if you don't even know how bad things used to be?

In Which Dave Makes a Resolution

I haven't been writing very much of late; that much is obvious.

Now don't get me wrong, I hate reading blogs that consist entirely of posts in which the author promises to post more often. Telling people you're gonna post more is a waste of everyone's time; either post more, or don't.

So why am I doing it anyway?

Well, it's partly to work through the hang-ups I have with posting stuff online. I often have thoughts that I'd like to share with the world, and I develop them to the point where they're almost blog-ready, but before I set finger to keyboard, I second-guess myself. Without a schedule for posting, without a regular audience to hold you accountable for missing updates, the experience of blogging can feel a bit like street-corner preaching: you step up onto your soapbox, fling your observations into the ether on gossamer word-wings, and the world just keeps on spinning.

So I tell myself that I don't really know that much about whatever it is I wanted to post about anyway, and I really should just leave the speculation to people who actually know something about it. Don't clutter up the Internet with pointless ranting, I tell myself. Just sit back down and keep quiet.

But what's the internet for, if not for cluttering up with pointless ranting? This is 'Murika, goddamnit! Where a man can say whatever the hell he pleases! I might not know everything about the various subjects I write about, but that doesn't disqualify me from having opinions about them. And dammit, I like writing! I've missed doing it regularly, and the best way I know to make yourself do something is to tell everyone you're gonna do it; that way, if you don't follow through, you look like a schmuck.

So I'm stepping up my game: I'm gonna start posing here more often. I'm gonna try for once a week, every Monday morning. They might not always be full-length posts, but I have a tendency to write too much anyway, so that's fine. What with the wedding coming up in October, I'll probably write shorter posts, or post less-often, so you'll all just have to live without the light of my empyrean wisdom for a few weeks at a time. Sorry about that in advance.

In the meantime, I'm following the advice of my my friend Jonathan Barkan (@jonathan-barkan) by making a Twitter account to promote myself and my writing. You can tweet me and/or follow me at @DWurtsmith. (Yeah, that's right, I broke down and got one. Joooiiiinnnn ussss...)

Anyway, the next one's gonna be up on Monday, July 1st. It's already waiting in the wings, just waiting to be loosed upon the world. Keep your eyes peeled for it, and all that'll follow it.

The Dowager Countess Should Have Her Own Series

Dear Julian Fellowes and the Senior Management of the BBC,

When you guys are done with Downton Abbey, please please PLEASE do a spin-off prequel series about the life of Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham. I'd pay good money to see a series starring the inimitable Dowager Countess of Grantham before she was a dowager. And even before she was a countess!

How It Would Be Different

Admittedly, there would be some major differences between Downton Abbey and the hypothetical Dowager Abbey:

The character would be very difficult to separate from the masterful acting of Dame Maggie Smith, but Dame Maggie could appear in flash-forwards, recounting and narrating (unreliably, of course) the exploits of her youth.

Second, you would need to hire several actresses, ranging in age from childhood to post-menopausal, to play Violet in the various stages of her life. I don't know if it would be more expensive to hire several up-and-coming actresses than one Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, but I don't imagine that

It might also be difficult to find that many talented actresses who all look more-or-less like Dame Maggie did at that age. Which limits the size of the available pool of actresses somewhat.

Also, I imagine that Downton Abbey saves a lot of money on set-building by filming everything at Highclere Castle. Dowager Abbey's later seasons could take place there as well, but you'd need to find locations and/or build sets to represent the house of her birth, important locations in Ripon and other nearby towns, and anywhere else she might have traveled. That would probably add to the cost of the series, having to build all those sets.

But it'd totally be worth it.

Why It Would Be Great

[WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!]

The Dowager Countess already has all the best lines. Many of these are so pregnant with meaning and half-veiled implications that they practically sketch the story of her life without ever revealing anything. The viewer's mind cannot help but fill in the blanks from her cryptic statements:


We know from one of the early episodes in Season One that Violet's sister Roberta took part in the Siege of Lucknow. "She loaded the cannons," Violet tells her granddaughters ominously. I want you to take a moment to think about what that means: for a Victorian woman, one of high birth and standing, the daughter of a baronet, the only reason for her to load cannons like a common soldier would be that they're trapped under siege, all the able-bodied men are dead or wounded, the enemy are pounding at the gates, and the final, desperate defense has been mounted against what is certain to be their doom if the besieged fail in their task.

"One way or another, everyone goes down the aisle with half the story hidden." 
What did Violet not know about the 6th Earl of Grantham when she married him? What did he not know about her? Did Violet go to the altar with a secret as ruinous as Mary's one-night-stand with Mr. Pamuk, or Lord Grantham's near-affair with one of the servants? Did Violet, unlike her granddaughter, plan to take her terrible secret to her grave?
Then again, perhaps she's referring to closeted skeletons which came to light after her parents' marriage, or the marriage of one of her aunts or uncles? It's a possibility. A likelihood, even.

"Marriage is a long business. There's no getting out of it for our kind of people."
Do I detect a touch of wistfulness in her voice? Or is it resignation?


"We can't have him assassinated. [pause] I suppose."
This line seems like it's something more than old woman expressing her idle fancy. One gets the feeling that she's running over a list in her head, counting favors, considering options. I don't know if she'd follow through on it, but the fact that she might actually know where to apply pressure to get herself a free assassination is worthy of consideration. Who might she know that could provide such a service? How did she meet them, and why would she even entertain the notion that she might be able to get that person to do the deed?

 "You are not the first drunk in that drawing room, and I doubt you will be the last."
 She says it very understandingly, as if she's used to it. Who else has let slip embarrassing, even scandalous words in the drawing room at Downton, while Violet was present?


"Do you promise?" (Her reply when the jilted Sir Richard declares they will probably never meet again.)
Where did Violet get the chops, the chutzpah, the sheer brass balls to speak to a man as powerful, cutthroat, and ruthless as Sir Richard, and proceed to give him a verbal slap across the face after he's just been betrayed (as he sees it) by her granddaughter? She knows that Sir Robert is not to be trusted, that he knows Mary's secret, that he's got the means and the motivation to ruin Mary's entire life, and by extension the life of all the Crawleys. But she will not be cowed by threats, and she just can't resist giving the angry bear one more little poke before he goes. I really, really like that about her. But where did she learn to do it?

"Losing a child is a terrible thing. Your heart never truly recovers." 
We know that Robert and Rosamund are Violet's only two living children. but we don't know if they might have had a sibling which they don't talk about because s/he died very young. Perhaps that would explain part of the reason why Violet defends her son and granddaughters so fiercely.


I hope that I've made my case effectively, Mr. Fellowes and Company. I certainly hope that your most excellent series continues for many more seasons. But if you're ever looking for a character on which to focus more deeply, you know who would get my vote.

Why We Break Our Resolutions

Part of the reason, I think, that we tend to do poorly on keeping our New Year's Resolutions is that we have so little time to think of good ones. The Yuletide is such a beast of a holiday that by the time we finish singing carols, clean up the wrapping paper, drive/fly/walk/teleport/pogo-stick home, and sleep off Christmas dinner, it's already four days to New Year's. And if you're anything like the rest of us, you probably haven't given the idea of resolutions a single thought until right about now.

 So we jot something down. Some vaguely responsible- and grownup-sounding thing that comes easily to mind: "Exercise more," "Quit smoking," "Drink less," etc. But there's no specifics, no way to measure or determine success. How much exercise is "more"? How many drinks are too much? Are we talking drinks per night? Per week? For the rest of the year? If you don't even know how much you drank last year, how are you supposed to arrive at a smaller figure this year?

If there's anything that National Novel-Writing Month has taught me over the years, it's that you can do a lot more than you think you can, as long as you've got a meaningful deadline and consequences for missing it. A good resolution, like any good goal, is a measurable one. Don't just say that you're going to exercise more, say how often you're going to exercise, and for how long, and to what intensity. What kind of exercise will you be doing? If you miss a day, will you have to go double the next day? Donate to a charity? Spend time doing chores for friends and family? Make it so you've got an actual incentive to keep the resolution. Otherwise, it's a lot easier to just slack off than to keep up the hard work, and since there's no accountability for missing your own resolutions, you can just go tumbling down into that satisfying darkness, the darkness of ease, the darkness of acquiescence, the milk-livered niddering darkness of sweet sweet cowardice..

So don't give up on your resolutions! It's easy to stop walking when you don't know where you're going and don't have a plan for how to get there. Just pull out your map, trace a route, and follow it. And if the road washes out, well, choose another route and keep on truckin'. Just don't stop moving.
You won't get anywhere unless you're going somewhere.

Book Review: The Hunger Games Trilogy

Every year, the Capitol selects two children from each of the twelve outlying Districts: one male and one female between the ages of twelve and eighteen. These twenty-four young men and women are taken by train to the Capitol, where they participate in the nation of Panem's biggest annual sporting event: The Hunger Games. The winner takes home a lifelong pension from the government, a fancy new home for their immediate family, a year's worth of extra food for the members of their home District, and exemption from being entered in the Hunger Games for the rest of their lives.

All the other contestants are murdered in the arena, live on national television.

That’s the setup for Suzanne Collins’ bestselling trilogy of young adult novels: The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay. I can’t say enough good things about these books. They’re intense, gripping page-turners from the mind of a professional screenwriter. They’re a blistering commentary on the state of our nation and the world, and the vast disparity of wealth between different countries. They’re a thoughtful deconstruction of the nature of fame, celebrity, and mass-media spectacle. They’re a guidebook to how oppressive regimes, from ancient Rome to modern-day North Korea keep their citizens frightened, in-line, and downtrodden. They’re a damn good read. The list could go on and on.

But mainly what keeps me coming back to The Hunger Games is Katniss Everdeen, the leading character and central focus of the trilogy. She’s honestly one of the most complex and nuanced characters I’ve ever encountered in YA literature. She’s a brutally efficient hunter, and a survivor to the core, but she’s also vulnerable, confused, and deeply scared not just for her own life, but for the lives of those she loves and depends on. Classifying her is difficult, as she contains so many seemingly contradictory elements, but one thing about her is always clear: no matter how long she lives, the emotional and psychological scars inflicted on her by the Capitol will never truly vanish. Collins' commitment to psychological realism is striking, and brings into sharp relief how easily the characters of other books (especially young adult fiction, or YA) seem to shrug off emotional wounds which would be permanent and crippling in real life.

The Hunger Games are brutal and gut-wrenchingly honest, but really that's the only way you can write about a dystopian hell and maintain your integrity. To those who say that the books may be too intense for younger teens, I call "bullshit". There are kids in our world who live lives very similar to those of Katniss and her family in District 12. When I was talking recommending trilogy to a coworker from South Africa, I mentioned that the series had really changed the way I look at the world, because I realized how very fortunate I am to live in a country where, unlike Katniss, no one I know will ever, ever need to worry about dying of starvation. My coworker's response was chillingly honest:

"Well, come to Africa sometime."