Sabrina

I just sat through the 1995 re-make of Sabrina (Julia Ormand and Harrison Ford). I feel....dirty isn't the right word, but it'll do. Bleh. It had it's moments, but nothing beats the original. I'm going to have to go home and borrow it from lithera, just to cleanse my brain. Stupid people trying to remake a perfectly good Audrey film.

A Self-Ultimatum

Last night I had a bit of a panic as I realized just how much stuff I have not done my dissertation. Frankly I'm beginning to wonder if I can pull off the topic I want to do. While there is a lot of information about the FY (former Yugoslavia) out there, much of it is politics/history/journalism and much of the anthropology is not focused on Serbia and/or is more political anthropology. Even the ethnography that is there focuses very little on religion because offically Yugoslavia under Tito was an atheist nation. There's a bunch of stuff I still need to do (emailing random academics and such), that I've been putting off just because I HATE doing cold-emails and I wanted more info before I went writing people. I can't put it off any longer though, as I need to get my butt in gear. So, I made a to do list, stuck in on my desktop, and if it's not completed by 6pm on Friday night,I'm not allowed to go dancing. We'll see how this goes.

Croatian Hamlet

During my daily dose of ER today, this scene really struck me, so I thought I'd share. The episode is "Secrets and Lies" and I think it's from one or two seasons ago.

Scene: Drs. Carter, Kovac, and Lewis, along with Abby and med student Gallant are stuck in a classroom waiting for a sexual harassment trainer who is hours late. Carter and Kovac discover that they both acted in college and had both done Hamlet. Carter begins doing an overblown version of the "to be or not to be" speech, walking around, eventually collapsing into a chair as he begins to forget the rest of the speech. Quietly, Kovac begins to fill in, he stumbles, looking for the words in english, and then begins to speak the lines in Croat. The camera never leaves his face, but he's not looking directly at the camera, his eyes point off to the side, lost in the words. His words, even though in a slavic language that can sound harsh, are less harsh than Carter's. Kovac is Hamlet.

RL note: For 6 years (1993-2000) Goran Visnjic (Kovac) played in Hamlet every summer in Dubrovnik.

Honestly, this was one of the best-shot and acted scenes I've seen ER do in a very long time. I admit to bias here, not only do I love Goran Visnjic, but Hamlet really does rate as one of my favorite Shakespearian plays. Nonetheless, it was a great scene.