Posts Tagged ‘The Sound of Music’
“Curiouser and curiouser!”*…
On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Public Domain Review and Medium have jointly undertaken to create an online annotated edition featuring twelve Lewis Carroll scholars taking one chapter each, plus new artwork and remixes from classic 1865 and 1905 illustrations.
Dive in here.
* Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
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As we believe “as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” we might send fantastic birthday greetings to Maximilian Goldmann– better known by his stage name, Max Reinhardt; he was born on this date in 1873. An actor, director, and impresario, he is perhaps best known for his stage and subsequent film production of Midsummer Night’s Dream, a hit in the U.S., but banned in Germany by virtue of Reinhardt’s Jewish ancestry and that of Felix Mendelssohn, whose music was used throughout.
Reinhardt established the Salzburg Festival with Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He was the inspiration for the “Uncle Max/Max Detweiler” character in The Sound of Music— which was filmed in the Salzburg schloss that had been his home before he fled the Nazi Anschluss (now the home of the Salzburg Global Seminar).
Butchering sacred cows…
While for the most part, one tends to act on positive recommendations– to see films with good reviews, to catch acts about which one’s friends are enthusiastic– it can be useful to be warned off as well…
“A programmer named Chris” at Cynical-C has stepped up to oblige. In “You Can’t Please Everyone,” he’s collected one-star reviews of classics, posted on Amazon…
Consider for example, this pithy reaction to Homer’s Odyssey:
This book sucks. I dont care if Homer was blind or not this book is like 900 pages too long. I could tell this story in about 10 pages. Homer taking all long to say stupid stuff. Teens if you are reading this all I have to say is CLIFF NOTES CLIFF NOTES you will pass the test, unless you are in AP classes. The teachers expect kids to read cliff notes trust me my moms a teacher. P.S this book SUCKS.
…Or this reaction to Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer in Robert Wise’s film of Rogers’ and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music:
This movie should be called the Sound of Mucus. The only redeeming quality is that the family has to run from nazis.
For more (much more) of this kind of corrective to the conventional wisdom, see here.
As we reconsider the classics, we might feel compelled to “Whistle a Happy Tune” or ask “Shall We Dance?”, because it was on this date in 1949 that Siam changed it’s name to Thailand (five years after Margaret Landon’s novel, Anna and The King of Siam; three years after John Cromwell’s film adaptation of that book, but two years before Rogers’ and Hammerstein’s musical, The King and I)…
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