F

Flavorwire

Shakespeare

Books

Our Favorite Writers as Legos

By Emily Temple on

We already knew that you can do just about anything with Legos, but we never imagined we’d see our favorite writers portrayed with that telltale yellow skin and weird cup hands. Luckily for us, way back in 2007, Fine Clonier held a contest asking people to build Lego versions of historical figures. But it’s only now, via Booklicious, that we’re hearing of it, and we thought we’d share. Obviously our favorites are the literary figures, but there are many great ones, so click through to see all the literary legos, and browse all the contest entries, from Hatshepsut to Pelé, here. … Read More

Design

Photo Gallery: Vintage Romanian Theatre Programs

By Emily Temple on

The more advanced graphic design gets, the more we appreciate amazing work that was done with no computers, no special tools, no handholding, and the more we like images to look a little rough around the edges. Plus, we admit we’re always suckers for a good mixed-media collage or manic scribble. These program covers, designed for the Comedy Theatre in Romania in the ’60s and ’70s, have an organic charm and bizarre sense of whimsy that is often hard to find in our slick modern world, and what’s more, they kind of make us want to see these 50-year-old Romanian plays. Go figure. Click through for more images, and check out an expanded collection on butdoesitfloat. … Read More

Daily Dose

Daily Dose Pick: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead

By Chris Kompanek on

Featuring an original score by Sean Lennon, Jordan Galland’s inventive debut feature is equal parts slacker comedy and vampire showdown, with a healthy dose of Shakespeare.

The film stars Jake Hoffman as Julian, a twentysomething unemployed director whose life is a blur of one-night stands, until he’s offered a job directing a nocturnal twist on Hamlet — written by an actual vampire. Literary pun title cards like “Job Interview with a Vampire” and “As I Lay Undying” punctuate the fast-paced scenes with whimsy, while the appearance of familiar faces like Devon Aoki and Ralph Macchio further propel the enjoyable satire toward future cult-classic status. … Read More

Web

To Tweet or Not to Tweet: Shakespeare Meets Twitter

By Kelsey Keith on

Canonized literature meets byte-sized social media in a new project by the Royal Shakespeare Company meant to pitch Shakespeare to a younger generation. We read along as novelist Rick Moody tweeted an entire short story in 140-character tweets, but supplementing The Bard seems like a trickier proposition, at least as it’s implemented in Such Tweet Sorrow, the RSC’s online story tying into its spring production of Romeo & Juliet. The venerable theater (theatre?) troupe’s leading actress, 16-year-old Charlotte Wakefield, has been prepped to tweet as Juliet Capulet for the next five weeks, responding to other actors as well as her Twitter audience and real-life events (to wit, a crush on Robert Pattinson). We’ve spotted a couple of Twitter gems from Juliet and her nurse, though the narrative is not as entertaining as one would hope — this is William Shakespeare, after all, King of Slang and Olde English patois. So whose Twitter feed would we rather follow? Our suggestions after the… Read More

Daily Dose

Daily Dose Pick: 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa

By Jason Jude Chan on

On the centenary of Akira Kurosawa’s birth, Criterion pays tribute to the Japanese cinema great with a monumental box set, AK 100.

The 25 films gathered in this treasury include Kurosawa’s ultimate whodunit and international breakthrough Rashomon; his ever-epiphanic masterpiece Seven Samurai; the princess-and-peasants caper that inspired Star Wars, The Hidden Fortress; and colorful, late-career opuses like Kagemusha. … Read More

Books

Twitterature: A New Book and A Literary Guessing Game

By Emily Temple on

Have you ever been reading a classical work of literature and thought to yourself, “What exactly is going on in this character’s head? Why must they jabber on in Shakespearian/18th Century/lyrical language? Why can’t they just talk to me in normal speak, that is, let me know what’s what in 140 characters or less?” Well, now they… Read More

Books

Juliet Is Romeo’s Fangirl, and Other LOL Things We Learned From Sarah Schmelling

By Heather Schwedel on

Sarah Schmelling turned a short but brilliant McSweeney’s article called “Hamlet (Facebook News Feed Edition)” into her new book, Ophelia Joined the Group Maidens Who Don’t Float. From a full news feed play-by-play of Shakespeare’s War of the Roses to a game of Scrabulous between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the book reads like a funnier version of Cliff’s Notes, updated for the Facebook generation. After the jump, we’ve excerpted our favorite LOL bits, including Juliet’s profile, Miss Havisham’s favorite TV shows and the news feeds of Jay Gatsby and Humbert Humbert. Now if you’ll excuse us, we are totally friend requesting Holden… Read More

Web

The Morning’s Top 5 Cultural Stories

By Caroline Stanley on

1. For starters, there’s the David Rohde kidnapping story that nobody picked up because the New York Times said so. [via Gawker]
2. Some drunken U.S. Open fans turned on Tiger Woods. He was playing out on Long Island. [via Newsday]
3. Moneyball — a Steven Soderbergh-helmed baseball drama starring Brad… Read More

Theatre

Pic of the Day: Be He the Bard?

By Eli Dvorkin on

Forsooth, be this the visage o’ the Bard?  So sayeth Alec Cobbe, a learn’d knave who didst uncover said portraite of a juvenal Shakespeare within the kin of Cobbe’s dustie, ancestral manse. The flap-mouth’d inheritor be of the apprehension that the plausive portraite doth depict the o’er-ripen’d, urchin-snout’d dramatist in the fleshe.… Read More