Word: tale
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...temptation, but it's also more than a little misleading. The tragedy unfolding now as an unfathomably brutal rebel army scoffs at peacekeeping efforts and fights its way toward the capital is not a product of some collective psychosis of the Sierra Leoneans. It is, instead, a sordid tale of ruthless pursuit of a buried treasure - diamonds - in the world's poorest country, and of political calculations, miscalculations and plain wishful thinking among powers as diverse as Libya...
...Hamlet is dead...but his corporation lives on. As one of many as of late who has expressed the desire to re-interpret Shakespeare, director Michael Almereyda has seen fit to take the age-old tale of the Prince of Denmark and set it in late '90s New York City. While we've seen a narcissistic Hamlet, a visceral Hamlet and a verbose Hamlet, now we have the young prince in a world of laptops and limousines, cellular phones and c-notes, Mercedes and martinis. Elsinore is an apartment building, Denmark is a financial concern, Fortinbras attempts a hostile takeover...
...Almereyda's own admission, the film was shot "fast and cheap" on 16mm film, and it shows. This version is certainly a "poor man's" Hamlet that neither remains truthful to the original text, nor emerges as a stunningly relevant interpretation that redefines the tale for our time. Under the circumstances, the text can't be faulted, but what the production team does in interpretation and execution makes for largely uninvolving storytelling...
Intrigued by this tale, Erik's eldest son Leif, sometime between 997 and 1003, decided to sail westward to find the new land. First, say the sagas, the crew came to a forbidding land of rocks and glaciers. Then they sailed on to a wooded bay, where they dropped anchor for a while. Eventually they continued south to a place he called Vinland ("wineland," probably for the wild grapes that grew there). Leif and his party made camp for the winter, then sailed home. Members of his family returned in later years, but Leif never did. Erik died shortly after...
...could write a novel that transcends her personal demographics. "A lot of black writing is this love-in, and I definitely don't write love-ins," she says, adding, "What did people think I was going to write? Some kind of searing slave drama or single-girl-in-London tale...