… and the stages of shirtless Kellan Lutz.
A little while back, I stumbled into watching the 2014 The Legend of Hercules for the, omigod, second time. Starring an immensely muscled Kellan Lutz as the great hero of myth, embedded in a famous stinker of a movie whose faults are at least in part linguistic. Though it does offer tons of glistening male flesh for aficionados.
(#1) Exhibit #1: Lutz as Hercules
From the annals of tv watching: Eddie Cahill as Tag Jones in season 7 of the sitcom Friends (and then as Det. Don Flack in CSI: New York); and Lucas Black as Special Agent Christopher LaSalle on NCIS: New Orleans. Both men are strongly physical actors with mobile expressive faces and both smile amiably a lot — they are really cute guys — and both do notable local accents: EC white working-class NYC in CSI: New York and LB white NOLA in NCIS: New Orleans. Both accents build on the actors’ native varieties — EC’s NYC and LB’s Alabamian — but with crafting (quite considerable on LB’s part) to fit their characters.
(Part One yesterday at the Aquarius Theatre, 11 to 3:30. A screening of the National Theatre Ensemble, London, production.)
Just stunning: remarkable staging, extraordinary performances, and of course the play. A poster for the NTE production:
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Nathan Lane, Andrew Garfield, Russell Tovey, Denise Gough, James McCardle
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part One: Millennium Approaches & Part Two: Perestroika by Tony Kushner, directed by Marianne Elliott. Original broadcasts to cinemas 20 and 27 July; Palo Alto screenings 14 and 21 August, and 20 and 27 August
The illustration:
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From a piece in BuzzFeed yesterday, “the first images of the live-action film, The Legend of Tarzan, have been released and they are quite simply [hot hot hot]” by Kimberley Dadds:
The first official stills, featuring Alexander Skarsgård as the main man Tarzan, were released on Wednesday and they’re heavenly.
Two pieces of recent news from the L&G world: a Tony for Fun Home (on the L side), a NYT interview with the French ambassador to the US (on the G side). Bonus on the G side: a photographic tribute to David Hockney.
Today’s Zippy, continuing the story of Lazlo Crannich:
To remind you: Lazlo Crannich is an actor who performs the character of Zippy the Pinhead: when you see Zippy in public, you’re actually seeing Lazlo, and who knows where the real Zippy is or what he’s doing. So Lazlo is a kind of double — a permanent double, so to speak. Lazlo has a (very constrained) private life under his own name, which we catch glimpses of in the strip, but Zippy’s private life is forever invisible to us. It’s a kind of magic irrealism., a counterpart to the literary magic realism I write about here every so often.
In my own fiction writing about two people called Sundance and Butch, there’s a good bit of magic realism, plus a lot of play on identities, names, and the performance of characters.
Two recent Zippys, continuing the story of Lazlo Crannich, Zippy’s character actor:
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Hasn’t the world had enough of Zippy the Pinhead? he cries out in despair. But then it’s back to the job, the job of being Zippy.
In the June 1st New Yorker, a brief piece “Stormy Weather: Sam Waterston plays Prospero, at the Delacorte” by Hilton Als:
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Illustration by Simón Prades
(Not much linguistics here.)
In the middle of the night on Saturdays here the TNT network shows re-runs of the current Hawaii Five-0 tv series, so I’m kept alert by acrobatic fistfights, exchanges of gunfire, and car chases all over scenic Hawaii. And the banter between the two principal characters — it’s a buddy drama, a bro show — with significant interludes of muscular shirtlessness.
