Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Briefly Back to the Brain

“Melancholy Brain.” By Gordon Bressack and Patrick M. Verrone. Perf. Maurice LaMarche and Rob Paulse. Dir. Charles Visser. Pinky and the Brain. Vol. 3, disc 2. The WB Television Network. 7 February 1998. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2007.

“Melancholy Brain” is, in part, a retelling of the old joke about the lady who went to see Hamlet. When she was asked how she liked it, she replied, “Well, I didn’t. It was full of quotations!”

But it’s also, above all, to its own self being true. [Please note the intentional self-reflexivity of modifying a Hamlet quote to suit my own purposes.] My kids’ favorite part is this exchange:
Pinkey: How do you spell “King”?

Brain: B - R - A - I - N.
It’s all about taking over the world (as are so many things).

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest