I woke up, I turned on the television, and there was Julius Caesar, the 1970 version, starring Charlton Heston, Jason Robards, Sir John Gielgud and others. I wrote about it on Twitter:
Watching Julius Caesar, starring prototypical Roman, Charlton Heston. Great American cast reading English dialect about Italians. #globalism
Heston played Marc Antony three times. Unlike Caesar he accepted it thrice. People made Planet of the Apes jokes the second and third time.
Twitter News Alert: They just stabbed Caesar. In a related story, the music is odd percussion, reminding audiences of Planet of the Apes.
Marc Antony gives a stirring, populist speech for Caesar and the people riot. He then drinks from a wooden bowl that breaks like glass.
Robards and Johnson just tear up the big Brutus/Cassius scene. It is exhausting to even watch it. “Fret till your proud heart break!”
Cassius’ death scene was so bad that when Brutus arrived he looked around, as if were expecting to be Punk’d.
Exeunt Robards nee Brutus. Heston comes on to say “We finally really did it. You Maniacs! You blew it up!” Credits!
This film isn’t well received at IMDB, I suspect because of the understated power and hammy acting of Charlton Heston. There are times when he feels like he’s performing on a stage for a great audience, waaaay in the back of the house, but forgetting the camera is right there. It is, though, a terrific movie for a day when it is too hot to move.
In the late evening we went for a bike ride. The bike I was riding is, well, messed up. It won’t go above fifth gear. Half the time it won’t go below it. But I can pedal in fifth! So I can coast or ride that one speed, or try to force the chain. Doing that means an awfully big downstroke which creates the other problem: the seat won’t stay up. Every hill or so I have to stop and reset the height, pressing the little clamp down as hard and as far as I can, hoping it will hold.
And it does, for a while. And then, seemingly at random, the clamp gives way, the seat slides down into the tube on the frame and whatever symmetry I had is replaced by something more or less perpendicular to the road, with my splaying feet and knees feeling like they are inches from the ground.
So I only did about five miles like that. The Yankee came in too, it was getting a little dim. Guess we’d started too late.
That’s OK, because after we got cleaned up we made dinner and enjoyed a delicious spaghetti parmesan. We watched the Back to School marathon on USA, which featured Juno, the story of a precocious 16-year-old who gets pregnant and judges everyone in lines a little too dated for someone her age.
Got a one-liner, an adoptive family and everything turns out great! Your parents will support you and your friends will come around. Welcome back to school, kids!
Tomorrow, I’m dumping a bunch of pictures and things on you from the last week. Thinking of making that a regular feature, too. Anything to pad another day around here.
