Ethan Hawke will play Starbuck and William Hurt will play Ahab.
Ethan Hawke will play Starbuck
William Hurt will play Ahab
Honestly, I’m sort of feeling Ethan Hawke as Starbuck, but I’m not sold on Hurt as Ahab.
On a side note, several years back, this guy I know was looking for a restaurant called Veritas in NYC and he was sort of drunk so he thought it would be funny to ask this couple that was sucking face sort of off in an alley if they knew where it was – and it was Ethan Hawke and Angelina Jolie. He claims it’s true. Me, however, I can only claim that I heard it claimed by a drunk guy. Therefore, probably not true.
And this other time I sat next to him and Uma at this Mexican restaurant over on the West side and one of their kids was sort of annoying. That’s true, as long as you trust my definition of annoying.
Moby-Dick is the second show in a trilogy of Wattis Institute exhibitions that are based on canonical American novels. The first, The Wizard of Oz, was presented in fall 2008; the third will be The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in fall 2010. All three stories have major themes related to exploration and (self-)discovery, and the corresponding exhibitions function as metaphorical journeys through which the audience experiences various notions of America’s reality, both contemporary and historic. Established and emerging contemporary artists from around the world are invited to address the key themes of the books and the historical moments in which they were written. Many of the artists create new commissions specifically for the shows.
This investigation of America and its realities through the lens of literature by means of artworks, artifacts, and historical documents is unique to the Wattis Institute. Moby-Dick will encompass a wide range of works, including sculpture, film, video, drawing, and photography.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
Kenneth Anger, Matthew Benedict, Mark Bradford, Marcel Broodthaers, Angela Bulloch, Tom Burr, Tacita Dean, Marcel Dzama, Ellen Gallagher and Edgar Cleijne, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rodney Graham, John Gutmann, Susan Hiller, Evan Holloway, Peter Hutton, Colter Jacobsen, Brian Jungen, Buster Keaton, Rockwell Kent, Mateo Lopez, Jorge Macchi, Kris Martin, Henrik Olesen, Paulina Olowska, Damián Ortega, Jean Painlevé, Kirsten Pieroth, Richard Serra, Andreas Slominski, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Adrián Villar Rojas, Orson Welles
I think I’ve heard of Orson Welles! (I mean, he’s no Bill Shatner, but…)
Sounds pretty cool. If I’m out that way, I’ll check it out. Runs 9/22 – 12/12.
Some guy named Mike Barker who directed some Canadian miniseries version of Jack London’s “Sea Wolf” is going to make a TV miniseries about Moby Dick, and, according to one of my favorite “newspaper” sentences of all times, “Although very little is being released at this time about the project, it has been confirmed that it is a period film set in the 1850s.”
I’m not familiar with any of Mr. Barker‘s work. Perhaps a Canadian reader who saw the Sea Wolf series can report if it sucked or not. It gets a 6 on imdb from users. It seems Barker is a specialist in period pieces, and he’s recently directed some B level talent in some of his films that I’ve never heard of.
I couldn’t find any video of Sea Wolf. I did look.
Apparently Neve Campbell was in the Sea Wolf series. I thought she might have committed suicide after receiving her lifetime achievement award for Wild Things.
CS: You’ve been attached to a lot of other movies, so have you been working to develop some of them?
Bekmambetov: Yes, yeah, we’ve been developing “Moby Dick,” for example, which is my true love. We’re making it all about Moby Dick as Frankenstein, it’s a supernatural creature. The concept is that if you have a supernatural creature than you need whalers with supernatural abilities.
CS: So this is more of a fantasy version of “Moby Dick” rather than another adaptation of the book.
Bekmambetov: Yes.
Meh…I don’t know. 9, which opens this weekend on 9/9/09, looked to me in the previews like another mildly cool cutesy-goth Tim Burton thing that would sit at the ass-end of my Netflix queue for the rest of my natural life, but it’s got a preliminary 87% positive rating on rottentomatoes.com.
I just don’t understand why Werner Herzog won’t just go ahead and make a great Moby Dick movie. Hell, I’d settle for a documentary that Herzog made about himself as he tries to raise Klaus Kinski from the dead to play Ahab.
And the version he has, has 552 pages in it. I’m no arithmetician, but that’s 552 original drawings. He’s up to about page 25. We’ll see…but so far, so good.
Page 1: Call Me Ishmael
From the first blog post, Matt says: “Because I honestly consider Moby-Dick to be the greatest novel ever written, I am now going to create one illustration for every single one of the 552 pages in the Signet Classic paperback edition. I’l try to do one a day, but we’ll see.”
Good luck. I can’t think of a more worthwhile endeavor.
I’m kind of disappointed I’ve never come across this site CallMeIsamael.org before. It’s where blogger and musician Patrick Shea has endeavored to write a song about each chapter of Moby Dick. It looks like he’s been going at it since about October of last year.
Patrick doesn’t seem to be releasing his songs in any particular order. Each tune is usually accompanied by a brief description of the chapter, Patrick’s interpretation of it’s meaning, the lyrics to the song, as well as an actual sound file.
It looks like Patrick also performed at the recent Mystic Seaport Moby Dick-a-thon. Hate that I missed it.
Today he released his lyrical and musical interpretation of Chapter 24: The Advocate. Go check it out – it’s everyone’s duty to support a man who loves Moby Dick so much he’ll write a song about every chapter.
Actor Conor Lovett and his director wife, Judy Hegerty Lovett, are bringing their one-man-play version of Moby Dick to Ventura’s Rubicon Theater next week. The Lovett pair are known for a producing a series of strong, minimalist one man shows in recent years, and Moby Dick is no exception. An rave-ish review in the Irish Times says of Conor Lovett, “He holds us spellbound as he catches the humour as well as the wisdom of Ishmael’s commentary, his pauses for thought, for memory, for finding the right word, reminding us that the story of this noble but melancholy ship, its crew, its quarry and its captain with the crucifixion in his face, is a story told by a man of honour and of mercy.”
Even though modern whaling was banned in 1966, and even though the blue whale was placed on the endangered species list in 1973, the largest creature ever to live on the planet earth still face many hazards; fishing gear, toxic waste and trash, and large ships. And while Santa Barbara channel is one of the best places in the world to see a blue whale, it’s also one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, making it a likely place for blue whales to get hit by ships. The NMFS recovery plan would address many of these hazards.
Nice post by Larry Weinberg at InteriorDesign.net that provides some interesting background on the working “relationship” between Herman Melville and Rockwell Kent. He argues that even though they never met and that Kent was 9 when Melville died, they were kindred spirits nonetheless. Both were New Yorkers, adventurers, and sailors. And they might have even shared some similar political and social views.
Weinberg also points out that the 1930 publication of Moby Dick with Kent’s illustrations pushed Melville and his book back into the public’s consciousness and that, ironically, Moby Dick has endured while Kent’s notoriety has diminished a bit as art styles and tastes have evolved.
And Sheila O’Malley posted a very nicely curated assortment of textual bits and pieces on, about, and from Moby Dick. Stuff like bad contemporary reviews of the book, letters to and from Nathaniel Hawthorne, and even some correspondence with a lover (of Sheila’s) about “The Whiteness of the Whale.” Do yourself a favor and check it out. Good stuff.
And now you know you’ve got “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” in your head.
“The church bell chimed, ’til it rang 29 times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
(actually…29 would have been a well-sized crew for a 19th century whaling vessel. The Essex, for example, has a crew of 21 when it was sunk by a whale)
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