Tuesday, June 30, 2015

(281) "Are you not entertained?"

(This Entry is, perhaps, not 100% removed from this Entry!? Living the Dream: A Coincidence Diary: (288) Writer Not A Fighter! Or Artist or Combatant!? Or Singer or S(e)argent!? (james-plasketts-coincidence-diary.blogspot.com)At 21:12 on June 29th 2015 I was flicking through a Youtube version of the 2000 film Gladiator - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbBiXPVKuTA
I reached the point just before a particular scene which I wanted to see.
Other available versions showed only certain excised scenes, but not the film in its entirety. It is where the gladiator portrayed by Russell Crowe talks with the slave owner played by the late Oliver Reed. The preceding scene, where Crowe takes on and slaughters a half dozen gladiators one by one, I had seen before as one of those excised.
I now saw Crowe, after his killing spree, lobbing his sword to hit a distant table and asking of the ampitheatre crowd, "Are you not entertained? Are you not entertained? Is this not why you are here?" He then spits into the dust and walks off as the crowd chant his name. And I had seen that finale before, too.
But the complete film here seemed to show a slightly different cut to that with which I was familiar. A missing bit was of Reed exhorting Crowe not just to kill but rather, in order to keep the crowd coming back,
"So entertain!".
But, as may be seen in the given clip Reed actually says nothing to Crowe.
At about 21:20 I saw that. 
At almost the precise moment when "Spaniard" was asking the crowd "Are you not entertained?" an e mail came in from London Real. It was headed

́are you not entertained?́
and was about the forthcoming week ́s content on the London Real series of interviews by Brian Rose.
Towards the bottom of the page were those same words and a still of Russell Crowe in the very scene which I had been watching as the e mail arrived.

Reed, of course, essentially drank himself to death at a bar in Valetta, Malta, during the very making of this film. A further merging of the themes of killing and entertainment, perhaps!?

Btw, just over a year aterwards, in October 2016, the newsletter of the Valencian chess federation ran this piece.
It was about me and featured the same still and the same heading!