'Grand Theft Hamlet' is Shakespeare in a violent video game
Plus: The wondrous 'Colleyville,' and thoughts on the Oscar-nominated documentaries
Those who love the documentary Grand Theft Hamlet will call it a brilliant and creative conceit. Those a bit more skeptical will call it a gimmick. I think they’re all right, and it’s both.
Directed by the team of Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls, Grand Theft Hamlet has its origins during the lockdown phase of the COVID pandemic, when a bunch of bored people in Britain, lacking a creative outlet during lockdown, decided to stage a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, inside of the Grand Theft Auto Online video game.
This mix of high and low culture has been irresistible to some, and it really was a great idea, especially considering that while GTA is pretty violent, Hamlet has quite a bit of murder and violence as well. This movie knocked the socks off a lot of my colleagues when it was shown last fall at the Philadelphia Film Festival.
But I don’t know, there’s something about the film that kind of made me hold it at a remove. It might be because I’m not much of a gamer, and GTA might as well be hieroglyphics to me. Or perhaps it’s my longtime resistance to pandemic-era movies.
We only see the characters as their avatars, which kind of makes it harder to relate, while I might have liked the film more if it had just been the Shakespeare play on its own, without telling the story of how it came to be.
There are some funny moments, mostly involving the casting process, but overall, despite the great idea, this one just didn’t do it for me the way it did for so many others.
Last week, at Philadelphia’s Weitzman Museum of Jewish History, I caught an early showing of Colleyville, a documentary about the Colleyville, Tex., synagogue hostage situation in 2022, when a rabbi and three congregants were held hostage for 11 hours by a gunman.
On hand were the rabbi, Charlie Cytron-Walker, and the film’s director, Dani Menkin (Picture of His Life.) I wrote a feature about the event that’s in the Jewish Exponent this week, on page 23 of the digital magazine and the web later. But I wanted to get a review in too, because this is a truly special documentary.
The film presents a tick-tock of that entire day, including security cam footage from inside the synagogue that the filmmaker obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request. It also uses talking-head footage of the survivors and others involved; the whole thing is riveting, even though everyone watching will know exactly what happened.
There’s a lesson here, about kindness and welcoming the stranger, and there’s also one about antisemitism: The gunman was so steeped in anti-Jewish conspiracy theories that he thought he could take people hostage, call up the prominent rabbi Angela Buchdal, and Buchdal would have the power to compel the release of Aafia Siddiqui, the convicted terrorist known as “Lady al-Qaeda.”
I have a couple of minor connections to the story. Rabbi Cytron-Walker is a guy I met once in college, we have lots of mutual friends, and I interviewed him on a previous visit to Philadelphia in 2023.
And Aafia Siddiqui, the terrorist the gunman was trying to free, did her graduate work at my alma mater, Brandeis University, and while I don’t remember her, we overlapped there for at least a year. The non-sectarian Jewish-sponsored university is certainly an odd choice for an al-Qaeda member, especially one who spent her criminal trial ranting about Jewish conspiracies.
I like to joke that if someone made a list of the most notorious criminals to ever attend Brandeis, it would include Siddiqui, Jack Abramoff, and about ten different radicals from the 1960s- one of whom, Angela Davis, inspired at least one airplane hijacking aimed at freeing her from prison. Another name may soon be added to that list, depending on what happens next to the Dan Markel murder investigation.
Colleyville appears headed to the Jewish film festival circuit, and I’m not sure when it might get a general release, but it’s worth checking out if it comes to your city.
On Thursday morning, the Oscar nominations were announced. I’ll be reacting to the full list tomorrow, but in the meantime, I thought I’d weigh in on the nominees in the documentary categories.
For Documentary Feature Film, the final five are Black Box Diaries, No Other Land, Porcelain War, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, and Sugarcane.
I like all five plenty, and Sugarcane and Soundtrack are my two favorite docs of the year. No Other Land was nominated without gaining distribution. I expect that film, and its place in Israel/Palestine politics, to dominate the discussion of this category, most of which will be driven by people who have not seen it.
One big takeaway? The documentary branch, as it has a lot in recent years, completely ignored anything involving famous people. The Christopher Reeve doc wasn’t even shortlisted, nor did Will & Harper make it, when I thought it might have the inside track. Docs this year about Jim Henson, John Williams, Elton John, Luther Vandross, and the making of We Are the World? Nothing. I was hoping Eno would make it, but I guess its unique distribution, and lack of screeners, hurt its chances.
In the Documentary Short Film category, the nominees were Death by Numbers, I Am Ready, Warden, Incident, Instruments of a Beating Heart and The Only Girl in the Orchestra. I’ve seen three of the five, and my favorite is Incident, made entirely from footage of a police shooting in Chicago in 2018, although I Am Ready, Warden is pretty outstanding, too.