Wideo Wednesday: What I’ve Been Watching

I had pretty much hopped down off my Mark Twain hobbyhorse when this bobbed up in my Youtube feed.

Twain  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYQgCAldglI

It basically covers the same time period of fictional biographical The Innocents Abroad (1983). Narrated by Martin Sheen. It got me wondering in my head just what we can really think about someone like, say, Mark Twain? Can we say we are getting the accent marks correct? How much of his writing (especially unpublished) might just be venting, not only of righteous anger, but of dark thoughts such as anyone might have (especially as they age and lose loved ones), which, once purged onto paper, might leave the man himself melancholy but basically sound? Are (especially modern) critics simply determined to make him dark and ‘interesting’ and not merely a humorist? What sort of Twain might we envision if we emphasized the ‘bright’ notes, his better angels? The image of a sad crotchety Tolkien was influenced by Humphrey Carpenter’s unsympathetic biography for years; it might tell us more about HC than JRRT.

Also, I revisited Monsignor Quixote.

Quixote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZeQGHt67fA

As I recalled in August of 2020: “I remember I began watching the [1987] adaptation with Alec Guinness and Leo McKern but missed parts of it. I finally caught up with it on YouTube, over 30 years later.” But I failed to mention it in my later consideration of Don Quixote and its influences (June 2025).

In it a Spanish priest, a supposed descendant of the famous Don, is promoted and sent forth from his simple life on a picaresque journey. Accompanied by his friend, a Communist ex-mayor whom he calls Sancho and driving in a beat-up old car he calls Rocinante, he must navigate the windmills and bullies of the modern world and the fallout of the Franco regime. His simplicity and innocence and faith are seen as a parallel to the original Quixote’s romantic ideals.