Keyword Archive:
Shakespeare

Much Ado About Nothing (1993)

Thursday, November 29th, 2007
★★★★★

I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will.

Between the mud-stained medieval warfare of Henry V and the emotional operatics of Hamlet, Kenneth Branagh, dipped his toe in one of Shakespeare’s lightest and airiest comedies and produced one of the most accessible and genuinely delightful versions of the Bard’s plays to reach the big screen. Its plot, boiled down to its essentials, will probably seem familiar to fans of modern romantic comedies, proving that the genre is one of oldest, and most durable, in English literature.

Much Ado About Nothing

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Henry V (1989)

Sunday, November 25th, 2007
★★★★★

Gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves acursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap.

Just 29 when he made this, Kenneth Branagh fired a shot across the bow of no less a figure than Laurence Olivier, who had, forty-five years earlier, also directed and starred in his own adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play. Olivier’s version, made in wartime, was intended as a patriotic rallying cry for a weary nation. Branagh’s grittier, more ambiguous version is no less accomplished, although it could stand to be slightly better paced.

We few. We happy few. We band of brothers.

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Looking for Richard (1996)

Sunday, November 25th, 2007
★★★★★

If I told him about that other ten rolls of film, he’d want to use it.

Not long before this movie came out, I spent a couple of weeks in London and, among other things, took in a production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre at Bankside. And unlike my wimpy travelling companions, who splurged for box seats, I experienced the play in true groundling fashion, huddled against the stage in a rain storm. Okay, I don’t think the groundlings of Shakespeare’s day covered themselves in plastic bags, but they would have if they’d had them.

Looking for Richard

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Hamlet (1996)

Sunday, August 19th, 2007
★★★★★

When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.

One might call this the Spinal Tap adaptation of Shakespeare’s greatest play, because everything about it most definitely goes to eleven. The first film of the unabridged text of Hamlet and the last film shot in seventy millimeter as of today, Kenneth Branagh’s brazenly, foolishly ambitious project will be the shortest four hours you ever spent in front of one movie. A broad cast of both veteran Shakespearean actors and many who you would not expect in this kind of film wring both drama and raw emotion out of words often calcified under the dreary mantle of “literature.”

hamlet

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Forbidden Planet (1956)

Tuesday, January 9th, 2007
★★★★★

Hypnotic illusions don’t tear people apart.

Seeing Forbidden Planet today is like meeting an old friend’s great-grandfather and seeing the family resemblance. Sort of a gold standard for the science fiction genre during the fifties, this film has its DNA in much of what we’ve seen since in film and on television, particularly the original Star Trek. From fifty years later, however, the movie is also a wonderfully nostalgic mix of forward thinking and amusingly dated social mores.

Forbidden Planet

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The Merchant of Venice (2004)

Thursday, January 26th, 2006
★★★★★

If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

“The Merchant of Venice” has been the problem child among William Shakespeare’s plays for some time. It’s very hard for modern audiences to reconcile the virulent anti-semitism in the characterization of Shylock and the light-hearted comedy that was the main story of the play.

The Merchant of Venice

This modern version takes the importance of the two stories and inverts them. (more…)

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Yes (2004)

Sunday, November 27th, 2005
★★★★★

There’s no such thing as nothing, not at all.

Sally Potter, the writer and director of Yes, has Something Important to say. Sadly, whatever message she was attempting to deliver gets lost among the gimmicks that call too much attention to themselves. It doesn’t help that the main characters are hollow ciphers asked to carry the burdens of their respective cultures.

Yes

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West Side Story (1961)

Friday, September 16th, 2005
★★★★★

Back home little boys don’t have war councils.

Day One of my own little Robert Wise Film Festival

It was just a coincidence that I had West Side Story in my DVD player the day that director Robert Wise passed away, but as long as I did, I thought it would be a good time to go through his films and include him in this diary. In the next few days, I’ll do The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Haunting, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Run Silent Run Deep, The Sand Pebbles, The Hindenburg, Citizen Kane and an update to my earlier review of The Andromeda Strain.

West Side Story

On with the review:

While I’m anything but a scholar on film musicals, it was instructive for me to watch West Side Story right after viewing Singin’ in the Rain earlier in the week. This wasn’t a conscious decision on my part. I use a computer program to track my DVD collection and it has the ability to spit out randomly picked titles that I haven’t watched recently. So, purely by coincidence, I watched the two most famous musicals in American movie history back to back (except for a few episodes of Lost in between).

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