| The major fault is
the poor relation of the balance of the cast to Shakespearean rhythms. It was
almost as though these were foreign actors reciting the lines phonetically,
without understanding their meaning. I guess they were, if 500 years ago is a
foreign land. It's as if I were to speak to the Chinese, and someone taught me
the sounds and their proper order. Inflection, pacing and meter be damned. The
audience would understand it, but would we really be communicating? Not as well
as we could be. It is like that with this.
The final
performance of the play-within-a-play for the Duke's wedding party is handled
very well. It is staged beautifully, and Thisbe was perfect. (Watching it
performed in this film gave me the feeling that this was one of the Bard's
earliest attempts at playwriting, and he finally found a use for it. A wise man
makes use of whatever scraps he can.)
Special effects
are used throughout, but the central feel of the woodsy scenes takes on a
staginess that leaves this film neither fish nor fowl. Contrasted with the
reality of the towne, i would have liked either a better attempt at reality or
a more marked departure from it.
It almost flies, but the
fairies and attendants do not have the magical quality I would have liked to
really make it soar. The Munchkins of Oz were more spirited than these. And
yet, when in the glade Oberon and Puck appear, the film is transformed. They
really know what is going on. Pfeiffer does little for it, except in a love
scene with Bottom that is probably more Klein's doing than hers.
And as if to drag
the whole thing into the mud, that is exactly what happens. The four members of
the intertwining couples end up in a mud pool slugging it out. It dragged
everything down into the mud. All we needed was The elegance was gone,
the joy was not evident, the prettiness was, well, muddied.
On top of
those character-istic problems, there is a fundamental perverseness about
transducing Shakespeare into other eras without re-writing the Bard-speak. Late
19th century Italy just does not do it for the wherefores and whithers of these
famous words. There were anachronisms, too, like battery-powered
electric lights on bicycles that seemed
really out of place, though our research indicates they could have had
them...and strange machinations that placed phonographs in the hands of the
fairies.
And strangely
petulant and disapproving these sprites were, too. Coarse and unrefined.
Mean-spirited at times. And too too too earthy and earthly.
The Romeo+Juliet website credits someone named
Shakespeare as its author,
unlike this one, which credits the director of the film with the
"writing".
More from the web:
"In
shaping the scenes with the four lovers who flee into the woods and become
enchanted, Hoffman was aware of a different problem. "Having played
Lysander and Demetrius, I know the feeling," he says. "You’ve
got the mechanicals on one side of you getting laughs and the fairies on the
other. How do you avoid being bland ingenues? That’s where the bicycles
came in handy. They create an obstacle and a level of comedy that you
don’t have to go over the top to achieve." The absurdity of people
chasing after love on bicycles enabled the actors to concentrate on finding the
laughs where Shakespeare put them -- in the hairpin turns the youthful
characters’ emotions are put through by Puck’s love
potion."
I doubt WS would want the credit.
Musically it was
ok, but it really felt like they were pretentious at times with the
interspersal of operatic voices. Did some suit say, Oh, we need a classical
piece Here, because the research says the audience expects it? That is what the
score felt like at times.
It played to a full
house at the 4:30 Saturday afternoon showing its second day of release. And the
crowd enjoyed it. I did too; it is only after taking a closer look that I found
it so lacking. But I could watch it again, just for the adventures of Thisbe,
and Oberon, Puck and Bottom.
Don't look too
close, and the wires won't show.
|
| The
Play - On-line from MIT |
I am so far removed from
stagecraft that I forgot an essential difference between a play and a
screen-play. Screenplays contain critical information about the landscape the
characters inhabit, how they look, and visual props that are necessary to tell
the story. It would be nearly impossible to produce a film without a clear
definition of the scene in the screenwriter's vision. (Of course this is
changed entirely by the director, who wants to make it his film,
but it still is considered part of the exercise to put it all in...)
Plays are intended for
stages, duh, where almost everything is left to the discretion of the director
and crews, and sets are changed throughout the performance. As such, a lot more
is left to the imagination of the producers, who have to find a way to impart
the feeling and intent of the play using sparse visual clues and an audience
ready to imagine they are seeing more than they are.
On film, everything is right
there, and has to be right there. It cannot be changed the next night. In
thinking about the adaptation of the this W.S. play to the screen, I should
have considered the sparseness of scene information, and realized that perhaps
WS. did not put the bosomy babes in the mud.
Certainly mud wrestling is an
ancient pastime although considering the difficulty of slinging mud on stage in
a off-election year, I doubt fighting in a mudhole was part of the original
play. In an endeavor to research the history of mud wrestling, I encountered
the Wet and Messy fetishists. There are a dozen sites on a central link that I
have provided for you at the bottom of this inset.. In the interest of
research, of course.
|
| INSTANT
SUMMARY OF USE OF MUD |
Let's see. If
mud was not in original... (can anyone prove otherwise? E-mail me)
- Old European White Male writes classic literature that
was in reality pandering to the masses of his day.
- Times change from EST* to DST, and work becomes
inaccessible to majority due to accompanying change in mores and language.
(*Elizabethan Standard Time)
- Mud wrestling becomes Internet pastime.
- Director discovers mud wrestling as modern interest of
uneducated. (Probably from focus group polling.)
- Director makes leap of faith.
- Shakespeare can be re-introduced to the masses, bringing
them up to the level of sophistication of 1500's England through linkage of
modern mud wrestling to ancient poetry/prose.
- Millennium masses are thus brought up from 500 years of
ignorance to passable intelligence through said linkage.
- Although not observed in exit focus groups, it is
conjectured that people like this new version of AMND but feel dirty in a
naughty way after viewing, thus proving mud-intelligence conditioning.
- Objective:achieved.Modern man has been lifted up
from the mud to the entertainment level of the peasant of 500 years ago,
without his knowledge.
- Whew.
|
Perhaps this will bring the masses
even closer to Shakespeare.
WET AND MESSY
OR
Yahoo; Mud Wrestling
Club
(Warning: these may contain adult material) |
/ |
