Category: Reviews

Movie and book reviews

Review : Julie Taymor’s Tempest

~ duane ~ 25 Comments

Well I’m happy to report that Julie Taymor’s The Tempest movie was in fact playing at one theatre in Boston, so I hiked into town to watch it just like I said I would. As Bardfilm put it, the fact that we’re seeing more Shakespeare on film these days at all is a major accomplishment and we need to support it.

SPOILER ALERT : This post contains specific details about the movie. So if you really want to be completely surprised by every directorial decision, you probably don’t want to read this.

Unfortunately I have to say that this movie had some good, a bunch of bad, and some decisions that were so downright terrible as to be insulting.

Open with a sandcastle, dissolving in the rain. Miranda, who made the castle, sees the storm, sees the ship. Begins running. Then we get the shot of the men on the ship, cutting back periodically to Miranda running. I liked the tempest itself. The sound mix was terrible and you could not hear much of what was said – I’m pretty sure that most of the good lines (like Gonzalo’s “acre of dry land” speech, and the “he hath no drowning mark upon him” line) were both cut. But here’s the thing – it was a good storm. We see fire, we see waves crashing completely over the boat, we see men going overboard. You watch this brief scene and you think, “This ship is going down, these men are all going to die.”

Cut to our first shot of Helen Mirren’s Prospera, who is actively controlling the storm. This could have been awesome – at how many spots in Shakespeare’s script do you get to say “I think Prospero is actually spellcasting here”? Unfortunately, the spellcasting in this case is Mirren holding her staff over her head and screaming. No words, no ancient incantations, just screaming. Until Miranda stops her.

Here I think an opportunity was missed. I would have loved to see something from Mirren to signify that, until a moment ago, she’d been on some different, magical plane, her entire awareness focused on nothing but the spell she was casting. A few moments of confusion, staring at her child and having to take a moment to come back to reality. After all she was just screaming her head off. Instead we get something more of a “What do you want, child? Mommy’s working!” moment. Miranda gets the same look from Prospera that my 6yr old gets from my wife when my wife’s trying to talk on the phone.

First real annoyance, though? We get an invented backstory for Prospera. This isn’t just a case of swapping out some gender pronouns in the script. No, we actually change the story. Prospera is the *wife* of the Duke, you see. So then when the Duke dies, she signs over control of the dukedom to her brother Antonio. This was troubling to me, because by doing that you split the universe we Shakespeare geeks know, and you move from a gender-bent Prospero (which we can understand, we’ve all seen gender-altered productions) to “No no, this is a whole different character.” Well, then, what do you expect me to do with that? How can I have any expectation about a character you’ve invented?

I can’t really do the whole story at this rate, the post will be 10 pages long. So let’s get to the good/bad/awful, shall we?

The Good

Prospera’s relationship with Ariel. I loved this. Every interaction between the two shows Ariel at Prospera’s shoulder, so close that they’d be rubbing against each other – a confidant and friend, not a servant. Ariel is human, and the same size as Prospera (more on this later). You really got the idea that these two were a team, and when Prospera says “I will miss thee” you know she means it. However, this did not come across as well as it could in the various spots where it could have – especially “Do you love me, master? No?”

Ariel is entirely a special effect. Well, I mean, he’s a male actor, in the form of a male actor, for the most part. But he’s got a CGI-enhanced white glow about him when he’s standing still. And when he’s not, he’s zipping aerily about, feet never touching the ground. This only makes sense. Ariel can’t be just another character like Caliban, there needs to be something other-worldly about him. Her. It. More on this later.

I thought Miranda and Ferdinand were acceptable, at least as far as their delivery went. I saw some reviews that thought the two young actors were out of their league, but honestly I though that they played the role well – they’re children, after all, and they’re not really major characters in the story. Their entire purpose is to make big sappy doe eyes at each other and tell each other they’re the moon and the stars. Ferdinand’s *look*, on the other hand, will make you question WTF Prospera is thinking setting her daughter up with this kid. Long hair hanging down in his face, and this really stupid mustache that looks like something a 13yr old could grow. No idea why they gave him that look. Oh, and remember the scene where he sings? Yeah, I didn’t think so. More on that later.

The Bad

The movie is mostly special effects – and they are bad special effects. Fans of theatre over film here will have a field day – some things are better left to letting Shakespeare paint the picture. When Ariel speaks of how he sank the ship? It’s a very descriptive scene, yes. So did we really need to replay it, showing a giant Poseidon-like Ariel literally flicking the ship back and forth with his fingers while he told the tale, like a child playing with toys in the bath tub? Most of Ariel’s special effects are a bit off. Remember, Ariel is basically just a person – but his feet never touch the ground. So several times when he has to leave the scene, there’s a special effect of him running across the sky, up into the clouds. Not a swoosh or a blur or anything, a person with legs running away, who just happens to be running up up and away. I thought it looked stupid.

Another weird one? Prospera’s cell is something out of an MC Escher painting, for who knows what reason. I mean, yeah, sure, it’s a cave carved into the side of a mountain, so of course it’s all entirely right angles. Makes sense??

Some parts just did not seem well thought out. You know how Trinculo, Stefano and Caliban are delayed on their way to kill Prospero when he lays out all his nice clothes to distract them? Yeah, well…how’s that scene play out when Prospera is a woman? Well, she lays out a bunch of beautiful dresses. And Trinculo and Stefano get all excited …and dress up in the women’s clothes. WTF?

Oh, I said I’d mention this — Ferdinand sings. For some unknown reason he breaks into the Clown’s number from Twelfth Night, the one that contains the big “Journeys end in lovers meeting” line. Had a very weird, Across The Universe vibe to it. I kept thinking I wanted Prospera to roll her eyes and say “Oh, sh_t, he’s in a *band*?! This was a bad idea.”

Russell Brand. Yeah, what can I say, I hated him. The whole scene on the beach where he climbs under Caliban’s blanket and is first discovered by Stefano? That scene was pretty painful to watch, it just did not work on any level. Well, I take that back, Caliban had a great “WTF is going on?!” look throughout the whole thing. And toward the end of the scene, Stefano and Trinculo did manage to give off this really nasty “These aren’t just buffoons, they’re criminals who are capable of serious harm” vibe that I don’t usually see. But Brand’s delivery of the material? Well, it’s on a different level, I’ll say that. It’s really and truly like Brand wanted to take it and run with it, do his own thing. Lots of mannerisms added to the character. More on that later.

The So Bad It’s Insulting

Trinculo and Stefano can both be heard quite clearly saying “F_ck.” That annoys me on an infinite variety of levels. In both cases it comes out the same way – they are both playing stumbling drunkards, tripping their way across the island, muttering random nothings as they go. And, at one point, one trip merits a very clear “F_ck!” Same thing happens later to Stefano. I can almost imagine how that came about, too. I can just picture Brand being “in character” as he saw it, improvising where he could, and thinking that this is what Trinculo would say when he stubbed his toe. Taymor, who seems to have a thing for curse words (on the Stephen Colbert show she dropped her own F-bomb), says “Go with it. That’s an Elizabethan word, it’s ok.” And then Stefano throws one in as well.

Listen, Jackasses. Don’t improvise. If Shakespeare wanted you to curse he would have told you how to do it. You show an amazing amount of disrespect to your source material, and your audience, pulling that nonsense.

Another major problem that I just cannot understand is that Ariel spends the entire movie naked. I heard that he was “digitally neutered”, so you won’t be seeing any dangly bits, but it looked in many scenes like he was wearing some sort of loin cloth. Every time he turned his back, however, we were treated to a “moon calf” of a different sort, if you know what I’m saying. Ariel’s backside is in this play almost as much as Caliban is.

That would be bearable. Maybe. But then, for some completely incomprehensible reason, the director must have said “Hey, can you give Ariel some boobs?” Every now and then, with no particular rhyme or reason, Ariel’s rocking maybe a B cup.

WTF?

I’d heard about this. Warned, is probably a better term. And I went into it thinking “Oh, ok, cool – Ariel is basically both sexes at the same time.” Well, no. Ariel’s a boy through 99% of the story. When he suddenly develops breasts, absolutely nothing else about his character changes – no facial structure changes, no longer hair, absolutely nothing to indicate that there’s any sort of two-sides-of-Ariel thing going on.

Why do this? I’ve already said, Ariel is a special effect. He flies most places. Spends a bunch of time in the water as well, as a reflection. Why not go with that? Why not just create a character whose entire body is amorphous, so you don’t have to deal with the issue? Why not make an entirely androgynous character from top to bottom?

Ok, last one. How hard would you rage if I used the three words “Benny Hill Music”? Maybe this is a Taymor thing, but several of the special effect sequences are done at high speed, and the soundtrack kicks in. It’s not true Benny Hill music, but one particular sequence at the end does play out like somebody asked for a newer, updated version of that classic tune to use. It was at this point that my expression was more one of “O R U Effing kidding me??”

Summary

My kids aren’t seeing this – too much unexplained and unnecessary nudity, and a handful of downright obnoxious and out of place curse words. The acting is fine, the plot fine. The audience I was with, maybe 3 dozen people or so, laughed at a number of the jokes (though many fell flat). I think it’s quite possible to make a movie for modern mainstream audiences where people understand what the heck is going on. But this particular interpretation is no “epic masterpiece.” I think that the director and actors both seemed to think that this was their movie, and that was their mistake.

Review : Wayward Macbeth

~ duane ~ 1 Comment


What is the magical spell that Orson Welles legendary “Voodoo Macbeth” holds over us? It was neither the first nor the only production of its kind, and yet 75 years later this the one that we go back to as one of the best examples of what a visionary director can do with Shakespeare. Ironically there’s talk of someone actually doing “Welles’ Voodoo Macbeth” again, as something of an homage. Not really sure how I feel about that. Newstok’s own essay in the collection refers to these as “re-do Macbeths.”
Anyway that brings us to Weyward Macbeth : Intersections of Race an Performance, edited by Scott Newstok. Scott was one of the first authors (editor, to be more specific) to have enough faith in my fledgling little site to send me a copy of his book, Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare, for review. I had no idea who Kenneth Burke was at the time, and said as much, but I must have done something right because Scott’s kept in touch over the years.
When Scott offered me a review copy of his latest, my first reaction was “Oh, like Voodoo Macbeth.” Scott said that reactions such as mine, this believe that the universe of what we’ll call “racial Shakespeare” began with Welles, was really a motivating factor for the book’s existence. Who paved the way for Welles’ vision? What’s happened in the 75 years since? Time neither started nor stopped in 1936, and there’s plenty to talk about on both sides of this particular (though monumentous) event in Macbeth history.
When I received the book, a collection of essays on the subject, I did just like I did with the Burke book – I flipped around the contents to find somewhere I felt like I could dive in. I looked to see where Welles and voodoo showed up, and was intrigued to see the first essay about Welles on page 83, 9 essays in. What, then, came first? I see that essay #8 is entitled Before Welles: A 1935 Boston Production. Coming from Massachusetts, I’m intrigued. I pick that one. 1935? Like, the year before? Why have we never heard of that one?

This production did not go for an exotic locale, though it was indeed an “all negro” cast (that is the term used in the essay). Other than that it was intended to be staged largely as Shakespeare wrote it, specifically because the director believed strongly in presenting the talent and range of his black actors. (This to me sounds like something of a snipe at Welles’ production which gained its legendary status precisely for its staging and its direction, and almost nothing is ever said of the actors themselves.)
Did Welles get wind of this production? That would, as the essay understates, “prove an important complication of the Welles legend.” I’ll say. He always claimed that his wife gave him the idea. But what credit would be due if he got the idea from seeing (or at least hearing about) a previous, similar production?
The book is full of small little fascinating selections like this. Flip toward the front of the book and you can read stories of Frederick Douglass using passages from Macbeth in 1875. Do not miss the picture of Ira Aldridge, a black man, portraying Macbeth in 1830.
Or flip toward the end and maybe head right for the sure-to-raise-eyebrows “ObaMacbeth” essay which goes straight for Barack Obama. After mentioning that Obama’s campaign never invoked Macbeth, the essay author Richard Burt spots a Newsweek story that broke out the footage from Welles’ production and basically called upon Obama to bring about a progressive revolution to the National Endowment for the Arts.
With 26 essays spanning over 200 pages, there is a massive amount of information here about the history of interpreting the Scottish play. An excellent and thought-provoking collection from Scott Newstok once again, and I’m pleased that I get the opportunity to have projects such as these cross my desk.

Review : Two Gentlemen of Lebowski

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Two Gentlemen of Lebowski hit the scene in January 2010, and we were there. In it, Adam Bertocci masterfully retells cult movie The Big Lebowski as if it had been written by, well, you know who.
So in a true demonstration of just how quickly an online hit can go from viral to print, I hold in my hands the paperback version of the book which Simon and Schuster were nice enough to send me in thanks for my early support of the project.
I’ve sat here for awhile, reading it front to back, trying to decide how I’d review this one. Then I wondered, what am I doing? If you’ve got interest at all in this project, you’ve also probably got the movie memorized. And chances are that you’ve already read, or at least skimmed, the online version.
But here’s a little secret that I’m not sure I should admit — I’ve never seen the movie. Gasp! It’s true. I started it, once. I know the bit about the rug. And some early scenes in the bowling alley where John Goodman pulls a gun on somebody because his toe went over the line. That’s about it. So that put me in what was probably a fairly unique situation – reading the Shakespeare version as if it were the original. It helped that I could picture Jeff Bridges as “The Knave”, I’ll tell you that.
If you know the movie and you’ve read the online version, why should you get the book? For the annotations, mainly. They’ve done this one up like a traditional text, with the script on one side and a full page of footnotes and other annotations on the facing page. That means that Mr. Bertocci not only had to map the entire plot of the movie into a Shakespearean script, but he had to backfill all the notes as well. Pay attention, because often those are the best part!

7. lance: euphemism for penis; see also most nouns in Shakespeare.

Many variations on that theme, as you could imagine. 🙂
Is the original movie on Netflix streaming? I’m thinking I’ll watch the whole thing now, this book in hand, and see how it works out. Somebody should do an audio book, and then we can play the old Wizard of Oz / Dark Side of the Moon game where you put on the video, turn the sound down, and play the audiobook in sync with it. That’d be cool!

SARAH : The Life of Sarah Bernhardt

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

When I was asked if I’d like a review copy of the Sarah Bernhardt biography, I said what some of you might have said: “Hamlet? That Sarah Bernhardt?”  Yes, that Sarah Bernhardt.  I said sure. Of course, that’s literally *all* I know about her.  So this was going to be enlightening. After receiving the book, all I can say is that anybody who thought writing a biography of Shakespeare was tough needs to try Sarah.  In the former case, there’s just no trustworthy information to work with because it doesn’t exist. In Sarah’s case that’s almost true – most of what we know about her came from her, and she made it all up.  So while Greenblatt’s Will in the World kept falling back on variations of “I imagine it went something like this …”, Gottlieb’s Sarah spends much of the time telling a story (typically a real doozy) and adding, parenthetically, “(then again we get this story from Sarah herself, so who knows how much of that if any is true).” This woman was so very, very much more than her Hamlet.  I’ll admit, I started by flipping to the index and looking for how much of the book would be spent on that role, and couldn’t even find Shakespeare or Hamlet listed.  I finally found it, though, in a very large section on Sarah’s Performances.  Answer?  5 pages are dedicated to Hamlet.  Did you know that an actual video clip of her 1899 performance exists?   Sarah’s life easily fills this book, and it never gets boring (and the nearly 100 images, including her Hamlet and Macbeth, beautifully decorate the stories as they are told).  On one page you have something out of a silent movie, everyone dressed to the nines during a Sunday brunch … and on the next page you read about the granddaughter’s firsthand account about how a dispute over politics resulted, literally, in the family smashing plates over each other.  Good times. There’s an amazing amount of information here, about an amazing woman.  It’s going to take me a long time to get through it, because I’m learning something new on every page. It would not do justice to the book to keep this post on the shelf until I’ve read it cover to cover, nor would it be fair to rush my reading to rush out the post.  So I’m being honest.  This is the first English-language biography of Sarah Bernhardt, and it is wonderfully informative as well as entertaining.  I’m glad I’ve been given the opportunity to experience it, and will never again think of her as just that woman who was famous for playing Hamlet.

Shakespeare Versus The Goblins : A Review of “Will Power”

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

A funny thing happened on the way to this review.  I got email from Tor books, who are known in the scifi/fantasy world.  So I thought it was a press release and didn’t really pay attention – until I noticed that Shakespeare was mentioned.  Then I realized it wasn’t a mass mailing, it was addressed directly to me at my Shakespeare Geek address. Turns out that this particular book was written by a Shakespeare professor and they thought I might like  a review copy. Sure! Will Power is the second in a series from author A.J. Hartley, Distinguished Professor of Shakespeare at the University of North Carolina. I felt a little weird jumping into the series in the middle, but really if you think about the fantasy genre the odds are against you on that one (for any N book series, you’ve got an N-1 out of N chance of finding a book other than book 1). This book tells the continuing story of our merry band of adventurers, including one Will Hawthorne, playwright.  You know the type – generally cowardly sort who only came along to hang out on the sidelines and partake of the treasure, and maybe some beer and wenches.  And, naturally, he’s the one who inevitably saves his stronger and braver friends when they get into trouble.  In Will Power, it doesn’t take long before the group is mysteriously transported into a strange new land, and split up in the process.  They soon find themselves unwelcome guests right in the middle of a war between the Fair Folk and the Goblins.  But is all as it seems?  His companions Orgos and Mithos have been captured by goblins, Renthrette and Garnet have joined the Fair Folk, Lisha is lost somewhere, and something just doesn’t feel right to Hawthorne. What happens next?  There are enough twists and turns and clever devices that I can honestly say I didn’t predict where the story would go.   The story ends on a satisfactory note while simultaneously opening up a door for the next book in the series.  This author knows how to write fantasy. 🙂 What about the Shakespeare, you’re asking?  Me too.  There’s a funny scene early on when Hawthorne stumbles across what he thinks is a tavern, and introduces himself by reciting something of a mini-ballad … in iambic pentameter.  Not bad. Later, while roaming around the city of the Fair Folk, we learn that they have a library, and that library has a drama section.  Hawthorne makes a beeline for this literary oasis, breaking down doors (seriously) to get to it.  I think some of the literature geeks in the audience can appreciate what that feels like.  There may be a goblin war raging outside the city walls, but if you need me I’ll be curled up with a good book. There are also plenty of opportunities to do the whole “act like somebody you’re not” thing for our hero.  He has to act like he knows what he’s doing half the time, after all.  But none of that is really Shakespeare.  Nobody “puts on a show.” The press release suggests “a magical world which very closely resembles that of the Elizabethan Era,” and I’m wondering if that was a comment from the first book.  Because other than starting the book out in a tavern and making regular comments about the poor quality of the beer, I can’t really see where the Elizabethan thing comes in.  Oh, well, I take that back – the city of the Fair Folk is populated with courtiers who spend their days drenching each other in over-the-top metaphor (“My Lord, embers and smoldering leaves produce a smoke most bitter and unwholesome to the senses, yet the heat from whence it rises is but a poor and mean thing at which one might not even warm one’s hands. The heart of a furnace burns pure and hot, consuming all and leaving little there to smoke withal. So my love for Johanna, like the core of the forge, blazes with white, undying passion, while yours for Beatrice, I fear, so cool and, doused with overlong laments, smokes merely.”)  I always thought this behavior was more Victorian than Elizabethan, but I’m not a history buff.  What it reminded me of was a Monty Python version of Oscar Wilde.  It did not go unnoticed, either, that the author drops in names like Beatrice as necessary – one of the others tells the story of a young lady enamored with a certain young shepard named Corin, as well.  Both are direct, if insubstantial, Shakespeare references.   Will Power was an entertaining fantasy book.  I may have started out assuming that it was going to fit the standard form where the ‘weakling’ in an otherwise stalwart band of adventurers eventually turns out to save the day, but in the end there was enough originality that I was impressed with how it all went down.  I would have liked more Shakespeare, but that’s not a fair measure – I always want more Shakespeare, up to the point where it *is* Shakespeare. :)  I’ll be curious to see how the third book goes, and how much Shakespeare comes into it.