Ok, I knew what to expect when I first heard about this one : gay Midsummer.  Turns out it’s more like, “gay Dead Poet’s Society”.  Gay kid at an all boy’s school, hangs out with the other “misfits”, taunted by the other boys and the very badly stereotyped homophobic rugby coach.  It’s made very clear that this is a gay movie, within the first five minutes.  The same boys that were trying to hit our hero in the face with their balls (ahem) are, in the next scene, dancing and singing shirtless in a fantasy sequence so unexpected that I had to check outside my window to make sure my neighbors didn’t think I was watching softcore.  Our hero, of course, goes on to play Puck, just like in Dead Poet’s.  Whatever will happen?

At this point, other than the very over the top homoerotic stuff (there’s a whole “love juice” sequence, too.  I mean, come on!), it’s about as predictable as it gets.  Hero kid’s got issues with his mom, his dad’s not in the picture.  Everybody that the mom runs into, from customers in her job to her new boss, all immediately hear about the gay son and want nothing to do with her anymore. I mean this literally – every character in the play is either gay or homophobic, there’s no middle ground. The acting goes along pretty much the same lines you’d expect.  There are some cute Shakespeare references, though, I’ll give them credit for that.  During auditions one character asks that he not play a girl’s part, because he’s got a beard coming in.  Later when roles are posted he’s heard to ask, “What is Thisbe?”  But if that were all there was to this one, I’d give it a pass.

There’s two big differences, however, that make this far more interesting.

First, it’s a musical.  And surprisingly, a good one.  I have to pay more attention to the rest of the tunes, but so far it’s good enough that I’d go track down the soundtrack.  You folks know me and Shakespeare-to-music.  It’s only partly that, more like “I’ll find a line or two from Shakespeare and then build a song around them.”  But, still.  Great start.  The title, for example, Were the World Mine?  That’s a line of Helena’s, but they give it to Puck.  And then they mix it in with lots of references to leading them up and down, and fairies running.  So, really, it’s all over the place lyrically.   But sung well.

The second, and this is the biggie, is that this is apparently a magical story.  Puck finds a recipe for “Cupid’s Love Juice” (I’m still trying to figure out if they wrote that up just for this movie, or if it was copied from something historical), makes it, and it actually works.  So with his prop flower from the play he goes about wreaking havoc by squirting it into the eyes of everybody – the rugby hero he was pining for in the first place, the homophobic rugby coach, his mother’s boss, everybody.  It wasn’t until he got to his mom’s boss and told her, “Try living in my shoes for awhile” that the significance of the title clicked with me.  Unlike Midsummer where the love potion inevitably causes the wrong people to fall in love, somehow in this movie he’s fixed it so that everybody he squirts falls in love with someone of the same sex, even though he runs through crowds spraying it on everybody he sees.  Somehow it never seems to generate a hetero couple.  Puck wields his magic flower like a super power, seeking out homophobes and dispensing justice.

Where his theory first breaks down is that none of these newly gay folk seem to have his closet insecurities.  They prance around, they dance ballet.  They throw themselves at each other.  That’s hardly seeing things through his eyes.  They even seem to speak Shakespearean, which is a weird side effect.

Once everybody’s gay (except for Puck’s straight female friend), the movie plays out like Midsummer – two guys fall in love with the same guy, and want to go fight about it.  Two girls, meanwhile, fall in love with Puck’s friend, the one girl who has no idea what’s going on and thinks they’re all playing some joke on her.  And, of course, Puck’s left to straighten it all out.  As far as I can tell there is no Oberon in this movie. Only thing is that Puck now actually *gets* his boy, and doesn’t want to give that up.

I’m not done with the movie yet as I write this review (I prefer to do it that way, getting in at least a portion of the review “live blogged”), but it’s not really keeping my interest.  Maybe it’s because I’m from Massachusetts where things like gay marriage aren’t nearly such a problem as they’re made out to be in this one.  Second, the acting and writing is seriously coming second to the heavy handed message.  Take the father who “caught his son in bed with his best friend .. holding hands and kissing!” because obviously it was important to not let anybody assume what “in bed with” meant.  Then he adds, “You can bet I taught them a lesson.”  And there we are left to wonder.  So, what, you beat them? You just admitted to an audience full of parents and teachers that you abuse your kid? That’s cool, though, because all the parents are homophobic and it’s ok to beat fags?

Like all of these “movies with some Shakespeare” that I watch, my favorite part is always the Shakespeare itself.  This one hasn’t got much.  It’s got some rehearsal, and the music, and a bunch of people randomly quoting.  But again just like Dead Poet’s, we get some performance near the end.  I dig the costumes, they’ve got this cool sort of “Dark Crystal” thing going.

So in summary?  Love the music (seriously, I’ll be hunting down the soundtrack shortly), dig the gimmick of playing out Midsummer in real life.  But this is very much a movie with a gay message, and as I said, I think the writing and acting suffer for it.  If you stripped all that away and just played it up like a typical romantic comedy with some mistaken identities and such, and it would have been just as interesting to me.  Maybe that means I’m just not the audience? But if your message is tolerance of the lifestyle, wouldn’t you want your movie to be seen by people who may not already live it and understand it?

“Something awesome this way comes,” I wrote back in August 2009 when I heard that “Teller’s Macbeth“, as I’ve come to call it, was going to be released on DVD.  Teller is perhaps most famous as the quiet partner of the Penn and Teller magic act, which in itself is known for special effects and lots and lots of gory violence.  People don’t realize that he’s actually an accomplished scholar.  Put together Macbeth with an illusionist who specializes in gory violence?  How could you not love it??  Note that, in conjunction with the Folger, that this is actually a book that is packaged with a DVD.  So if you go hunting for it look in the book section.  Honestly I bought it entirely for the movie, so I can’t tell you much about the book.

The DVD is fascinating. It’s not a movie version, it’s a filmed version of the stage performance.  So you can see and hear the audience.  Right off the bat you know what you’re in for, as even the woman who comes out to announce that the plays about to begin ends up getting run through with a sword.  (Truthfully this special effect was fairly weak, as she was holding a folder in front of her that was pretty obviously there to hide the prop sword.)

The special effects later are more interesting.  The witches seem to be where they put most of their effort.  There’s a fairly neat scene where Macbeth goes to grab at one and it disappears underneath him, leaving him holding an empty cloak.  Not movie quality stuff here, but then again they’ve got CGI and all Teller’s working with is live actors on a stage.  When Macduff’s wife is murdered it’s downright chilling, as you don’t see anything, we just leave her in the clutches of a ski-masked bad guy who is … singing.  Something right out of a horror movie, that was.  

Hard to tell the time period of this performance.  Everybody’s wearing leather jackets, for instance.   Some, but not all, wear kilts.  The backdrop appears to be like an iron fence of some sort, some pedestals and a staircase, giving the illusion of  castle.

As for the performance, I’m surprised that it gets a good number of laughs.  The porter is one thing, sure.  His scene is practically stand up.  He comes right out and hangs with the audience as he does his very long scene.  But there are other times as well where even Macbeth gets the occasional laugh.  Not sure that’s always right.  (Right now, for instance, the doctor’s just come in to report that Lady Macbeth is not well, and the audience is laughing?)

I’m actually watching as I’m typing right now, and digging the performance Macduff provides as a man just told that his family was murdered.  All my pretty ones?  Somehow he manages the trick of monologuing about his feelings while still *looking* like somebody that’s about to go on a murderous rampage.  Later he loses the leather jacket and dons a blue bandanna, which is a mistake because it makes him look like a pirate.  When he takes off the shirt he looks like Lord of the Dance meets Last Temptation of Christ.

How are the leads? I don’t love Lady Macbeth, but I suppose it’s a very hard role.  She reminds me of the wife from The Sopranos, for some reason.  I don’t mind her shrieking, but I’d like to think of them as scary psycho shrieks, and not just bitchy ones.  You know?

Macbeth’s good.  They don’t go with the “monstrous” interpretation.  He’s just a normal looking soldier.  He wears a t-shirt while most wear jackets, so you can see his muscular build a bit more, I’m sure that’s intentional.  I’m enjoying the way he’s playing the last scenes.  Some lines are completely confident in that “Nothing can hurt me, I’m immortal” way – while the very next line is screamed like a man afraid of his shadow. He’s nuts.  He’s got that sort of maniacal laughter thing going just right.

I don’t want to give away all the good stuff, so I have to stop now.  I like it.  It’s not going to go down in history like an Orson Welles, but it’s a nice addition to the collection.  The laughter is bugging me.  I’m scenes from the end, the climax is building, bodies are falling, and people are laughing.  I think that if I was in the audience that would have bugged the heck out of me…. yeah, you know what?  I’m gonna change that, and say it’s ruining it for me.  That’s a shame.