news, views and reviews of Shakespeare on film (and in the Pacific Northwest)
Posted in "Put money in my purse!", It Ain't Shakespeare, but... on Jan 17th, 2008
In the “put money in my purse!” category—money for the hotel room/plane ticket to NYC, since the event tickets are only $20—the divine Roger Rees is among the cast doing a Red Bull Theater “Revelation Reading” of Elizabethan playwright James Shirley’s The Cardinal.
Roger Rees, if the name isn’t quite a household word, was last seen [...]
Posted in Branagh, Directors, It Ain't Shakespeare, but... on Nov 23rd, 2007
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
starring Michael Caine and Jude Law
War of Wits
Sleuth kicks something vicious. Those familiar with the deliciously over-the-top 1972 version, which pitted legendary Laurence Olivier against a lean-and-hungry Michael Caine, may rightly wonder, why bother? They already got this one right. The play by Anthony Shaffer was a clever bit of gamesmanship—a sort [...]
Posted in It Ain't Shakespeare, but... on Aug 23rd, 2007
Directed by George Cukor
Starring Ronald Colman and Shelley Winters
Reviewed by John Murphy
Method in his Madness
Ronald Colman won an Oscar in 1948 for his riveting performance in George Cukor’s A Double Life, a noir-ish psychological thriller that cleverly anticipated the Method movement in acting in the early 1950s. Colman plays Anthony John, a famous Broadway actor [...]
Posted in Bard Northwest, It Ain't Shakespeare, but..., OSF on Jul 30th, 2007
Oregon Shakespeare Festival Production, 2007
reviewed by Rachel Murphy
(Editor’s note: We know it ain’t Shakespeare, but we all thought this was too good a production not to comment on. So we’re adding a new category: “It ain’t Shakespeare, but…”)
Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2007 Season Gem is the first of a ten-play series known as “The Pittsburgh Cycle” [...]
Shakespeare's Othello meets Spenser's Faerie Queene in this new and provocative mystery-thriller set in Milwaukee.
This is the story of James Ireton, a gifted young Shakespeare scholar haunted by a tragic past and recurring nightmares of a Knight, a Lady and a vicious Dragon. James thinks they’re just dreams, but when two people close to him fall victim in a seemingly motive-less series of brutal murders, James discovers there may be a very real Dragon preying in the shadows of his life. Worse, if he doesn’t find a bit of St. George in himself, the woman he loves may prove the Dragon’s ultimate victim.