news, views and reviews of Shakespeare on film (and in the Pacific Northwest)
Posted in Bardfilm on Apr 23rd, 2008
Ever since I began writing The Mystery of Things, I’ve had a fascination for Shakespeare’s villains in general and Iago in particular. It’s the “why?” question, as Dan Donohue, one of our favorite actors, points out in a lively and revealing interview on the Oregon Shakespeare Festival website called “Playing Iago.”
My favorite quote, besides “You’ll [...]
Posted in Bardfilm on Sep 12th, 2007
As in, Hamlet?
You know, maybe I’m all wet, but this is one London theatre production I can’t quite get excited about.
And here’s someone at The Guardian who positively cringes at the thought.
Geoffrey Wright, the director who gave us (by way of a truly disturbing performance by Russell Crowe) the truly disturbing movie about Australian skinheads, Romper Stomper, has re-envisioned Shakespeare’s Macbeth in a drug-land setting, complete with the three witches as Goth chicks.
Yikes.
It isn’t clear to me from the review how much of the script is [...]
…according to Daniel Rosenthal, author of Shakespeare on Screen and the soon-to-be-published 100 Shakespeare Films. The Guardian UK has an article on Rosenthal’s thesis here.
Here’s how the article begins:
Shakespeare is box-office poison - or so the thinking goes. But if you look at the hundreds of blockbuster epics, westerns and rom-coms based on his work, [...]
(order the DVD from Amazon)
starring Adrian Lester
reviewed by John Murphy
We Shall Sift Him
“It is only when we forget Shakespeare that we can begin to find him.”
[...]
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.