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Reviews
Twelfth Night (1986)
Wrong movie!
Somebody's badly screwed up here. This adaptation has been confused with Kenneth Branagh's 1988 TV version: http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0324342/
The posters shown at the top are for the Branagh production. There are even reviews of the Branagh production on this page. The Amazon link takes you to a page for the DVD of the Branagh production: the Armfield film isn't out on DVD. Please be wary: these are two different adaptations!
I'd love to see the Armfield version if anybody can get me a copy; if you have one to sell, please PM me! For anyone who hasn't seen Branagh's Twelfth Night, I can recommend it: it's one of the best versions I've seen. Branagh has said he'd like to adapt Twelfth Night for the big screen some day; here's hoping he does.
The Importance of Being Earnest (2002)
So-called purists need to take their blinkers off
Whenever any play is adapted for the cinema, one will find people complaining "It's less than three hours long! It isn't all set in one room! What a travesty!" The fact is that theatre and cinema are different media, and adaptations have to recognise this. There are a lot of lines I miss in this adaptation but one can't put a play of this length on the screen without cuts, and one can't cut Wilde without cutting brilliant one-liners, so it was inevitable that some people's favourite lines would be gone. (Having played Lane myself, I'm attached to his comment that "I have only been married once, and that was in consequence of a misunderstanding": but the discussion had nothing to do with the plot and would have held up the pace of the film.) The 1952 version is one of the best examples there is of filmed theatre. This is a fine example of a play successfully ADAPTED to film. The scene switches are the only way to maintain on the screen the play's galloping pace. (Dialogue can do that unassisted in the theatre, but film is a visual medium: it may seem obvious, but a lot of critics don't seem to understand it. One that I've read has dismissed Kenneth Branagh's _As You Like It_ unseen because it will, er, actually render the Forest of Arden instead of asking the audience to imagine it. That's how blinkered they are.) The design is exquisite and the cast perfect (one expects as much from Judi Dench and Colin Firth, but Reese Witherspoon's flawless accent and extraordinary charm make her perhaps even more impressive, while Rupert Everett, an actor of frankly limited range, is for once in his element as a character one suspects is very like himself.) The "additional" dialogue is in fact mostly salvaged from the four-act version Wilde originally wrote, while the few lines which are added take care of necessary exposition economically and without the least incongruity.
No other filmed version can make me laugh as much as seeing the play live. This one can. Parker, after a disappointing start with _Othello_, has become an excellent film-maker.
The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama (1925)
Brilliant early Waugh (very minor spoilers)
Before he was famous, Evelyn Waugh and a few of his fellow students created this hilariously irreverent short film. Waugh had not yet become a Catholic, and is satirical at the expense of the Church, but still more merciless in his treatment of the British Establishment: the real name of "Derek Erskine", who played the King, will probably never be known, as he was a Guardsman and knew that he would be kicked out of his regiment if he was ever identified as the man mocking the monarch from behind that false beard. Four real figures of the day appear amid the fictional throng: the Pope is portrayed as a Machiavellian conspirator, the King as a pompous booby, the Prince of Wales as a dissolute, weak-willed young libertine; while the Dean of Balliol (Waugh's own college*) comes off worst of all. ("My son! With the Dean of Balliol!" exclaims the King. "Act quickly, Kettering!") Waugh himself proves as fine a comic actor as he was a writer, in the double roles of the predatory Dean and parasitic Lord Borrowington, while Elsa Lanchester (making her cinematic debut) is delightful as the coke-sniffing chorus girl who exposes the "Popish Plot". The evil cardinal's doddering, alcoholic mother, played by a man in drag (Lanchester is the only female cast member) and flirting with the Pope, is another comic gem.
Waugh was a genius. If you can find this film (it's very difficult to obtain), I urge you to see it.
* Edit - d'oh! Of course, Waugh wasn't at Balliol. Thanks for the correction.
The Canterbury Tales (1998)
The "return journey" episode was ill-advised
The three most popular of the Canterbury Tales are those of the Miller, the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath: perhaps the makers of the series felt that they had been wrong to exclude the Miller's tale from their original two-hander (whose six tales, in various but equally beautiful animation styles, were those of the Nun's Priest, the Knight, the Merchant, the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner and the Franklin, with nods to the three unfinished tales - the Cook's, Chaucer's Tale of Sir Topas, and the Squire's: the Cook, too drunk in the original to complete his story, is here too drunk to begin it; Chaucer's doggerel is cut off by the Host as originally, but much sooner, and is not replaced with the rather boring prose Tale of Melibee; the Squire merely makes a few noises about the kind of tale he wants to hear before the Franklin tells it). So, here are four more tales: the Squire's, with an invented ending; the Canon's Yeoman's; the Miller's, and the Reeve's, told in alternating episodes.
Pluses: the evocation of fourteenth century life in the between-tales segments (and the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, which, like the Pardoner's, uses the same faux-plasticine style of animation as the "real" segments of the story) is as rich as ever; and the watercolourish animation of the Squire's tale is exquisite, possibly the most gorgeous in the series.
Minuses: the Squire's Tale rambles all over the place with no real narrative strength; the rivalry played up in the first two episodes was that between the Summoner and the Friar, not the Miller and the Reeve (indeed, I don't think the Reeve even appeared), so we haven't been prepared for their fighting and interruption; the language in their tales is excessively modern; and, worst of all, the grotesque computerised animation of these last two tales is unimaginative and ugly.
The third episode is still worth seeing, but it cannot bear comparison to the first two.
The Tempest (1983)
How not to do Shakespeare
I have seldom seen such two-dimensional, amateurish acting. It's a waste of film and an insult to Shakespeare. In a village hall or as a primary school Christmas play it might just about be acceptable, but from professionals it's embarrassing.
Apparently I have to provide at least ten lines of comment, but I've said all that needs to be said and more than this travesty deserves. Everybody in it speaks with an utter lack of naturalism, as if they're trying to make the lines sound as artificial as possible. Every character is given a single note to strike, and all complexity excised; half the time the note is inappropriate, and many of the actors don't even achieve that. The idea that these sorry specimens could make a living as actors while talented people wait table for years before getting a break is sickening.
Gangs of New York (2002)
Scorsese on top form
A mindblowing epic from a truly great director, this film has attracted a great deal of opprobrium from people who seem to have missed the point. I thus find myself forced to write a defensive review instead of simply raving about it.
#1: "The plot is so hackneyed". No it's not. Of course there are lots of revenge plots around; show me *any* movie and I'll show you a basic plot that's been used a thousand times before, but the good ones put new twists on them, and I felt that this was an original handling of the revenge plot (Amsterdam's growing closeness to Bill, the recognition that he is becoming like him, and even a genuine sympathy for the old monster aided this impression). It's a simple plot, certainly: but that's because the film is less about the story than about the evocation of an era, which was brilliantly realised. The story is there for the picture to hang on, which means that it needs to be strong but not too complex. It succeeds.
#2: "The accents are terrible": Have you any idea how much work went into getting these accents right? Of course Amsterdam and Jenny don't sound Irish: they've grown up in New York and naturally have mixed up accents. Of course Bill doesn't sound like a modern New Yorker: it's a well-researched old-fashioned Anglo-Dutch NY accent, predating other (particularly Italian) influences.
#3: Criticisms of the acting I simply don't understand. I used to dislike diCaprio, but he has grown stronger, surer and better in every film I've seen. There is only one point in this film where I felt his acting faltered for a few seconds - I'm not telling you where - and I was on the lookout for slips. Cameron Diaz rises beautifully to what is by far the greatest dramatic challenge of her career, while Daniel Day-Lewis and Jim Broadbent prove yet again that they can do no wrong.
Right, that's that off my chest. If you enjoy well-written, gorgeously shot gangland epics which bring together some of the finest acting and directing talents around, this is for you. If you can't cope with moral complexity or are too fidgety to sit still for three hours, blame yourself, not Scorsese.