Shakespeare Movies

I love Shakespeare movies.  Live plays are even better.  And reading them is great, too, even reading about them.  It was the movies that got me hooked, though.  I watched Franco Zeffirelli's 1990 Hamlet with Mel Gibson and Glenn Close when I was a senior in high school.  But I didn't watch it at school, I watched it in my living room at home. I don't even remember why I chose to do that.  At school they made us watch two movies: first, Zeffirelli's 1968 Romeo and Juliet, which I thought was OK aside from Juliet's annoying voice; and, second, his 1967  Taming of the Shrew, which I hated.  (I'm sorry, but Elizabeth Taylor will never be more than the White Diamonds lady to me.)  This Hamlet movie was serious, though, and Elsinore felt like my living room at home: isolated and restricting.
Something else happened my senior year of high school: someone besides Franco Zeffirelli made a popular Shakespeare movie.  By casting Claire Danes as Juliet, Baz Luhrman ensured that my girlfriend, a huge My So-Called Life fan would have to see Romeo + Juliet.  We took our seats in the theater completely unprepared for what was about to happen.  They had guns, but they said "sword".  They spoke in iambic pentameter while blowing up gas stations.  Mercutio was a drag queen on ecstasy.  I had only vague notions of what a drag queen was and no idea about ecstasy at this point in my life.  It was different.  Really different.  And awesome.
In college, I had a fantastic Shakespeare professor who, in addition to taking me to my first two Shakespeare plays, introduced me to Kenneth Branagh's contemporary cinematic renaissance.  I clearly remember watching Henry V in her class, completely surprised by how much I liked it.  Today, one of the greatest pleasures I take in teaching high school is showing my students great Shakespeare movies.  Recently, I picked up Studying Shakespeare on Film by Maurice Hindle at a used book store.  Browsing it's pages got me feeling like I've limited myself by watching the same Shakespeare movies over and over again.  So, here's what I'm going to do: watch some more of them and blog about it.  To begin, let me disclose my current preferences by dividing up those films I've seen into three categories: Like, OK, and Don't Like.

Like
Branagh's Henry V (1989)
Zeffirelli's Hamlet (1990)
Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing (1993)
Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996)
Hoffman's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999)
Branagh's As You Like It (2006)

OK
Olivier's Hamlet (1948)
Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968)
Burge's Julius Caesar (1970)
Radford's Merchant of Venice (2004)
Taymor's The Tempest (2010)

Don't Like
Zeffirelli's Taming of the Shrew (1967)
Branagh's Hamlet (1996)

After some research, I came up with the following list of films that I will watch in chronological order.

1. Reinhardt and Dierterle's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
2. Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1957)
3. Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1971)
4. Oliver Parker's Othello (1995)
5. Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night (1996)
6. Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000)

I realize that I am leaving out some important films, specifically the following:
1. The entire silent era
2. All films by Orson Welles
3. Kozintsev's Hamlet
4. Hall's A Midsummer Night's Dream

Perhaps one day I'll get around to those, but for the sake of time and not annoying my wife too much, I've got to draw the line somewhere.  Here we go.