"Boring Macbeth" Should Be an Oxymoron

I've put off writing this post because I knew it would be no fun to write.  Roman Polanski's Macbeth was a big let down.  It's boring.  The scenery was boring, the acting was boring, even Lady Macbeth was boring.  Even her "famous nude sleepwalking scene", as touted on the Netflix slipcase and elsewhere, was about as shocking or moving as it was exposing (that is, hardly at all).  On the other hand, you get an eye full of old naked witches huddled in a basement as if it were an alternate ending to The Blair Witch Project.  Gross.  To be fair, I may have missed the really good parts since I couldn't help dozing off here and there.  But I doubt it.  So, hopefully it's on to better things with Twelfth Night.  I'm excited about this one because the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival is performing Twelfth Night this year.  (On a side note, "twelfth" is about the weirdest word in the English language if you repeat it a few times.)

Shakespeare Movies: A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1935

My exploration into the "deep cuts" of Shakespeare movies begins with Reinhardt and Dierterle's 1935 rendition of  A Midsummer Night's Dream.  I was impressed.  This is a beautifully designed and shot movie with wonderful special effects.  And it is very, very funny.  
When watching old movies, I find that it takes me a while to get used to the acting, or over-acting.  At nearly two and a half hours, A Midsummer Night's Dream allows time for that.  So, things that were annoying at the beginning, like Puck's spastic laughter, had become charming by the end.  A few scenes, especially the pre-dawn fairy round-up, could have been edited down significantly, but these scenes allowed the film-makers to indulge their whimsy, creating truly magical illusions of fairies floating on the mist or disappearing into the starry night sky.  Still, "brevity is the soul of wit."
It is impossible not to compare this movie to Michael Hoffman's 1999 A Midsummer Night's Dream, one of my absolute favorites.  As is typical, the acting in the more contemporary movie is much more subdued.  The actors in the 1935 movie often sound like they are reciting, not acting.  This is also typical, as the prevailing philosophy about Shakespearean acting has shifted over time to a more natural, less formal, style.  This is most evident, I think, in the character of Oberon, whose style follows his costume.  Making use of the black and white pallet, Reinhardt and Dierterele dress him up in a shiny black body suit and oversized crown of glittering sticks.  Hoffman, on the other hand, dressed Oberon down, way down, to almost nothing.  While overdressed Victory Jory nearly sings his lines, Rupert Everett speaks his lines effortlessly, almost sleepily.  
The performance of Helena is another study in contrasts.  Jean Muir, in Reinhardt and Diertle's movie, responds to Demetrius' rejection with helpless sobbing.  Calista Flockhart, however, is  highly entertaining in Hoffman's movie as a spiteful, obstinate mess of emotions (and hair), who makes the bicycle prop an integral part of her character.  Only Stanley Tucci as Puck uses it as well, and it helps his character even more.  After seeing the 14-year-old Mickey Rooney as Puck (pictured above), however, I have to say that a young Puck makes more sense.  The innocent, playful energy that Rooney brings to the part is electrifying, once you get used to it.  He steals the show.
In Hoffman's movie, Bottom is the center.  With additional brief action scenes, backstory, and exceptional acting by Kevin Kline, the character attains a nuanced, heroic quality.  While Kline grips your heart in his "Bottom's Dream" soliloquy, James Cagney laughs his way through it.  But that works, too.  It's a traditional take on the character, a sympathetic fool.  And while there's nothing wrong with that, Kline's performance is, in my opinion, transcendent.
Reinhardt and Dierterle's A Midsummer Night's Dream is worth watching, if for nothing else, for the cinematic artistry.  It's so impressive what these folks were able to do with film, real physical film.  It's both innovative for it's time and true to the original play.  It's exactly what it should be: comedy.

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.