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I never can see him but I am heart-burned an hour after
I do not like the trailer for Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing. Partly it's that I am not a Whedon person: I didn't fall in love with any of his shows (The Avengers surprised me), so the prospect of a cast stocked entirely from his regular company does not fill me with anticipation of old home week/the best crossover ever (Wesley and Fred and Mal Reynolds and Phil Coulson and Topher and Simon Tam and I had to look most of these people up) so much as a slight distrust, because the only actor in that parenthesis who ever really caught my eye was Clark Gregg and I don't consider him a Jossverse discovery. Mostly it's that five seconds into the trailer I was trying to figure out why the swing-themed black-and-white contemporary house porn and ten seconds after that I was ranting at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel about the dialogue. I am hoping it's a function of the pull quotes, but everyone in the cast seems to have exactly one register of voice. I can't hear any resonance, any range. It's all the same dry kind of flat. And the wit and cut of the language is instantly lost. You can make a case for Much Ado About Nothing as the prototype of the screwball comedy, with unexpectedly sharp outcroppings of cruelty and loss. (Look closely at the Hero/Claudio plotline, honestly, and it starts edging out of romance into problem play.) It has verbal fireworks, it has whip-smart repartee, it has characters who are identifiable instantly by their speech patterns and I'm not talking only about Dogberry's malaprops. It has fantastic flyting and chilling seriousness. The actors have to be in tune with all of that. I don't mean that you can't play it naturalistically, but you cannot play it monotone—"By this day, she's a fair lady" cannot read the same as "By this hand, I love thee." And that's all I hear in the trailer. It's my hope I am mistaken, or it's a not very good trailer for a perfectly reasonable film. But right now I want either to rewatch scenes from the 1993 version (which I don't own) or get someone from the Anarchist Society of Shakespeareans to direct one. Other recommendations are welcome.
(As a form of self-medication, I am catching up on Tumblr. A couple of days ago, when I was distracted,handful_ofdust posted me a succession of Leslie Howard gifs from The Stand-In (1937), a wonderful meta-joke of a film I love (and wrote about clumsily, but sometimes that happens). I will never cease to appreciate his willingness to look like a total nerd—I like him in horn-rims, but they do him no favors. Henry Higgins has an even worse pair. I will never cease to be faintly amazed that all sorts of people who weren't me thought he was beautiful.)
derspatchel about the dialogue. I am hoping it's a function of the pull quotes, but everyone in the cast seems to have exactly one register of voice. I can't hear any resonance, any range. It's all the same dry kind of flat. And the wit and cut of the language is instantly lost. You can make a case for Much Ado About Nothing as the prototype of the screwball comedy, with unexpectedly sharp outcroppings of cruelty and loss. (Look closely at the Hero/Claudio plotline, honestly, and it starts edging out of romance into problem play.) It has verbal fireworks, it has whip-smart repartee, it has characters who are identifiable instantly by their speech patterns and I'm not talking only about Dogberry's malaprops. It has fantastic flyting and chilling seriousness. The actors have to be in tune with all of that. I don't mean that you can't play it naturalistically, but you cannot play it monotone—"By this day, she's a fair lady" cannot read the same as "By this hand, I love thee." And that's all I hear in the trailer. It's my hope I am mistaken, or it's a not very good trailer for a perfectly reasonable film. But right now I want either to rewatch scenes from the 1993 version (which I don't own) or get someone from the Anarchist Society of Shakespeareans to direct one. Other recommendations are welcome.(As a form of self-medication, I am catching up on Tumblr. A couple of days ago, when I was distracted,
handful_ofdust posted me a succession of Leslie Howard gifs from The Stand-In (1937), a wonderful meta-joke of a film I love (and wrote about clumsily, but sometimes that happens). I will never cease to appreciate his willingness to look like a total nerd—I like him in horn-rims, but they do him no favors. Henry Higgins has an even worse pair. I will never cease to be faintly amazed that all sorts of people who weren't me thought he was beautiful.)
no subject
As for Whedon's, since it's pitched as more of an adaptation/update (as well as something filmed loosely on a whim over a week), I'm not going to go in with too much prejudgement. I enjoyed, for example, the BBC updates from a few years back, and am a sucker for things like Scotland, PA in general.
And Nathan Fillion as Dogberry really does seem like inspired casting (not that we saw much of him in the trailer).
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I have no argument with updated Shakespeare. My favorite Hamlet is Kozintsev's Russian period piece, but Patrick Stewart in a modern surveillance state is my definitive Claudius and the most painful Othello I've ever seen is a tossup between Trevor Nunn's Civil War and the Actors' Shakespeare Project's non-genre near future. Julie Taymor's Titus is an alternate history and I adore it. The gonzo awesome production of Measure for Measure I saw
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We did a straight up Guys and Dolls setting of A Comedy of Errors when I was in high school that involved a revolving house. It wasn't quite to the level of the one the Flying Karamazov Brothers did that was available on DVD for about 10 seconds an eon ago, but it was close. And at the time, I hadn't seen the Karamazov version.
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. . . Do you own a copy of said DVD? I have never seen this and I kind of think I need to.
no subject