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I always found Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet rather silly. Every line is shouted, some of the attempts to fit Shakespearean dialogue into a modern-day setting are overly cute, and Mercutio is a pretty cringe-worthy stereotype. I've seen the hamminess defended as a satirical commentary on urban violence, etc., but mostly it just comes across as unintentionally funny. By the way, I found this essay about a passage from Hamlet that's pretty interesting: http://tartarus.org/martin/readings/poem08.html I agree with him that Hamlet's poem, which on the surface seems like such a stridently confident affirmation of love, is actually more ambivalent when examined closely. I don't really agree with his conclusion, though, where he backs away from what he's just noticed because he apparently wants to believe that Hamlet truly loves Ophelia, which seemed far from clear to me, although it's been a while since I last read or saw Hamlet. I always remembered the line as "Doubt that the stars are fire" instead of "Doubt thou the stars are fire" myself. While the search results aren't quite as lopsided as they were when the essay was written, "Doubt that the stars are fire" (with quotes) still yields 37,900 Google hits, while "Doubt thou the stars are fire" yields only 32,300. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Dec 3, 2014 |
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Dec 3, 2014 03:28
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Falstaff Infection posted:"[Posting] should be pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, free without indecency, learned without conceitedness, novel without falsehood." This quote is found in a lot of 19th- and early 20th-century books and some random websites, but none of them seem to list the play it's from. I can only assume it was made up out of whole cloth by a Victorian.
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Dec 3, 2014 03:52
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Falstaff Infection posted:Keep in mind that Shakespeare was what we would today call bisexual This is hardly an established fact.
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Dec 13, 2014 04:36
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CestMoi posted:So I've been reading a lot of Shakespeare (and Bloom) lately and is Hamlet the most fully realised character in literature? Every other character in fiction seems to pale in comparison. I'm not sure who the other candidates for the position are (and the question of the most fully realized character probably deserves its own thread), but Bloom is prone to silly hyperbole where Shakespeare is concerned.
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May 18, 2015 23:10
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Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet is very silly. I guess some of the over-the-topness was meant to Comment on Our Violent Society or something like that, but it just made me laugh. "All! Are! Punish-ed!"
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May 17, 2016 09:40
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Mr. Squishy posted:I hate how they filleted all the quotes people know and dropped them disconnected from anything into action scenes so silly even Schwarzenegger would blush. Also I've never really dug McKellen. I remember that they changed the context of Richard's "If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell" line from a hilariously uninspiring pre-battle speech to his troops to a taunt to Henry during a one-on-one fight. Sort of changing it to be more like the "Lay on, Macduff!" bit from Macbeth. I can actually see the logic behind the change there, since the previously sociopathic Richard suddenly showing signs of a guilty conscience is one of the weaker aspects of the play. On the other hand, I like the idea of a commander's guilty conscience causing him to deliver a bad speech that ruins his troops' morale and lose the battle as a result. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Sep 10, 2016 |
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Sep 10, 2016 19:28
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