The Tempest (2010)

Director Julie Taymor’s Tempest is the perfect storm: the cast, the effects, the costumes, the make-up – everything about this production is phenomenal.  The shame of it is that with Taymor busy trying not to kill anybody on Broadway in her exceedingly dangerous musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and with virtually no distribution for the film’s December 10^th 2010 release – can you even call four theaters in the whole country a release? – the spectacular Tempest has yet to receive the attention or the reception that it deserves.  Having been severely disappointed to realize on December 9^th, that my geographical region was not to be one of the four graced with a single theater playing The Tempest, I was furious to read blurbs in the press about the financially disappointing performance of the film after the opening weekend.  So allow me to briefly vent to all of those writers before I proceed with the review:

Hello, film industry geniuses.  If a film isn’t released in more theaters than I can count on one hand, THEN IT CAN’T POSSIBLY MAKE ANY MONEY!  That is, unless there are some 100,000 seat theaters somewhere in America that I don’t know about.

Sorry about that, I just love this film, and I was super salty that people were trashing it just because none of the power players involved made its release a big enough deal.

The irony is that the film itself is a testament to the power of great decision making. 

As You Like It (2006)

By any standard, Kenneth Branagh’s 2006 production of As You Like It is exceptional.  It is both an incredibly entertaining film and – in my mind - a terrifically faithful adaptation of Shakespeare’s original play.  In the DVD extra “From Page to Screen With Kenneth Branagh,” the director explains that, as a filmmaker adapting Shakespeare, “you’re trying to serve the story in the medium you’re working in” (emphasis added).  The point being that if you just stick to the text, then you don’t have a visually stunning movie; but throw the text out the window in order to make a Star Wars prequel-esque, special effects-heavy, cinematic explosion, then you’ve lost Shakespeare’s genius in the translation.   Brannagh makes neither mistake here.

In As You Like It, Branagh makes the bold decision to change the play’s setting from a French dukedom (of an uncertain time period) to the feudal Japan of the 19^th century.  In fact, as the film opened, I felt like the play was happening in the cover art of Weezer’s classic 1996 album Pinkerton.  

You should own this album.

As a huge fan, I was that much more excited about the movie.  The setting change was a make it or break it move for Branagh’s production, one which proves itself over the course of the film to be a brilliant decision. Shakespeare’s play begins with the hostile takeover by Duke Frederick already completed, but the cool new setting allows Brangh to stage it at the film’s outset as a ferocious samurai invasion.  Pairing that awesome open with seamless translation of Shakespeare’s “wrestling” in Act One to the sumo wrestling in the film, and you not only have a dynamite new setting, but also the brilliant juxtaposition of the dukedom’s violence and the peace we find in the Forest of Arden.