A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, June 20, 2020

Much Ado About Nothing (Joss Whedon, 2012)

Alexis Denisof and Amy Acker in Much Ado About Nothing
Cast: Amy Acker, Alexis Denisof, Nathan Fillion, Clark Gregg, Reed Diamond, Fran Kranz, Jillian Morgese, Sean Maher, Spencer Treat Clark, Riki Lindholme, Ashley Johnson, Emma Bates, Tom Lenk, Nick Kocher, Brian McElhaney. Screenplay: Joss Whedon, based on a play by William Shakespeare. Cinematography: Jay Hunter. Production design: Cindy Chao, Michele Yu. Film editing: Daniel S. Kaminsky, Joss Whedon. Music: Joss Whedon.

Fleet, light, and lucid, Joss Whedon's film of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing is made without undue reverence or pretense, which is pretty much the way Shakespeare ought to be filmed -- or at least his romantic comedies, which have so much in common with the classic Hollywood screwball comedies. Amy Acker, who should be a bigger star, is a pitch-perfect Beatrice, and Alexis Denisof is well-matched as Benedick. The obvious comparison here is with Kenneth Branagh's 1993 film version of the play, a more elaborate and star-studded affair, but Whedon's film, shot mostly in and around his house in Santa Monica, more than holds its own in comparison. It actually comes off a little better in casting Sean Maher as the villainous Don John, where Branagh's choice of Keanu Reeves in the role shows off some of that actor's limitations. The weakest casting in Whedon's version is Nathan Fillion as Dogberry, which Branagh bettered with Michael Keaton. Fillion is too bulky and handsome an actor to play the clown, and he struggles to make Dogberry quite as fatuous as he should be, whereas Keaton relished every one of the character's malapropisms. But as Dogberry himself put it, "Comparisons are odorous." Fran Kranz makes more of the somewhat flimsy role of Claudio than is usual, and it's fun to see Clark Gregg step out of the Marvel universe into the Shakespearean one.

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