Month: February 2011

Wait, wait, wait… The Godfather was supposed to be a modern version of King Lear?

Ten Academy Awards nominations and the winner of 3 Oscars: Best Picture, Best Actor (Marlon Brando), and Best Adapted Screenplay; the top-grossing film of the year, and a $134 million box-office hit; set in the mid to late 1940s NYC to the mid 1950s, a 10 year period, with Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone, head of the crime family; it was filmed as a modern version of Shakespeare’s King Lear (featuring a king and three sons: hot-headed eldest Sonny, Fredo and Michael); the ‘honorable’ crime “family,” working outside the system due to exclusion by social prejudice, was threatened by the rise of modern criminal activities – the “dirty” drug trade. Family loyalty and blood ties were juxtaposed with brutal and vengeful blood-letting, including Corleone’s attempted assassination in 1945 after he refused to bankroll a crime rival’s drug activities…

[ Spotted on Filmsite.org’s history of the Oscars ]
Anybody want to discuss that? Beyond the “king separating his empire among three children” bit I’m not sure how long it holds up. Is this a legitimate comparison, or more like how Lion King is supposed to be Hamlet?

In case you missed this, our dear animated Shakespearean gnomes are now sitting at the #1 Box Office spot!
Granted, box office charts are an incredibly relative measure and based entirely on what else opened that weekend. But still! Three weeks in, and this kids movie is still hanging in there. That means more people have the chance to go see it. I still contend that’s a good thing.
On the same subject, check out this article at Jim Hill Media which speaks of Disney’s own happiness at the success of this one, and how honestly they had no idea. What to do now that their next kids’ movie, Mars Needs Moms, comes out next week? Where should the advertising budget go? Decisions, decisions…

Ok, fine, nobody was willing to claim that any film could live up to the title of being the definitive interpretation of a play. I have to concede.
But I’ll take Alexi’s idea and open up a more specific topic — definitive cinematic versions. Will that make everybody happy? What is the definitive cinematic version of, say, The Tempest?
What’s a better definition for “definitive” in this case – would you call it the one you’d recommend to a friend as their first exposure to the story? Or would you go the other end of the spectrum and say, “No matter how many film versions of X you’ve seen, you simply must see Y.”

Today, Ian said to me that Taymor’s The Tempest was far from the definitive film version of that play. Which made me think of a question.
What are the definitive versions?
Choose a Shakespeare play, and tell me what you feel is the definitive film version of that play. Availability of the film in question is not relevant – if ever in your life you get a chance to see Chimes At Midnight, you must see it. Please explain what your working definition of “definitive” is.
If we need some form of common ground to start the discussion, let me offer this – the definitive version is the one you would recommend to someone who has little/no experience with the play. This film will be their first exposure to it, therefore you want their experience to be as close to Shakespeare’s ideal vision as possible.
Feel free to debate that, too. 🙂 But no fair saying “go see it live”, this is specifically about the ability to share a film, and to know that you can see a film, recommend it to a friend, and then have the experience of that film in common with others. That’s near impossible with live theatre.

Private Romeo is about to add to the list of modern Romeo and Juliet retellings. This time the story takes place in a boy’s military academy, and takes the form of, what was it that Bardfilm told us to call it, a meta play? Where the plot has them acting out Romeo and Juliet the play, while simultaneously their lives mirror the story?
If “boys military academy” didn’t give it away for you, I’ll say it up front – this is a gay version of the story – or is it homosexual? I’m not sure what the preferred was is to say that, and I’m copying “gay Romeo and Juliet” right from their homepage so I’m assuming it’s ok. I mentioned Were The World Mine, a gay version of Midsummer, to the creators of the movie who swear to me that theirs is nothing like that.
Judge for yourself, there’s a very well-produced trailer on the site. I like the way they mix up the verse with the story, and am very very pleasantly surprised to see Queen Mab playing a big role. What I can’t figure out from the trailer, though, and maybe this is deliberate – where is the “two households” bit? All I see is boys at a military academy. So, what, is it two different schools? Two different grade levels? I honestly have no idea, I can’t tell which is a Capulet and which is Montague. Is this just a case of the gay gentlemen trying to survive in a world of straights?
Take Juliet out of the picture for a moment, an R&J is one heck of a male bonding story. You’ve got best friends goofing around, you’ve got enemies, you’ve got fights, you’ve got watching each other’s back, you’ve got loyalty. If you want to make a bunch of that take place on a basketball court, why not? Of course, somebody has to play the Juliet role. I think that how they pull that off will be crucial to the success of the storytelling. This is not going to be a case where they name one of the boys Julian or something like that and we’re supposed to figure it out — Juliet is called, by name, multiple times in the trailer. So somebody’s playing that role, as that role.
Now, I wonder if their soundtrack will be as killer as Were The World Mine? 🙂