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The Princess of France
There is a type of film that tells a story from Shakespeare, with or without his language, that happens in a time and place that might be called “a world without Shakespeare.” A plot unfolds that is recognizable as that of a Shakespeare play. But, a funny thing about the unfolding: in a milieu that…
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Two Gentlemen of Verona
Sets and costumes are, when you get right down to it, a bit redundant if you are the Fiasco Theater. They are the quintessential troupe, pop-up players who could make do with the clothes they came in, the lines in their heads, and whatever is lying about to make a prop of. But, since they…
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Wild Tales
Damián Szifron’s movie WILD TALES opens with a prologue in which the laughs come at you like Roman slaves claiming to be Spartacus, one after another. It’s the first, and shortest, of six revenge comedies in a mordant Argentinian anthology that keeps one guessing at the violence to come while making sure we always know,…
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Under the Greenwood Tree
The cross-dressing heroines of Shakespeare’s comedies create a new social relation by virtue of their masquerades and the secret knowledge they hold. They are thus empowered to influence events to a degree otherwise unpermitted of their sex, and so fulfill Beatrice’s repeated plaint in Much Ado About Nothing: “O that I were a man.” The…
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Much Ado About Nothing
Joss Whedon’s MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING is something to see, a smart, elegant, fast-moving romantic intrigue filled with the spirit and surprise of the best storytelling. It’s that rare film of a Shakespearean comedy that, without modernizing the language, is utterly comprehensible from the first frame to the last. Kenneth Branagh’s version of the play…
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Old Hats
I believe that any respectable dictionary must include as one of the definitions of “sui generis” the words “Nellie McKay”. Has anyone encountered anywhere another such being, so precocious, eccentric, old-timey, modern, sweet, caustic, irreverent, generous, unforgiving, feminine, feminist, brilliant, faux naïve, and Nellie-knows-how-many-other qualities that I can’t begin to put my finger on? Is…
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Heartless
In the mid-’80s I ventured to say in a published review of Sam Shepard’s True West that we were in a presence of a new dramatic genre, which I dubbed “the situation tragedy.” This notion was consistent, in retrospect, with a recognition on the part of Raymond Williams and others that circumstance had replaced action…