King Lear
|
List Price: Our Price: $9.89 You Save: $10.02 (50%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $6.55 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of King Lear
Movie Review: Highlighters
Summary: 4 Stars
This version of King Lear highlights the action of Lear and his daughters. The setting, costumes, and minor characters are downplayed so that the viewer can really focus in on Lear and his daughters.The change in setting from a bland inside to the stormy, or foggy outside makes the scenes more memorable and helps to highlight the events that happen in these outdoor settings. For instance, when Lear is outside in the storm, the storm seems to be used as a mirror to show Lear's madness.
The film was good. The staging at the end was especially useful to the viewer in tying up loose ends. After reading the play, the movie highlighted many things that may not have been understood from simply reading the play.
Movie Review: Ion Holm's Great
Summary: 4 Stars
King Lear is a difficult part because of the old age of Lear. The energy that Ion Holm put into this part is outstanding. Great preformances in all of the cast.Movie Review: THE LEAR JET EXPRESS TOO HEAVILY ABRIDGED; SEE JAMES EARLE JONES IN THE PARK INSTEAD
Summary: 3 Stars
One school of cinema says you start a scene in the middle and end it before the action ends. This we see here. Shakespeare snipped.
I hope and pray the coming Pacino production respects the text, and uses the Quarto written for the King's original Saint Stephen's Day production, not the naked later Folio version edited for groundlings and a later censorious King who did not like astrology mocked. Shakespeare of course ducked the divine prohibition by setting this in pre-Christian Britain. I hope the Pacino version might use the full conflated text as developed by Professor Tucker Brookes in the great The Tragedy Of King Lear (The Yale Shakespeare).
But I have not so much faith in present scholarship and literacy.
Here in this presentation with Ian Holm we have the streamlined, aerodynamic version, which loses far too much in its editing for "efficiency" and modern dramatic theory.
It's all about Lear; we lose the Fool, as did Nahum Tate, but not as much.
This Fool by the way is EXCELLENT, and absolutely correct, the best actor of this and the best Fool of any other filmed . The elderly Lear would neither care for nor even recall a recently arrived "boy" but a longstanding companion like Kent he would dearly recall as part of his psychological make-up, his counselor and medic, as he enters the dark night of dissonance and discord and madness. This is the excellent Fool; unfortunately most of his lines are removed in this express edition.
We also lose the great and long lines of Kent in response to Oswald asking "What do you know me for?" a marvelous and varied response here lost entirely.
Of course no British production permits the wonderful lines: "Fee, Fi, Fo, fum! I smell the blood of a British Man!" which we are only permitted to hear in video recording in Joe Papp's excellent Shakespeare in the Park production filmed live in 1974 with a young and virile Raul Julia as Edmund, and the greatest American Shakespearean actor, Mr. James Earle Jones. This Joe Papp production has the finest edition of the text ever played, as the most comprehensive recorded in any media. No problem. Great actors, and great staging (even if Paul Sorvino was having an off night). The staging makes great sense of lines which otherwise lack clear context. For instance, when the Fool is saying the lines with Halter, Daughter, Slaughter, etc. he is stealing food from the table avoidng her wrath, after she had found him hiding under the table rather than following the King (a great wheel rolling downhill).
In this Ian Holm production, the old Fool remains at the table until driven off, trying to win favor from Albany in order to get a new patron than the mad King, a good choice and true. But then the whole daughter, slaughter, halter bit is cut, and we lose much.
Olivier cut John Hurt's excellent fool and the Ian Holm production cuts this excellent and properly, equally elderly Fool, for some the one character as essential to the play as a Greek Chorus in Euripides, as essential as a good, wise and trusted friend to a great man losing his grip. It is a serious fault to cut him off.
We may doubt the Fool in Joe Papp in some few aspects, but at least he has all of his lines, and expresses them more or less properly, including the most bawdy ones. We are blessed by the Joe Papp production; it is the best we have. It is the one we must see to know the fullness of Shakespeare's Historical Chronicle of King Lear. Rene of the impossible last name is EXCELLENT as Edgar, the best in any production, and plays especially well off Raul Julio's half brother Edmund, and off Gloucester, even as Sorvino fails. I can not speak highly enough about this marvelous production, full of life and reality and of course as a live staged presentation, broad theatrical gestures and costuming and projection despite the clip on mikes (including one strapped around the naked Edgar). Once our government sponsored such free and sophisticated and top notch professional and scholarly theatre in Central Park; may we return soon to this former glory.
I therefore advise you to get at all costs the Joe Papp version at King Lear / Jones, New York Shakespeare Festival (Broadway Theatre Archive) and to skip over this unfortunately seriously, tragically abridged Ian Holm production.
Movie Review: King Lear Meets Star Wars
Summary: 2 Stars
The casting director should have spared us the bow to diversity and political correctness when a hispanic was cast as France and a negro as Burgundy. Set design and costume sacrificed tradition and historical representation to economy and off-beat originality. The costumes resemble those of Star Wars. The Fool, instead of being youthful, agile and entertaining, is fat, old and dumpy. The most entertaining thing about the fool is Lear referring to the grizzled 70 year-old as "boy". Holms as Lear can't hold a candle to Lawrence Oliver. Holms plays every scene with the same, monotonous, high level of intensity, like a manic Lear. He is unable to play Lear as a likeable, sympathetic character, in any scene. During the scene in which Lear's heart is supposed to break when Cordelia fails to declare her love with sufficient eloquence, Holms' Lear only comes accross as manic, obsessed and neurotic. Even with its poor film quality, Sir Lawrence Oliver's production is the best.Movie Review: No Nuance
Summary: 2 Stars
This is a production totally without nuance and its owes that to the bellowing of Ian Holm. Holm as Lear bellows at the beginning. he bellows in the middle. And he belows at the end. Lear bellows when he is dividing teh kingdom. he bellows then he rejects Cordelia. he bellows when he realises that he has been betrayed by Goneriel and Regan. The character presented as Lear is entirely one dimensional. Any change of circumstance or emotion is presented as more bellowing. There is no tragedy in this production because there is no change in Lear from beginning to end.
This DVD is not worth buying.