Love's Labour's Lost
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Movie Reviews of Love's Labour's Lost
Movie Review: Very Good if your Tongue is Planted Firmly in Cheek
Summary: 4 Stars
As a fan of Kenneth Branagh's work and a big fan of old-time movie musicals, I wonder why it took me so long to see Love's Labour Lost. Maybe because the reviews I read were pretty scathing. But I was able to rent this video from my library and have to say I had a great time watching it.Branagh and company have done an admirable job updated the story to pre-World War II; the musical numbers fit perfectly into that scenario. It is obvious that some of the cast members are not trained in either dance or song, but that is part of the movie's charm. Because the numbers are not polished like a Busby Berkley kaleidoscope, I think the critics missed the point.
I never would have bothered to read Shakespeare's Love Labour Lost if I had not had such a good time watching the movie. I guess critics have a problem if a movie is an "adaptation" of a famous work. Because every single word of Shakespeare's play was not used, they were offended. But it is great fun to normal folk like myself.
One word of caution, though. As with most movie musicals made after 1954, if you do not see the widescreen version, you are missing out. The VHS version I first watched had 2 1/2 dancers on the screen most of the time, instead of the 4 that I knew were there.
Movie Review: British DVD is much better
Summary: 4 Stars
Okay, so this film is an acquired taste. I won't deny its enormous flaws. In order to make a 90 minute movie, with at least a third of that time devoted to musical numbers, far too much of the play is cut for it to make any sort of sense. Most of all, the fact that the actors were not trained singers or dancers or, for the most part, Shakespearean actors, shows, especially in the embarassingly amateur performances given by the two lead Americans, Alicia Silverstone and Matthew Lillard.
In spite of all this, however, I can't help but love this wacky little film. It just has such an infectious sense of joy, and such gorgeous music. No matter how much I may know, logically, that it is hopelessly flawed, I end up grinning as I watch it.
I do want to let people know, however, that there is a better alternative to this Miramax DVD. The British DVD, if you are able to play foreign discs, has much richer colors and also boasts an extremely informative and chatty commentary track by Kenneth Branagh, as well as one or two extra deleted sceens not on the American disc. It's available for about ten bucks at amazon.co.uk and is highly recommended for a fun, light Shakespeare experience.
Movie Review: Much Ado About a Musical
Summary: 4 Stars
This film was not widely released, but being an avid Branagh fan I made a trip to go see it, hoping it would become a favorite like his earlier film, Much Ado About Nothing. Alas, this was not the case. Although very cute, I felt like I was watching a high school drama production -mind you, a very good one- but I didn't think it was as up to par as some of his earlier films. The movie definitely does have a feeling of a MGM musical (I think that's what they were going for) and the songs are old favorites by Cole Porter, the Gershwins, and Irving Berlin. Amazingly enough, the actors sing, and quite well. Adrian Lester (previously seen in Primary Colors) has a great voice and was the best dancer in the cast. At times I felt that Alicia Silverstone (The Princess) seemed a little too southern California for Shakespeare, but even she began to grow on me during the movie.Love's Labour's Lost is one of the Bard's lesser known plays and is very easy to understand. Although I seemed to rip on the movie, I truly did enjoy it. It's a light comedy, and even though it's Shakespeare, it won't have you scambling for your Cliffs Notes. A must see for fans of the Bard and musical lovers alike!
Movie Review: It's a solution, anyway.
Summary: 4 Stars
The original play is sort of the "Finnegans Wake" of the Shakespeare canon: an avalanche of dated puns and contemporary satirical references that is going to be just about impenetrable to a modern audience. It was probably written for a very specific audience which would get all the jokes, but we, without footnotes at least as copious as the text, are simply lost. A "straight" production must rely heavily on that old technique of "if we laugh hard enough, the audience will have to join in", which can quickly grow mighty tedious. So chopping the text and story down to their bare bones, and going for slick entertainment value (as per original intent, no doubt), is probably as good a solution as any. If the effect is merely cute, that hardly represents a betrayal of the Bard, in the case of this play. One hopes, though, that Brannagh will get back to some more substantial Shakespeare at some point. The "Henry V" and "Hamlet" films are really interesting, agree with them wholly or not.Movie Review: Immensely Charming
Summary: 4 Stars
What can you say, it works. The two curmudgeons who disliked the film should be sentenced to see the full play produced on stage for life - because LLL was probably unintelligible even in its own day on stage (tons of in-jokes that were almost certainly dated by 1600), and is completely beyond comprehension in this. What Branagh has done is taken the goassamer elements of the plot, brightened them with some first class songs and wonderful staging (can't say dancing, because almost none of the principals can dance), done one brilliant conflation of the Bard's best lines from the play (toward the end, concerning women's eyes and the lessons to be learned from them, superb editing) and come up with a first class piece of nostalgia, barely Shakespearean, but close enough.So it isn't the pure stuff by a country mile. And yet one does have the feeling that Big Bill himself would have smiled and said, `he's got it exactly right.'