Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears (and eyes), to watch 10 Shakespeare screen adaptations this July. https://boxd.it/VgPp8 I'm using this list from Wikipedia as a source. Shakespeare in the Park #1: The Comedy of Errors The Flying Karamazov Brothers, The Comedy of Errors ~ R. Woodruff (1987) A juggling and comedy troupe performs an elaborate staging of The Comedy of Errors, recorded for Live from Lincoln Center (NY) on PBS in 1987. Years ago over a winter break before taking a college Shakespeare class, my Dad (an English teacher) pulled out two VHS recordings of The Comedy of Errors for me to watch. The first, a well-made traditional version that featured Roger Daltry. The second was this version. A mad-cap juggling circus performance of the play. Some hero has uploaded a copy of this to youtube, and it is as brilliant as I remember. There's definitely a few 80s references, but the elaborate choreography and staging remain terrific. A great example of the adaptability of Shakespeare.
Shakespeare in the Park #2: Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 My Own Private Idaho ~ G. Van Sant (1991) Mike (River Phoenix), a narcoleptic street hustler, runs through the pacific northwest with his friend Scott (Keanu Reeves), the rebellious son of Portland's mayor. In love with Scott, Mike wants to stay close, but Scott is slumming it and already thinking about going straight once his inheritance comes through. A really good film. Using the bones of Hal's story in Henry IV for Scott's arc gives it a solid framework and some cool dialogue that seemed to be straight from the play, while using Mike's story to explore the street hustler lifestyle gives the film a modern edge. Phoenix is excellent in his role, and Reeves is pretty good as well.
Shakespeare in the Park #3: Macbeth The Tragedy of Macbeth ~ R. Polanski (1971) This film presents a traditional Middle Ages period piece setting for Macbeth. While visually interesting with dreary, sweeping landscapes, evocative lighting, and good costuming, most of the play is delivered via voice-over narration. In some ways, this makes sense as it's largely a play about characters expressing their guilty conscience, but it makes for a largely boring shots of characters looking grim. There's a very cool mirror scene in the second meeting with the witches, and the final fight scene between Macbeth and Macduff is appropriately brutal for armored combatants.
Dark [3 seasons] Finally got around to watch this. I wanted to like it more than I did. Perhaps I'm just not sophisticated enough to understand these shows, but it got so convoluted that it became difficult to follow. Otherwise, I like the concept and the idea behind the show.
David Byrne's American Utopia ~ S. Lee (2020) A film of David Byrne's Broadway version of his touring concert American Utopia. An amazingly choreographed performance of musicians and dancers on a square stage with wireless instruments. The film makes use of the opportunity to view it from many angles, including overhead, to highlight the performers' movements. There is a strong political message about human connection and working towards a better future. It is maybe too loosely tied from the beginning to the end of the film, though. A lot of it is Byrne's newer music which hits a little less hard then the well-known Talking Heads ones. It's still pretty good, but maybe not the cohesive message of hope I was expecting based on the reviews.
Shakespeare in the Park #4: Titus Andronicus Titus ~ J. Taymor (1999) An anachronistic setting for this tale of tragedy and revenge, the film mixes modern and ancient Rome in a sort of 90's fever dream. Anthony Hopkins kind of centers the chaos of the sets and camera movement with a very good performance. I wasn't familiar with the play, so I was surprised that the second half turns into a bloody revenge plot. Pretty good, but the visual inconsistency kept it from being great.
I remember really enjoying this, but it doesn't seem to be something I've reviewed. Definitely need a re-watch.
The Furious (2025) Dir. Kenji Tanigaki Somewhere in South-East Asia (shot in Bangkok), Wang Wei is a Chinese immigrant, a mute man who works as a handyman and who is a single parent to his daughter Rainy, who usually lives with her grandmother in China. One day, during a visit to a hair salon during which father and daughter get into a fight, Rainy is subsequently snatched by a gang of criminals after she runs away, the individuals in question human traffickers. Wei gets little help from the local cops, who are dirty and on the gangsters payroll. He decides to try and find his daughter himself, helped by his martial arts skills. During his investigation, he comes across Navim, another man desperate to uncover the inner workings of the gang. His wife Matia, a journalist who had been investigating the gang's activities, has disappeared. Navim knows that her disappearance is linked to her research into the gangsters. Navim and Wei end up teaming up, each working together in the hope of finding and saving their loved ones. Decent entertainment, a martial arts actioner that is perhaps not very original, but solid in terms of its amusement value. Joe Taslim is always good in this kind of stuff. Miao Xie a solid enough co-lead. The director is a veteran from Donnie Yen's stunt and choreography team. I would say that whilst some sequences work very well, a few others are shot in a way that makes them very confusing to follow. This is especially true for a climactic three on two fight that goes on for a decent amount of screentime. I did enjoy the hammer work earlier in the film, always enjoy some good hammer action in my martial arts flicks. And seeing Yayan Ruhian in Asian action cinema, almost always playing a baddie henchman, is a delight in itself. I realized watching this that he is sort of the Eastern cinema equivalent to what Al Leong was for countless action movies made in Hollywood in the 1980s and early 1990s.
My mother and I were considering seeing him on that tour but IIRC, we never got around to it. I think life stuff got in the way. I got to see him with my uncle and dad last October. Definitely a fun show. And for a guy his age, he's spry. Probably a top ten show I've seen. Good vibes all around, had a funny preshow recording where he said the fire department mentions dancers having an unfair advantage in an emergency, brought the energy, and wasn't phoning it in.
Shakespeare in the Park #5: The Tempest Forbidden Planet ~ F.M. Wilcox (1956) A spaceship crew lands on Altair IV looking for a lost scientific crew to find only Dr. Morbius, his daughter, and a robot. Mysterious occurrences begin happening while the male crew starts lusting after the daughter. I'm not familiar with The Tempest, but I understand this to be a "loose" adaptation. The set design is incredible for the 1950s and the score is incredible weird electronic music. I did not recognize Leslie Nielsen as the lead, Cmd Adams. The acting is pretty hammy and stilted. Costuming for Dr. Mobius was terrific. It is definitely a bit goofy, but in a fun way.
Don't click if you want to avoid The Furious spoilers, but this is kind of what I mean. Technically very impressive, but at the same time occasionally hard to follow, especially if it goes on for like 10+ minutes.
For video game fans, Robby the Robot the obvious primary design inspiration for Fallout's RobCo Protectron robots.
His first line is about how he speaks 100+ languages in a line directly lifted for C3PO as well. There seemed to be a lot of small things that influenced later sci-fi from this film.
DTF St.Louis [2026] It said this was a dark comedy. This was indeed dark, but I must have missed the comedy. The show was definitely bleak and a bit odd. All 3 leads were pretty great and I kept waiting for something crazy to happen. It didn't.
Shakespeare in the Park #6: King Lear King Lear ~ J.L. Godard (1987) William Shakespeare V, Jr. tries to recreate the text of King Lear following the disappearance of art and culture following Chernobyl. Godard is deconstructing the language of Lear and the idea of adaptation to talk about film making and film theory. It is very much an anti-adaptation of Shakespeare. Five minutes in, I was convinced this was going to be an incoherent, self-indulgent mess, but I ended up liking it quite a bit. It's abstract and pretentious to be sure, but Godard's treatise on the "image" is backed up by terrific shots. The actors, Sellars, Meredith, and Ringwald, are all engaging in what must have been an exhausting exercise.
The Sheep Detectives Gordon loves his sheep. He's estranged from his kids and secretly a millionaire, but he's got his sheep. But then he's killed, the local constabulary is an idiot, and it's up to the sheep to solve the case. A sweet movie that works. Of course, it could have been a Disney animation, but the live action aspect exacerbates the will-it-workness of the film. A fun little film.
Rapaces (2025) Dir. Peter Dourountzis Samuel is a crime reporter with enough years on the beat to have learned some unscrupulous methods and a cynical outlook on the job. He is unafraid of lying to or manipulating both the relatives of victims as well as the police to get leads for his stories. Interning at the somewhat shabby and small potato magazine that employs Samuel is his estranged daughter Ava. Ava is primarily there to try and rebuild a relationship with the father she has barely seen after her parents' divorce. The pair are assigned to a story revolving around the gruesome murder of a young woman who was killed on her bike ride home from her fast food job at a Burger King. Her body was mutilated with acid and found in a field, near her deserted bicycle and the police have her frantic call to law enforcement recording her final moments, though not yet any solid leads. Sam finds out that there was a similar crime some years ago, back then the cops caught the culprit and the man subsequently killed himself in prison within a fortnight of his incarceration. Sam's new theory is that the original killer had one or more associates who have started killing again, using the original m.o., a story he wants to investigate further, against the will of his editor in chief. Slow burn crime thriller. Not bad, though the writing is a bit straightforward and cliché. Good lead performance by Sami Boualjila as the quite cynical and cutthroat Sam, which is perhaps the best the thing about the film. And extra points to director Peter Dourountzis for deploying a couple of nice split diopter shots. The climax is suspenseful but also requires an absurd amount of suspension of disbelief.
Batman (1966) The device is truly one of the wonders of the world - a portable apparatus that instantly and remotely removes all the water from an object. And it's on its way to Gotham City on the yacht of its unlikely inventor, the bumbling and unaware distillery owner Commodore Schmidlapp. That is, until the craft is boarded by pirates. Fortunately the Caped Crusader Batman and Boy Wonder Robin are on the case, arriving at the yacht by Batcopter to foil the kidnapping. Where they find it's a trap. The Joker, the Riddler, the Penguin, and Catwoman are conspiring together for a scheme beyond Gotham, beyond the United States, and they need the dehydrator and they need Batman out of the way. The situation cannot be more serious. Whatever the opposite of grimdark is, this movie is it. Brash, colorful, and stone cold straight in a way that makes it clear it isn't. It moves from scene to scene at a frenetic pace, and is frequently hilarious, usually by its trademark juxtaposition of tone and action (like when Batman says "A solemn moment, gentlemen" while holding a floppy garden hose). I really enjoyed the flagrant overacting by all the villains - they seemed to egg each other on to greater cartoonishness by competition. It's the kind of movie where it's clear the actors all had a blast doing it, and that always comes across in their actions, large and small.
Shakespeare in the Park #7: Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet ~ B. Luhrmann (1996) Adapting a play about teen angst, "love", and foolishness, Baz Luhrmann made a film specifically for 1990's teens. It's a flashy post-modern California setting with the original language overlaid and two of the biggest young movie stars of the time with DiCaprio and Danes. Filled with a late 90's rock and a music video vibe, it's taking the 90's indie film aesthetic to Shakespeare. I probably would have quite enjoyed this in 1996, but 30 years later, it mostly doesn't work. The lines come out flat and the quick, jerky camera is distracting. The concept and set design all work well, but there's no life in the delivery.
DiCaprio is a great actor-- but he should stay as far from the Bard as he can; he has no feel at all for the rhythms of the greatest write our language has ever produced. I thought Danes did fine under difficult circumstances. Occasionally he let her dictate the tempo and phrasing, and those scenes were okay.
The Maltese Falcon (1941) If you've been a private detective as long as Sam Spade and Miles Archer, then you've heard them all. And they knew Ruth Wonderly's story about looking for her runaway sister who's taken in with a sinister man wasn't on the up and up. But two hundred dollars is two hundred dollars, and you have to roll with it until you know the score. Besides, she's a looker and it wouldn't hurt to be around her a while longer. But Archer gets it, and now Spade gets gun-toting visitors and a tail, all related to what not Ruth Wonderly is looking for. Spade has to thread the needle of killers who might want to deal, all while keeping the cops at arm's length. What I liked best was the assumed deep lore about Spade that made him supremely confident in dealing with clients and the police, and it was a joy to see him manipulate these people even while he was in such a weak position. The one person he didn't know how to deal with himself, at least when it comes to women. We had to have that initial plot point of his failed affair to at least have some reason for his falling for the woman calling herself Ruth Wonderly - the movie gave us precious few reasons otherwise. But that's a minor failing - everything everyone says about the movie is right and it's pretty darn brilliant. It's crazy complicated but it so satisfyingly comes together at the end. Can't say it uses its San Francisco setting in any particularly interesting way.