Reimagined Shakespeare Marathon Movie 9: A Midsummer Night's Rave (2002)

I’m now nine movies deep into the Reimagined Shakespeare Marathon.  May is almost over.  It’s been interesting.  There were ups and downs, but I’ll talk about them in a later blog entry.  This one is about the ninth movie in the Reimagined Shakespeare Marathon.  This one is about 2002’s A Midsummer Night’s Rave.

A Midsummer Night’s Rave is quite obviously based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  The story is kind of complicated to even attempt to describe, so I’m going to go really vague.  There is a rave, and a bunch of 20 somethings take ecstasy and think over their relationship statuses.  It has people such as that one guy from The Fast and the Furious, that girl that was on the new Hawaii 5-0 for a while in the second season, that Shermonator guy from the American Pie movies, and that douchey guy from 10 Things I Hate About You.  That’s right...someone from 10 Things I Hate About You is also in this movie.  I found that slightly interesting.  There’s also one of the London twins, but I’m not sure if it was the drug addict one or the other one.  Whichever one was in Dazed and Confused, this was him.

I went into this movie expecting the worst and was pleasantly surprised when it ended up being a decent flick.  I’d say it was exactly what it wanted to be.  It was a Shakespeare play set in a rave.  It had some substance.  It didn’t feel hollow.  What more could you possibly do with it?

If there was one thing that was an obvious problem with A Midsummer Night’s Rave, it would be the ending.  Some story threads are left hanging, some tie up too nicely, and something happens that completely undermines the beginning.  It’s similar to...was it Annie Wilkes in Misery? I think so.  If not, someone correct me.  It’s similar to what Annie Wilkes said in Misery.  She watched one of those old serial movies and at the end the character was left in a predicament where they would surely die.  The next episode of the serial rewrote the ending so that the main character was safe.  That’s kind of what happens in A Midsummer Night’s Rave.  The beginning shows something saying that it will happen.  In the end, it doesn’t happen.  It undermines the beginning which presents it as a concrete happening.  That’s where I find my problem in this movie.

Other than that, I enjoyed watching the movie.  There’s something about it.  It’s something I can’t quite figure out.  The movie has that one indescribable trait that hooks me.  It might not be there for everyone.  Hell, it probably isn’t there for most people.  I could see myself being one of the few people that liked this movie.  That doesn’t remove the fact that I like this movie.

A Midsummer Night’s Rave is worth checking out, if only to see what you can possibly do with Shakespeare in a rave setting.  It’s below Go on my list of movies with raves, but far about Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave.  That doesn’t tell you much, but I can say that it’s a fact.

Moving onto the final film of the Reimagined Shakespeare Marathon, I have an adaptation of Hamlet that is about as Canadian as a movie can get.  It’s called Strange Brew.  If you don’t know this movie, you are a hoser.

Reimagined Shakespeare Marathon Movie 8: A Double Life (1947)

There are different ways that someone can adapt a book or play to the big screen.  The most interesting of the methods is to have the movie be about someone adapting the source while also being involved in a story that goes along with the source.  Two of the adaptations of this sort that come to mind for me are Adaptation, which takes it a step further, and The Red Shoes.  The Reimagined Shakespeare Marathon has helped to add another film to that list.

A Double Life is a 1947 film based on Othello.  Guy 1 is starring in a stage adaptation of Othello.  He gets so deeply into his character that his life begins to take the shape of the play.  That’s it.  That was honestly the easiest plot to describe out of the entire marathon without spoiling any of the dramatic beats.

The first half of the movie is kind of weak.  I don’t think it holds up too well 65 years later.  It has nothing to do with the direction or the acting in the movie.  The first half feels a little bit long and of the time in which it was made.  There isn’t too much movement of the plot which may hurt the movie.  I couldn’t get interested in the first half and it made for a struggle as I tried to watch the movie.

Once I got into the second half of A Double Life, things picked up.  The acting from the lead actor, Ronald Colman, is especially good as the movie gets going.  It all leads to a final ten minutes which is some of the best payoff in the entire marathon thus far, both emotionally and plot wise.  A Double Life still feels a little bit stale throughout its entire run but the final act is a great piece of filmmaking.

There’s something about a person devolving into insanity that always gets me when I’m watching a movie.  That is where the second half of A Double Life got me invested.  The actor becomes too involved in his character, so much that he can no longer separate his character’s life from his own.  This is similar to an idea that was presented in Black Swan, though it doesn’t have as much of an emotional punch.  That could have been due to the code that was in place in Hollywood at the time.  That does not matter though as the final scene created enough emotional tension in order to leave the viewer satisfied in their viewing experience.

I don’t have too much more to say about A Double Life.  It was an okay movie.  The first half definitely holds it back, and it isn’t a timeless movie.  But the lead actor is superb and deserves recognition for his performance, which he got when he won the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Was that the shortest writeup of the Reimagined Shakespeare Marathon?  I think it was.  I don’t have too much to say about the movie.  Hopefully the next one, I’ll have more.  The next movie is A Midsummer Night’s Rave from 2002.  When I picked it as part of the marathon, I picked it solely on name alone.  It may have been a bad choice.  We’ll see.

Reimagined Shakespeare Marathon Movie 7: My Own Private Idaho (1991)

Sometimes you have to wait to write about something you watched.  It allows the movie itself to settle in.  You can distance yourself from the material enough to not simply have initial thoughts.  Certain works deserve a little bit of thought to help you better understand what they have shown you.  My Own Private Idaho is one of these movies and even with a three day buffer, I don’t know if I am any nearer a complete understanding.

The seventh film in the Reimagined Shakespeare Marathon, My Own Private Idaho, is a 1991 film that was directed by Gus Van Sant and starred River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves.  It is about guy 1 trying to find the life he never had, and guy 2 dealing with the life he must leave behind.  There is also a little bit of male hustling involved.

I’ll cover the usual stuff quickly.  Direction wise, I thought it was well done.  There is something that Van Sant has to his direction.  I would call it a complex simplicity.  Not many directors do it and I like how he works it.  The acting is pretty good for the most part.  The only person that stands out as not so great would be Flea.  Yes, that Flea.  The bassist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.  Even Keanu was good in this.  His usual style was here, but it worked with his character.  The music must have been good because it didn’t strike me as out of place.  Not good enough to be memorable, but not bad enough to make me dislike it.  The movie looked good.  That’s always a plus.  And the writing.  There is some great writing in this film, which I shall now elaborate on.

My Own Private Idaho is a loose, but not too loose, adaptation of Shakespeare’s trilogy of plays Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, and Henry V.  Those make up the arc of the character that Keanu Reeves portrays.  The three plays were stripped down to what was included in this film as the entire arc for that character.  What an arc it is.  A man who is not yet a man realizing that he is going to need to change his life in the near future in a major way and dealing with what will come of that change.  That arc is probably the part of My Own Private Idaho that I like the most, which is only fitting since I believe it to be the central plot of the movie.  And although that is the main plot, Keanu Reeves is not the star of the movie.  That would be one Mr. River Phoenix.

There isn’t much of an arc to Phoenix’s character in My Own Private Idaho.  I would say he doesn’t grow all that much throughout the movie and is basically the same person at the end that he was at the beginning.  But I don’t think that is the point of the character.  I believe that...I think the character is Mike...I believe that Mike is our Shakespeare surrogate in this movie.  He’s there to serve the part of the narrator or, in the case of the plays that it is based on, the writer.  He lets us in on the story of Keanu’s character.  Mike is the audience, watching his friend go through this transition period.  Mike gets his own arc, sure, but it’s nowhere near as big or important as his friend’s.  Mike’s arc is there to allow him along for the ride of his friend’s bigger, deeper arc.

Outside of the characters themselves, the source material was a middle ages set tale that occurred during a wartime period.  The translation of that to a modern prostitution setting was well done.  It’s an unexpected take on a classic work that is successful in ways that couldn’t have been predicted.  I only know the plot of the source material from Wikipedia, but from what I understand of it and what was omitted in this adaptation, My Own Private Idaho is worthy of the material that it adapted.

Now, understand that this movie isn’t for everyone.  It takes a while to get going, and even then, it’s not overly exciting.  My Own Private Idaho takes its time in telling a story.  It starts slow but when it gets going, it gets going.  In a story sense, not an action sense.  This isn’t a blockbuster.  Do not go into this movie expecting lots of gunplay and explosions.  You won’t find that here.  You’ll find a well crafted story that builds dramatically.  It works well, not perfectly, but very well.  So, take whatever I just said as a recommendation or not.

Next up is A Double Life.  This is a film noir based on Othello, I think.  If I’m remembering correctly.  Three movies left in the Reimagined Shakespeare Marathon.  I’m going to have to hurry these ones up if I’m going to finish within this month.

Wives of AMC

What’s the deal with AMC?  I watch three of their scripted shows and I dislike the wives of the main characters in each show.

That question, a Jerry Seinfeld style boggler, has been rolling around in my head constantly for a few days now.  This question has not kept me up at night but it has bothered me while I’ve been awake.  I suffer the wrath of liking good television with both likeable and unlikeable characters.  It’s a problem for me.  I thought that now would be the right time to get down to the core of the issue.

The three shows that are under surveillance right now are The Walking Dead, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad.  Each show has qualities that make me like it.  Each show also has one character, married to the main character, whom I dislike greatly because of their attitude towards those around them.  It’s a common bond between the three shows and something that I felt the need to highlight right here and right now.

In Mad Men, we have Betty Draper.  She is a stay at home wife who watches over the children and is a spoiled brat in her own.  Brat is used because she acts like a child.  Of course, her husband isn’t the greatest moral being in the world.  That doesn’t excuse the fact that she spends all of her time complaining about her husband, her children, her life, and overreacting to any small misstep in what would be the perfect life.  She lashes out in immature ways that negate almost anything that is done against her.  And she makes choices that are completely the wrong way to deal with situations which adds to the distaste that viewers have for the character.

In Breaking Bad, the wife character is Skyler White.  The problems begin when she begins to make her husband’s decisions for him because of what she wants instead of what he wants.  I’m trying not to spoil the plot here and this is very sensitive to what the plot is.  Let’s just say that she’s trying to force him into turning his entire life one way because of how she feels instead of caring about how he cares in the situation.  That starts the distaste for Skyler.  But during season 3 and 4, she comes to the forefront of the show as a giant hypocrite who is intelligent, yet dumb in the stuff that she is doing.  The hypocrisy largely encompasses everything she does which does not allow me, as a viewer, to feel for the character in any way.  Then there is a whole other part of the plot which to talk about would spoil, but she does something with the smallest shred of evidence that left a terrible taste in my mouth.  If you’ve seen the show, you might understand what I’m hinting at.  It was a major part of season 3.

Moving on, we have Lori Grimes in The Walking Dead.  This is a fairly simple character to describe.  She pitted her husband, main character Rick Grimes, against his best friend.  There are reasons that would be filled with spoilers and that’s not how I want to go about this.  The other reason is that she doesn’t know how to watch her child.  Though, to that point, neither does anyone else with them, really.  They don’t know how to watch any of their children.  Anyway, her attitude is what gets me to dislike her as much as I do.

Those three characters are the wives of the main characters of the shows.  Each of them have parts of their personalities that make me dislike them.  Some of it might come from their husbands and the way they interact with their husbands.  Some of it might come from the situations that they are put in.  But a lot of it is in the characters themselves.  I don’t like any of them.  Each of them makes everything about themselves in ways that they don’t need to.  They make problems out of nothing.  This isn’t really getting my point across right now.  I think the three previous paragraphs did.  At least, I hope so.  Or else this whole entry is a waste of space.

As I said, all of these shows air on AMC.  This is a strange phenomena to me.  Most drama shows have to have at least one unlikeable character in order to build tension and the drama.  It seems odd that all three of these shows have the unlikeable wife character.  Why is this the case?

This probably is nothing at all, but I felt like making a mountain out of this molehill.  Do you agree?  Do you disagree?  It’s all up to opinion.  This is how I feel, you might feel differently.

Reimagined Shakespeare Marathon Movie 6: West Side Story (1961)

Romantic stories are something that can work very well, or not work at all.  There isn’t too much in between.  Great romantic tales keep you invested in the characters and the blossoming of their love.  The bad tales try to invest you in the characters’ love for one another but fail due to many possible factors.  I think West Side Story, a musical reimagining of Romeo and Juliet, might fall into the second category.

Like I have already said, West Side Story is a musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.  The movie was made in 1961, based on a 1957 play of the same name.  Instead of being about two feuding families, it is about two feuding gangs.  There is a forbidden love story about a boy from one gang and a girl involved with the other.  That’s it.  Two feuding gangs and a love between people from each.

The gang feud was my favourite part of West Side Story.  It was the most satisfying part in terms of enjoyment.  The performances were good, if a little over the top, but enough to keep the audience entertained.  The songs were better for the gang feud part of the movie.  Watching the choreography, it was great to see the gang members doing all of the physical work that they did.  This whole portion of the movie kept me interested enough to sit through the rest of the movie.  Now onto the other part.

The Romeo and Juliet love story has never worked for me in any adaptation.  When I watched West Side Story I finally understood why.  There isn’t enough tension to the core of the relationship.  Sure, you could argue that there’s tension between their respective gangs or families or whatnot.  Yes.  That tension is there.  That isn’t what I mean.  The actual relationship has no tension to it.  They are in love from the first time they see each other.  They get together.  Nothing stopped them.  Then they plan to run away together.  Until the climax of the entire play there is absolutely nothing that hinders the relationship in any way.  I want some tension in a romantic story.  It gets me interested.  Romeo and Juliet never had that tension and thus the romance in it does not click for me.

Other than that big issue I had with West Side Story, the only other problems were very minor.  The Puerto Rican gang, The Sharks, were all in brown face.  It’s really distracting when you’re looking at them and you know they aren’t as brown as they seem in the movie.  The makeup did nothing to the actors and actresses but make them look fake.  The other issue was with watching Natalie Wood.  It’s not that she’s a bad actress.  She’s fine.  The problem was in knowing that she would die by drowning in the vicinity of a boat on which you could find Christopher Walken and Robert Wagner.  That shouldn’t be distracting, but I’m weird like that and couldn’t stop thinking about it.

One final thing that I just thought of.  The actors were clearly lip syncing the music.  Sometimes they were right on and it wasn’t a big issue, but at other times the sound was off from the mouth movements.  I know that some of it was due to different singers doing the music than the actors.  The rest of it was probably because of quality of sound.  I only say this all because it gets distracting every once in a while.

So...West Side Story.  The stuff I liked, I really liked.  The romantic story, I really didn’t like.  It might be a classic film to some people.  It isn’t going to be one of my favourite movies.  With the romance issues, I just can’t love it.  It was enjoyable enough though.

Next up, I’ll be watching My Own Private Idaho.  It’s based on a bunch of Shakespeare works and I’ve never seen it, nor do I really know what it’s about.  That’s going to make the watch interesting.  I’m nearing the end of the marathon.  But that’s for another entry.  So I’ll end this one now before I ramble on too much.