Richard III
Jul. 24th, 2012 04:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerDID YOU KNOW that there's a movie version of Richard III set during the 1920s? There is! There is! So many of my favorite things all in one place: the British nobility behaving badly, and Shakespeare, and story retellings, all wrapped up in Jazz Age trappings!
The movie has a jazz version of Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love!" (Modern musicians, I think you should consider this "setting Renaissance poetry to music" thing. It could be epic!) And splendid twenties-style clothes! And Ian McKellen as a delightfully vile Richard III; and of course Maggie Smith plays the Duchess of York, because she plays all the steel-spined dowager ladies. (If I were her, I'd want to play a weeping and pathetic granny, just for some variety.) The scene where she curses Richard? A++.
I tend to like the women in Shakespeare's history plays more than the ones in his comedies. (But I haven't read Twelfth Night, which everyone tells me is the best.) The presence of historical fact seems to constrain him to portray them as braver than he otherwise might.*
Like the scene near the end, where Richard is trying to convince Elizabeth Woodville to marry her daughter to him. She seems to be caving, which I found exasperating when I first read the play - why do all the women say yes to Richard when he's so obviously evil? Is Shakespeare having one of his exciting "the inherent weakness of being female" moments?
But the movie makes it clear that she has no intention of getting her daughter to marry Richard. She's trying to convince him that she will, because he tends to shoot people who don't do what he wants; the scene shows great guile and bravery.
And by this point, Richard is so high on his own success that he totally buys her charade. A victim of his own success, that's our Richard. Evil Overlord tip for the day: if you find yourself contemplating taking your supporters' children hostage to ensure their loyalty, know that this is a good way to lose all the supporters whose children you haven't gotten to yet.
*Although this doesn't help poor Portia, Brutus's wife in Julius Caesar. The classical historians have her killing herself after Brutus died, thus making her a heroine - and yes, I realize it's totally problematic that most of the classical heroines prove their heroism by killing themselves - but still, committing suicide with great classical dignity, in the tradition of Cato and Seneca, is a thousand times better than having Portia kill herself, as Shakespeare does, because she can't stand the suspense of Brutus's absence!
The movie has a jazz version of Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love!" (Modern musicians, I think you should consider this "setting Renaissance poetry to music" thing. It could be epic!) And splendid twenties-style clothes! And Ian McKellen as a delightfully vile Richard III; and of course Maggie Smith plays the Duchess of York, because she plays all the steel-spined dowager ladies. (If I were her, I'd want to play a weeping and pathetic granny, just for some variety.) The scene where she curses Richard? A++.
I tend to like the women in Shakespeare's history plays more than the ones in his comedies. (But I haven't read Twelfth Night, which everyone tells me is the best.) The presence of historical fact seems to constrain him to portray them as braver than he otherwise might.*
Like the scene near the end, where Richard is trying to convince Elizabeth Woodville to marry her daughter to him. She seems to be caving, which I found exasperating when I first read the play - why do all the women say yes to Richard when he's so obviously evil? Is Shakespeare having one of his exciting "the inherent weakness of being female" moments?
But the movie makes it clear that she has no intention of getting her daughter to marry Richard. She's trying to convince him that she will, because he tends to shoot people who don't do what he wants; the scene shows great guile and bravery.
And by this point, Richard is so high on his own success that he totally buys her charade. A victim of his own success, that's our Richard. Evil Overlord tip for the day: if you find yourself contemplating taking your supporters' children hostage to ensure their loyalty, know that this is a good way to lose all the supporters whose children you haven't gotten to yet.
*Although this doesn't help poor Portia, Brutus's wife in Julius Caesar. The classical historians have her killing herself after Brutus died, thus making her a heroine - and yes, I realize it's totally problematic that most of the classical heroines prove their heroism by killing themselves - but still, committing suicide with great classical dignity, in the tradition of Cato and Seneca, is a thousand times better than having Portia kill herself, as Shakespeare does, because she can't stand the suspense of Brutus's absence!
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Date: 2012-07-24 09:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-24 11:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-25 12:52 am (UTC)As for Maggie Smith playing something other than steel-spined ladies, have you ever seen Gosford Park? She's not quite a weeping and pathetic granny, but she is a gossipy old spinster, which is kinda close, wouldn't you say? (As an aside, if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. It's also set in the jazz era, and it's sort of a deconstruction of the stereotypical murder mystery, wrapped up with some neat social commentary.)
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Date: 2012-07-25 03:58 am (UTC)And I have seen Gosford Park, and I keep wanting to post something about it in conjunction with Downton Abbey, as they have the same creator - in particular their contrasting portrayal of class relations - but I haven't gotten to it.
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Date: 2012-07-25 04:00 am (UTC)And Maggie Smith was awesome in Gosford Park - hence my desire to see her cast in the vast spectrum of roles her talent so obviously deserves. Don't you think she'd be awesome as the heroine of a romance (or maybe rom-com!) about two old lovers reuniting? Or a spy movie! NO ONE EVER SUSPECTS THE OLD LADY.
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Date: 2012-07-25 04:42 pm (UTC)And OMG, SPY!MAGGIE SMITH. I WOULD WATCH THE SHIT OUT OF THAT. (That reminds me--maybe ten years ago, now, I was having a conversation with a cousin, and she was telling me about this series of books she had read. I seem to remember it being about an elderly woman, who, widowed and without any immediate family left, decides to become a private investigator. I WISH I could remember the title, because it sounded fun then, and it sounds even more fun now.
Not least because I would now be imagining Maggie Smith in the role.)no subject
Date: 2012-07-25 06:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-25 01:40 am (UTC)Twelfth Night is, IMO, the queerest and most gender-bending of Shakespeare's plays, which is saying something, considering how many cross-dressing ladies and homoerotic friends there are in Shakespeare. I am not sure about just reading it (or just reading any Shakespeare), but if you get a chance to see it, definitely do so. (I haven't seen any of the movie versions yet, so can't recommend yea or nay, except to say that She's the Man managed to be simultaneously defensively heterosexual and transphobic, and that's a feat given the source material.)
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Date: 2012-07-25 04:26 am (UTC)I haven't seen She's the Man, because I kind of expected that it had to be trainwrecky. Thinking of other modern Shakespeare adaptation - Ten Things I Hate About You actually managed to make Taming of the Shrew quite palatable, by making the story about being nice to people rather than being a properly submissive woman. (But I may be biased because the movie features Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and objectivity is all but impossible in the face of all that pretty.)
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Date: 2012-07-25 05:22 am (UTC)I liked Ten Things, but I haven't seen it in years. She's the Man was nonstop embarrassment squick, took out everything I find charming about the play (play Cesario is pretty smooth! Movie Cesario is...a dudebro, wtf, which makes Olivia liking 'him' utterly baffling), and really kind of brought out the transphobia all sudden-like. I was kind of appalled by it. I can't imagine, even given rosy memory, that Ten Things was anywhere near as bad.
There's a modern version of Twelfth Night with Parminder Nagra as Viola that I really want to see--it's so hard with a modern setting to come up with a convincing reason for the drag, so I'm really curious about how they do that. It also has Chiwetl Ejiofor as Orsino. So basically I will watch it just for the cast. One of these days.
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Date: 2012-07-25 04:32 pm (UTC)I feel a marathon of Shakespeare movies coming on...
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Date: 2012-07-25 05:21 pm (UTC)