A daughter of the powerful Duke must show her courage and inventiveness to be with the man she loves.
Co-writer/Director: Kenneth Branagh
Stars: Bryce Dallas Howard, Adrian Lester, David Oyelowo.
Stuart Hopps ... choreographer
damaged disc: early ch 7 of 14 has at least a dozen freeze points, but they all recover quickly, which is why my ffwd test did not catch them. Sure enough, this was a 9'07 release. HBO must have used the same factory that did all the Warner wrecks. (There is a '13 dvd, upc 0883316769959, but it costs more than $14 today.)
I really didn't like this: too many characters, too much going on, and too sudden changes. It would be a 5, but I read Sparknotes afterward, and appreciate what KB brought (how much worse it could have been). I'll watch the '78 BBC version in a couple of days.
At least 3 couples are formed by love at first sight; only 1 doesn't persist to the altar, but she marries the boy who loved her before. Ugh to all of it.
We have 2 pair of fraternal animosity, with amazingly quick resolutions of the enmity. <sigh>
We have a jester and a wannabe, but neither contribute much to the proceedings. (One of them delivers the "All the world's a stage" line, but little else that I got.)
What Branagh brought that helped me: he set the play in Japan, with both British and Japanese characters, and cast the de Bois brothers with black actors. So it was easy to distinguish who was who. And the makeup department helped a lot with the dukes, who were played by the same actor which I didn't realize it until I saw that in the cast list afterward.
In the Sparknotes, they talked about Duke S's band killing a deer, but in the film they made a point of NOT having a deer, showing us a pot of mushrooms & roots cooking. Can't imagine why that change was made.
KB added a non-speaking scene to begin the play, showing the coup with ninjas attacking Duke Senior's party watching a geisha perform and Duke Frederick taking power. I don't remember any exposition explaining things, which would be necessary in a play that does not show the attack.
The BBC '78 version is 2.5 hours, so other material must also be cut. (Thankfully, Helen Mirren is in that one, so I have something to look forward to.)
Rated 6.3 (2,823)
HBO, BBC & more. dir. Branagh; 6
