As You Like It (or Not)

Last Wednesday I saw the Shakespeare Theatre Company production of As You Like It. I didn’t. The acting is good, the writing is Shakespeare, and the sets are appealing. The problem is with the director’s “madcap” concept.

The play starts with a clever and well-executed live recreation of a silent movie clip, setting the scene for the beginning of the action. The scene then shifts to a conventional theater stage, with décor and costumes implying puritan England. Things work well like this until the main characters all flee tyranny and end up in the forest of Arden, which has somehow been relocated to the East Coast of North America. The same stage magic that merged two continents also transformed time, placing the continuing action just prior to the American Revolution.

That transition was jarring and a little disorienting. But the tie in with a search for freedom made it somewhat palatable. Unfortunately it didn’t stop there. Suddenly years and sets began to change at a dizzying pace. The play skipped merrily through almost 200 years in two hours which seemed like an eternity.

But wait, there’s more: the movie theme resurfaced. With each scene change various camera crews, gaffers, etc., swarmed the stage, then faded into the wings.

I kept waiting for the director to tie it all together, but when the spectacle was over, I was merely confused and disappointed.

NOTE: Today's review was written by the man in the good seats, Eric H.

Holiday Films for Atypical Tastes

Film companies usually release their best films (or the films they consider most likely to get award nominations) during this time of the year, so it's surprising that there are relatively few really good movies playing right now. Still, if you're looking for a night out, I've recently seen three films (all playing in town) that I can recommend: Up in the Air, The Road, and Red Cliff. But be warned, none of these are traditional holiday feel good fare.

Up in the Air, the new film by Jason Reitman, director of Juno and Thank You for Smoking, is the best of the bunch with George Clooney playing Ryan Bingham, a professional corporate downsizer who's hired by companies to fire their employees. While this idea has the potential to be a first rate downer or a tear-jerker, it is neither. It's a funny, witty, complex film that looks at the value of connections between people - what we want, what we're willing to reveal, and the choices we make to protect ourselves. The scenes involving the layoffs are handled respectfully and never for laughs, giving us insight into the emotional armor that Bingham has built up over the years. All said, it's a very funny, moving film with one of Clooney's most emotionally charged performances.

On the surface, The Road, drawn from Cormac MacCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is one grim tale, but beneath this struggle of a father and his young son to survive a holocaust that destroyed all animals, plants, and most humans, is a beautiful look at the love between a father and his son. Viggo Mortensen gives an intense performance as "the man" trying to prepare his son for the world and teach him right from wrong in an environment riddled with cannibals, cold, hunger, and violence. And as can happen, it's the son that ends up teaching the father. The film asks us to consider the very nature of humanity and manages to find it in an unbelievable bleak environment.

Red Cliff, John Woo's film about the Battle of Red Cliffs (208 A.D.) toward the end of China’s Han Dynasty, is highest grossing film ever in China and some other Asian countries. The most expensive Asian-financed film ever made, Red Cliff  is a visual tour-de-force, featuring a cast of thousands, court intrigue, sweeping battle scenes, slo-mo fight scenes, and a detailed look at battlefield tactics and strategy. Beautiful in its scope and execution, particularly in the climatic naval battle, the movie is an old-style epic with new style CGI effects—two warriors battle, in part for the love of a woman, leaving thousands dead in their wake. The 148-minute version that's playing in the U.S. now was edited down by Woo from his original 2-part, 5 hour film released in China.