DAYS OF OUR WIVES

Phoenix-area folks looking for some counterprogramming to the Super Bowl and/or the Olympics might consider Southwest Shakespeare Company's The Merry Wives of Windsor...

...this afternoon at Mesa Arts Center; it plays there through February 22. Your Humble Narrator has the honor to share the stage, in the small role of Falstaff's drunken sidekick Bardolph, with a very talented cast. Directed by Keath Hall--of last year's Klingon Hamlet--the production places the farce in an Arizona trailer park in the 1990s, a setting to which it quite readily adapts.

Also on the subject of Shakespeare: In case you missed it, check out the great Ian McKellen on Stephen Colbert's show last week, performing a magnificent speech apparently by Shakespeare from the play Sir Thomas More, unproduced in Shakespeare's time and first performed by McKellen in the mid-1960s. It's More, then "shrieve" (sheriff), shaming an anti-immigrant mob in London, and it's as witheringly appropriate to our time as it ever was.

Back in 1995, I got to interview a pre-Gandalf McKellen (by phone) for Phoenix New Times in connection with Richard Loncraine's pre-WWII-era Richard III movie, in which he played the title role. I asked him about Sir Thomas More and his status as the only living actor to create a new Shakespearean lead. There was a long pause on the line, and then he said, "Can you have seen it?"

No, Sir Ian, I'm just a nerd.

But to hear this beautiful piece of writing blisteringly performed by this absolute freaking master, on national television no less, is a privilege.

UNCURED HAMNET

Check out my review, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Hamnet...

...opening Thursday.

A safe and happy Thanksgiving to all!

BAG TIME

Monday evening my friend and I braved an apocalyptic-looking haboob to attend the memorial service in Chandler for the powerhouse actor-director-playwright Ben Tyler, who departed earlier this month.

I only appeared with Ben once, in The Comedy of Errors at Southwest Shakespeare Company in the mid-‘90s, but he was a pleasure to work with.

I arrived in the Valley in the early '90s, and was baffled when I would hear Zonies complaining, sometimes bitterly, that they "never got a Ladmo Bag." The Wallace and Ladmo Show--for which Ben had written, and which he later adapted into a successful stage show--had ended its long, beloved run on KPHO (1954-1989) a few years before I got here. It wasn't until I later saw some reruns on Channel 8 that I realized how good, how genuinely funny and creative the show was. It's quite probable that it was the best local kids' show in TV history.

So it was an unexpected honor, as I was leaving Ben's service, to receive, at the age of 63, my very own Ladmo Bag. My friend, a lifelong Zonie, told me that the Ladmo Bag he got was his NINTH.

The contents of mine:

One Wallace and Ladmo postcard
One bag of Jelly Bellies
One Tootsie Pop (orange)
One Moon Pie
One Twinkie
Crackerjack (in old-school box)
Bazooka Bubble Gum (one piece)
Pixie Stix (2)
One can Mug Root Beer
One "Official State of Arizona Commemorative Folio celebrating Arizona's Quarter issued as part of the United States Mint's 50 State Quarter Program"

An awesome haul; greatly appreciated Ben!

A VIEW FROM THE RIDGE

Any play that begins with a figure in black brandishing an inflatable pterodactyl on a stick deserves some credit. A Klingon Hamlet, a Ronin Theatre Company production playing for just one more weekend at Stage Left in Glendale, has many such flourishes of very low-tech theatricality.

As the title indicates, it's a version of Shakespeare's Hamlet performed in Klingon drag. The actors are costumed, and made-up with the ridge-browed foreheads, of Klingons, the warlike aliens from the Star  Trek franchise.

The adaptation, by Keath Hall--who also directed, and plays the title role--and E.C. Darling-Bond (who plays Horatio), boils the play down to its bare essentials and substitutes many words and phrases for Klingon references. The duel is fought with Klingon weapons, for instance, and Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are sent to Earth rather than to England.

Familiarity with the Klingon language, invented by the linguist Marc Okrand for the Star Trek movies, is not needed to watch the show, however. At the beginning the handy "universal translator" is engaged so that we hear the actors in English, except for the play-within-the-play, which is indeed in Klingon, with a projected translation. Hall and Darling-Bond wisely see to it that the whole thing clocks in at under two hours; they don't let the gag wear out its welcome.

They also don't try--again, probably wisely--for any deeply tragic tone. The flavor is droll and facetious, right down to Hamlet singing snatches of contemporary pop songs, or putting on an "antic disposition" by donning a red clown nose, and wearing it for a fair amount of his stage time.

The skill of the actors varies widely, but everyone is game and committed. At ten, however, the cast is too small; the doubling gets pretty awkward at times. The show could have used at least one more actor, possibly two. Maybe there just weren't enough ridge brows for any more.

C.D. Macauley delivers some true Shakespearean music as The Ghost, The Player King and The Gravedigger; he nicely sings Spock's ballad from the original series episode "Plato's Stepchildren" in the latter role. Kate Haas generates some honest emotion in Ophelia's mad scene. Wes Martin's Claudius is commanding and despicably genial.

The star, however, is Hall. His antic approach to the title role works well with his persona, which comes across like a contemporary comic leading man in the movies, a Vince Vaughn or a Jason Bateman. More than many other Shakespearean plays, the success of Hamlet depends on the likability of the lead, our ability to identify with him, root for him, enjoy his company. Even if it had nothing else going for it, and it does, on that score alone A Klingon Hamlet succeeds.

SPACE STAGE

Check out my Phoenix Magazine preview of Ronin Theatre Company's A Klingon Hamlet...

...playing, in an abridged form, at Phoenix Fan Fusion at 4:30 p.m. today, June 7, and full-length at Stage Left Productions in Glendale for the last two weekends in June.

Let the record show that Your Humble Narrator has been covering the Klingon-Shakespeare connection since 2002, when I wrote this for the Detroit Metro Times.

Also online at Phoenix Magazine, here's my preview of playwright Ashley Naftule's latest, Selena and Judy Go Dancing...

...opening this weekend at Space 55.

NO PAIN, NO DANE

Now streaming only on MUBI:

Grand Theft Hamlet--This one flew way under the radar during its very brief theatrical run here in the Valley. I'm glad that it's now available for streaming.

Directed by Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane, it's the story of how in 2021 two young British actors (Crane and Mark Oosterven), sidelined by the COVID lockdown, decided to audition, cast and stage a production of Hamlet within the confines of Grand Theft Auto Online. The film unfolds entirely in the virtual realm of that classic video game, a favorite of armchair criminals since 1997, and played online for more than a decade.

Except for a few arcade games when I was in high school and a simple game called Backyard Zombies that I had on my phone for a while, I essentially don't play video games at all. I was vaguely aware of the existence and popularity of Grand Theft Auto, but I had no idea what an expansive and immersive and visually alluring environment it is.

The online aspect, allowing for interaction, however indirect, with other human beings, adds to its intrigue. I remember being up late reading in my front room one night some years ago when my kid, who had been playing some combat game in her room, emerged tearful because she had lost track of a dude she had been playing online with and had no way to reconnect with him. So the creative and collaborative possibilities of modern videos games, and the potential for real emotional investment in them, seem to be broader than I would have guessed.

On the other hand, I am pretty familiar with Hamlet. That is one seriously good play, and this movie is a testament to the durability and adaptability of the masterpiece. In Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum insists that "life finds a way"; this movie is one of many examples supporting the assertion that "Shakespeare finds a way."

But Grand Theft Hamlet is also an amusing and sometimes touching ode to the vagaries of making theatre. Even in this controlled setting and these narrow circumstances, these guys are still afflicted with herding cats in rehearsal, actors apologetically quitting because they got a better gig, etc. Plus, in this production you never know when strangers are going to show up and shoot you.

YOUNG BLOOD

This past Saturday my pal Dave invited me to join him for my favorite play, Shakespeare's dreaded ["Scottish Play"]. I've acted in it twice, and seen many productions of it over the years, from scrappy regional theatre versions to a Broadway-bound tour with Christopher Plummer and Glenda Jackson at the Mechanic Theatre in Baltimore in 1988 (Cherry Jones played Lady MacDuff in that production, though I didn't know who she was then).

But I never saw a ["Scottish Play"] quite like the one Dave and I saw Saturday, at Spotlight Youth Theatre...

It's ["The Scottish Play"] performed by teenagers, so it's safe to say that it's uneven. The vaguely 20th-Century dress works well enough, although the use of guns instead of swords in the battle scenes is a poor choice. But overall the direction, by Jack Taylor, is straightforward and coherent; most admirably, Taylor resists the temptation, so common in modern productions, to overuse the Witches (though they're excellent).

In any case, for me, at some level, it seems like this show's dark, awful power always takes hold in the end. It's the all-time greatest dramatization of the terrifying truth that some wrongs can't be made right, and placing the weight of such crimes on the shoulders of performers this young and callow somehow adds to the horror.

The cast is full of spirited players, but the standout is Wardeh Hanna as Lady M. It wouldn't astound me to see her in, say, ten years, accepting an Emmy or something.

The show runs through Sunday, April 23.

NET GAINS

Opening this weekend:

Champions--Just like Gene Hackman in Hoosiers, Woody Harrelson is a hotheaded basketball coach who loses jobs over violent outbursts on the court. Just like Keanu Reeves in Hardball, he has a coaching gig forced on him, in this case as community service in lieu of jail time. In short, Champions follows the standard sports movie playbook plot point for plot point. The variation, this time, is that Harrelson is assigned to a Special Olympics team made up of players with intellectual disabilities.

Thus the obvious worry, going in, is that these characters will be either ridiculed or patronized, or both. The director is Bobby Farrelly, half of the Farrelly Brothers, who in earlier films have indeed derived broad comedy from intellectually disabled characters; his brother Peter Farrelly, who we saw advising the filmmakers with Down syndrome in the documentary Sam and Mattie Make a Zombie Movie, insists that they "revere" such people but refuse to sentimentalize or condescend in their depictions of them.

How does this approach work out in Champions? Well, certainly the quirks and limitations of Harrelson's ballers are played for laughs, but I think no more insultingly than in, say, The Mighty Ducks or Dodgeball or, for that matter, Major League, or any other formula sports flick about the triumph of a ragtag bunch of misfit underdogs.

It helps, too, that the coach is generally the butt of the jokes. More importantly, the actors who play the team members are spirited, ebullient, confident performers with vivid personalities. They also bring out the best in Harrelson, who responds to them with what appears to be genuine warmth and delight.

Aside from the charming engagement between these actors and the star, the movie, set in Des Moines but mostly filmed in Canada, is pretty by-the-numbers, though it's pleasant and watchable (it's a knockoff, by the way, of a 2018 Spanish film called Campeones, a hit in that country). Ernie Hudson and Cheech Marin turn up in supporting roles but have little to do. Harrelson's love interest is Kaitlin Olson as a small-potatoes Shakespearean actor and the protective sister of one of the players, and the bantering dialogue Mark Rizzo provides for them isn't a disgrace. And I'm predisposed to like any movie in which the climax of The Winter's Tale is used to teach the pick-and-roll.

YOU'LL BREW THE DAY

The Viking melodrama The Northman, now in theaters, dramatizes the Nordic legend that was the root of Shakespeare's Hamlet. It's to the credit of Harkins Theatres that, as the "Tuesday Night Classic" for this week, they're showing another, rather more lighthearted version of Hamlet: 1983's Strange Brew, the big-screen outing of the SCTV "hosers" Bob and Doug McKenzie, played by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas respectively.

No, really. The toque-wearing, beer, donut and back-bacon loving Canadian brothers from the second-greatest sketch comedy show of all time (second only to Monty Python's Flying Circus, that is) serve as a sort of two-man Horatio in the yarn, in which Pam Elsinore (Lynne Griffin) finds, after the death of her father, that her Uncle Claude (Paul Dooley) has taken over the family business, Elsinore Brewery. A video game assumes the role of The Ghost. Best of all is the great Max Von Sydow, who plays an evil brewmeister completely straight, as if he was the villain in a Bond picture.

Directed by Thomas and Moranis from a script they wrote with Steve De Jarnatt, this very silly but sweet-natured and sometimes hilarious '80s curio deserves a bigger cult. I defy anyone to deny the ring of Shakespearean poetry in a line like "Gee, you're real nice. If I didn't have puke breath, I'd kiss you."

Strange Brew plays at 7 p.m. Tuesday at numerous Harkins locations, as part of the chain's "Tuesday Night Classics" series. Tickets are just $5; go to harkins.com for details.

IT TAKES A PILLAGE

Opening this weekend...

The Northman--The hero of this historical epic is Amleth, a 9th-Century Nordic prince whose father is murdered by his brother, who then marries Amleth's mother. Amleth flees, vowing revenge. When he's all grown up into the strapping Alexander Skarsgård and enjoying a nice career as a raiding, ravaging berserker, he travels to Iceland, poses as a slave on the estate of his Uncle (Claes Bang)--who's still married to Amleth's seemingly contented Mom (Nicole Kidman)--and waits for the chance to avenge his Dad.

Wait, haven't we heard this story somewhere?

Yeah, sort of. The Amleth legend, as recorded in the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus in the 12th Century, is the root that, greatly refined by time and civilization, ultimately grew into Shakespeare's Hamlet. But director Robert Eggers, who wrote the script with the Icelandic poet and novelist known as Sjön, prefers to take the story of fratricide punished back to the raw source material.

This is, on the whole, a serious attempt at a historically and mythically accurate depiction of the Middle Ages. That's not to say that it's always an accurate depiction of daily reality in those times, but the movie tries to be true to the era's imaginative and moral sensibilities. As such, it's a seriously harsh, bloody, gory, nasty tale. It offers us almost no quarter, and asks none of us.

For that, it has to be respected. Not many big-budget period movies are this unwilling to throw a sop to modern attitudes. These characters aren't just 21st-century people dressed in Viking drag; when, say, helpless peasants (including children) are locked in a hall that's set on fire after a battle, Amleth isn't the perpetrator, but he doesn't stop it, or object to it, or even seem to notice it. It's just another day at the barbarian office.

The acting is strong. Skarsgård is capable and appealing as Amleth, Anya Taylor-Joy feels period-authentic as the enslaved woman he comes to love, Kidman has an impressive, almost Shakespearean bearing as the Mom. Ethan Hawke as Amleth's Dad and Willem Dafoe as a lippy jester are both effective, and Björk has a creepy scene as a prophet. Best of all is Claes Bang, who wisely plays the murdering brother as a sensible, reflective man.

Despite all this creditable work, what with mutilated servants, and the horses with severed heads, and plenty of other atrocities, the list of people who will prefer to take a pass on The Northman is likely to be long. Even on it's own terms, it's a little slow, and a little heavy, although it gathers steam as it goes, and by the time we get to the final showdown--in the midst of a volcanic eruption!--it's entirely engrossing.

The movie also comes across--unintentionally, I think--as a little, well, Aryan. If you aren't in the mood to watch a lot of stripped-down white guys screaming into the camera as they psych themselves up for battle, this may not be the flick for you. This behavior is historically accurate, of course, and again, I don't think for a moment that it was what Eggers and Sjön had in mind, but it's too easy to imagine a bunch of skinheads or Proud Boys watching this movie over and over, and nodding along with the rage.

THE THANE MAN

 Merry Christmas everybody!

The Tragedy of Macbeth--Nothing says "Christmas" like a tale of witchcraft,  madness, tyranny and the murder of a guest by his host. So Joel Coen, working independently of his brother Ethan for the first time, has served us up an adaptation of Shakespeare's bad-juju masterpiece, with the great Denzel Washington in the title role and the great Frances McDormand as the Lady.

It's a fine-looking film, shot in lustrous black-and-white by Bruno Delbonnel on stylized, angular sets by Stefan Dechant, and it isn't saddled with any heavy-handed "interpretation." Still, it's full of choices I found disappointing.

All Three Witches, for instance, are played by the same actress, Kathryn Hunter, switching voices and contorting her body. She's brilliant, but the conceit doesn't come off authentically; it feels like an Oral Interpretation class exercise rather than true drama. As in Roman Polanski's 1971 version, the Thane of Ross is here portrayed as a scheming, side-switching Machiavel; in both versions this seems to me to dilute the central spiritual tragedy of the main characters.

There are successful aspects to the film: Coen's use of crows as a recurring motif is creepy and effective, for instance, and the confrontation with Young Siward is handled imaginatively. Stephen Root, excellent as usual, tosses off the Porter scene with no mugging.

On the whole, Polanski's Middle Ages bloodbath of '71 is a more satisfying version. But Coen's film has something Polanski's doesn't: true, charismatic stars in the leads. Washington keeps it reserved and quiet, but his internal power is commanding.

McDormand, on the other hand, lets it rip from her first scene, with terrifying intensity but also with lucidity and focus. You can see why her husband's reluctance to commit the dreadful deed wilts before her inexorable will; you can also see, appallingly, the psychological pit she's digging for herself. She's flawless. 

Whatever its shortfalls, this movie has two of the very best actors of their generation playing two of the greatest roles in Western drama. That's not something one should skip lightly.

HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS

In theaters this Friday:

In the Heights--The Lin-Manuel Miranda musical before Hamilton was this interweaving of the lives and dreams of residents of the heavily Latino upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights, over a few summer days including a citywide blackout. It opened on Broadway in 2008, with the ridiculously talented lyricist and composer Miranda in the lead.

For this film version, directed by Jon M. Chu, an older Miranda has wisely given himself the relatively minor supporting role of the "Piraguero" and turned the leading man duties over to Anthony Ramos, who played Laurens in Hamilton on Broadway. Ramos plays Usnavi, who runs a bodega but dreams of returning to his native Dominican Republic to open a beachside cantina. The characters around him also dream of business or artistic or academic success, and of course circumstances and relationships interfere with these.

The storylines, in themselves, are fairly conventional, and Washington Heights is presented, rosily or not, as such a paradisal place to live in this movie that it's hard to see why a person would dream of "getting out." But the numbers through which these stories unfold are thrilling in the way that only a beautifully written, well-performed, well-directed, well-edited musical can be; that is to say, about as thrilling as anything in the performing arts (with the possible exception of really well-done Shakespeare) can be.

Ramos is a delightful master of ceremonies, and he handles Miranda's peerless, slippery run-on rhymes superbly. The standout in the cast, however, is Olga Merediz, from the Broadway production, as the "Abuela," a matriarchal figure in the neighborhood. Her big number "Paciencia y Fe," about coming to the U.S. from Cuba as a kid with her mother, is a knockout; emotionally direct and potent without a trace of Broadway-style pushing or straining.  

I've heard a lot of bitching over the past year or so about how contemporary movies are either too fluffy or too horribly depressing. If you're of this mindset, In the Heights may be for you; it's in touch with the conflicts and hardships of the world, but the tone, beginning to end, is joyous.

Streaming on TubiTV:

We All Think We're Special--Charlie (Jared Blankens) is a raging alcoholic; after a particularly wild binge, his more mild-mannered drinking buddy Ed (William McGovern) suddenly decides to forcibly detox him in Charlie's rambling house (which he's about to lose, as his late mother willed it to AA!). Charlie resists but Ed is implacable, and as the hours and days go by and Charlie gets sicker and more distraught, he shrieks out a lot of invective.

At the beginning we're told that this is based on a true story, that it offers us "neither medical advice nor wisdom," and that we shouldn't "attempt substance withdrawal unless under the care of trained medical personnel." Uh, yeah. The two actors are strong, especially Blankens, and even manage to inject a little wit and warmth into the proceedings, and the direction is moody; there's no denying the movie has some power. Overall, though, it isn't much fun. But it did convince me not to ever try a DIY detox on one of my friends.

Streaming on YouTube:

Hamlet/Horatio--Director Paul Warner and screenwriter David Vando had the intriguing idea to build an adaptation of Shakespeare's masterpiece based on the intimacy between the Dane and his school friend and confidant Horatio. At times Horatio seems almost like an imaginary friend or longed-for absent lover here; the "To be or not be" speech, for instance, is a duet between the two men.

Horatio is, unquestionably, a fascinating, ambiguous character. But this stripped-down version, played in a mix of modern dress and Ren Faire costumes with a "meta" device--a baleful, chalky-skinned cameraman observing the action, played by writer Vando, who also plays the Gravedigger--suffers from uneven acting and a somber, glacial pace.

More painfully, most of Shakespeare's language has been translated into very prosaic, CliffNotes-style modern English that lands with a thud (in 1965 Rouben Mamoulian published a modern-English version of Hamlet as well, and it too has somehow failed to replace the original). Trying to improve the text of Hamlet is, I'm afraid, more madness than method.

WHY YOU ALWAYS LION?

Hope everybody had a great Inauguration Day.

On Inauguration Eve, Donald Trump, Jr. posted this comparison between incoming President Joe Biden and Scar, the villain of Disney's The Lion King, on Instagram:

I'd like to set aside the obvious silliness--that Biden "cheated to win"--and ask Junior a different question: Who, in this "analogy," are the hyenas?

Back in 1994, when I reviewed The Lion King for Phoenix New Times, the 32-year-old pedantic ass I was spent interminable paragraphs trying to show off my supposed great Shakespearean acumen by tediously noting all the allusions to the Bard in this and other Disney animated flicks of the period. I didn't get to what should have been the point of the review until the last couple of graphs, and even there I let the movie off too lightly for it.

Specifically, I should have given more emphasis to how hard it is to escape the interpretation of The Lion King as an allegory (probably unintentional) in support of racial--or, at the very least, nationalistic and aristocratic--purity. Much was made at the time that this was the first truly original Disney film; that it wasn't based on some fairy tale or novel or other such source. Yet what they came up with was, as in the Star Wars flicks, one more tired-ass tale of a prince destined to rule as a birthright.

Even back then, though, what I found still more disturbing was the matter of the hyenas.

The usurper Scar invites the hyenas to integrate the lion pride, a sure sign of his wickedness. Two of them have overtly "ethnic" characterizations, voiced by Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin. A third, performed by veteran voice actor Jim Cummings, appears to have some sort of disability. It's this diversity that wrecks the integrity of the pride under Scar. The filmmakers seemed to be uncomfortable with this implication themselves, since toward the end there's a heavy-handed shot of the hyenas goose-stepping. This touch now seems like a classic reflexive right-wing projection, a meme tactic, like putting a Hitler mustache on a picture of Obama.

I closed my review back in '94 with the observation that "...if The Lion King weren't so obviously good-hearted...it might have seemed like the jackboots had been placed on the wrong paws." I can remember people I knew back then rolling their eyes at this mild suggestion as being overthought and tiresomely "politically correct" of me. But the 58-year-old pedantic ass I've grown into now wonders if I didn't take this insanely popular movie too little to task.

So, again, I'd like to ask Don Jr., who would have been about 16 years old when The Lion King came out: Who, in your view, are the hyenas?

Also, does this mean you see yourself as Simba, destined to rule after throwing Biden off a cliff?

TRIUMPH OF THE WILL?

Check out my review, on Phoenix Magazine online, of All is True, with Kenneth Branagh as William Shakespeare.

Have a great weekend one and all!

TRIUMPH OF THE GILL, 'PAC MENTALITY

Opening this week:

47 Meters Down--Sisters Kate (Claire Holt) and Lisa (Mandy Moore) are on vacation in Mexico. Lisa has recently been dumped, and wants to post pictures online that will make her ex jealous, so she lets the more adventurous Kate talk her into diving in a shark cage.

You can guess how this works out. The winch and crane break off from the decrepit-looking old boat, and the cage plunges to the title depth, where it comes to rest on the ocean floor. The scruffy captain (Matthew Modine) tells the sisters by radio to stay put, as swimming to the surface would risk the bends, always assuming they weren't devoured on the way up by the various great white sharks covetously cruising around the cage. Help, he assures them, is on the way.

It need hardly be said that the rescue operation does not go smoothly. Claustrophobic terror, in the manner of 2010's Buried, and grueling survival measures ensue. As with last year's shark siege melodrama The Shallows, an unseemly amount of the movie consists of women keening in panic and pain.

But 47 Meters Down, directed by Johannes Roberts, is better than The Shallows. It doesn't have Blake Lively and her impressive all-but-one-woman-show appeal, and it doesn't have a scene-stealing seagull, but it also isn't marred by a ridiculously corny, over-the-top action picture finale. It feels plausible. Moore and Holt are touching in their sisterly support of each other, and in their guileless delivery of the simple, declarative lines: "I'm so scared!" "The shark almost got me!"

The special effects are preferable, too. The great whites, with their disconsolate, thuggish faces, come across a little more convincingly than Blake Lively's enemy in The Shallows. But only a little more. 47 Meters Down is watchable, even ingenious at times. But in the end, it lands alongside The Shallows in the same large category: Shark Movies That Just Aren't Jaws.

All Eyez on Me--The role of Tupac Shakur in this biopic is played by a newcomer named Demetrius Shipp, Jr. While Shipp's features don't quite have Shakur's weirdly Old-Masters-like beauty, the resemblance is nonetheless striking, and he's a relaxed, natural actor with a likable manner. It's a creditable debut in what could easily have seemed like a no-win role.

He's no Tupac, however. He has none of the rapper's electrically vivid presence and magnetism. But maybe that was asking too much. Under the circumstances, it's an achievement simply that he doesn't disgrace himself, that he maintains the audience's sympathy.

The movie, directed by Benny Boom, is a conventional show-biz chronicle history of the short, prolific career and appallingly violence-filled life of Shakur, who was murdered in Las Vegas in 1996 at the age of 25. We get his unstable childhood among the Black Panthers, his turbulent but intense bond with his mother Alfeni (the terrific Danai Gurira), his scary youth in Baltimore and Oakland, his early success with Digital Underground, his rise as a solo artist and movie star, the rape charge, the prison term, the partnering with Suge Knight and Death Row Records, the feud with Biggie, and so forth.

The movie doesn't quite sanitize Shakur; his amusement at Knight's brutality to others, for instance, is chilling. Still, through it all, he is depicted as, to quote one of his favorite writers, a man more sinned against than sinning. I'm not remotely qualified to say if this is fair or not, I can only say that All Eyez on Me, though possibly a hair overlong, is absorbing and enjoyable on its own terms. And the music on the soundtrack, both of Shakur and others, demonstrates how anemic is most of the stuff that currently passes for hip-hop on the radio.

Shakur was a furiously angry young man. He was also a smashingly talented, riveting performer, and the evidence of his few film roles suggests that he could have become a great movie actor as well. Because he died young, he's fixed, like James Dean, in tragic radiance. But who knows if he would have kept it?

On the other hand, who cares? Had he survived, he would be pushing 50. Maybe he would have sold out and become happy; he might be on his twelfth season in the cast of Law and Order by now. Or he might have kept his social anger but found a way to channel it productively. Or a little of both. Any of the above would be better than what happened.

BRAVE CONCERNS

Check out my essay, on New Times blogs, on Huxley’s Brave New World, written 85 years ago this year.

And since the title phrase “brave new world” comes from Shakespeare’s The Tempest…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week’s monstrous honoree is this cool 19^th-Century illustration by C. W. Sharpe of Caliban from that play...

STAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE

Check out the October issue of Phoenix Magazine…

…for my story on Stephen Wrentmore, the innovative Education Director at Arizona Theatre Company. It’s on Page 40, or you can read it here.

HAPPY BARDTHDAY

Happy Shakespeare’s Birthday everybody! Check out my list of the Top Ten nerdiest pop culture versions of Shakespeare, on Topless Robot.

RIP to Richie Havens, who, at least to judge by the movie, may have given the best performance at Woodstock, passed on at 72.

ROMAN RUIN

Some of Shakespeare’s plays seem awkward when performed in modern dress, and some of them seem perfectly attired. The Roman tragedy Coriolanus is of the latter sort. I saw it in modern dress in Washington, D.C. more than twenty years ago, with, of all people, a game young Bradley Whitford in the title role, and despite this miscasting it worked.

It works again in a gripping new movie version, opening this weekend in the Valley, directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes. He retells the story in 21st-Century clothes and settings (much of it was filmed in Serbia and Montenegro), with Shakespeare’s text boiled down to its bones by screenwriter John Logan.

Although T.S. Eliot thought it was superior to Hamlet, Coriolanus is one of Shakespeare’s most brilliant but least-beloved works. It’s the story of a General in the early Roman Republic, Caius Martius, later given the title cognomen for his victory over the Volscians at the town of Corioli, and of how, for all his martial valor, he is ultimately destroyed by his open contempt for the uppity Plebeians—with a little unwitting help from his psychotically militant mother.

For his successes in war, Martius (Fiennes) is nominated for consul, but he can’t get past a formality he finds demeaning—a requisite custom of presenting himself to the common people and displaying his scars won in Rome’s service. An unapologetic Patrician snob, he loathes the commoners, if he thinks about them at all, and is indifferent to their opinion of him.

Cajoled by his mother Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave) and the avuncular consul Menenius (Brian Cox) into the ritual scar-baring, he endures it with misery, only to have the Tribunes stir up an insurrection by convincing the Plebes that he was insincere. They aren’t wrong, either—confronted with this horde, he spews venom at them, and ends up banished for his trouble.

Now homeless, Martius seeks out his mortal enemy—who’s also his unmistakable and requited man-crush—the Volscian leader Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler), and spitefully offers to help him invade Rome. Aufidius gleefully agrees, and the stage is set for a final, catastrophic clash between native loyalty and lust for revenge.

Fiennes and Logan find very clever modern contexts for the verse, and Fiennes’ tense staging of the battle scenes could please any fan of Green Zone or The Hurt Locker. He also captures a wonderful performance from Cox, and one of Redgrave’s best turns in a long time.

Gerard Butler comes off well, too. His Aufidius, thick-bearded, friendly, slyly sexy, makes a startling contrast to Martius.

On top of all this, Fiennes also gives one of his own best screen performances. He’s a strong, commanding actor, and he had a certain sad charm in Quiz Show, but overall, likability isn’t his specialty. That’s not a problem here. He doesn’t need a common touch for his Martius, a portrait of a deeply unhappy man who can only make sense of life in the midst of chaotic violence, to be moving.

Unlikable though the title character is, maybe part of the reason that Coriolanus can be so alienating for modern audiences is that the Ayn-Rand-ian slight regard of Martius for the unwashed herd has its seductive side. From this and many other works, there can be little doubt that Shakespeare shared at least some of his protagonist’s disgust for the fickle and dangerous mob, though not to the same pathological degree, and you may find yourself guiltily stirred up by the sneering invective directed at them (partly because Shakespeare, unlike Ayn Rand, could write).

And finally, in this Primary season you may reflect that, compared to the shameless attempts to dupe us into serving the interests of the rich, the open disdain of Martius for the poor might be downright refreshing.

SOMETIMES BARD IS BAD

Your Humble Narrator missed the screening of Anonymous last October, & didn’t catch up with the film during its brief theatrical run. I wrote a column summarizing my thoughts about the premise it dramatizes—that the works attributed to Shakespeare were secretly written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, with Shakespeare as a front, & that this was covered up for various political & personal reasons.

Ludicrous as I think this idea to be, I was nonetheless very curious to see if Anonymous might be a fun movie on its own terms. Last week it came out on DVD & PPV, & I got my chance to find out.

The film, directed by Roland Emmerich from a script by John Orloff, is a really crazy Renaissance fever-dream. Though the class & academic snobberies from which I believe the Oxfordian “theory” arises are the tale’s unmistakable subtext, it’s hard for me to imagine even a staunch Oxfordian thinking much of the case it makes, since Emmerich & Orloff ignore history at every turn.

Rather than offering even a partial list of its nonsense, suffice to say that, even aside from any speculation about Shakespeare’s authorship, the film shows no more interest in historical accuracy about the Tudor period than, say, Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds showed toward the history of WWII. Taking such liberties is, of course, a perfectly acceptable convention in period drama—for the most obvious example, it was Shakespeare’s own method in his history plays. But it seems an odd approach for a movie that claims setting the historical record straight as its mission.

Aside from any issue of accuracy, the plot, built on the idea that Oxford & Elizabeth I were longtime lovers, is overlong & overcomplicated. But for all that, I quite enjoyed Anonymous. This shouldn’t be mistaken for a recommendation, except to other fanatical (& thick-skinned) Shakespeare geeks for whom even a curio like this has its appeal. It’s a pretty bad movie, I suppose, but it’s a well-made movie, with an absurdly distinguished cast.

Rhys Ifans, with his handsome high forehead & his troubled eyes, is effective as Oxford, wisely not trying to make him likable—the Earl is an imperious & bitter sort, but with a quick, observant mind. Vanessa Redgrave & Joely Richardson are both beguiling as different vintages of Elizabeth, Sebastian Armesto makes an improbably self-effacing Ben Jonson, & Mark Rylance actually gets to do a bit of classical stage acting as Henry Condell.

But these are only a few examples of the fine work done by the huge cast. The actors skulk around the loving recreation of late-Elizabethan London in doublets & tights, murmuring exposition at each other, & if you’re a sucker for this sort of thing, as I am, there’s a decent chance you’ll be amused. Also, laborious as the plot may be, its final twist, though silly & unsavory, is at least a juicy humdinger.

What I most enjoyed about Anonymous, however, was, oddly, its depiction of the “real” Shakespeare. Played rather likably by Rafe Spall, this version of ol’ Will is a Dickensian knave, not just a fraud but a drunken, whoring lout, a vain buffoon, a blackmailer, & even a thuggish cutthroat—it’s implied he murders Christopher Marlowe for threatening to reveal his secret (some six years after poor Marlowe had already died in a barfight).

I couldn’t help but find something perversely endearing in this very posthumous & ineffectual attempt at character assassination. I think it reveals the psychological heart of the Authorship Controversy: The envious resentment that we mediocrities may feel when confronted by an unassailably superior talent—especially a talent who had the nerve not to go to college.

The urge to paint Shakespeare as this movie does isn’t very different, perhaps, than the urge of an underachieving student to doodle obscenely on the face of the valedictorian in the yearbook. It’s outrageous, of course, but—especially at this historical distance—it’s too human to be truly offensive. Shakespeare can take it.