Shakespeare in Secret

I'm approaching my final year at University, and as an English student I'm about to embark on the inevitable; Shakespeare. So far this summer I've managed to read 28, which leaves only ten to go, so the finish line is very much in sight. Hurrah! Obviously Shakey's been dead for centuries, and yet his plays have somehow transcended the constraints of time with stories that even now are frequently reproduced for the screen. Perhaps the most significant upcoming release is King Lear, featuring Anthony Hopkins as the tragic title-character with Keira Knightley, Gwyneth Paltrow and Naomi Watts as his three daughters. It's a great play and could make a great film, so I'm already really excited despite the fact that we're looking at a 2010 release. There's been no shortage of Shakespeare in cinemas in the last decade, and those with the biggest box office hauls have been those which relocate the action to modern-day America and reimagine the characters as high-schoolers. So what impact does this have on the original text, and why are filmmakers targeting an audience which is presumably the most anti-Shakespeare demographic on earth?

First of all, age isn't always an issue. Baz Luhrmann's excellent Romeo and Juliet was completely accurate; the star cross'd lovers were always meant to be teenagers. But what about Get Over It, the truly abysmal adaptation of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', or She's the Man, the surprisingly pleasant though occasionally moronic version of 'Twelfth Night'? Why the easy option of a high school comedy when you've already got comedic gold already written and royalty free? As far as I can see, the relocation of these plays to include sixteen to eighteen year olds is an effort on someone's part to pretend as far as possible that the film is about as far away from the bald guy we studied at school as humanly possible. Sure, there's the odd undeniable reference (Illyria in She's The Man, Stratford being Kat and Bianca's surname in Ten Things I Hate About You) but other than that any difficult aspects of the play are scrapped for teenagers' viewing pleasure. In 'Twelfth Night', Violet thinks that her brother has died in a shipwreck and, stranded in a foreign land, pretends to be a boy to ensure her security. In She's The Man, Violet is merely left a note by her brother stating that he has popped over to London for a couple of weeks, and she disguises herself as him in order to be able to play soccer. It is as if whoever wrote the script needed to flip the gender roles even more than Shakespeare did and thought 'I know, we'll make her like sports!' Similarly, the final message of 'The Taming of the Shrew' spoken by Katherine herself, that women should always obey men, is scrapped in favour of the concept that men will always be forgiven for being paid to date a woman if they buy her a guitar. The original message is of course too dated for modern day life, but then why bother making the film? It's a great teen film, but there's a strange friction between the original play and the new film which renders it a poor adaptation. So why push Shakespeare into the shadows? Are teenagers really so shallow that they would be less likely to see Get Over It if the trailers mention any trace of him? Maybe they are, in which case they're likely to miss out on King Lear unless some hasty re-writes make Lear a rich businessman offering his three major credit cards to his three high-school daughters before the two eldest try and bankrupt him while the youngest flees to a boarding school in France. If they manage to credibly get the eye-gouging scene in, I'll be first in the queue.

Why Keira's In For A Challenge

There are few Hollywood starlets that I rate more highly than Keira Knightley, and of all late actresses I am fairly unoriginal in my fondness for Audrey Hepburn, so the news that Knightley has signed up to fill Hepburn’s shoes in a planned remake of My Fair Lady is, for me, great news. Her vocals in the recent release The Edge of Love suggest that she won’t require the dubbing that Hepburn did, and her last couple of performances have truly proven that she has the acting chops to manage the role. The problem seems to be, however, whether or not any individual can ever truly succeed in a performance that has been done to perfection already. Jude Law, for example, failed spectacularly to capture the cheeky charm of Michael Caine’s Alfie, while Heath Ledger had to almost completely reinvent the Joker in order to escape the shadow of Jack Nicholson. Ledger’s is one of the few success stories in an encyclopaedia of failures, and there are perhaps no actors whose body of work has been imitated to such vast and undoubtable failure as Hepburn. I’m staying hopeful that Knightley will do the part justice, but given the past efforts it’s not looking good. Let’s review shall we?

Julia Ormond in Sabrina
As remakes go this isn’t half bad, but Ormond lets herself become upstaged by hog Harrison Ford, something that Audrey Hepburn would never have done. As appearances go, it’s a great match, but the performance is a little lacklustre and isn’t a patch on the original.

Thandie Newton in The Truth About Charlie
An adaptation of one of my favourite Hepburn films Charade, this is just awful. Thandie Newton is certainly as beautiful as the woman who played Reggie Lampert first time around, but her acting is hammy and over the top and the chemistry between Hepburn and Cary Grant which made Charade so wonderful is practically non-existent with Thandie and Mark Wahlberg (who, incidentally, should stop ruining remakes with his presence).

Mandy Moore in Chasing Liberty
This isn’t a remake in the strictest sense, but is generally perceived as a modern re-imagining of Roman Holiday, set in a montage of European cities and featuring a very familiar Vespa ride. Mandy Moore is her usual perky self in a fairly pleasant film, but never truly convinces that she’s not just playing herself again.

Jennifer Love Hewitt in The Audrey Hepburn Story
Again, not a remake, but a biopic. There are no words to describe how awful Love Hewitt is in this, so I shan’t bother finding any.


Good Luck Keira. With the reputation that precedes you, something tells me you’re going to need it.

Spot the Difference

It has recently been revealed that Tim Burton will soon start work on his adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, with casting beginning with Australian actress Mia Wasikowska and the possibility of Johnny Depp (right, as Willy Wonka) appearing as the Mad Hatter. Past attempts to transfer Lewis Carroll’s classic novel to film have been wildly unsatisfying (I’m thinking specifically of Disney’s animation and the 1999 TV movie) but I’m sure that Burton has the ability to bring out the true hallucinogenic quality of Wonderland. On discovering the news of this film though, my first thought had nothing to do with casting, or Burton, or even past adaptations. Instead, I instantly remembered reading about another film currently stuck in pre-production; Alice, based on the computer game where Carroll’s protagonist returns to the strange world to find it a darker place than she remembers. It looks as if the film may never get made and yet IMDb still slates it for a 2009 release. So does the world want two Alice in Wonderland films in the space of a year? How does the first to be released effect the second? Can both find an audience and financial success, or is one doomed to fail?

Let’s look at the track record. Hollywood is rarely original so the release of two similar films in quick succession is hardly a new issue, just look at Antz and A Bug’s Life. If I stopped the average person in the street, however, and asked them if they’d seen the 1991 film about Robin Hood, they would surely assume that I was enquiring about Prince of Thieves starring Kevin Costner (which I love by the way). Very few, if any, would even acknowledge the existence of the film’s rival Robin Hood, which starred Uma Thurman as Marian (below left, with Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in Prince of Thieves right) and had a video release in the UK after being made for TV in the US. The film is no worse than the more famous version, and is at the very least more historically accurate than Costner’s offering (the Celts several centuries out of date really got me). So why did one get all the attention? Perhaps it has something to do with the actors involved; Kevin Costner, Christian Slater, Alan Rickman and Morgan Freeman were all big names in the early nineties, while Thurman was a new face on the Hollywood radar after Dangerous Liaisons. If the big names always win, however, then what about Infamous? This 2006 film followed Truman Capote’s relationship with the men who inspired In Cold Blood, practically the same story as 2005’s hugely successful Capote. Infamous, however, had a host of Hollywood stars including Sandra Bullock, Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Sigourney Weaver and Isabella Rossellini, surely trumping its competitor. Nor is the film considered particularly inferior to the other, while many consider Toby Jones’s performance superior to the one which won Phillip Seymour Hoffman an Oscar. In this case then, the answer to the question of why one succeeds while the other fades into obscurity is simple; Capote got there first.

If the success of a film with a direct subject rival can be hampered by an inferior all-star cast or a secondary release, then the makers of Dylan must be bracing themselves for a car crash. After this summer’s The Edge of Love, a film about Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’s relationship with his wife and ex (played by starlets Sienna Miller and Keira Knightley), comes the delayed Caitlin (starring Rosamund Pike as the eponymous wife) and then Dylan starring, um, Neil Morrissey and Matthew Kelly in supporting roles. If they submit to the trend which has destroyed the success of Robin Hood and Infamous, then the third Dylan Thomas film in one year may not be third time lucky. We can only hope that Tim Burton can break the curse.