Oh, *that* guy

[randy_byers]

I've been rereading Shakespeare's The Tempest, and it got me in the mood for Shakespeare on film. So I watched A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999) again, probably for the fourth or fifth time. One of the things I love about this movie is the cast, with Kevin Klein, Michelle Pfeiffer, Rupert Everett, Stanley Tucci, Christian Bale, and David Straithairn at the top of the bill. However, this time around I recognized a couple of the secondary actors for the first time.

First was Roger Rees as Peter Quince. Rees first came to my attention as the delightfully drunken British ambassador on The West Wing, Lord John Marbury. More recently I spotted him with a completely different accent playing the German-Mexican father in Frida. He actually sports a similar mustache and yet a third accent as Quince. I see from IMDb that he was in The Prestige, but I don't remember his part.

The other actor I recognized was Sam Rockwell as Francis Flute. Rockwell first came to my attention in this year's British SF film, Moon, although I was reminded when I saw Galaxy Quest on an airplane recently that he's the hilarious redshirt character in that film. Rockwell gets one of the great scenes in this adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream when his Thisbe stops the laughter with an unexpectedly heartfelt death scene. It's a great bit of acting, as is his dual role in Moon.

I found the movie less visually interesting than I have in the past, but I still really enjoyed it as a presentation of the play and for the air of melancholy given to the ass, Bottom. He has spent a night in heaven, and it will haunt him the rest of his life. For all the play's comic frothiness, a tone of melancholy is well-suited, because the depiction of love's mechanical and mutable nature is pretty haunting in its own right. It's a little bit like Mozart's opera Cosi fan tutte that way.

Comments

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

Have you ever seen the star-studded 1935 version? Jimmy Cagney as Bottom, Mickey Rooney as Puck, and Olivia de Havilland as Hermia, among others.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

We've recently been going through the BBC miniseries, Shakespeare Re-Told, which takes four of the plays and sets them in contemporary settings and tells the core story of the play without any of the Shakespearean language. It's an interesting exercise, especially since the plays a couple of the plays they picked seem hard to drag into the 21st century. But one of the plays that works surprisingly well is their version of Midsummer Night's Dream, set in a cabin resort where most of the participants are either guests of a wealthy businessman throwing an engagement party for his daughter, or staff of the resort. There are still fairies, though.

It did put me in mind that it might be time to re-watch the 1999 film, and since I hadn't remembered Sam Rockwell being in it that's an additional impetus. Rockwell is remarkably versatile, and cameleonlike, unrecognizably different in every role. (Cue cranky Harrison Ford, re Apocalypse Now: "I'm an actor, dammit, you're not supposed to recognize me!")

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

You do have a knack for making me want to drop everything else I'm watching and watch what you're watching. I've only seen the '99 Dream once, and it sounds like it would be well worth watching again. And of course I'm eager for Taymor's Tempest and long for a goodly immersion in various forms of that play. I haven't seen Branagh's Henry V but I love his Much Ado -- it is an utterly joyous production and left me feeling gloriously alive -- though I second smofbabe's caveat about Keaton's Dogberry. But then the part itself is badly overwritten. Branagh's As You Like It is also quite good and worth a look, despite a strangely untalkative Rosalind.