Friday, March 21, 2008

Hamlet: Now you See him . . .

Hamlet. Dir. Franco Zeffirelli. Perf. Mel Gibson, Glenn Close, and Helena Bonham Carter. 1990. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2004.
. . . now you don’t.

And that’s one of my favorite things about the Zeffirelli / Mel Gibson Hamlet (the character, not the play). This Hamlet is sneaky.

There are great advantages to portraying a Hamlet who overhears a lot of what goes on in Elsinore. It helps motivate his hatred of Polonius, it helps us understand his suspicions of Ophelia, and it gives him a greater rationale for putting on the mad act.

Of course, that depends on whether we think that Mad Max is capable of merely acting mad and not being mad.
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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

 —The Tempest