Monday, April 7, 2008

Almereyda's Hamlet: "This is the Tragedy . . ."

Hamlet. Dir. Michael Almereyda. Perf. Ethan Hawke, Julia Stiles, Sam Shepard, and Bill Murray. 2000. DVD. Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2001.
Olivier’s Hamlet opens with the words “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.”

Almereyda’s Hamlet (with Ethan Hawke) might easily open with these lines:
This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind—
—about which video to check out.
And I think those lines would fit the general tongue-in-cheek feel of the film.
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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.

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