Tuesday, August 19, 2008

"Why must the show go on?" Because of films like this!

A Midwinter’s Tale [a.k.a. In the Bleak Midwinter]. Dir. Kenneth Branagh. Perf. Richard Briers, Hetta Charnley, Joan Collins, Nicholas Farrell, Mark Hadfield, Gerard Horan, Celia Imrie, Michael Maloney, Jennifer Saunders, Julia Sawalha, and John Sessions. 1995. Videocassette. Turner, 1999.

I haven’t been able to get Branagh’s A Midwinter’s Tale (for which q.v.) out of my mind, and I thought we’d all enjoy the opening two minutes—in a combination of text and video.

Joe Harper: It was late November, I think, and I was thinking about the whole Christmas thing: the birth of Christ, The Wizard of Oz, Family Murders, and, quite frankly, I was depressed. I mean—you know, I had always wanted to live my life like in an old movie. Sort of fairy tale, you know? Mind you, I suppose if you think that a lot of fairy tales turn out to be nightmares and a lot of old movies are crap, then that’s what I did.

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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.
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