Sunday, February 22, 2009

Mazursky's Tempest

Tempest. Dir. Paul Mazursky. Perf. John Cassavetes, Gena Rowlands, Susan Sarandon, Raul Julia, and Molly Ringwald. 1982. DVD. Sony Pictures, 2007.
This may be one of the mircoest posts in this microblog, but here it is. In Mazursky's Tempest (part of which I'm using in my Shakespeare and Film class to show the degrees of Shakespearean derivatives), the characters mention the possibility of a new musical:  "It's a cross between Chorus Line and Macbeth."

The film itself is a good derivative, playing with the plot and abandoning Shakespeare's language.  "Show me the magic," says the Prospero analogue as he summons up a storm—toward the end of the film rather than the beginning.

It also introduces Molly Ringwald, who plays the Miranda analogue!
Links: The Film at IMDB.

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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