Thursday, April 29, 2021

Unexpected Agincourt in Mystery Men

Mystery Men
. Dir. Kinka Usher. Perf. Ben Stiller, Janeane Garofalo, and William H. Macy. 1999. DVD. 
Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2010.

Here's a little something fun courtesy of ShakespeareGeek, who mentioned it on his blog on Shakespeare day.

It's a brief clip from a film about, according to IMDB, "A group of inept amateur superheroes [who] must try to save the day when a supervillain threatens to destroy a major superhero and the city."

I haven't seen the film myself (but it sounds a bit like the 2000 film The Specials, so I think I'll enjoy it). But this is clearly the scene where the heroes are up against it and ready to give up. Don't give up on the scene—give it a try:  


Well, there's not much of the St. Crispin's speech there, but I still think it's a successful modernization. I'm eager to give the rest of the film a chance. Perhaps there will even be a victor's speech like the one at the end of Richard III.

Links: The Film at IMDB.

Click below to purchase the film from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

1 comment:

Rose said...

Mystery Men has a startlingly star-studded cast (Geoffrey Rush, Greg Kinnear, William H. Macy, Ben Stiller Janeane Garofalo, Hank Azaria, Eddie Izzard and even Ceelo Green!) and really is a fun watch. It's just bonkers and over-the-top and I love it.

And it's currently on Netflix!

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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