Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Bogdanov's Macbeth

Macbeth. Dir. Michael Bogdanov. Perf. Sean Pertwee and Greta Scacchi. 1998. DVD. Home Vision Entertainment, 1998.

Originally broadcast in the UK, Bogdanov's Macbeth is a straightforward performance. The only particularly exciting thing about it is that it's placed in a modernized setting. Yet it's not without its interest. In the dagger speech, Sean Pertwee gives us a suffiiently awed Macbeth, and Bogdanov's decisions about voiceovers are intriguing:


There are other points of interest in the film, including Bogdanov's use of the witches and his use of special effects (especially as they relate to the witches). The witches are homeless women who have the ability to scatter themselves to the wind in the traditional Saturday-morning-movie fashion. But we'll have to save that for another time.

Links: The Film at IMDB.

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

No comments:

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