Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Shakespeare in Arrested Development

“Bringing Up Buster.” By Mitchell Hurwitz and Richard Rosenstock. Perf. Justin Grant Wade, Jason Bateman, Michael Cera, Alia Shawkat, and David Cross. Dir. Joe Russo. Arrested Development. Season 1, episode 3. Fox. 16 November 2003. DVD. Twentieth-Century Fox, 2013.

A great amount of fluster and flurry surrounded the recent release of a new fourth season of Arrested Development. Having missed most of the episodes of the show when it originally aired and feeling reluctant to be left out, I started catching up. Not far in, I found some good Shakespeare.

The plot is complicated. Those who know the show probably already know what's going on; those who don't are advised to read the Wikipedia article on the episode for more details.

In short, the high school is putting on a production of Much Ado About Nothing; various members of the family try out for it for various reasons. The father of one (and the uncle of the other) takes over as the show's director in order to meddle. I've excerpted the key scenes in the clip below.


Links: The Episode at Wikipedia.


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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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