This seems more like a pot-fueled Shakespeare idea.
You add crack to Shakespeare, you end up with Titus.
Hmmm. A light romantic comedy, penned in English and featuring characters who are obviously English, yet absurdly set in medieval Japan. My, but this sounds familiar.
Methinks Branaugh in trying to pull a fast one, but I’m not fooled. He’s really directing a big screen adaptation of The Mikado, but knows he’ll lose funding from all the high-fallutin’ snobs who turn up their noses at such undeserving fluff.
So who’s playing Ko-Ko?
And BTW, Kevin Kline is (IIRC) the only American actor who has played Hamlet in a major West End production – and received great acclaim for it.
'Round hereabouts they call that Twelfth Night, baby! 
So? So? It’s NINJA SHAKESPEARE, my friend! How will this not be the awesomest pseudo-pretentious movie ever made?
Just think of how many great stage-to-screen translations there could be made with ninjas.
“Oedipus Ninja”
“Death of a Ninja”
“The Importance of Being a Ninja”
“A Ninja Named Desire”
“The Philadelphia Ninja”
Box office GOLD. Ken Branagh is a (crack-addled) genius.
I’m not seeing the pretension here, since you quoted Branagh saying “I’m trying to make Shakespeare accessible and inspire the opposite of reverence.” That lends itself to Ninja Shakespeare more than reverence and pretension do.
Dude, that’s like saying The Mikado is no good because Gilbert got all the details of Japanese culture wrong. Wrong they were indeed, gloriously wrong. Remember, Shakespeare’s pastoral comedies are set in a timeless landscape that has tenuous connections at best to any real historical setting. In A Winter’s Tale, Bohemia as a seacoast, for chrissake! As You Like It is not really set in any particular, real-life French duchy, the Forest of Arden is merely an artistic abstraction of the Ardennes Forest, so what’s wrong with setting it in some abstraction of Japan inhabited by white people?
What’s “authentic” when you do Shakespeare, anyway? A truly “authentic” production of Julius Caesar would have the characters wearing Elizabethan hose-and-doublets rather than Roman tunics-and-togas – because that’s how the actors under Shakespeare’s direction would have done it.
I just want to know where Adam Sandler fits in.
I’m not entirely sure if you’re in earnest or if you’re running with my lame joke by emulating the way “Star Wars sucks!” “No it doesn’t!” arguments typically go.
For the record, I’m looking forward to seeing how Branagh’s As You Like It turns out. I usually enjoy his stuff and this sounds like it could be interesting.
(Might be the best thing since Strange Brew, eh?)
Seriously? I was very surprised by how much I didn’t like him playing Nick Bottom - given how good he is in most films. He brought too damn much pathos to what was supposed to be a funny role.
Stanley Tucci was the bright spot in that movie for me. I did think that it was vastly underrated, incidentally. I quite enjoyed the whole film.
It sounds like it could be a lot of fun. Let the anal retentives get their hackles up because it’s not set in England (ignoring things like Orson Welles’s modern dress MACBETH or Joseph Papp’s 1898 “Much Ado” or Ian McKellan’s 1930s “Richard III” – all find Shakespeare adaptations). Branagh has some some of the best adaptation of Shakespeare on film (and his Frankenstein was absolutly brilliant) and I’m sure he could pull it off again.
God forbid you use your imagination about something. :rolleyes:
As long has Branagh has Kevin Kline in the cast, I personally thing that Kline would make a better Touchstone than Branagh himself. I guess when you are the director, you get the best part for yourself.
Sweetums
(who got to play Touchstone in college)
Dude, this has got to rock one way or another. I mean, either glorious art or total MST3K. Either way, it’s on my must-see.
Now, what play would you adapt for Pirate Shakespeare?
I’m looking forward to this, and I speak as someone who thought Tromeo & Juliet was one of the best Shakespeare adaptations of the last two decades.
…which made him the only actor I’ve seen who actually made something of Bottom’s last speech. Everybody else tries to make a quick, confused joke out of it and it never works.
They could finally do “Romeo and Juliet” as “Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter” – the way it was meant to be done!
I’ll grant Branaugh this: a Japanese-influenced adaptation has the potential for some interesting variants of the drag elements of the play (the theatricality of Noh drama, red-light-district geisha girls, etc.) Although the prospect of Western actors donning the whiteface makes my brain hurt.
Or is Branaugh planning a contemporary Japanese spin on it?
Oh, you purists. :rolleyes:
Yeah, I really can’t explain it. I just expect him, at any moment, to break character and order a half caf low-fat caramel machiatto or something. Something about the cadence and pacing of his speech and the movement of his body just screams “stage actor circa 1990.”
I know it’s irrational, but I can’t figure out any other reason why I love his contemporary work, and get lost in his modern characters, but the period ones might as well have a flashing neon sign pointing to him reading KEVIN KLINE! LOOK! IT’S KEVIN KLINE OVER HERE!!! IT’S THE FISH CALLED WANDA DUDE!!!>>>>
I saw Welles’ film version of Macbeth and it was in a Dark Age setting with Dark Age costumes. Are you referring to a staged version?
If I lived in modern Japan, I know I’d want to run for the woods!