Brush Off Your Shakespeare

Yeah, we're gonna be seeing a lot of this guy.

I’d like to wish you all a good morning, but to be honest, “good morrow” leapt to mind first. That's because I’ve been ingesting a steady diet of Shakespeare for three weeks’ straight and my brain is now unconsciously spitting out words like "thither" and "nonny" and "bonny" and "strumpet." (It sounds like an annoyance, I know, but I'm kind of loving it. My conversation companions, maybe not so much.)

So why so much Shakespeare? Because my colleague Josh Rosenblatt and I are endeavoring in this, our second Film Fight, to take on film adaptations of the Bard. If you want to know more about this crazy thing called Film Fight – about the rules of engagement and the Happy Hour we’re hosting next week at Spider House – go here. And, as always, we'd love to hear back from you, dear reader, and the added incentive is that registered commenters are eligible to win prizes.

So let's dive right in, shall we? For those of you who were with us for the first Film Fight, you’ll remember that Josh and I tend to keep different hours. So I’m gonna toss a few posts out into the ether this morning, Josh will respond in the afternoon, and then we’ll both do some typing tonight.

There's a lot to tackle here, and Josh and I previously agreed to focus today's posts on old versus new adaptations – all of which retain the original language of the Bard (we'll get to works simply inspired by Shakespeare tomorrow).

To be more specific, Josh will be defending the classical/traditional adaptations (everything up to and including Polanski’s Macbeth), while I'll be singing the praises of the contemporary adaptations, many of which rather radically reimagine the text – Julie Taymor’s Titus, for instance, which grab-bags Studio 54, video-game culture, ancient Rome, and Fascist Italy. (Fascism's big with the recontextualizing crowd – see also Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost and the Ian McKellen-starring Richard III.)

I'm gonna get some coffee in my system and then we'll get straight to the film I think we've both been itching to talk about – for very different reasons – since we first set out to do Shakespeare: Baz Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet. I suspect there will be a lot of biting of thumbs at each other, which is just as it should be.