As You Like It | Brian Blessed, Richard Clifford

As You Like It | Brian Blessed, Richard Clifford | The Perfect Balance

DVDs:

As You Like It

	As You Like It Brian Blessed, Richard Clifford Hbo Home Video, 2007 average customer review:based on 22 reviews view larger image
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I loved it !

Imaginatively directed, superbly cast, beautifully acted and wonderfully orchestrated production, with Kevin Kline's presentation of the seven ages of man quite the best I have ever seen, including Stratford and Montgomery!

The Perfect Balance

This AS YOU LIKE IT is a mixture of comedy and serious issues involving estranged brothers, a desposed duke, and forced and voluntary exile. In this imaginative production the terror and the comedy are well balanced resulting in a somewhat odd combination of comedy and emotion. But this is the wonderful complexity of Shakespeare. There are some cuts in the dialogue, but all in all it results in the best and most coherent telling of the story I have ever seen in the play. And I have seen a lot of productions of this play. Enjoy it for its imagination, freshness, and beauty.

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As I Kind of Like It

It's like watching the cast of FIREFLY do Shakespeare and they're wearing their same costumes, that curious blend of Old West leather and buckskin and vaguely Asian silks, kimonoes, sashes. Branagh must have been inspired by Joss Whedon's version of the future as a mixed bag of racial and gender identities bumping up againat each other like pinballs in a magic machine, for he tries to recreate old Japan (hello, PACIFIC OVERTURES) and makes it playful, dangerous, enchanted fun, a land out of the course of current events, a land in which a black family of brothers could emerge as noblemen intermarrying into the daughters of the white, landed gentry without an eyebrow raised, even though it's the 1820s or 30s or 40s and in many parts of the world slave trade was not yet abolished.

Is the experiment a success? Maybe not, but Branagh brings an immense amount of vitality and bright autumn colors to his screen picture. You might almost believe it could happen, and such is the vivacity of his young leading lady, Bryce Dallas Howard, that even though she is technically ill-suited to play Shakespeare, she's well up to playing the Joss Whedon version given here. Her drag act is one double take after another, lowering and raising her voice along a tiny range, the same cute vocal inflections again and again--like Buffy's--but persuasive, too; she makes you believe she's having the grandest time in the world.

Why cast the Duke and his brother with the same actor (Brian Blessed, just about the most overblown ham since Lorne Greene in BONANZA)? It doesn't make a lot of sense, and to have one of them in white beard, another black, brings to mind the difference between Gandalf the Gray and Gandalf the White in LORD OF THE RINGS. If little Frodo and Samwise had come trailing after the pair I wouldn't have blinked an eye. For Branagh, it's all about the color scheme (I guess), which gives his AS YOU LIKE IT a strange visual unity, reds, yellows, the umber color of falling leaves.

I kept watching and watching and at the end, I turned to my cat and asked her, "Did you get *why* Rosalind had to dress up as a young man?" Or rather, why once it proved inconvenient for her to continue doing so, why didn't she just stop, reveal herself to Orlando? I've seen this play a dozen times before and never before have I had to ask a cat that question. Please comment and answer me, as Sylvia refused to say one way or another.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5

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