Word: branagh
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Fifty homegrown productions, including films like Kenneth Branagh's The Magic Flute and the upcoming Elizabeth sequel, The Golden Age, contributed $290 million. But the real boost came from outsiders, especially U.S. studios, which poured $1.12 billion into filming Bond and Potter as well as non-English creations using the country's locations, talent or technical know-how. That's the level of activity the industry might have expected after a bumper year like 2003 when Bridget Jones joined forces with Troy and Alexander to help generate $2.2 billion...
Julie Christie doesn't like Shakespeare. So when Kenneth Branagh wanted her for his lush new Hamlet, she was disinclined to accept. "I just find Gertrude such a weird part. And I didn't know if I wanted to get into all that emotionalizing," says the actress whose cool presence lit up classic films like Dr. Zhivago and McCabe & Mrs. Miller but who hasn't been seen much onscreen since the '60s and early '70s. Friends changed her mind about Gertrude. "I'm ever so glad they did," she says...
...movie history--Julie Christie, Billy Crystal, Gerard Depardieu, John Gielgud, Rosemary Harris, Charlton Heston, Derek Jacobi, Jack Lemmon, John Mills, Robin Williams, Kate Winslet and the Duke of Marlborough, to name but a dozen--in the second longest film released by a major studio (after Cleopatra). If Kenneth Branagh doesn't win an Oscar for his four-hour, uncut Hamlet, he should at least cop a Chutzpah Award...
...with Crystal a nice surprise as the gravedigger and Richard Briers rescuing Polonius from amiable fuddery; this old man is as much plotter as plodder. If there's a lapse, it's in the central performance. Spuming his lines with catarrhal intakes of breath punctuating the bolts of rhetoric, Branagh is a whiz at making the poetry colloquial and intelligible; he spits out the 400-year-old verse like a rapmaster. But he can't so easily make it poetic...
...scrim resembling the Viet Nam memorial wall in Washington. This sobering reminder of the wages of war remains onstage during the final lighthearted scenes, when the King shifts from fighter to lover, as if to mock his charm. The production is vigorous, persuasive, at moments unforgettable, and in Kenneth Branagh, 24, it features a potential heir to the legacy of Olivier, Richardson and Gielgud. Branagh has the animal magnetism of a leading man and the cerebral fire and ice of a character actor. He brings off the hortatory set pieces of command with howling fervor and excels at the gentle...