Word: ghosting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Some impatience with the play perhaps results from seeing this scenario one too many times. Popular movies (Ghost, Beetlejuice, Ghostbusters) with the same treatment of otherworldly experiences have numbed us to the once-ingenious plot. It's particularly ironic that his plays should seem hackneyed, since Coward's ideas broke into the conservatism of the 1940's with his sexual innuendo and fresh comedic touch. Damn that Hollywood...
...restaurant one night, as he chats over dinner with his attorney, Stephen Neal, the legal Houdini behind his release, Keating confronts naked hostility: a complete stranger, recognizing his craggy features like a ghost from an old "wanted" poster, drops by his table to hurl an unprovoked insult. He's unperturbed. "When I was first brought into the lockup I faced a howling, screaming mob," Keating says matter-of-factly. He points out that unlike other major white-collar felons of the 1980s, who sojourned in comparatively luxurious "Club Feds," he did "hard time." On the inside, he was known...
Branagh sets the play in a pre-World-War-I era, apparently for no reason other than novelty. As all Hamlet-o-philes know, the story begins with the sighting of King Hamlet's ghost by Horatio (Nicholas Ferrell), Marcellus (Jack Lemmon '47) and Barnardo (Ian McElhinney). Here Bismarck-style hats poised atop the head of an improbably cast Marcellus steal a scene intended to prepare the audience for the play's mood of ranting and revenge. But to the audience's consternation, the period so over-emphasized early on plays a minor or non-existent role later...
Unable to decide if he wants to scare us into being enthralled by the film, or present us with visual candy, Branagh falls short on special effects, particularly with those for the ghost of King Hamlet. Perhaps attempting to prove his knowledge of Saxo Grammaticus, one of Shakespeare's main sources for Hamlet, in which Hamlet Senior is more a demon than a shade, Branagh plays up Hamlet's first meeting with his father after his death like a campy horror film. Hamlet runs, panting, through a forest of wind-bent trees, while smoke bellows out of the ground seemingly...
Branagh's spooky portrayal of King Hamlet commanding his son underlines his opinion that it is mainly the ghost who motivates the play's ensuing violence. Shifting the blame for Hamlet's sanguinary campaign of vengeance to the execution of King Hamlet's behest allows Branagh to play one of the more sane versions of the Dane seen in the last 20 years. His Hamlet is not moping and melancholy, but rather a clever and witty theater buff...