Word: plot
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...makers of this super-animatronic clunker were so enamored with themselves for creating swarms of giant bugs, big fancy spaceships and massive explosions, and so sure the audience would be equally enthralled, that they neglected to make a passable movie. The special effects are unsupported by any semblance of plot, character development, directing, acting or editing. If you've seen the preview, then you've enjoyed it considerably more than anyone who actually had to sit through...
...Henry James's notoriously dense novel, bringing its melodramatic and erotic undertones to the forefront. A well-bred but dowerless English girl (Helena Bonham-Carter), secretly engaged to an equally impecunious journalist (Linus Roache), persuades her lover to court a young American heiress dying of TB (Alison Elliott). The plot thickens as the three take a pleasure trip to Venice. The scenes in Italy are lovely, and the three stars give superb performances--esp. Bonham-Carter, who brilliantly captures the complexities of her character...
This is not to say that Your Own Thing's main fault is lack of originality. Rather, it stretches Twelfth Night's plot thin and destroys the original play's unity by neglecting important themes and literary nuances. Music, for example, is surprisingly subordinate to the plot. It is convenient that the main characters are musicians and musical agents for the purpose of fitting in songs, but music fails to be the full-bodied theme it is in Twelfth Night. Viola's name is, after all, a pun on the name of the musical instrument, and Twelfth Night opens with...
...revealed, freshly-out-of-the-closet Orson unhesitatingly declares his love for her--whoever s/he is--and Olivia seems only mildly ruffled by the discovery of the discrepancy between Sebastian-as-Charlie and Viola-as-Charlie. Overall, the interpretation in Your Own Thing seems prudish: it takes only plot from Twelfth Night and leaves behind the Shakespeare's finesse...
Slide projections, voice-overs and an offstage puppet theater spiced up what was an otherwise fairly homogeneous performance. Kitschy pop culture icons like Shirley Temple, Humphrey Bogart, and John Wayne kept the audience connected to the plot, and the voices of Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III as the Mayor of Illyria and Professor of English Derek Pearsall as Shakespeare rang with pleasant familiarity amidst the musical's otherwise bizarre cultural collage...