Word: shakespeareanly
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...SHAKESPEAREAN ACTORS. London loved U.S. writer Richard Nelson's semitrue story about rival Macbeths who sparked an 1849 New York City riot. For the Broadway staging, now in previews, Brian Bedford and Victor Garber play the duo, one British and one American, one declamatory and the other psychological in style...
...different story. Or rather nonstory, in which a pair of homosexual hustlers (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves) search inconclusively for the meaning of their lives. What plot it has is borrowed, improbably, from Henry IV, and whenever anyone manages to speak an entire paragraph, it is usually a Shakespearean paraphrase. But this is a desperate imposition on an essentially inert film. There's more drama, and comedy, in the reviews of critics who committed themselves to Van Sant's anti-Establishment genius after Cowboy and | are trying to justify their enthusiasm now. Talk about desperation...
DEAD AGAIN. Kenneth Branagh, Shakespearean phenom of the London stage, hatched an improbable hit from this no-star film noir. Branagh has fun ransacking Hitchcock's skeleton closet, and his wife Emma Thompson is ravishing as the doomed heroine, but there's not much here to prop up a preposterous plot...
Celebrity detection is not difficult here. Felicia Lisle, a beautiful British actress who wins an Oscar just before World War II playing a Southern belle in Hollywood's grandest period extravaganza, sounds a lot like Vivien Leigh. And her lover and frequent co-star, the great Shakespearean actor Sir Robert Vane, would need no letter of introduction to Laurence Olivier. Do we recognize bits of the brassy showman Billy Rose? Is that lovable, tormented, red-haired American comedian a scrap of Danny Kaye? Yoo-hoo, Sir Ralph...
...thought such self-questioning doubt was reserved for certain Shakespearean tragic heroes. Little did we know that a certain Undergraduate Council chair was losing sleep over the very same question...