Word: titania
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Hoffman stages their play-within-a-play with energetic conviction, and Bottom's misalliance with Titania, the fairy queen (Michelle Pfeiffer), is played with a certain sexy intensity. But the human lovers (who include Calista Flockhart as the comically obsessed Helena), muddled by the carelessness of Stanley Tucci's smug Puck with his love potions, don't achieve firm definition. Lacking the center of concern they might provide, this version of the play becomes a collection of well-loved scenes: dutiful but mostly unmagical...
...essence, it's two hours of fluff. Not the dryer-lint variety either. We're talking sparkly, ethereal fluff here. Costumes by Academy Award winner Gabriela Pescucci and a setting under the Tuscan sun bake Titania's World in a glittery glow. Hoffman's only departure from The Riverside Shakespeare is his decision to set the romance in Victorian Italy--a transposition that further enhances the plot of romantic confusion. As the frilly dresses and neckties come off, the characters wander into a timeless forest netherworld, where sparkle is queen and the sprites are anything but virginal...
While some may denounce the lack of altercation as uncreative, Shakespeare's original comedy is strangely suited to film. The magic of the lens makes it possible for Pfeiffer's excruciatingly beautiful Titania to fall in love with an Ass (played by an eager Kevin Kline)--a revelation that never quite came off in the written version. Perfect casting decisions and scanty strands of well-placed opalescence turn the scripts' confusing jumble of characters into a fay beauty pageant (fragrances soon available at your local department store...
...sunshine. No, reading period doesn't look like much fun. But, have no fear, dear readers, Hollywood is near! During the next few months over 100 new movies will be released, the most anticipated of which is that one about the Force or something. From Michelle Pfeiffer's charming Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream to Nicole and Tom's romp-arama in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, upcoming films cover a range of genres. Austin Powers is more shagadelic than ever. Adam Sandler plays--surprise!--another doof. Julia Roberts fans will want to catch her first...
...dingly dells of Titania and Queen Mab bordered on the badlands of sex, drugs and hallucination. The last two, especially, were never far away, and all three pervade Christina Rossetti's extraordinary narrative poem of the symbolic rape of a girl by the "Little People," Goblin Market. In painting the action was milder, but fairies were shown appearing in dreams to maidens whose sleep, as the phials by the bedside make clear, was induced by opiates. Then there were the magic mushrooms, which famously appear in Sir John Tenniel's illustration for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland--the stoned...