Counterpoint; Joss Whedon is awesome

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=113937

I actually took your Desc: at face value before watching.

Well, obviously. I can't believe how much I loved The Avengers. I've never seen a comic book movie that was so true to the comic book, and yet it worked. And it worked because of fundamental narrative virtues. It worked because of storytelling.

I knew one guy would take it literally, and you are that guy.

I would have done the same thing. It's a reference to this discussion, a comment from Stanley Pain:

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=118791

JHM, I went and saw this last night. It is one of the worst movies I have ever seen, and tied for the worst Shakespeare performance I have ever seen. In short, the acting is unforgivable.

Whedon fans are giving my online reviews as many thumbs-down as possible.

5 FOR EVIL.

He's got a lot of nerds who are enthusiastic about his work, and that's enough to make about half of POETV feel like they have an obligation to hate him.

Whedon is a consistently entertaining filmmaker, and that's a difficult thing to find. And after The Cabin in the Woods it would take a hell of a lot to get him on my shit list.

It's all been downhill since Orson Welles staged Julius Caesar back in the 30s with the Romans as Nazis. You're never gonna top that for a modern update of Shakespeare.

That sounds really awesome, but so did Orson Welles making Don Quixote, which was really awful (poeworthy really). It was about how Don Quixote doesn't fit in the modern world and how Orson Welles should drink a lot.

I don't understand WHY we can't have a full Renaissance tights and swords Shakespeare any more. They just stopped making them. I wouldn't MIND seeing a full period production, honest.

The Ethan Hawke Hamlet gets a lot of that play right that other film versions miss. Bill Murray is Polonius. And no I'm not joking.

To be fair Welles never finished the film, a lot of it remains in private collections -- the prints floating around are just fragments thrown together with little consideration given to coherency or juxtaposition. (except for the beginning)

If you've never seen a good one, I suspect that you just don't like them. I loved Ian McKellen as Richard III, Julie Taymor's Titus with Anthony Hopkins, and Baz Luhrmann's 1996 Romeo and Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio and Clare Danes.

I'm only 55, so, of course, I never saw Orson Welles' famous production of Julius Caesar.

I had a hard time with the Ethan Hawke's Hamlet, because they edited the dialogue right smack in the middle of the line of verse, and I founs that jarring. If I wasn't so familiar with the verse, I think I might have loved it, but even though I had bought my own (used) DVD, I never finished watching it.

The last full period production I remember was Twelfth Knight, with Helena Bonham Carter. Turns out that was in 1996.

You may be right, I probably just don't like the genre. Did you ever see the Family Guy (normally this would be the part in the conversation when a decent human would stop reading) where they did Anna and the King with robots and stuff? That's how I see the motivations behind everyone voluntarily engaging in the making of these modern Shakespeare movies. Like they sincerely set out to insult Shakespeare because they don't like him.

Yes, I think Patrick Stewart must secretly hate Shakespeare.

Coriolanus was pretty good.

Yeah, Coriolanus was not bad even a little. I saw it twice in theaters, proudly. Richard III with McKellen is good.

As far as the Hawke Hamlet, I don't remember edits of the dialogue mid-verse, JHM. It could be. Was it prose? There's no real definitive version of Hamlet, so that complicates it greatly, but the line in question might be clearly definitive or not. The Branagh Hamlet is very complete, and very hot and cold. I don't remember the Branagh Othello enough to say.

As far as other recent versions presented historically, the Twelfth Night from the 90's is not bad. Taming of the Shrew from the 80s' with John Cleese is not bad.

I can't recommend As You Like It from the 00's or Midsummer Night's Dream from the 90's, even though Kevin Kline does well with his big speech in both. [Jaques and Bottom]. I don't like Taymor or Luhrman, but if they get people into Shakespeare, good.