#30 - Men of Respect

Here we have another Shakespeare adaptation set in modern times. Of course I say another because I have seen a number of them in recent years, but this one was made in 1991, so I guess the other ones I have seen are actually the "another" Shakespeare adaptations. That doesn't make any damn sense. Anyways, this is an adaptation MacBeth and is set in an Italian mobster environment. Not a bad idea. As we all know from watching the movies, mob families have their heirarchies, chains of command, backstabbing, plotting, and the like. My first thought was that this could work. Uh oh. When I say things like that it is usually followed up by some description of the opposite. Well, I'm not one to disappoint.

It's not that the idea doesn't work, in fact it fits very well. The problem is that they stuck to the original play structure WAY to strictly. The characters and dialogue were modernized, but the scenes were essentially the same as in MacBeth. This is a problem because it's just not very fluid on film. There is a rhythym to Shakespeare and the dialogue flows in and out of the structure of the scenes and acts. In my mind, if you change one, you probably need to change the other. Okay, maybe thats not completely true, but in this case, it wouldn't have hurt to try. Instead we get stuck in this limbo area where everybody is playing this natural modern style, but it just feels clunky because one thing doesnt flow well into the next

For comparison, I submit two movies. A Midsummer's Night Dream and Ten Things I Hate About You. In Midsummer's they presented the story in Victorian times, but they used Shakespeare's dialogue AND his play structure. There was a naturally flowing rhythym to the movie and it worked well for me. In Ten Things, they updated the dialogue AND modernized the structure to match. It had its out rhythyms, but the spine of the story was still intact and the movie was surprisingly well done. So there. Either, or. All or nothing.

Having said all that, we have another film with the odd occurence of admirable performances in a bad movie. It really is a good cast with John Turturro, Stanley Tucci, wait...you can read the damn poster yourself. They are commited to the characters and the story they are telling. Its a nice thing to see, but hard to watch when the film doesnt come across very well.