34 - Kenneth Branagh's William Shakespeare's Hamlet
Added 2022-05-11 11:01:02 +0000 UTCWhile Josh is out sick with the novel coronavirus, Brian and A.J. return once again to Elsinore Castle as they dive headlong into the four-hour, bloated monstrosity that is Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. They discuss the difficulties of adapting Hamlet to the screen, Kenneth Branagh’s lips, and the dangers of treating any text, no matter how great, as sacrosanct.
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Comments
Hi! I just became a patron of this podcast and I really enjoyed this episode. I’d like to hear you talk about more Shakespeare movies, even if they’re good. You’re both very intelligent.
Elizabeth Power
2022-10-09 22:30:02 +0000 UTCI think there's something hilarious and bleak about this becoming 'the teaching tool' for Hamlet in schools. Of course it would be, for treating the text as sacrosanct but that just reflects the problems with how Shakespeare is often taught; my experience was that - because you're ultimately being trained to write an essay response to a number of effectively preset questions - there's an emphasis on learning parts of the text of the play verbatim, able to recite and reproduce them, largely devoid of context. It was only when I started viewing the questions as invitations to engage with the text thematically that I was actually able to retain them because context links them together. That's sort of how I feel every time I look back on Brannagh's adaptation in the years since then - it's someone who was so obsessed with Doing Shakespeare, the actual story about a scared, depressed teenager called Hamlet became a secondary concern. Also yes I just did enjoy the simple pleasure of listening to two people rip into something they didn't like, thanks.
WarMom
2022-05-16 22:29:55 +0000 UTCI was subjected to this movie in high school, but stopped watching entirely when I noticed the music. The soundtrack is extraordinarily beautiful. Many scenes are accompanied by a variation on a single original theme. It's impressive how different it sounds each time it's reworked. The goodnight, sweet prince scene actually made me cry not because of the acting but because that last return of the theme is so poignant. Worth that terrible movie for the film score, 100%,
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2022-05-15 08:20:58 +0000 UTC
