Julian Marsh is an out of work ladies' man who lands a job directing a bizarre adaptation of Hamlet. After casting his best friend and his ex-girlfriend in the show, Julian finds himself in the middle of a two thousand year old conspiracy that explains the connection between Shakespeare, the Holy Grail and some seriously sexy vampires. It turns out that the play was actually written by a master vampire name Theo Horace and it's up to Julian to recover the Grail in order to reverse the vampire's curse...If only being undead wasn't so much God-damned fun!
23 Feb Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead (2009)
Mousetrap, Mice
I‘m a sucker for folded, reflexive and referential narrative, and especially so when built on Carroll or Shakespeare. So take this comment in that spirit. You will probably find this movie juvenile, but there are some clever things going on.
The overall shape is based on the play and not on people or romance. Each performance of Hamlet in this world is a reincarnation of a complex being at war with itself. Over thousands of performances, it tries to resolve its inner conflicts, sometimes going back. There is a complex secondary karma as these performances sweep up the actors and sometimes the audience, ‘infecting‘ them with energetic plasma.
To negotiate this story, we enter through the eyes of a potential saviour, each intelligent director being the next fresh soul to attempt to bring order to the play. His life has its own dramas and the players and situations in his life fold into the play. Tensions involve sex, death, blood, being. It springs from Stoppard as much as from Shakespeare.
So far so good, a standard Hamlet.
The key participants are the sons of John Lennon and Dustin Hoffman. They have no idea what is going on, none. There are some women, and some attempt to weave a universal female around Ophelia, but she is played by a talentless model. Everyone involved in the actual staging of this play decided to pretend to be inept so as to hide their ineptness.
Good stuff spoiled. We could have had a ‘Shadow of the Vampire‘ crossed with ‘Tampopo.‘ What we have instead is unwatchable, except for the first few moments with Bijou Philips in a fairy costume. The camera loves her.
Posted in 2011
Ted’s Evaluation — 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
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