Very cool: Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing

Kudos to Jason Morehead over at Opus for putting together a review roundup for Joss Whedon’s previously under-the-radar Shakespeare adaptation. I’ve been looking forward to this for a while, but now I’m genuinely excited. I hadn’t previously checked out who was in it, and I have to say that the primary appeal for me is to see that cast to that play. I’m particularly keen to see Alexis Denisoff and Amy Acker as Benedick and Beatrice, respectively. The frisson, for Whedon fans, is that Denisoff and Acker played the star-crossed Wesley and Fred on Angel. As much as Whedon loves screwing over fan-fave characters, it’s kind of sweet for him to cast the performers for one of his most infamous doomed duos as a pair for whom things pretty much work out — with plenty of barbs, bumps, bruises, and murder requests along the way, natch.☕

Let us remake them in their own images

Stories have been retold for ages.  The Romans stole the Greek pantheon, changing the names, tweaking the stories, and reselling Greek mythology as Roman mythology.  Thomas Malory assembled known tales about Arthur and his knights into his grand compendium, Le Morte d’Arthur, which serves as one of the ur-texts of Arthurian legend, even though it was more a personalized feat of scholarship rather than an origination.  And how about the Bible?  Hundreds — thousands — of stories have re-interpreted the tropes of the Christ story in various ways to different purposes.  One of the most venerated retellings of Biblical mythology, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, is my favorite work of literature to date.  And what of that most famous of English wordsmiths, William “the Bard” Shakespeare?  Besides his historical dramas (which are unsourced reinterpretations of well-known events), many of his other plays are also based on pre-existing stories and legends, some of which had already been dramatized by other playwrights.  James Joyce’s Ulysses, considered by many to be the greatest novel of the 20th century, is an imaginative reworking of Homer’s Odyssey.

Män som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women) ☕ d. Niels Arden Oplev, 2009

Confession time: the primary reason I’m logging my thoughts about the 2009 adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (as it’s known in English-speaking countries) on my blog now is because I want to have a reference for later, when the David Fincher version comes out.  I’m one of those fascinated-by-the-process apologists who refuses to get my knickers in a twist every time a movie I like is remade.  Part of it is exhaustion.  It’s very tiring to get thoroughly worked up every time Hollywood decides to “screw up” a beloved “classic.”  Because it happens a lot.  Then there’s the fact that sometimes — once in a very rare while — the remake is superior to the original.  If not superior, sometimes interesting as a failure.  Or just interesting because it’s substantially different.  Or interesting to see how a film can be redone, nearly shot for shot, for no other purpose than the fact that lazy, American audiences are too stupid and lazy to read subtitles.  Or the fact that lazy, American studios and distributors don’t bother to market foreign or older films very aggressively.