Love's Labour's Lost

Rating:
Summary: this movie was all "LOST" on me...
Review: I never read Shakespeare's play "Love's Labour's Lost" so it'd be unfair for me to judge the main elements of the plot, but I look at this as a movie and judge it as a moviegoer would.

I had been wanting to rent this movie ever since I knew of its existence, and after years of anticipation, I finally got to see it...but boy, was I in for a laugh. The timing of everything is so unrealistic, the floating in the air scene is purely comical, and the four boys easily fall in love with the four girls only after about two or three minutes of meeting. And immediately they abandon every "No Women" vow in the book. The boys took their oh so sacred oaths as seriously as a girl with braces takes the rule to never chew gum again--it just doesn't happen. I was relieved whenever they broke into song and dance because hearing all the rearranged Shakesperean dialogue just hurt my head. I think I spent more time trying to decode the sentences than I did understanding what the heck was going on. Call me Shakespeare-illiterate, but unless the main female actors were quadruplets, I seriously think the use of color coded costumes to differentiate between the four young ladies could've been avoided. The only result that produced was that the girls went by colors rather than by names.

Do the characters even have names? I think the only two I caught were the King of Navarre and the Princess of France...other than that...yup...it's all lost on me. You have to wait for the credits to find out who is who, that is of course if the three female leads don't mind being called Girl Blue, Girl Orange, and Girl Green.

Ok, ok. I guess I'm being a bit harsh...As ridiculous as some scenes may seem, they can also bring a smile to your face...but I'm glad I decided renting the movie instead of going ahead and investing in a copy of my own. Cuz as I much as I love to hear people with little vocal ability sing, I just can't get over the fact that I still haven't a clue as to what role Nathan Lane plays in all of this.

Rating:
Summary: no, shakespeare never wrote a musical
Review: this is a loose musical adaptation of the non-musical shakespeare play. it misses the point of the play which was about the absurdity of too much bookish learning and the attendant abuses of the english language. but considering the difficulty of the play's language, substituting songs for words is probably the only way to make lll accessible to middlebrow audiences. what branagh does retain is the lighthearted spirit of the play. i prefer the original, and, if you can, watch the bbc tv shakespeare version of 'love's labour's lost'. it's one of my faves.

3 1/2 stars for this unusual adaptation

Rating:
Summary: Fred Astaire Meets Shakespeare
Review: Normally I am a big fan of Kenneth Branaugh, but this just had too much singing and dancing and not enough substance. Everytime it seems that a character got a little bit heartbroken or needed to let off some "girl" or "boy" trouble steam, they suddenly turned into Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. The part where the men were flying in the air singing about love was almost too much for me to stomach.

I do credit Martin Scorsese for taking a relatively experimental step with Shakespeare and making it into a jazzy 30s style movie. Many directors would not take such a chance. This is a movie that is more about fun than taking itself too seriously, and if you are the type that enjoys a good musical, this might be a fun movie to take in.

I just felt it was too much musical and not enough dialogue, and by the end, I really didn't care about any of the characters.

Rating:
Summary: Watch Brannagh's Much Ado or Fred and Ginger, Instead
Review: Kenneth Brannagh started out as the modern wunderkind of Shakespearean cinema. His early films, Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing, are both brilliant, despite some odd casting choices in the latter (Keanu Reeves). And while I wasn't wild about his uncut, four-hour version of Hamlet, he definitely deserves credit for having the guts to film the whole thing. So, while I was deeply skeptical about his approach to Love's Labour's Lost, I decided to give it a chance anyway.

In some ways, it worked. It had entertaining moments, the songs were adequately executed, and the cast was more or less up to the task before them. It is a perfectly acceptable way to spend a otherwise unoccupied afternoon. But having watched it, I will probably never do so again.

Brannagh is both helped and hindered in this production by having chosen one of Shakespeare's lesser known plays. The radical liberties he takes with the text (and the insertion of all those songs!) are more likely to be forgiven (or even really noticed) with this than, say, A Midsummer Night's Dream. That also allows him to get away with the tidying of Shakespeare's rather open-ended non-ending.

But there's a reason Love's Labour's Lost is one of the lesser known plays -- namely, Shakespeare wrote much better ones. Nothing exists in this play (or in the movie version) that isn't done better somewhere else. If you want a Shakespearean comedy, try Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, or a Midsummer Night's Dream. (There are excellent movie versions of each. Better yet, see one live.) If you want to see a thirties musical, try one of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodger's classics. And if you have seen Brannagh's Benedick (in Much Ado), you have pretty much seen his Berowne, and in a better movie with a better cast.

Rating:
Summary: Definitely labored and definitely lost.
Review: Of all the adaptations of Shakespeare's plays for the screen, this is among the very worst. After Branagh's glorious Much Ado About Nothing, one might expect a similar treatment for this comedy. Unfortunately, this was not so. Why bother making a musical with actors and actresses who can neither sing nor dance? Maybe this could be forgiven if the acting weren't, at best, merely adequate.

Rating:
Summary: Reconciling the Poles of Opinion: An Honest "C"
Review: Give Kenneth Branagh credit for his gallant inventiveness and his desire to broaden the contemporary audience for Shakespeare. (He deserves someone's lifetime achievement award for his filmed Shakespeare oeuvre.) Sometimes this Love's Labour's Lost clicks beautifully, other times it misses woefully. In spirit, however, it is wholly consonant with the Bard's light, light-speed, merry-mocking, yet ultimately serious intentions. Serious, yes, because love always has a serious subtext, but Shakespeare also knows better than any who has ever lived how ridiculous love may make both lover and beloved. The broad, broad style of this production perfectly suits the material.

Moreover, Branagh + Shakespeare is always worth it. Absolutely no one has so effortlessly natural a way with any line in Shakespeare than Branagh. Ian McKellan is his match in the tragedies or the history plays, but McKellan is difficult to imagine as Benedick or Biron or Petruccio or any of Shakespeare's wiseguy comic heroes. If this were opera, Branagh would be the greatest bel canto tenor of all time. His masterful voice is on good display here, and particularly so with Biron's great speech on "love, first learnèd in a lady's eyes" from act 4.

I am troubled hardly at all by the singing and dancing inadequacies of the cast: the ensemble numbers reminded me of high school plays - utterly amateurish but overflowing with enthusiasm. And not all lovers are singers and dancers of professional caliber. Although the cast members here are all accomplished actors, when they sing and dance, they're just you, or me, in love, hoofing for their lives and trilling their hearts out - which I count as one of the charms of the picture.

And I am also untroubled by the performances of the crowd-pleasing kids, in particular Alicia Silverstone and Matthew Illiard. Again, their broad comic approach is fine, they did what Branagh directed them to do, and they intoned the lines clearly, and in plain American (part of Branagh's charm as a director is his recognition that Shakespeare doesn't have to be declaimed by figures of marble all draped in togas: the words accept a full range of accents). Even so, not all the cast makes the cut: I thought Timothy Spall's Armado, for example, was close to grotesque - not quite appalling but, perhaps worse, unintelligible: an amusing part utterly wasted. Nathan Lane's Costard, however, amply made up for this - plus he's perfectly at home on the musical (sound)stage.

For all its splendors and creative flights, this production has difficulties that begin with Branagh's savage cut of a play that is undeservedly treated by most critics as "minor": it is early Shakespeare, but in its poetic abundance it is dazzlingly beautiful, filled with verbal delights and the poet's own romantic exuberance. For some odd reason, Branagh has chosen to preserve less of this than the play warrants. He could have given us a great deal more by adding a mere 15 minutes to a very brief (90 minute) film. And whither the rhetorical fencing between Biron and Rosaline? She is the great proto-Rosalind/Beatrice, and here she simply disappears along with much of Shakespeare's words.

And I also have a problem with the almost total breakdown of Branagh's original concept: the timeless examples of the Great American Songbook deployed throughout the film are simply not very well integrated into the narrative flow: they do little to advance the tale, they pop up, they recede, they're gone, they leave no trace. They could have been neatly excised, unlike the poetry and songs they replace, which I missed.

So: on balance, an honestly earned three stars for being game and entertaining, however uneven - and, frankly, for being Shakespeare on film, for which we must all be grateful. (And I must add that, over the past two months at Washington D.C.'s Folger Theater, we've had Aaron Posner's absolutely stunning production of Twelfth Night, which with vastly greater success melds a rock score to a production that uses almost all the words - and makes me think Posner got the idea from Branagh. If that's the case, those who were fortunate to experience the Folger production have additional reason to be grateful to the Great Irishman.)

Rating:
Summary: not worth the rental.
Review: I worked at a video store the summer this came out. I took home the screener, expecting to fall in love with it; I'd heard about the premiere in Entertainment Weekly and was a big fan of Silverstone, in addition to being a Shakespeare fanatic. However, after watching the screener, I found myself questioning the sanity of the director. I thought everything in the movie was perfect, except for the fact that he had hired big names who COULD NOT SING AND DANCE TO SAVE THEIR LIVES. Silverstone is an amazing actress and extremely talented, but the girl just can't sing. The same goes for most of the other big name stars. The director clearly hired big names to draw in the crowds and lure people to theatres, but ruined his movie in the process. Also, it was doubtful as to whether anyone in the film (besides Kenneth B.) knew what he or she was saying (i.e. understood Shakespeare's text). Other than that, the costumes, set and script were amazing; the director simply botched the whole thing by hiring the wrong actors and actresses to sing and dance (Matthew Illiard as a singer? c'mon now). But, as always, K.B. was a treat to watch perform, although I wouldn't reccomend him for any future dancing roles.

Rating:
Summary: Delightful!
Review: This movie was a wonderful surprise. This pleasant blending of showtunes and Shakespere is a keeper, guaranteed to lift spirits.

Rating:
Summary: This is a unknown gem......Alicia Sliverstone radiants....
Review: Unless you are a fan of musicals...and a love story..than this movie is for you...
I saw this movie when starz had a free preview and let me tell you i love this movie....
this is a beautifuly done movie..kenneth brannah did a wonderful directorial job in this movie.
Alicia Sliverstone radiants and shines in this movie. This movie is a must....i give it 5 stars....

Rating:
Summary: Branagh has many better Shakespeare plays on DVD
Review: Okay, go ahead and click "NO" if this makes you angry, but I wish somebody had written a review like this to keep ME from buying this DVD, so I'll risk mentioning an insufficiency of imperial raiment. I have written enthusiastic reviews, but not this time. I couldn't stand to watch all of this mess and would donate it to the Public Library if I weren't worried about ruining somebody's first Shakespeare experience.

For one thing, although Branagh handled his lines as well as usual, some of the cast's wooden delivery sounded like high school kids. For another, the Broadway song & dance numbers were often just plain silly and not meshed well with the script and action.

"Much Ado About Nothing" and "Henry V" clearly prove that with the right cast, direction, and production, Branagh can handle both lighter and heavier Shakespeare. "Love's Labours Lost," though, just doesn't work well. The only reason to buy this DVD is to have lots of DVD versions of lots of Shakespeare, but otherwise, many better DVD's are available.