Rating: 
Summary: A brilliant and imaginative interpretation
Review: Ian McKellen's "Richard III" is a brilliant 20th Century adaptation of the Shakespeare original. McKellen sets the murderous intrigue and civil strife of the play in an imaginary fascist period of English History. In doing this, he removes the story from its historical context and demonstrates the timeless nature of its themes. The original story was set during the War of the Roses, a bitter succession conflict which took place in pre-Tudor England. None of the medieval butchery is lost on us when we see it take place in a fascist context.The central theme of Richard III is not ambition or ruthlessness but the power of momentum. Richard relies on both physical and rhetorical momentum for his success. Physically, he must always be on the move. Once his movement is stopped he is doomed. Richard makes this abundantly clear in the play and in the film when his transportation is destroyed at the Battle of Bosworth field and he can no longer move. Richard says "a horse a horse,my kingdom for a horse" meaning that without movement he loses the battle and with it his life and his kingdom. This signature death speech is even a bit ironic in the film since it is Richard's jeep that is shot out from him which means that he is speaking metaphorically when he refers to it as a horse. What could be more fitting for a fascist leader? Momentum is also crucial to Richard's rhetoric. On two occasions in the play, Richard must convince a woman whose husband he has murdered to marry him. Richard accomplishes this the first time by matching each of the widow's arguments with a witty retort until she has none left. But Richard is later unable to do this with the second widow. He begins his confident stream of witty retorts but is flustered by and then outdone by her. Rhetorically he has lost his momentum and with it his power to dominate and control. Momentum is as crucial to modern despots as it was to the tyrants of Shakespeare's time. Hitler mesmerized a generation of Germans with speeches whose content made little sense but whose momentum carried the day. And like Richard III, Hitler was only successful as long as his army could keep on the move. I wonder if any Panzer driver stuck in the mud and snow of Stalingrad in 1942 found himself muttering "a horse a horse, my kindom for a horse"?
Rating:
Summary: Proves the bard is timeless
Review: This is just an amazing transition of the War of the Roses of the fiftenth century to England of the 1930's. Here the scheming Richard of Gloucester is a generalisimo of a distinctly fascist cut.
The film begins with cuddly British soldiers being defeated by hard camo-dressed elite units, and the rightful king and his heir coldly executed by Richard. As the film progresses the parallels to the Third Reich become clearer: soldiers start dominating the background, the leaders start wearing black uniforms, and the boar flag, Richard's coat of arms, turns into something reminding us of a swastika flag.
Ian McKellen wants to show how weak democracy is against determined assaults from unscrupolous people.
Now I am awaiting the 2000 version with with Karl Rove as Buckingham, Rumsfeld as Tyrrel, Gore as Clarence, and you-know-who as Richard.
Rating:
Summary: Great Movie, Great Play, Great Actor
Review: This is director Richard Loncraine's and Ian McKellan's take on Richard III, and it's brilliant. The setting is England in the 1930's, all art deco color and style, and moral decay. Edward IV has beaten his Lancastrian enemies with the ruthless generalship of his younger brother, Richard, and now runs Britain as a fascist state. The Yorkists have triumphed. Things seem under control, but Edward is sick...and Richard has ambitions. If Edward dies, then between Richard and the throne are their brother, George, and Edward's two young sons.
McKellan brings malevolent good humor, wonderful charm and mesmerizing treachery to the role. One of the funniest scenes is at the start. The battles have been won and Edward is hosting a great ball. Here McKellan starts the "Now is the winter of our discontent" remarks. Unlike Olivier's version, where he speaks to the camera and brings the audience into his schemes at the start, McKellan places the speech as a toast of honor to Edward, with the continuation, "made glorious summer by this sun [son] of York," referring syncophantly directly to Edward. But then Richard excuses himself, limps down to the gents, and continues while using the urinals and now talking to us. The whole thing is funny and grotesque. It's impossible to think of Olivier trying this.
There's also a Thirties-style swinging pop song sung at the ball that's set to Shakespeare's words. It's a great song and helps set the mood.
For anyone put off by Shakespeare, this movie would be an easy way to get interested. It moves quickly, the period setting is comprehensible, and there are drownings, impalings, smotherings and beheadings. And the film is witty. When Richard cries out, "My kingdom for a horse," it's because his tanks and armored cars are being blown up.
The acting is exceptional; McKellan is extraordinary. Jim Broadbent does a great job as the sly, unprincipled Duke of Buckingham. After Edward dies (earlier Richard had dispossed of George), Richard takes the crown. Buckingham hesitates, finally, to act on Richard's hints that the two princes are awkward to have around. Instead, he asks Richard for the wealth and lands he was promised in exchange for giving Richard support. When Richard replies, "I'm not in a giving vein," Broadbent just through a subtle facial expression let's us see that the relationship has been fatally compromised, with the emphasis on fatal.
This is a superb, funny, malicious version of the play.
One caveat: The real Richard of Gloucester, who died fighting to defend his crown as Richard III, was evidently a good man, a better than average king, and didn't have a hunchback or a pronounced limp. He was the recipient, after his death, of an unrelenting hatchet job by those kissing up to Henry VII, who defeated him, and the other Tudors. Among the most noteworthy of those smearing Richard was William Shakespeare
Rating: 
Summary: Hitler of Gloster
Review: Few things in entertainment can be more deceptively sure than a remake, "re-envisioning", or an otherwise re-interpretation of a classic. In film particularly so.
An example: George A. Romero brought to screen *Dawn of the Dead*, part II of a classic horror trilogy filled with blunt but entertaining satire on American commercialism. 25 years later Zack Snyder and screenwriter Peter Gunn created their own "Dawn of the Dead": it is actually an Americanized remake of Danny Boyle's *28 Days Later *, resembling Romero's film primarily in title and cameos. Because Snyder and Gunn synthesize just about every horror movie of the past thirty years into a 97 minute MTV music video, it is wildly popular. But neither Romero's story nor his theme survives, and I really don't like it.
The same has been said for film renditions of plays. No Shakespeare expert, I am dimly aware of the curmudgeon opinion that the best celluloid translations of the Bard's great works were those filmed when color was an expensive novelty and televisions hadn't left the laboratory. So when somebody in the 1990's comes along and attempts to modernize a play written before America had seen its first English setters, there's sure to be some criticism.
Fortunately, for my tastes at least, Sir Ian McKellen and director Richard Loncraine come through where many other filmmakers fail. They manage to update a classic work while maintaining at least a ghost of the original ideas. All heil the deformed fury of *Richard III*.
<Rise of the Edwardian Reich>
Fascism seems to suit this play. Sir McKellen and Mr. Loncraine marry Bill's black drama of medieval British power play to the English fascist movements. Mixed with the assassination-fever that rocked Imperial Japan shortly before World War II, and an amazing collection of wartime weapons, costumes, and sets, the film is as poisonous as it is mesmerizing.
Indeed, even today's Americans may be put off by all the Nazis speaking the Bard's tongue. Attacking Shakespearean English royalty with Soviet tanks and Mauser handguns is certainly anachronistic--even absurd. To British WWII historians, though, this film may stir echoes of Sir Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists. A Parliament politician (1918-1930) he amassed an army of some 30,000 followers by 1934. One famous disciple was "Lord Haw-Haw": Anglo-American William Joyce who defected to Nazi Germany and broadcast pro-Nazi propaganda. The filmmaker's style, then, is not without substance.
<Der Shakespeare>
`Course, I know my WWII better than my British plays. Still, I checked out a paperback copy of Will's *The Life and Death of King Richard III* after I saw this film. So far as I can tell, McKellen and crew cut, mixed, and pasted swaths of prose to account for Shakespeare's language while using exclusively non-verbal references to the airplanes and radios buzzing around the characters. The makers do so best at the beginning. Richard Gloster's opening soliloquy is repeated intact here, but with a few simple zooms and cuts, the picture dramatically demonstrates that film can both match and enhance the power of a revered playwright's hallowed prose.
Unlike the Bard, the filmmakers lovingly depict the consequences of Richards' ire. No marching prisoners off stage here: McKellen follows the aforementioned murder festival of Japan's pre-war hierarchy. *Richard III* gives us switchblades and shanks, cut throats and backstabbed bellies. Dukes strangle while Prime Ministers hang. Around it all ring the shots and bounce the shell casings of just about every automatic weapon made between 1900 and 1945. There's a reason for that "R" rating.
I'm sure pacing reasons exist for some of the plot switching, but the film may throw off those more familiar with the play than me. Sir Ratcliffe is as murderous and complicit as anyone in the original. Here Ratcliffe is a glorified squire, standing by to the end like a male Eva Braun to McKellen's Hitlerian Richard. It's Sir Tyrrel-here a common soldier-who eagerly takes all wet work. Played by Adrian Dunbar, Tyrrel makes Himmler proud as he butchers his way through Royalty as much for personal pleasure as for the favor of his Lord Protector. Necessarily then, the film sequences of murder switch around from the play-which pretty much means every other major scene I am aware of also changes, the 1930s setting aside .Characters whom Shakespeare slaughters survive here, while McKellen kills off kin who lived.
<The Triumph of the Will>
Lest I frighten anyone off, the violence is as tastefully done as far as one can use that word for "R" films. Some scenes are beautiful in their fatal simplicity: a red scarf falling into the camera, darkness, then looking down upon the form of a gasping face pressed against the crimson fabric--Tyrrel strikes again. The film's cinematography is no mere showcase for circuses anymore than it is self-indulgent art house expression: it is as murderously savvy, as corrosively charismatic as its' titular villain.
Sure: it digs jackboots and smog stained brick walls; and likes Cold War tanks mixing it up with World War II halftracks, while Robert Downy Jr. tries to bring 1930's American playboy cheek into a 16th Century British Royal Family (a brave attempt to account for the New World in Shakespeare--but as Queen Elizabeth's brother?). While it's no more the original play than any other film translation, in my opinion McKellan's *Richard III* reflects the plot and thematic essentials, more or less preserving the characters and the scope--unlike some recent "remakes" I have mentioned.
McKellen and company at least in places show that Shakespeare can be modernized in sight while preserved in speech. It is a worthy addition to the Bard's filmography, from my Generation X perspective.
DVD Note: It looks and sounds like a decent video transfer, but comes on one of those annoying dual-sided disks (not to be confused with dual layer) for widescreen and full screen editions.
Rating: 
Summary: Brave try
Review: Three stars for courage. But, for me, it didn't work. Shakespeare's play is cut to the bone. The struggle to find adequate 1930s parallels to the extreme convolutions of the Wars of the Roses (all concerned with hereditary power), and the rise and fall of the Bard's version of Richard Crookback, is just too much. There is certainly a tendency, in general, for history to repeat itself, but attempting to combine Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin, Oswald Mosley (for all of whom hereditary power was completely irrelevant), and the Duke of Windsor, into the mythical figure of Richard of Gloucester, is misguided, to say the least. Much of the point of the play lies in the fact that Richard was systematically murdering his nearest family members. This resembles the modern Middle East far more than pre-World War II Europe. Incidentally, the setting is NOT Nazi Germany, Edwardian England, nor WWI, nor did the actual historical events take place only "a hundred years earlier", as one reviewer seems to think. Much of the film was shot inside and outside the Brighton Pavilion --- hardly Art Deco! Another major objection to this production and its version of the original script (which was not "a novel"!) is that it appears to be driven by a desire to be as unlike Olivier's stunning interpretation as it possibly could. In fact, it is haunted by Olivier's film, in a highly negative way: this counterpoint motivation destroys its integrity, since it is not basing its thrust on the words Shakespeare wrote. I just couldn't take the sight of McKellen sitting in a jeep, and bawling out: "My kingdom for a horse!" One reviewer has pointed out that Richard's seduction of the Lady Anne is probably the most impossible scene that Bill ever penned. Yet Olivier, because he makes Richard so incredibly fascinating, repulsive and compelling, and almost understandable and pathetic at the same time, delivers it in a manner that will probably never be equalled for theatrical bravado. McKellen is simply repellent, and the seduction couldn't be less convincing. The psychology of Richard's bitterness at his physical malformation --- "sent into this breathing world scarce half made up" --- is not sufficiently stressed by McKellen, so he cannot elicit any sympathy for his villainy from the audience. The idea that the characters smoke so much in order to symbolise the fogginess of their words is interesting. However, in any film from the 30s and 40s, with a contemporary setting, the characters smoke practically all the time. In fact, King George VI, as decent a king as ever lived, died from lung cancer brought on by cigarettes. As another perceptive reviewer remarked, the intensity of the design of the costumes and settings, while extremely impressive, tended to overwhelm everything else on the screen. As noted, that seems to be the dominant trend in most film-making these days. All design and very little substance. In fact the complete opposite of any Shakespeare play, where the plot and the words are everything, and the scenery is completely irrelevant. The only modern film-maker who manages to combine brilliant dialogue with matching sets is Tarantino: he actually writes like Shakespeare. It's blank verse, not prose.
Rating:
Summary: Magneto ROCKS
Review: Way, way better than in X-Men OR X-Men 2. His plots are less grandiose, but much more believable. And the dialog is amazing!
JEAN GREY: Shall I be tempted of the devil thus?
MAGNETO: Ay, if the devil tempt thee to do good.
In this one little bit of dialog, they manage to concisely describe the temptation of Christ -- ultimately, he was not tempted to do evil, but rather to do good, which would none-the-less have precluded him from being the saviour. Would you have ever expected this from an X-Men movie?
The special effects are weak, and I don't understand why he let Richmond shoot him -- couldn't he have used his power over magnetism to deflect the bullets back at Richmond? -- but the acting is amazing.
The new Jean Grey isn't as hot as the last one.
Rating:
Summary: Shakespeare gets updated and how
Review: Once you get used to the Shakespearian lingo, you marvel at the ingenious blending of a Third Reich "ish" regime & the original Shakespeare. A beautiful modernization of the play that works. The cinematography was amazing. The use of smoke via cigarettes or cigars was pure genius not to mention brillant symbolism with freudian overtones. The same can be said of the use of color and camera angle techniques. Reading the original version only enhances the beauty of this piece. Oh, and it also kicks a** as a war movie.
Rating:
Summary: An interesting version of the celebrated play.
Review: The greatest aspect of this film is its look. With extravagant costumes and glorious set designs, there is ambitious detail in every scene. The problem with a film looking this gorgeous is that many of the performances are often overwhelmed with the color and sparkling detail surrounding them. As a result, only two performances stand out. Annette Bening has seldom behaved so furious in any of her other roles, and it was a breath of fresh air to see any of the characters fight back against the tyranny and betrayal of Richard III. Her performance is excellent, and glows accordingly. The other great performance is, of course, Ian McKellen and his diabolical and just plain evil portrayal of the title character. He oozes with lust and is oftentimes disgusting to look at as a result. This is another notable performance in a long list of superb roles for Ian McKellen. There is a small role for Maggie Smith which she relishes, yet she has only one fantastic scene where she reprimands her son Richard for being the foul human being that he has become. I thought she was going to spit. The rest of the cast is either forgettable or wasted. Kristin Scott Thomas has the famous scene with Ian McKellen where Richard III woos her character while she mourns her husband's death. She knows full well that is was Richard who killed her husband. I have never been able to believe this scene, regardless of the performances. If she truly loved her husband as much as she says, and loathes Richard with as much passion, she could never be tempted to either forgive his actions let alone lay them aside and go to his bedchamber. Surely, she is in a weakened state, and perhaps susceptible to persuasion, but that is simply too much to ask. Robert Downey Jr. has a throwaway performance. He is a great actor, but the role he has here is limited and really could have been portrayed by any decent actor. Overall, the film is gorgeous to look at, and is certainly worth watching for the grand acting of Ian McKellen and Annette Bening.
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