Much Ado About Nothing (4/5 Stars)

“Thou and I were made too wise to woo peaceably.”

- Shakespeare

Among a multitude of others things, what is also great about Shakespeare is that it is supremely low budget. Production value can be added but it is not needed. After all, Shakespeare originally produced all of his plays on the bare stage of the Globe Theater. He had no sets, no furniture, and no curtains. The only things added to his words were generally props and costumes. Think about that. It means that anyone anywhere in the world could adapt a play with minimal cost and it could turn out to be just as the Bard originally intended. There aren’t even any intellectual property rights to buy. The whole catalog belongs to the world. The best Shakespeare I have seen (a performance of Richard II) wasn’t even in a theater. A bunch of actors just got together and put on a show for free in a park field, (Yes I tipped). The writing is so descriptive the lack of visual aid hardly ever matters. You want to know what it looked like when Ophelia committed suicide, just give a listen. Shakespeare makes his characters speak for uncharacteristically long lengths in order to compensate for the lack of visual aid. And perhaps to compensate for the rowdy crowds and not very good actors (both common staples of Globe Theater and amateur community theater nowadays) he marks his characters without the slightest trace of subtlety. It is very hard to screw up a performance in Shakespeare because the dialogue is so brazenly truthful, profound, and above all articulate. Given some patient translation you start to notice with startling clarity that what is being said are things we all think but rarely ever have the time, patience, or bravery to figure out how to actually say (even almost 500 years later!)

Unfortunately there is generally the impulse for modern moviemakers to add all those pretty things money and technology make possible even though Shakespeare made it all superfluous. This is sometimes done to an absurd degree. There are plenty of high-school movies that are adapted from Shakespeare but the only thing used is the plot. Even the words are ditched in favor of “accessibility.” Fie! I bite my thumb at thee! Directors need to have much more faith in the audience. Let us now consider director Joss Whedon’s take on “Much Ado About Nothing.” It is my opinion that this is how Shakespeare should be done and what is more, you can do it too. We all can.

The story of how this production of “Much Ado About Nothing,” is well known now. Joss Whedon had just finished production of a huge tent-pole movie named “The Avengers” and had two months before post-production started. He was in a funk. (As he probably should have been. See my review of “The Avengers”). His wife noticed this and counseled to instead of taking a planned vacation to spend the time doing one of his favorite hobbies, putting on a Shakespeare at his home. This has apparently been a long-time Whedon thing. To wind down after working on TV series all day, he would invite his company of actors over to his house and they would read through Shakespeare for fun. This time however, Whedon got out his digital camera and made a movie over a period of a couple of weeks. The result feels so Shakespeare. The entire thing takes place in a mansion. There is no production design besides the original architecture of the place. The cast is dressed in simple modern costume. The actors, all having worked with Whedon before and now on a movie not really intended for an audience beyond themselves, are friendly and relaxed. And the movie is shot in black and white, a perfect choice given that it allows the audience to not be overly distracted from the words. You can really focus in on them here, and like almost all Shakespeare, it is incredible stuff.

“Much Ado About Nothing” is a comedy about two pairs of lovers, one serious and the other comic. The serious romance concerns that of Claudio (played by Fran Kranz) and Hero (played by Jillian Morgese). In serious romance tradition, their love is perfect but besieged upon by outside forces intent on breaking them apart. In this case the subterfuge and sinister behavior of Don John (played by Sean Maher) who is at odds with Hero’s father Leonato (played by Clark Gregg). The comic romance concerns that of Benedick (played by Alexis Denisof) and Beatrice (played by Amy Acker). In comic romance tradition, the only thing keeping Beatrice and Benedick from each other is their own combative personalities. Benedick takes it with some pride that he won’t ever fall for a woman and Beatrice, a dormant feminist, doesn’t think much of men. Their relationship is marked by sharp patter, sharp jabs wit, and finally a smoldering recognition that each may have finally met their match in the other. A conspiracy is formed against them as well, however, it is hatched for the purpose of getting them together. Wicked lies are spread that each is secretly in love with the other! And….hilarity ensues.

All of this takes place at Leonato’s mansion over a weekend that contains a party that I would seriously have wanted to attend. What’s more, near the end, Nathan Fillion shows up as the incompetent yet very proud police chief Dogberry, and is hilarious for each and every second he is on the screen. All and all, this is a great piece of community theater that is sure to be much valued within the Wheedon-verse. It is a delight to be able to crash the party. If only the “The Avengers” was this good.

p.s. I have been inspired to put “Firefly” in my Netflix queue.

The Avengers (3/5 Stars)

It’s Okay!

 I never read comic books as a kid nor did I have a ton of video games, but I did own action figures, mostly Star Wars and Legos. Action figures, unlike books and video games, do not come with their own story lines so kids had to use their imaginations in order to have fun. I do not recall any particular story of mine that is worth repeating suffice to say they all had one thing in common: continual cartoonish violence. You know the kind where you take two action figures and you harmlessly smack them against each other and make kablooie noises. I remember it fondly in that odd nostalgic way people tend to glorify the stupidity of children (or innocence, either one), but I would not insist on making a feature film out of it, which, I would argue is essentially what “The Avengers,” is: A story composed of the kind of action sequences I would have come up with when I was ten years old....and had access to several hundred million dollars.

Don’t get me wrong. “The Avengers,” is okay and I must admit I haven’t the slightest idea how they could have made it better. It seems fated to be mediocre due to the cast of characters that are included. The Avengers are composed of Iron Man/Tony Stark (played by Robert Downey Jr.) a genius mechanic/billionaire who wears an indestructible suit that can fly and has plenty of machine guns and missiles. Then there is the Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff (played by Scarlett Johansson) who is good at martial arts and uses pistols. Then there is Hawkeye/Clint Barton (played by Jeremy Renner) who is good at archery. Then there is The Hulk/Bruce Banner (played by Mark Ruffalo) who is a brilliant scientist who involuntary turns into an uncontrollable green monster with unlimited strength whenever he gets angry. Then there is Thor (played by Chris Hemsworth) who is an immortal demi-god with an all-powerful hammer that can summon lightning storms. Finally, there is Captain America/Steve Rogers (played by Chris Evans). He has a patriotic uniform and a nifty shield. It should be fairly obvious that these superheroes aren’t exactly equal. I mean Captain America may be strong, but not as strong as the Hulk, and he can’t fly like Iron Man, and he has no ability for stealth like the Black Widow, and he has no long range ability like Hawkeye, and he isn’t educated like Bruce Banner or Tony Stark. In fact, he really doesn’t know anything about the last fifty years because he was cryogenically frozen during that time. (He is otherwise their leader though.) Contrast that with Thor, who as an indestructible and immortal god should be able to beat the tar out of every other Avenger in every scenario. The presence of a superhero such as Thor also requires the story to have a super-villain with an almost equal amount of power as him. Enter his brother, the semi-god Loki and an army of mean-looking aliens with supposedly superior technology.

The movie stages two rather huge battle sequences. One takes place on a flying aircraft carrier (largest waste of taxpayer money EVER) and another in Midtown Manhattan. Besides the death of one person, it may surprise you that nobody else gets seriously hurt or dies. No superheroes, no military personnel, and no civilians end the movie with anything more than the faintest scrapes, cuts, or bruises. In fact, I would argue the greatest special effect used during the full scale destruction of a completely inhabited Manhattan is the framing of the shots in such a way that we never actually see anybody getting hurt. This sense of total unreality is what reminded me of playing with plastic toys as a kid. Nothing is real. Otherwise Tony Stark would be dead ground meat in his fancy suit after every battle he is in. And can the Hulk really survive a multitude of rockets launched point blank into his face without a single blemish occurring?

 For some reason it has become increasingly difficult for blockbusters to achieve the very reason they exist: to excite and thrill. It is not hard to have violence that is exciting. It simply must include actual danger or actual pain or the threat of actual pain. To demonstrate how little you need, take a look at the movie, “Black Swan.” In particular, the scene where the main character notices a cut near her nail cuticle, tries to fix it, and accidentally pulls off a strip of her skin. When I watched that it made me recoil. Why then would Thor knocking Iron Man 100 feet into the air with his magic hammer have little to no effect at all? Well, because it results in nothing but a dazed look. It must not have hurt. A movie with action sequences that have no effect on the characters is not exciting. It is desensitizing. Pretty soon it does not matter how big the explosions are, all I recognize is their impotence. What is more, when I do not understand how things happen, I stop caring pretty soon if they happen at all. I don’t get how Iron Man can survive all the blows he takes. I don’t understand how The Hulk can beat up a floating leviathan one thousand times his size. And will someone please tell me how the hell Scarlett Johansson can beat up burly men three times her size. She has no muscles. None.

 I suppose some of this has to do with the MPAA. There is this strange rule out there that allows PG-13 movies all the gunfire, explosions, and metropolitan destruction they want just as long as you do not see anybody getting hurt. However, if you wanted to see a man realistically cut off his own arm like James Franco does in “127 Hours” you would get an R rating. In effect, violence is morally okay just as long as you don’t show the consequences of it. Oh, will someone think of the children. They are our future. But unreal hammed up violence is not in itself bad. I’ve seen plenty of movies I loved that worked just like that. The best of director Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, Planet Terror, Machete, Desperado) excels in that sort of thing. The difference though is that these movies are fun exploitation movies that don’t give us a bunch of scenes containing impassioned speeches about the importance of it all. “The Avengers,” needs to be more uniform in its purpose. If you are going to make the action sequences ridiculous then make the characters and dialogue ridiculous, and do it the whole way through. And please no intended-to-be-taken-seriously-patriotism. This country deserves better than that. “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol” was a great action movie. So, for that matter, was “Black Dynamite.” “The Avengers,” works best when it treats itself like it should: a joke. There are enough self-referential and belittling jabs that make the movie pretty funny throughout its run time. Quite a lot of these are provided by the best character, Tony Stark, played brilliantly as always by Robert Downey Jr. Mark Ruffalo, the nth incarnation of Bruce Banner, does a solid job as well. I still wish Thor’s weakness was stupidity and not arrogance (see my review of “Thor”) and I never saw Captain America’s movie so I guess I missed the part where it makes sense for our symbol against Nazism be a guy that looks like the poster child for Aryan machismo. Scarlett Johansson and Jeremy Renner like most interesting actors continue their star rising descent into less interesting movies.