Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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91 of 96 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Review? Simple. It's Beautiful!!, August 22, 2007
This movie is beautiful! That's right. That's my whole review.
There are stylised Komonos and rich 1890-ish Western costumes. A pallette of amazing reds, maroons and rose colors set against a magical green forest with ancient towering trees and exotic oriental marshes.
The romantic comedy element is all about being in love; being giddy with all consuming love. The Shakespearean words are edited short and crisp and are delivered naturalistically and effortlessly by the likes of Kevin Kline and Brian Blessed. Of the leads, David Oyelowo stands out as a very masculine and handsome leading man and Bryce Dallas Howard (an American) more that holds her own with the mostly British cast.
Perhaps due to Branagh's pruning of the text, I also found listening to, and understanding As You Like It just as effortless as the actor's delivery. I'm not an English teacher nor an Elizabethean scholar and this movie spoke to me, taking me on a wonderful escape. (NOTE: Make sure to watch all the way through the credits!)
It is obvious that Kenneth Branagh puts his whole soul into his movies. Thank you Kenneth!
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34 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
'All the world's a stage', August 22, 2007
Kenneth Branagh, aside from being a gifted actor with an enormous range of creative character abilities, has once again brought Shakespeare to life on the screen. His previous excursions into the bard's repertoire have included 'Much Ado About Nothing', 'Henry V', 'Love's Labour's Lost', 'Hamlet', and 'Othello', and now he adds one of the bard's most successful comedies AS YOU LIKE IT to his list of successes. Branagh has the gift of making the visual aspects of Shakespeare's stories enhance the language and in doing so he makes Shakespeare sound like brilliant conversation (which it of course is) instead of stilted and brittle old English.
The 'gimmick' used here by Branagh in adapting Shakespeare's play is placing the action in 19th century Japan, and while other less sensitive directors might have opted to insert parody here, Branagh instead makes the story seem all the more plausible - the two feuding brothers (one dark and one light) whose struggle over their estate opens the play before credits with an ingenious silent drama of black leather feudal costumed men invading a genteel house party of lovely people enjoying a Japanese dancer's performance. The original brother is banished with his clan to the Arden forest and there the magic begins. Love between several couples is played in all its manifestations with disguise, misconceptions, lust, and poetry until the play's rollicking end in a song of Hey Nonny Nonny!
The lovers include the disguised Rosalind (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Orlando (David Oyelowo), Celia (Romola Garai) and Oliver (Adrian Lester), the court fool Touchstone (a brilliant Alfred Molina) and Audrey (Janet McTeer), and Sylvius (Alex Wyndham) and Phoebe (Jade Jefferies). Brian Blessed plays the roles of both feuding brothers with style and authority, and Kevin Kline offers a fully realized Jaques - the character who is given the most memorable soliloquies in the play. The settings and imagery (Tim Harvey) are artistic and beautiful and captured with style by cinematographer Roger Lanser, and as with all of Branagh's production the music score (here by Patrick Doyle) is letter perfect and atmospheric.
But in the end the kudos go to Kenneth Branagh for his consistent courage and conviction that Shakespeare's plays are timeless, and his devotion to bringing them to the contemporary audience is to be applauded. This is a fine film - one to own! Grady Harp, August 07
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Just happy it's finally on film..., October 27, 2007
Incredibly, this seems to be the first version of Shakespeare's masterpiece of comic wit, As You Like It, in 70 years - since Laurence Olivier's disappointingly dry and frilly 1937 production! If for no other reason, true fans of the Bard will be grateful to Kenneth Branagh for this latest effort, although many of his decisions as director left me scratching my head.
As for mixing the Forest of Arden with the world of Shogun, I was basically neutral. Let Branagh have his artistic license with that one, although I admit it did make the scene where Orlando is attacked by a lion somewhat surreal. (Which may be why it happens off stage in the play.) And sure, the cinematography and landscape are stunning, but what really disappointed me was the way Branagh and the cast chose to play the key roles. As You Like It contains three of Shakespeare's most brilliant major characters: Touchstone the Fool, Jaques the melancholy cynic, and the incomparable Rosalind.
Touchstone trails in brilliance only behind Feste from Twelfth Night, and Lear's Fool from that great tragedy, but sadly, many of his best lines are either cut out of this version, or delivered by Alfred Molina in such a way that he just seems morose. He partially rescues the role with his facial expressions and physical slapstick, but Touchstone can be much more than the rude court goof that he is here. Kevin Kline does fairly well with Jaques, but inexplicably, one of the greatest minor speeches in all Shakespeare ("All the world's a stage...") is delivered in a distant, wide-angle shot with virtually no emotion, so you can't even tell Kline is speaking the lines until the very last words. It seems like they're being read off camera. Last but not least, Rosalind. If you agree with Harold Bloom, Rosalind is one of Shakespeare's three most brilliant minds, in the upper pantheon with Hamlet and Falstaff. She can spar with anyone, and bends the entire cast of As You Like It to her will. While Bryce Dallas Howard admittedly has a big job to do, she just keeps failing to nail the part. Unquestionably lovely and captivating in some scenes, she never quite reaches that saucy, fiery spark that puts Rosalind so far beyond other Shakespearean heroines. It doesn't help that Branagh barely attempts to maintain the cross-dressing fiction of the plot, having Howard play the role with her hair down for half of the movie, and even bathing nude in a stream in one (invented) scene. As a viewer I had no complaints, but you have to go to great lengths to suspend disbelief enough to imagine that Orlando still thinks Ganymede is a boy.
All in all, a charming production and long, long overdue. Three stars just for bringing it to the screen, and another for trying to be creative, but in all his zeal to experiment with the setting, the dialogue, the casting, and the production of this film, Branagh seems to have forgotten that you really better be careful if you're going to try to be more clever than the Bard.
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