My Year of Shakespeare

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She's the Man [2006]

Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare. This week we're watching the Amanda Bynes farce "She's the Man", a teen version of Twelfth Night. This was.... of its time. Most of the "comedy" that doesn't deal with gender [and some

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Twelfth Night, Or What You Will [1996]

Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare. We're watching Twelfth Night and I'm wondering about how to write about Twelfth Night. I'm using this adaptation as a sort of baseline for understanding the play more broadly; I've done similar with other plays

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Thane of East County [2015]

When shall we three meet again? When the Year of Shakespeare's done, when the tortured opening paragraph's won; Somehow the loosest adaptation of the five, Thane of East County ports the story to present-ish day to a group of performers putting on Macbeth. In a

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Macbeth [2015]

Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare. We're winding down The Scottish Month with our second to last entry, the 2015 Michael Fassbender/Marion Cotillard vehicle, which in addition to being more dynamic and action-y, is also easily the most Scottish adaptation we've watched. For

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Throne of Blood [1957]

Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare. This week we're watching one of the Akira Kurosawa adaptations, Throne of Blood, and I had a fantastic time with it. I watched the Criterion release, with English subtitles, so please understand that is the lens that I have viewed the

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Scotland PA [2001]

Welcome back to My Year Of Shakespeare, the blog series where I watch 50-plus Shakespeare adaptations and write about them. Today we watched Scotland, PA, a slight latecomer to both of its genres — a late 90s Teen Shakespeare adaptation, and an indie 90s screwball slacker comedy — and it executes

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The Tragedy of Macbeth [2021]

Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare, this week we're kicking off the Scottish month with Joel Coen's immaculate The Tragedy of Macbeth. I must've watched this fifty or sixty times during the lockdown - I was Going Through It, and also it was a

My Year of Shakespeare

Anyone But You [2023]

Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare, we're at the tail end of Much Ado About April with the Glen Powell/Sydney Sweeney romcom Anyone But You, ostensibly based on Much Ado About Nothing. I didn't have a great time with this, but it also was

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Much Ado About Nothing [1973, New York Shakespeare Festival, dir Joseph Papp/Nick Havinga]

Welcome back to this week's episode of My Year of Shakespeare. Today's entry is available online at the internet archive (for free) if you want to grade my essay in real time. Apologies for anyone who mistakenly watched the 1973 Soviet production, that isn't

My Year of Shakespeare

Much Ado About Nothing [2012]

I was pretty down on the '93 adaptation. Maybe that was unfairly so. The second week seems to be The One Where I figure out what the play is and what the adaptation is and I think overall I don't care for the play for this month;

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Much Ado About Nothing [1993]

Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare. On the one hand, it is nice to go back to lighter fare than last month's drink-from-the-firehouse pace of cramming four fairly heavy plays, each of which took a little footwork on my part to properly appreciate, into

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Titus [1999]

Frustratingly, my CMS, Ghost, decided to throw out my first draft of this. It was better written but they were unable to recover it. So, once more from the top, but with expedience and, unfortunately, brevity: I did not know how dead-on I was last week, saying that this