The Hollow Crown - Henry IV, Part II [2012] + Mufasa The Lion King [2024]

Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare, a blog series where I watch fifty-some Shakespeare adaptations, sit baffled for a couple hours, re-watch them, and then stare at an empty blog entry in my CMS until the refuse in my brain accumulates enough that I can write about them.

Henry IV, Part II

If last week (Part I) was about sowing, this week was for reaping. Falstaff's debts come due; King Henry worries the rebellions he's beset with are due to him seizing the throne via rebellion; Northumberland withdraws from the rebellion, the cost of his son Hotspur too great; and Prince Hal, having sown worry in his father through his youthful folly & debauchery, has a confrontation with his father over whether and how he's fit to rule that mends the feelings of both, but ends with his father dying.

A play isn't the format of story I'm most familiar with — I'd wager nowadays it is almost certainly the "prestige television series", having thoroughly rotted my mind since the 2000s — but it feels strange that this should be a standalone play. It feels like a bridge, like in a serialized format, it would be a tablesetting episode (or two) between the setpieces of Henry IV, Part One and Henry V.

I found the Falstaff and Ancient Pistol segments frustrating to get through. I understood the characters as archetypes for representing the lower classes and their relationship to the crown, a sort of ecumenical role. Useful for illustrating the contempt held by those positions for the crown and vice versa, but man do they suck to watch. Let's do truly any other plot, please. Thankfully this will be our last interaction with his belching corpulence for the month, though I guess we'll see Joel Edgerton and Orson Welles's takes on the character at the end of October and start of November, respectively.

The scenes of the ailing King, though. I think these are some of the strongest in any of the adaptations watched this year. The way Hiddleston and Irons were able to play off each-other in the climactic scene was truly something to behold. I don't think I have a particularly contentious relationship with my own father — distant, sure, taciturn maybe — but oh man, that hit a nerve, a nerve labelled "call your dad."

Ultimately, I think this was a very strange play, absent many of the dynamic moments of the previous two entries. I suspect it would be one where the more I think about it and chew on it, the more I would enjoy it, but with a mere week between writings, it hasn't opened for me like that yet.

Mufasa The Lion King

I didn't need to watch this and you don't need to either. This was crap. I'm sorry you needed a paycheck Barry Jenkins and cast, but this was hot trash, and I hold it in lower esteem than "Simba's Pride".

In the same way Simba's Pride was the low budget version of the '94 Lion King, Mufasa cut corners in animation, acting, writing, hell even the editing was sloppy. How do you make sloppily edited CGI? You've got immediate, parameterized control over the entire process, it's hard to argue all of that isn't the most deliberate of creative processes, there's no aleatory to let "take the wheel" beyond machine-defaults and sporadic RAM errors.

This didn't need to be made and I'm more than a little frustrated I wasted my time on it on the basis of the talent involved; Hopefully I didn't waste yours while learning that even talent panders.

Next Week

We're wrapping up season one of The Hollow Crown. I'll also have the schedule together for My Hallowatch next week — those will be going up on Sundays on their own posts.

• September 27 - The Hollow Crown, S01/E04: Henry V
• October 4 - The Hollow Crown, Season 2, Episode 1: Henry VI part 1
• October 11 - The Hollow Crown, S02/E02: Henry VI part 2
• October 18 - The Hollow Crown, S02/E03: Richard III
• October 25 - The King (2019)
• November 1 - Chimes at Midnight (1966)
• November 8 - My Own Private Idaho (1991)
• November 15 - Henry V (1989)
• November 22 - The Black Adder [series one] (1983)
• November 29 - The Goodbye Girl (1977)

Thank you for reading My Year of Shakespeare.