Shakespeare in Love

"oh you're very clever youngman, but it's turkeys all the way down"

Well, that Mad George thing shifted a lot of punters onto seats and a lot of popcorn into punters, and when it went, as all things must, to video, a lot of Haagen-Daz off the Blockbuster shelves; so why not repeat the success? The Madness of George the Third Part Two has a certain Shakespearian jenesaisquoi about it. My God! That's it!  'We can apply the same formula to Shakespeare!' ; and so they did, and the rest is historybooks.
The producers were not impressed as they looked at the checklists on their clipboards (state of the art notepads, entendu): the first consideration, coming before irrelevancies such as plot, director, budget... is Tie-ins. It is difficult to include close-ups of the immortal bard enhancing his street credibility by swigging a can of coke or propping his reebox Street Annihilators up on his writing desk, or indeed tossing off some of the treasures of English Literature with a Waterman Executive Drive, Gold.

  Looks like we're stumped, before we've even paced the crease.
But wait, I like what you said just there about him tossing off. That's a new angle- a kind of raunchy bio-pic with highbrow appeal- we got the best of both worlds.

And so it came to pass, the tie-ins were ditched in favour of increased bums on seats watching bare bums and seats.
 Tom Stoppard was installed in a Bel Air mansion of Barton Finkesque emptiness. On a lounger beside the Olympic length open-air swimming pool filled with Chateau Yquem and naked starlets, he was enjoined to "For godsake, keep it light- and no fancy talk!".
This explains the stangely modern speech; it was with some trepannation that I went to the cinema, imagining in my naivity that I would have to sit through 90 minutes of Elizabethan speech-Tom settled my hash with another bodyshot of fine wine and half-considered having Marlowe suggest that Will downsize his plotbase.
BTW I'll be dashing off a quick monograph for my semiology email discussion group on the Significance of 90 minutes being the accepted timespan for both mainstream cinema and football- the two biggest 'global campfires',-no doubt, only to be flambeed (drat this kboard) by Umberto Eco.
                             Next, a session on the casting couch, more and more apt as a screening system because acting has degenerated into the ability to simulate sex. Whatever happened to Victorian prudery?
Umberto Eco will publicly lambaste me with facts and figures on the extraordinary growth of pornography under Victoria. But.....Surely it's just embarrassing to watch people go through these kinds of motions on celluloid. If you opened a door and saw people having sex, what would you do?: close the door as quickly as possible, or ring out for some popcorn? I suppose the real question is would you watch if you could remain unnoticed. Other animals don't have this voyeuristic  streak- it is rare to see a circle of cattle around a bull covering a cow, but then cows don't eat popcorn.
Or Haagen-Daz.

The collective noun for producers must be 'pack', so the pack moved in and started casting lots. Having gone through the motions on the casting couch Joseph Fiennes was chosen to play The Greatest Writer That Ever Lived -purely for the length of his eyelashes-certainly his acting couldn't have been any worse. His  actor's studio method coach was Alan Bennett's Lesley: "Ideally, Joseph, at this stage, Gunter would like to see a variety of emotions flit across your smouldering eyes, resolving themselves in a fiercely intense poetic trance-like vision".
Either that or stare into the distance, transfixed by the prosaic dilemma, is it a number 1 or a number 5 tram that's coming? Such is the stuff of which megabucks are made.
  If musicke be the food of lust then play to the stalls, or groundlings. Much as it would please me to rant and rave about cinematic music, which, as you know is my pet hate, I am unable to, as there was a technical error with the print that I saw- the soundtrack seems to have got mixed with that of The Horse Whisperer ( a film I of course have not seen, not even as fodder for my anthropological discussion groups) vast, swooping strings to underline the vastness and universality of Shakespeare's  awe-inspiring talent.

Pompous shite, thinly disguised as light divertimento, as understood by Mozart (I rest my case, I rest my case ). Oh! to listen to those immortal lines, even delivered by a company of hacks accompanied by Mantovani and the Music of the Mountains.
   Hacks! Did I just refer to Dame Judy as a hack? Obviously not, I must have meant prostitute. How impressive, how easy she made it look, what a trooper! As she QL falls Dea Ex Machina from the gods in the closing scenes to hammer home the last nail in the coffin of suspended disbelief, one looks in vain for even a glimmer of irony......"what am I doing in a production like this?". Never! What a pro!
               And those cracks, those jibes, those in-jokes, those pipes, those timbrels, how delightfully witty! There were in retrospect a few scenes which may have drawn a wry smirk to my prim and disapproving lips, but most of the time I indulged myself by retaliating in kind for the barrage of indignities I had to endure for venturing into A Place of Public Entertainment, albeit off peak hours (7pm).
Big Macs, sweet papers, slurpings of Shite MacLite, careless whispers- all carried out with a self-righteous defensive air:"I'm at the cinema, I'm here to party!". Retaliation took the form of enormous sighs during the most exasperating excesses, and there were many.
  A recent film programme on the Beeb came up with this classic from a U.S. reviewer: "Sure, he sucks, but at the end of the day you're gonna be rooting for him".

Well, excuse me, I do not go to the cinema to root.
More and more, it seems I go to be offended.