"Shakespeare in Love" Throwback Review
...blah blah blah...Saving Private Ryan should have won Best Picture...blah blah...Judi Dench won for this?...blah blah blah...fuck Harvey Weinstein... blah blah blah...Gwyneth is a weird lady...blah blah blah...
With that out of the way, let's talk frankly about the infamous Best Picture-winning, Shakespeare in Love.
Framed as one of The Bard's plays, the script by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard pulls out every trope in the book. There's a whole cinematic universe worth of Easter eggs for every junior high school English teacher to drool over.
It would be easy to call the script trite and full of clichés, but you have to remember that Shakespeare wrote melodramatic comedies that scoff at logic. When you think of this as a stagey romantic comedy, it becomes much easier to appreciate what its going for.
Director John Madden has his camera swirl around the theatre, showing off all of the trimmings within his production. The score is quite wonderous as well.
Okay, I'll admit that Ben Affleck and Geoffrey Rush are rather weak. Paltrow and Fiennes are pretty good, I guess. Judi Dench is the best thing about the cast, but she's barely in the movie, sadly.
Again, everything I said in the beginning of this review is true. But history has already been settled and there's nothing else we can do. All that's left is to enjoy this movie for what it is and move on to the next bit of controversy.
