213 Richard III

[Brian C]

Dear lord, that makes him look like a character in a Mel Brooks movie. Hopefully the vocal reconstruction doesn't reveal an exaggerated lisp!

[Matt]

Looks like Neil from The Young Ones to me. Oh, heavyyyyyyy.

[Michael Kerpan]

Interesting that more than a few "infamous" figures from the past turn out to have been champions of "ordinary people" over the rich and powerful.

[andyli]

Beaver.

[hearthesilence]

Stunning. Curious to see the rest - when I was at the NYFF screening of the restoration, the sequences that didn't use the original camera neg were easy to spot.

[Fred Holywell]

Just started on TCM @ 1:15 am ET, Thur. morn. Pre-credit sequence indicates that it's The Film Foundation - Janus Films restoration, if you're curious.

[The Narrator Returns]

For those interested, the Blu-Ray and DVD appear to be available at Barnes & Noble already.

[Fred Holywell]

Criterion's Richard III - Restoration Demonstration, hosted by Martin Scorsese, is up on YouTube.

[tobe1950]

Hi, I ordered this from America, but it will not play on my multi region player, it plays all my other region A discs no bother, does anybody know why ? ps, most upset it cost a lot of money to buy, thanks.

[Zaki]

It turns out (the real) Richard III had "parasitic worms in his guts that grew up to a foot long": http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/eur ... story.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[MichaelB]

Shakespeare missed a trick there.

[Napier]

He also suffered a humiliation injury. He was stabbed in between his buttocks with a knife or sword.

[zedz]

It turns out (the real) Richard III had "parasitic worms in his guts that grew up to a foot long": http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/eur ... story.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

So that's who he was talking to in his soliloquies!

[movielocke]

This is an absolutely gorgeous bluray. Unfortunately, the film was uneven, with severe pacing issues and a certain hammyness gilding everything, which I didn't really find to be the case in either Henry V (which I love) nor Hamlet (which I'm indifferent towards). I imagine some of my disappointed reaction stems somewhat from a lack of familiarity with the material as Richard III is one of the plays I haven't read, nor seen. The material itself is inherently more demanding than a Hamlet or Macbeth. There are a lot of moving parts and interweaving factions and backstabbing going on, unfortunately, most of those parts are just people miming in the background, or possessing only a line or two, and Richard explains to the audience who they are and what they're doing. This method makes it hard to follow when so few of the Hastings and Rivers etc have any lines or on stage time to distinguish them. That means that although it was very easy to follow the broad beats of the story, betrayals and executions and subterfuge, oh my, I often had no clue who Richard was fucking over in most given scenes (other than the Act II stuff with his brother or Act IV stuff with Buckingham). I presume that most of the time, Richard was screwing over one of the well dressed dudes in the background, but they all looked the same, and never had any lines, so who knows what lord was which.

[MichaelB]

The problem with the original play is that it started out as, essentially, Henry VI Part 4, picking up on and resolving loads of loose ends (and characters) from the previous three plays. The full version (Shakespeare's second longest play after Hamlet) only truly made sense to me after I watched all four plays back to back, courtesy of the thankfully excellent and conceptually consistent BBC Television Shakespeare production.

But to make Richard III work as a standalone drama, drastic cuts and changes are needed, and structural issues inevitably arise.

[isakborg]

You are in good company if keeping track of Dorset, Rivers, etc. is a problem when reading or watching "Richard III". Whatever its shortcomings, there are some wonderful moments in Al Pacino's "Looking for Richard", his documentary (of sorts) concerning his preparations for taking on a stage performance of the role. At one point, in rehearsal, the cast is stopped dead in their tracks - Rivers, Dorset, who ARE these guys anyway? And after bumbling around for an answer, Pacino suggests, "Why don't we ask John Gielgud?" Cut to a brief shot of a transatlantic jet. Cut to the UK, and the whole cast present, as Sir John himself tells them, "You know, I always wondered who Rivers and Dorset were myself," with elucidation to follow. (Details are subject to the caveat of my remembering a film I haven't seen in 20 years.)

[colinr0380]

That's perhaps why Looking For Richard is one of the more interesting mainstream attempts to do (or understand) the play, in the sense that if you are not going to do the whole cycle of Henry VI plays for context then you are already going to be dealing with a partial experience, and necessarily have to almost entirely re-create a context in which to set the events (as in say the 1990s Ian McKellen version). The Pacino film is also re-creating that context by fracturing the play even further with frequent jumps outside that into documenting the production process, highlighting that his film is kind of annotated approach purely towards individual scenes and even line inflections without trying to hide that. It is the ultimate, filleted version of Richard III, but strangely highlights a number of things through its structure that some of the other 'standalone' Richard III films lacked.

[movielocke]

The television extra feature with Olivier was superb, it's a wonderful interview and overview of Olivier's career and his perspective on his shakespearian achievements from late in his career.