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Name the movie you have seen most often in the theaters.
My answer is incredibly strange & reflects the weirdly dogged, emotionalized, adolescent cast of mind I had at the time, but it was Branagh's HAMLET. Four hours long. I saw it 8 times in the one DC theater it was playing.
My answer is incredibly strange & reflects the weirdly dogged, emotionalized, adolescent cast of mind I had at the time, but it was Branagh's HAMLET. Four hours long. I saw it 8 times in the one DC theater it was playing.
I haven't seen it once since then, but then again why would I need to? I have the play at my fingertips (and most of it memorized anyway), and I SAW THE DAMN THING EIGHT TIMES AND HAD TO COMMUTE 1h30m TO DO SO AS A KID.
It has its flaws. But I love it nonetheless.
It has its flaws. But I love it nonetheless.
Imagine the kinds of things most parents are worried about their kids getting up to when they're 16yo. Drugs, sex, etc. I asked mom and dad for $20 to take the Red Line into the city to watch a 4hr Shakespeare film adaptation, and loved it so much I bought the CD soundtrack.
They were probably so glad I wasn't out murdering hobos or injecting heroin into my head at the time that they didn't even really care that I was also secretly smoking Marlboros during intermission. Ah, teenagerdom.
Same thing that appeals to me about it now as a 38yo husband and father: it's a truly universal work of art. The people portrayed in it are ALL fully fleshed out characters. You could have written "Hamlet" from the POV of half the cast and it still works.
Imagine "Hamlet" with Laertes as the tragic protagonist. It makes sense. Imagine it with Claudius, or Gertrude, or Ophelia as the protagonists. It *makes sense*. This is a play written from Hamlet's point of view but with such LARGENESS, such immense breadth of imagination...
...that it truly surpasses nearly all human literary endeavor as a full portrait of realistic characters in realistic situations. You can play Polonius or Horatio in countless different ways. You can play any of the leads in endless variegations. It is the dramatic tree of life.
And what hits hardest about HAMLET is that it is a nominal "tragedy" (everyone dies, basically -- spoiler alert!) but unlike, say, LEAR, it doesn't necessarily *feel* like a despairing tragedy so much as it does the price of a journey from childhood to adulthood. Act V is genius.
Every parent should make their children read and hopefully understand what is going on in Act V, Scenes i & ii (everything up to the duel) of "Hamlet." There is genuinely profound philosophy there, philosophy that will give a person succor in difficult times.
Hamlet in the graveyard, Hamlet walking along the halls with Horatio explaining what had happened (and more importantly, what had *changed* since his last ironically pointless soliloquy): you could teach entire philosophy courses from these and improve students' minds.
in summary, shakzpere is gud
