fajrdrako | Brit boys... (Reply)

commodorified and Alayne came over and we watched Othello, the 2001 version with Christopher Eccleston and Eamonn Walker. It isn't Shakespeare's version, though it follows the same basic story; it's set in a more or less contemporary setting (with lots of posh art deco sets), the language is modern, and there are a few significant changes to the plot. Thanks to

rosiespark for pointing me to this one.

It's brilliant. I loved it. It made me want to hide under the sofa. It is very, very intense. Very scary, in the same sort of way Ian McKellen's Richard III is scary.

You remember that I love Christopher Eccleston with a deep and unconquerable passion, right? Well, now, all the more so. And yet he is so unmitigatedly bad you think he ought to be in the who-can-outdo-Satan competitions. Oh, yes, very Iago-like. This particular production - besides introducing an interesting racial theme - does what Shakespeare didn't: It gives Iago a motive.

And Eamonn Walker (last seen and loved in Oz) is a magnificent actor. A sexy actor, but then, everyone in this movie was strikingly sexy - and it manages to hit a few of my kinks that most movies miss.

Eccleston managed to be utterly sexy and utterly despicable at the same time. Some lines (like "Trust me") and some mannerisms made were simliar to the way Michael Rosenbaum characterizes Lex Luthor in Smallville. Richard Coyle as Michael Cass was charming and gorgeous and I knew him but couldn't place him at all - had to look him up on IMDb and see that he played Alcock in The Libertine.

For further diversion - and because the movie had us tied into traumatized knots - we watched Much Ado About Nothing, the 1973 Joseph Papp stage version. Sam Waterson was quite toothsome as Benedick - yes, quite lovely, though I could have done without the mustache - and Katherine Widdoes as Beatrice was so like the Beatrice in the Stratford production I saw last week that it was unnerving, right down to the white Edwardian dress she wore, and the curly hair tied up in the back, and the straight nose and large eyes.

I had two major problems with this production. One, I found it stilted. Perhaps it was because it was filmed from a stage production - stage diction sounds strange on scene. Maybe it was because they acted it in a certain careful way, but they sounded as if they were carefully reading every word, not living it.

The second problem was that the powers-that-be (Papp presumably) decided to stage this as if it were a production of The Music Man, setting it in midwest America c. 1910. I kept expecting Benedick to pull out a trombone and burst into song.

After Act One we decided to watch Act One in the Kenneth Branagh version, and somehow we got so into it, because it is so irresistibly good, that we neglected to switch back to the Sam Waterson version. I had half-forgotten how much I love the way the Benedick-Beatrice romance is done in that one, and that the "Kill Claudio" scene is played just exactly the way I always want it to be played - and I even enjoy the Dogberry scenes in this one, too.

After that, we watched part of Cambridge Spies, browsing through it on fast-forward and then stopping to watch the good bits. (I leave it to your imaginations to determine which parts the 'good bits' are. They generally involve Sam West, of course.)

After that, we watched the first wonderful episode of Jericho, with Robert Lindsay as Detective Inspector Michael Jericho. It's a little reminiscent of Inspector Morse; set in the 1940s, Jericho is similarly brilliant and beleaguered, with a bright young vaguely-Lewis-like constable as his assistant, and a delightful thickening plot with all the right kinds of Gosford Park-like suspects and plot twists.

I should perhaps mention - for those here who haven't known me long - that my love of Robert Lindsay is immense, dating from my days of being into Horatio Hornblower, at which time I wrote piles of Horatio/Pellew slash. The spark is still there.