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Reviews
Anastasia: Once Upon a Time (2020)
lol
I cannot believe that this actually got made. It appears to be a film version of a fan fiction written by a twelve-year-old girl, complete with self-insert character. Everyone should watch this. I was genuinely conflicted on whether to give it 1 star or 10 stars.
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
I hate this.
I don't get it. I just don't. This is one of the most revered movies of all time. And I just hate it. I don't understand how anybody who isn't a child could like this.
My chief complaint is that everybody in the Land of Oz (including Dorothy) is extremely annoying. I spend the entire time just wanting everybody to calm down. The worst ones are the munchkins who speak in incredibly irritating voices, wear hideous costumes and sing a song that lasts a million years. Not to mention that they feel quite offensive towards little people to me. And nobody can talk properly either! (Somebody could argue that everyone in Oz is imagined by a child so that's why they behave so weirdly. That doesn't stop it from being extremely unpleasant to watch them, though.)
The music is also all terrible (except for Somewhere Over the Rainbow). Whenever a musical number started I would roll my eyes and pray that it wouldn't go on too long.
I don't think this opinion could convince anyone who likes this movie because I'm basically just ranting, saying that I find it annoying. But that's how I feel. Everything just irritates and infuriates me. And I don't just hate old movies by the way: I love plenty of movies that are as old or older than The Wizard of Oz. I even like some children's movies from the time like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. So I don't know what happened here.
If I have to give some positives, I guess that the movie looks good for 1939 and the black-and-white section at the beginning is fine. (The scene with the fortune teller is actually kind of good.) And admittedly there are some pretty clever ideas like the transition from black-and-white to colour and the Wizard actually being a normal man. This movie is technically not a complete wash but I find it outrageously irritating.
P. S.: Dorothy looks 17 but acts like she's 8 (she's meant to be 12) and I find this really unsettling.
Hamlet (1996)
As good as a direct Shakespeare adaptation can get
This movie does everything it can to bring Shakespeare's work to life in the new medium. The story is presented unabridged, but with cinematic flair: the production and costume design are top notch, the music compliments it excellently and the calibre of actor is unparalleled (Kenneth Branagh and Derek Jacobi in particular impressed me). And flair really is the word for this film. A sense of bombast is brought to it, which we rarely see in Shakespeare adaptations: usually these works are treated as high are which cannot be degraded through extravagence, but here we see the Earth cracking open, we have massive armies, we have extravagent fight scenes. This really brings a sense of life to the material that makes it fly by (especially for a four-hour movie).
So maybe you find it strange that it's still only an 8/10. Well, as far as I'm concerned an unabridged adaptation of a Shakespeare play can't really beat that. This film inherits the typical mishaps of his work: people behave out-of-character to contrive the necessary plot developments, vital plot elements take place off screen (including a central character's death!), the climax feels annoyingly unclimactic and so on. To make a truly excellent Shakespeare adaptation, one would have to take liberties with the plot and this film goes out of its way to alter as little as possible from the original script.
(I know some people find this kind of talk about Shakespeare unthinkable, but come on, let's stop treating him like a god; he was a writer with flaws like any other. And he wrote four hundred years ago; storytelling has come a long way since then. It's no slight against him to say that his works don't hold up perfectly hundreds of years later.)
That being said, for what it is, it is a triumph: brilliantly performed and with a great style, an epic in every sense of the word.