not really Shakespeare

Rating: 7/10 (6 April 2008)

a peerless cinematic/visual experience. i can name very few films that have even a couple of scenes to compare; lawrence of arabia does, but the list is tiny. and this film just keeps them coming and coming.
my reason for a seven is that the film is a failure as Shakespeare. being sadly monolingual i cannot speak to the stunning beauty that other languages probably offer when crafted in the right hands, and maybe the Japanese language version of this sings as sweetly as william does in English... toward the end when the fool rails against the gods i heard my wife mutter: 'as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for sport.' now that hits an English speaker full on. the fools rant, though meant to express the same thought is comparatively empty.
this brings me to another reviewer's point: Shakespeare's very language evokes the images needed to bring life to the ideas right inside your mind with a sort of 'uhuh!' flash. he pours into your ear his gold and the empty stage comes alive. kurosawa is trying to do this with the images foremost. they are beautiful beyond words. it is stunning. but it isn't Shakespeare. we have the ideas like vanity and treachery, we have the wonderful visuals framing them, and we have the actors coming across in maxed-out melodrama mode. This is not madness, not a soul seething with demons. it is histrionic flailing.
i think perhaps the Japanese cultural approach to the very idea of madness is not accessible to us in our usual western terms. it may be that an appearance of high melodrama is as close as we can come on this issue. the cultures simply don't see the same thing when they look. the film makes me glad bette davis never did Shakespeare.
sorry, kurosawa fans, i love him, too, but this one misses as badly on the verbal level as it transcends on the visual.