ppriest-1

Ha! Watch this movie if you dare. Performance, cinematography, setting, choice of lines, interpretation... they're all there, in full force: relentless, perfect, a pure experience from the moment the first witch's robe drags upon the soon-to-be-battle ground to the "I LIVE A CHARMED LIFE!" battle scene. This version is what one should expect from this play. I only wish Polanski had followed up with Titus Andronicus. I'd love to see how he deals with the incest and rape. (Eeeeek...! What? Shakespeare wrote about THOSE things? Gee, do ya think Polanski knew that?) When I need a break from movies that fall back upon dizzying effects and mindless scripts, I watch my Shakespeare films again and again, and Macbeth is a top-runner in the rotation. This psychedelic hallucination of a production is a dream.

Easily one of my favorite movies of all time, Peter Brook's King Lear demands that you think, and will disturb you because you are alive and will one day (statistically speaking) be an old, foolish, feeble, mistake-laden human. Comment to the angles and lighting and all the things that seem to consistently disturb viewers: place yourself in the mind of a slowly ebbing ego, driven to rage over confusion and denied shame--an old man of four score and not a day more, in love with his youngest daughter, living his final days having denied and banished her... of course you are never going to see someone clearly, steadily, squarely, or in the same screen area. This masterfully bleak representation of one of Shakespeare's more difficult plays is unjustly in moratorium. I have shown it to many of my classes and will continue until the tape is worn with holes. Brook's treatment of Edgar is so haunting, so perfect, if you leave this feeling empty and lost, bravo! He who scoffs at their first viewing of this film is simply not watching the film, but is watching their expectations dashed on the wall.