Ranting to /dev/null

Underground cinema

I just got back from my first experience with underground cinema. In that the theater was actually located under Broadway on 61st St. I saw The Merchant of Venice with Al Pacino as Shylock. It's taken pretty much directly from the play, though it is abridged somewhat to fit into the two hours allotted for normal feature films these days. Pacino does an excellent job, and Lynn Collins plays an excellent Portia.

On the whole, it was quite good - it's Shakespeare after all - but there were times when the director seemed not quite capable of moving beyond the story's roots on the stage. When two characters are engaged in dialog, frequently the rest of the characters will kind of just stand around and watch them. This can happen on stage without it looking too weird, but on film, it doesn't work as well.

The original play is arguably a tad anti-Semitic, and Radford makes much use of this fact in ways that could really have used a little more subtlty. Yes, we get the idea that the Renaissance church was decadent, corrupt, and hypocritical. We've heard all this before. There was a reason for that thing called the Reformation, you know. The political overtones were a bit disappointing, especially as he had such great materials to work with in both script and actors. Fortunately for the film, they are both excellent enough to more than carry the less-than-steller writing and directing.

B/B+