I love Shakespeare and I love musicals. I really do. But putting them together is almost never a good idea (the one exception I can think of to this rule is West Side Story, which at least at the grace to disguise its origins).
Kenneth Branagh has always struck me as an extremely overrated director. He made a perfect adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, but his Henry V and Hamlet were all about himself. He seems to suffer much from having no Emma Thompson to balance with.
This movie was a mistake from start to finish. To begin with, it's a bad play. Yes, even Shakespeare had his flops and this was one of them. It's already a complicated plot that makes little sense with a ton of characters that are impossible to keep straight. So what did Branagh say? Let's make a musical! Bad idea. If you're going to film a bad play at least leave Cole Porter out of it. The musical numbers don't fit at all and are incredibly overdone. They simply don't work. They don't add anything and really seem to take away any chance the film had of being taken seriously. It's just a bad movie.
Some people found it enjoyable, and I'm honestly mystified as to why. They may like seeing Cole Porter songs come to life, but they need to realize that a film should either be Hamlet or Moulin Rouge. It should never try to be both.
Kenneth Branagh has always struck me as an extremely overrated director. He made a perfect adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, but his Henry V and Hamlet were all about himself. He seems to suffer much from having no Emma Thompson to balance with.
This movie was a mistake from start to finish. To begin with, it's a bad play. Yes, even Shakespeare had his flops and this was one of them. It's already a complicated plot that makes little sense with a ton of characters that are impossible to keep straight. So what did Branagh say? Let's make a musical! Bad idea. If you're going to film a bad play at least leave Cole Porter out of it. The musical numbers don't fit at all and are incredibly overdone. They simply don't work. They don't add anything and really seem to take away any chance the film had of being taken seriously. It's just a bad movie.
Some people found it enjoyable, and I'm honestly mystified as to why. They may like seeing Cole Porter songs come to life, but they need to realize that a film should either be Hamlet or Moulin Rouge. It should never try to be both.