Schweedie

I haven't no! I'll give it a look, although I think maybe it's just a play that I need to see live for it to really grab me. Gotta love being accused of wanting hipster cred with your favourite play, eh? I know a friend of mine whose favourite is The Tempest has received similar comments. I wouldn't even necessarily say it's likely not intended - after all, there's quite a case to be made for Shakespeare himself being bisexual, so I wouldn't be surprised if it were intentional. Agreed, the Trevor Nunn Twelfth Night certainly plays that up, and I've always felt that the Baz Luhrman Romeo + Juliet did that with Romeo and Mercutio, too. Heh, you can say that again.

Ha, and there I go, just repeating the mistake without even noticing! I can absolutely imagine that she was. Doesn't she even look a little bit like Elizabeth Taylor the Zefirrelli film version? Which I hated when I watched it, incidentally. Shrew isn't a favourite of mine to begin with, but in that film, the sequence where Burton's Petruchio is chasing Kate, finally catching her and basically twisting her arm behind her back while declaring that they're going to marry? I didn't find it funny at all, just immensely uncomfortable. (Maybe that was even the point - to be honest I tried to put film out of my mind as soon as I'd seen it and didn't analyse it too closely.) I always feel like a bit of a bad Shakespeare fan for not really enjoying Hamlet, in any film version. Maybe I just need to see a really good production.

(The production with Samantha Spiro as Katherine? I saw her as Lady Macbeth last summer and kept thinking I was seeing Katherine on stage. It's like she was born to play that part. And hey, when I was in Shrew we played Bianca that way, too.) "Kiss me, Kate!" "Up yours, weirdo." I did love Rupert Sewell, he was perfect, and Shirley Henderson worked well, too. It's a tricky play to modernise, what with Katherine's big speech at the end, but I thought they got it to work quite well on the whole.

Oh gosh, yeah. I mean, I have no real issue with Hiddleston himself in it - I think he could've been a terrific Henry if the direction had allowed him to, but the direction didn't allow him to. Addressing the St Crispin's Day speech to four (or something) noblemen? No. Sure, it doesn't have to be done the bombastic way Branagh did it; it can be done awesomely if delivered more low-key and intense, but it does need to be delivered to his men, the men who were exhausted and sick and hungry and needed rallying. I was sorely disappointed in that whole film, and I love the play and had such high hopes. The first part of the Hollow Crown tetralogy, though, Richard II, I thought was fantastic! A little heavy on the Christ imagery, yeah, but gorgeous cinematically, and Ben Whishaw was perfect. Interesting! I've always felt the opposite, that his Benedick is so quintessentially, well, Benedick. My other favourite Benedick would have to be Damian Lewis in the ShakespeaRe-Told version. That version is actually great on the whole, too, especially with fixing the Hero/Claudio ending.

He's really one of my favourite things about that film. Blasphemy though it may be, I actually don't love Branagh as Henry V at all. I don't know what it is, but he just doesn't work for me in that film - especially his delivery of the big speeches. I adore his Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, love his Iago, and his Macbeth was one of the better things about that production (don't get me started on Alex Kingston as Lady Macbeth, though - I wanted to stuff something in my ears when she spoke), so I do enjoy hearing him do Shakespeare, just not his Henry.

There was this one scene in We're The Millers that really cracked me up - when they're sitting around the campfire, and the Fitzgerald family start singing "I Fought the Law". Jennifer Aniston's facial expression at that moment was just so perfect.

Very true. My favourite Shakespeare play is Macbeth and I'm really, really excited for the new adaption with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, but I'm also curious to hear how they'll do with the language. I know Marion Cotillard herself said it was hard for her to wrap her head around it, and that she'd wondered why they picked someone whose first language wasn't English to begin with. I think she has the potential to be fantastic, though. Can't wait to see it.

I didn't even know there was hype about the Affleck dong and I still caught it, heh! I really enjoyed it, not having read the book, although I gotta admit I thought it felt longer than it needed to be. Great acting all around, and they really nailed all the supporting actors, too - Neil Patrick Harris was wonderfully and pathetically creepy, and I loved Tyler Perry and Missy Pyle. I knew going in that it wasn't going to be as simple as him having killed her and for a while I figured Amy might've pulled a 'Sleeping With the Enemy' escape because Nick really had been abusive (I thought the diary entries contrasting with what Nick said was neat), but I didn't see it coming that she was a vindictive psychopath. I thought that came across, yeah. Pointing out before the interview that he was wearing the tie and watch Amy bought for him, making a point of how much he loved them, I definitely thought it was clear that he was trying to play her. I pointed that out to the friend I saw it with afterwards - it bugged me, too. Like, you take off her bloody dress, but you don't clean her up before putting the hospital gown on her instead? I thought the same thing, actually, especially in her 'Nancy' scenes.

Se7en's "What's in the boooox?" is an always-favourite of mine. And it's always useful, somehow. Heh, well, I'm a football supporter (soccer, that is) and I would love to be able to use in that context, but unfortunately football players have to be some of the whiniest sportsmen on the planet, so it just doesn't work. The original is still a favourite quote, though!

Amen. We watched this for English class back in high school, and when it got to the part where his character has successfully pulled off his evil plot and basically skips down a tunnel or something while going "Muhahahaha!" the whole class just erupted into laughter. I'm still fond of his portrayal for that memory alone!

I love Amy Adams in everything, pretty much, but my favourite was Junebug. She's just so freaking adorable it almost hurts. Re: Jessica Chastain: I second this. I think part of it was due to the chemistry she and Octavia Spencer had, but she was just wonderful. Everyone in that film was, really. Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis killed it.

The talk about Saving Mr Banks in the Adaptions thread reminded me of a moment in that film that made me burst out laughing: P.L. Travers: "Responstible" is not a word! Richard Sherman, proudly: We made it up. P.L. Travers: Well, un-make it up. Richard Sherman: [hides sheet music of "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious."] It was a small thing, but it was probably my favourite moment in the whole film. Also, the first time I saw the bridge fight in Robin Hood: Men in Tights I was laughing so hard I was crying. Granted, I was a kid, but to be honest I still find it hilarious.

I was surprised at how much I liked the ending to Shutter, a Thai horror movie. Usually I feel like horror movies tend to fall apart at the end, but for me this one really kind of made the whole thing. Maybe I should've seen it coming (my mother of all people did), but I really didn't, and I loved how the final scene .

I may be a grown woman, but if I were to watch Watership Down today I would STILL fast-forward through that scene where they show the rabbits panicking and trying to claw their way out while suffocating underground. It gave me nightmares when I was a kid, and I still think it's one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen in an animated film.

The first one that comes to mind for me is Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream: "I like thinking about the red dress and the television, and you, and your father." The way she says that line just breaks my heart. That Julia Roberts beat her to the Oscar that year is still a travesty. Christian Bale in American Psycho is another favourite. And in Fighter. The man may be an ass, but he's a fantastic actor!

I was so excited about Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down, a book I adore, getting an adaption with a cast I thought seemed really promising - Pierce Brosnan was a pretty inspired choice - and then I finally saw it, and it sucked. Rushed, jumbled, missing all the humour and pathos of the book, with no depth to the characters. I could count the moments where I actually felt for anyone on one hand. I feel like a bit like it shouldn't have been a such a surprise, since so much of what makes the book and the characters great comes from internal monologues that are hard to do on film, but god, they could've done much better than they did. There were some internal monologues narrated in the film, and they just chose not to actually use the wonderful bits from the source material. Yeah, this one is going to bug me for a while.