Tag Archives: love’s labour’s lost

112 – Love’s Labour’s Lost

Rita Mae Brown’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. On an unrelated note, in this episode Leigh, Brendan, and Chris return to the filmography of Kenneth Branagh just to see how we feel about perhaps his most unusual and unique movie, his 2000 Shakespeare adaptation Love’s Labour’s Lost. Yes, that’s right, that little-performed play that Branagh chopped down to about 80 minutes, reset in pre-World War II Europe, and then added musical numbers from the Great American Songbook. Can such a weirdly specific take work? Is this even a play that can justify having this much done to it in the first place? Does it matter if Kenneth Branagh doesn’t really get how to make a 1930s movie musical or indeed how to make song and dance look interesting? Listen in, won’t you, as we spend a lot of time trying to make sense of all this while enjoying a sparkling cocktail (but sadly no cocaine).

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111.5 – Maladapted from a Video Game

Remember a few weeks ago when the Borderlands movie came out and no one liked it and it flopped and we all agreed that there was no reason to talk about it ever again? Well, we’re talking about it briefly. Or to be more specific, we’re talking broadly about movies adapted from video games, a much-maligned niche that has only rarely ever resulted in a movie that can actually function on some level. Leigh, Brendan, and Chris muse about the innate difficulties of trying to adapt a video game in the first place, the problems that seem to affect most movie versions, and if there have ever been any successful ones in the first place (there’s a few!). Join us again in two weeks when we cover some wildly different territory with a setting-shifted jukebox musical adaptation of a lesser Shakespeare play directed by someone whom we’ve talked about, uh, quite a bit. Hey nonny nonny!

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