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iambicmidgit
Reviews
Hell's Kitchen (2005)
Stupid but oh so watchable
What's been already said here pretty much wraps it up, but i wanted to throw in my own two cents for Ramsay. I'm not sure which episodes of which seasons i was watching, but i saw about four, and i wanted to post this simply in defense of "chef." He's really not being such a jerk. Anyone who has had any experience in food AT ALL should be downright shocked that a single one of the contestants considers themselves anywhere remotely near competent. If I'm not mistaken, every one of the contestants has worked in a restaurant or graduated from a cooking school. I'm dumbfounded. These people are absolute, unequivocal, idiots, and the true pleasure of this show (and yes, true pleasure can be found) is in watching them make complete fools of themselves. Ramsay entered into a bad deal when he signed this contract. The prospect of one of these dolts running the restaurant of a serious chef has got to be a painful one for him even if he's making boatloads of cash off of it. He has every reason to yell his head off.
Hamlet (1990)
Sub-par
This movie, though certainly not bad, was also certainly not good. First, the acting. Although Gibson does do an acceptable (barely) job, he often butchers the language and more than often rushes inexpressively through important lines. Gertrude as well, and also the more minor characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, really do shabby jobs with their lines and acting. The same is true with many of the other characters, especially Polonious, who is played once again as a pitiable and lovable old fellow, a role-casting that completely ignores many of his lines. In all fairness, Ian Holm's acting in the "neither a borrower nor a lender" speech (his goodbye speech to his son) is fine, but, I am guessing largely because of the director, he speeds through (quietly) all the lines that add any depth or anything despicable to his character before pronouncing loudly the only kind lines in the speech.
The director does this more than once: choosing carefully which lines to include, which to exclude, in order to present a story more to his liking. He cuts out many of the earlier scenes that develop Claudius' character, instead choosing to display his character by showing him drunk and laughing upon many an occasion. He also adds much of his own to the storyline, shifting scenes, showing characters spying on scenes that Shakespeare did not have them spying on.
By cutting so much and by inserting his own additions the director has essentially leveled all the characters and make them much more dull and single-faceted. Hamlet comes off as a dumb, bewildered hothead, which makes his more intelligent lines (and this is largely thanks to Mel Gibson's mediocre acting) seem out of place and dull. Gertrude,Polonious, and Claudius, as well as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are similarly paired down until they lose all their intricacies and become single-trait characters: Polonious is well-intentioned but silly; Gertrude is loving bewildered; Claudius is evil to the core, without any nuance; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are conniving and a bit out of their league. In fact, the only actors somewhat major actors who play their roles at all satisfactorily are Ophelia, Horatio, and maybe Laertes, and they have together perhaps 100 lines.
But, despite the poor acting, the director is most at fault for the failures of this film. He switches around many scenes, destroying the momentum and gradual realization that Shakespeare's brilliant scene progression. He changes characters and butchers lines in order to simplify the movie.
I am sure this is all in some effort to make the play more "accessible" to a wider audience, but I think it is a tremendous insult not to the English language's most celebrated author, but also to that "wider audience" for the director to feel that Hamlet needs to be doctored up and dumbed down for anyone to appreciate it.
I don't want to sound like another one of those people who is simply throwing a hissy fit over how the the movie is not being faithful to the play (like all those people who got angry about the Lord of the Rings flicks.) I can only stress that Shakespeare is the most famous English writer in all of history for a reason: he was profoundly skillful not only at poetic writing but also at creating complex and interesting characters that did more than simply tell a story but also called upon important philosophical questions and questions about the interplay of the characters themselves.
What the director has done by editing and shaping the play so much (and I admit that Hamlet is a LONG play when not edited) is remove many, many, (ie all) of those intricacies that make Hamlet more than any old movie. I do not object to adaptations in general. I do understand that the director has time constraints. I just feel that his choices, as well as much of the acting, make this adaptation one to be avoided.