Review of Love's Labour's Lost (2000) by Rand S — 08 Jun 2004

Here is where we do the oblicitory song and dance. Er, well in this case it's appropriate. After renting more serious fair for a while now from the library, I got my hands on something that looked less....serious. "Love's Labour's Lost" A 2000 remake of one of shakespears plays. It said it was a 'romantic, comedy, musical.' What they failed to mention was the goofy acting, the poor singing and dancing, and of course the language. Shakespearian.

It's a movie without an identity. They really had some novel ideas that alone might have done the movie well. If they had stopped with one or two of the approaches. but no. someone said. hey that's a good Idea lets do this too...and this...and this...

So you get a movie that's supposed to be set in the 1940's, screen actors over acting on purpose like you might expect from a stage play. You get songs...which in themselves wouldn't be bad, but in the style of "Moulin Rogue" They tried to use current songs with current sentiments to convey the story. Songs re-written to sound totally different. Done very poorly. They tried to make the film look like a movie musical from that time period. with the news reels and other elements. But it was all killed by the Shakespeare prose. One too many irons in the fire is what we have here.

Not all of the acting was bad though. Nathan Lane was hillarious in his bit parts. And there was actually some nice breast shots...framing a mans face who is talking while the camera looks over the shoulder of the woman, with the perfect angle to see all.

Alicia Silverstone, NOT a shakespearian actress. Nuff said there.

In the end I didn't finish the movie. I fell asleep instead. Perhaps I'll finish it later. When there isn't anything on TV, my DVD collection has be stolen, I have no money for a trip to the rental store, I'm tied down in a chair with a gag preventing me calling for help and my eyes pinned open. I might find time to watch the rest of it then.