I love this movie and I'm not going to apologize for it. The idea of the movie is to show Shakespeare, the greatest of all playwrites, in the midst of creating one of his greatest plays, Romeo and Juliet. The earliest version being Ethel and the Pirate King, of course. The movie mixes Elizabethan England with Hollywood and the combination is genius.
This movie might have the most clever script in this entire project. It features jokes for Shakespeare fans like Ann Hathaway's property being described as 'a small cottage'. It also has wonderful explanations for famous Shakespeare phrases like 'a plauge on both your houses'. Maybe my favorite feature is the depiction of stage life. Henslow's repeated wisdom that the play will go on somehow regardless of problems is a literal truism amongst theater people. We can only imagine the same thing was true then.
The acting is good throughout. Joseph Fiennes is very good as Will Shakespeare. Gwenyth Paltrow does a serviceable job as a young lady who is held down by gender. Geoffrey Rush plays a theater owner and is quite good. Judi Dench won a Best Supporting Oscar for her (very brief) appearance as Queen Elizabeth.
One of the most winning pieces of this movie is it's score. Stirring strings and a good lovely melody. This is the best score of any of the movies I've watched in this project. (We even used a bit of it for our wedding video.)
A great movie.
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