Thursday, August 4, 2011

A Return to the Romeo and Juliet Monkeys

Romeo and Juliet: A Monkey’s Tale. Dir. Karina Holden. Perf. Tim Hopper and Thousands of Monkeys. 2007. DVD. Animal Planet, 2008.

When I first wrote on this film, I was a bit dismissive (for which, q.v.). I'm still pretty dismissive, but now I have a video clip to back up my dismissiveness!

Actually, the film isn't bad. It's an intriguing way of telling us about these amazing monkeys—it draws in the double audience of naturalists and Shakespeareans, and, I suppose, Shakespearean naturalists—though that sounds a bit like a nudist colony headed by King Lear ("Come, unbutton here . . .").

The clip below will give you a sense of what happens when you take the gnomes, the seals, the sparrows and pigeons, and all the other animated entities out of Romeo and Juliet. What remains is the basic story—with monkeys!


Links: The Film at IMDB.

Click below to purchase the film from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).

    

1 comment:

Sharky said...

Oh thank Odin, I thought I was the only one who actually saw this movie!

Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

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