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Title: 21st Century Shakespeare?
Review: I should, perhaps, disqualify myself as a reviewer of this admittedly lush production, because I found the first twenty minutes of it so dismayingly bad that I did not care to watch the rest. In what I take to be an effort to make Shakespeare accessible to audiences raised on Bruce Willis and Matt Damon, director Oliver Parker delivers something emotionally incoherent, clumsy, shallow, and crass. Branagh, Fishburne, and Jocob seem to inhabit different dramatic universes. I was unable to believe that their characters had any real connection with one another. This was particularly--and painfully--true of the scene in which Fishburne's Othello deflowers Jocob's Desdemona. Exciting bedroom games for some, I suppose, but for me it was Shakespeare made vapid.
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