Watch Love's Labour's Lost For Free

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

"Dancing With Shakespeare" is the direct translation of the title this film was given in Norway, and it is quite an apt description not only of the film's content, but the fundamental, gnawing weakness of the film: a play that above all plays with language seems ill at ease in a jacket marked "dancing". When you dance with Shakespeare you don't want to get out of step, and Love's Labour's Lost doesn't QUITE come together. And it's very sad because it's a film you so much WANT to work, because its heart is in the right place, and its intentions are good and creative and exciting and bold. Yes, it's enjoyable and frothy, silly and sincere in equal measures, beautifully shot with a camera that plays a part in the best Hollywood-golden-age manner, and sometimes it's very funny and works beautifully. But frequently the novelty of turning one of Shakespeare's most language-reliant comedies into a nostalgic romantic musical simply works against itself, and the result is then flat rather than uplifting. And this is not because people don't TRY –everyone involved in the film really gives it a good go, and clearly wants to try to make it come off. It very nearly does, but not quite –there is an unevenness about it that keeps us from getting fully engrossed in what we see, and this is the sort of film that needs that to work. I was lucky enough to see this film originally at a special screening introduced by Kenneth Branagh and Alicia Silverstone, which boosted the preview audience into a higher gear of excitement and expectation than would be usual, so the experience was a little like the prospect of drinking lots of champagne –delightful, but somehow never as good as the idea of it!Upon re-watching the film recently, I think the film in fact rather MORE resembles one of those very fancy, colourful cocktails you order when on holiday, with tiny umbrellas and exotic fruit and flowers sticking out and looking enormously tempting on the menu and when brought to you, but always somewhat impractical to drink and with ingredients that don't quite mix together satisfyingly enough. With Love's Labour's Lost the conceit of transforming Shakespeare's rich ideas into classic Hollywood musical numbers to bring across certain moods and emotional moments is a fun recipe, but it seems to me to clash too often with the actual text the film is based on. Now, admittedly much of Shakespeare's play is very obscure and difficult to understand compared to other plays he wrote, and severe editing was going to be inevitable; but putting in musical number after musical number as a replacement seems more a way of padding the film to arrive at a decent length rather than really moving the story along. In fact, many of the musical numbers –skillfully and cheekily staged though some of them are– just get in the way of things, and frequently I found myself wishing that Branagh had been even more faithful to Shakespeare and instead kept in more of the actual play itself. Thus I was pleasantly surprised to find a number of deleted scenes on the DVD of the film that sadly never made it to the final cut. I think these should have been kept in because they help make more sense of the story. The diversity of performers that comprise the cast is quite interesting and there are some magnificent individual performances, though again the range of different styles doesn't always gel on screen. To a certain extent this was also true of Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet. Everyone is doing their own little film, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Timothy Spall's Don Armado is perhaps one of the most outrageous performances ever seen on screen, but it is totally in keeping with the character as written. And both he and Nathan Lane (as Costard the clown) bring an essential element of sadness to their otherwise comic roles that is very moving. But the double quartet of lovers that form the central romantic story of the film is a very mixed bag indeed. Branagh understandably gives the plum role of Berowne to himself and sells his Shakespeare with that admirable deftness that is uniquely his, but he is really too old for the part and this works against him here. I also feel at times he should have directed himself more astutely or had better assistance at doing so, for it is largely the scenes in which he does not appear that work best –simply because at such times he, as director, is able to concentrate fully on the other performances. The film also seems unable to break itself totally free from its staginess to become the truly filmic musical it aspires to be.So, I am quite ambivalent about this film. I DO like and enjoy it, and applaud Branagh for tackling a lesser-known Shakespeare comedy, and with such gusto, but I SO wish I were able to like it more and be fully satisfied by it –and by the greater film that is in its heart..

Surprisingly light on substance.A Kenneth Branagh written-and-directed adaptation of the Shakespeare play. Set in WW2 for the movie, The King of Navarre and his three best friends have sworn off wine, women and song for three years, in the interests of studying. But then the beautiful princess of France, and her equally-lovely ladies-in-waiting arrive, and their oaths are quickly and sorely tested...Fun and funny at times but ultimately quite empty. It is short to begin with - about 85 minutes. Then you have the fact that this version is a musical and the amount of actual movie time is even shorter. In the end it just seems so full of empty schmaltz, fluff and padding. Reasonably moving ending though.On the subject of the music, I generally dislike musicals but the choice of music here is pretty good: George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Kern and Hammerstein, Irving Berlin. While I would still have preferred no musical numbers - it just wrecks any plausibility and continuity - it could have been a lot worse.Decent cast - Branagh, Alicia Silverstone, Alessandro Nivola, Natascha McElhone, Emily Mortimer, Nathan Lane, Timothy Spall - who put in solid performances. Don't know what Matthew Lillard is doing there though (note that I didn't include him in the "decent cast" list). He is conspicuous by his lack of acting skills and should stick to C-grade frat farces.

As an avowed lover of Shakespeare Branagh has an odd way of demonstrating his affection. His versions of the plays are vastly edited, adumbrated, hacked and stuffed into curiosities.This one is the most bizarre. It is barely the real play "Love's Labours Lost", which is, by most reckoning, not a very good play, and like many Shakespeare comedies suffers from his often irritating humor. Onto that Branagh imposes musical numbers and then again he has a real in-joke using 1940s newsreel with his arch accent as a way of editing the play which is very heavily cut by at least an hour in length.So he packs a cut version of a play into less time and uses two other artistic/media styles into a shorter length. It's a not even the play; he might have called it, "Some Songs and Dance on Old Bill".Walter Benjamin might have used this film in his essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" as an example of how facile it is to transfer properties into a broth which is disingenuous.It takes gall and conceit to construct something that is not one thing nor anything else; that is a travesty on any measure. It's atrocious Shakespeare; it's even more degrading as Busby Berkeley musical as no one can really sing or dance; and as a piece of direction it is starchy, inelastic and very English in all the worst of all possible ways.Murder most foul is the Shakespeare line that comes to mind.

I found Kenneth Branagh's Love's Labors Lost to be delightful. There are those who approach the Bard with religious awe and will be scandalized by how much of the original script has been truncated here and replaced by singing. And there will be those hate or adore Branagh and cannot view this movie without comparing it to others of his movies. And there will be those who love musicals and are bewildered at performances by the usually unsung and flatfooted. But taken on its own merits, it's a fun, farcical, giddy, touching, beautiful, musical romp. In its spirit, it reminded me of "A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to the Forum" but with a simpler plot and more beautiful imagery and language.As others have commented here, Love's Labors Lost is not Shakespeare's best, but there are some gems of language and an amusing, though fairly simple, plot. Branagh did just the right editing of some of the more tedious or dated wordplay and set the action in a romantic Navarre surrounded by the very real dangers of a European conflagration. I couldn't help but imagine Shakespeare delighting in the light elegance and witty turns of phrase in the Cole Porter and Gershwin music... exactly the spirit of the original and a good match for the plot but adapted to modern sensibilities. I enjoyed the singing and dancing by actors who don't routinely do this sort of work; it added to the naturalness and effervescence of the performances. On the whole, it's not dazzling musical fare, but its perfectly enjoyable, almost a musical parody of musicals. And the clowning was just ridiculous in the best sense of the word, and often slapstick.In short, it's not a conservative adaptation of Shakespeare, it's not a Broadway extravaganza, it doesn't have deep or complex character development or conflict. It's an unusual and well done movie. And it's just fun. Enjoy!