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Memorable, crazy movie

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

This rare play is fascinating and surprising. It is first of all political, highly political. The queen, or rather wife of the king of Britain in Roman times, is a plotter who tries to get the crown for her own son. The king has lost his two own sons and the queen has to get rid of his daughter. She plots and plots but to no avail apparently since she will die and her own son will be killed by one of the lost but surviving sons of the king. But things being complex the queen leads the king to refuse to pay the tribute to the Romans so that, she hopes, the Romans will come and get the king. Unluckily the two sons and the man who has raised them and the husband of the king's daughter who the king had banished save the day and defeat the Romans. So much for politics.That's were Shakespeare turns magic. Till the very last instant in the last scene everyone is under the threat of being killed for some crime he has or he is accused of having committed. And the various death sentences that are hovering over the heads of them all fall like leaves in the autumn, but fall flat on the ground. Shakespeare uses contrived explanations that are so marvelous that no one can refuse to believe them and then we have a father who meets his two supposedly dead sons, is reunited with his supposedly lost daughter, is confronted to his son in law who he had banished and yet helped defeat the Romans, is brought face to face to a soldier he had banished a long time ago and who had taken care of his two sons. And he finally ends up the day by granting pardon to every one prisoner. That's a charming happy ending but constructed so swiftly and wisely that we doubt it will really end without any more killing till the last word about a general pardon is uttered. Then a soothsayer can come in and explain some mysterious prediction the son in law had managed to receive from Jupiter himself and all is well that ends well.Yet the play is a lot more interesting than that after all. It contains some patterns that are so Shakespearian. Two brothers are quite a common pattern in many plays. A difficult or impossible marriage, that's common too, in a way a primordial feature in many comedies. An old king that has become bitter and a wife that is manipulating him into unwise political decisions and human crimes is there to remind us of Lady Macbeth. A son in law who is receiving some poison in the ear when he listens to some report or rumor about his wife is there too reminding us of Hamlet. The exiled people living in the wild, or nearly so, can make us think of King Lear and his period outside in the wild nature. The disembarking Romans are not far from King Lear again. And of course the daughter of the king disguised into a page is so common that no one could miss it. We could actually be surprised that there be only one disguised girl.This production has another charm. It is systematically played in Renaissance costumes and the setting is Dutch or Flemish looking. That's in fact a charm added to the play because it enables it to move from the Roman paraphernalia on one side and the rustic if not barbaric attire and accoutrement on the other side. It makes recognizing who is who a little bit difficult but it gives the play a real universal fragrance. The BBC was already getting globalized in 1983 when they decided (in 1978) to produce the complete plays by Shakespeare. And that project was a unique decision in a time when DVDs did not exist yet, and the Internet was still a secret military tool in some laboratories and universities in America. It is a good thing they did it and many other public television networks in the world could do the same thing for their classics: all Molière, all Racine, all Corneille, all Goethe, all Schiller, and I guess we could move then to more modern projects. I won't speak of operas because that is being done, little by little somewhere in the world: all Handel, all Mozart, all Wagner, all Richard Strauss, etc, without speaking of the Italians, Verdi, Rossini, and so many others. It is a fine treat to get into 32 plays by Shakespeare.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID

It would be much easier to make a laundry list of complaints about how "Shakespeare didn't know what he was doing," or "everyone and everything bores me," but let's do it the hard way and see what's here.This is one of those late plays that academics can't classify as a tragedy, comedy or history. This is not a mistake of Shakespeare's, but a deliberate choice. "Cymbeline" is crammed full of incident, sprouts multiple strands running off in all directions, and miraculously pulls itself together at the end. In fact, some critics refer to "Cymbeline," "Pericles" and "The Winter's Tale" as the Miracle Plays.So, assuming just for the moment that Shakespeare did know what he was doing, how well has he been served here? Helen Mirren as Imogen is herself a miracle, "in the moment" at every moment, totally committed to her character. John Kane and the ubiquitous Paul Jesson bring similar conviction to Pisanio and Clothen, respectively.Michael Gough surprises with his model delivery of Shakespeare's language - clear and natural. More likely to be remembered for some spectacularly grungy horror movies, Gough has done his own reputation a disservice with his enthusiasm for constant work no matter how scuzzy the script. This is his only appearance in the Shakespeare series, and that's a real pity.Richard Johnson rasps and scowls well as the King (check out his IMDb.com bio for a few surprises). Claire Bloom flirts with a Disney concept of an evil stepmother without quite going over the line. Michael Pennington acts everything that can be acted about Posthumus without the gift of making you care.Robert Lindsay, so grand in comic roles in "Much Ado" and "Twelfth Night," here is the inverse of Helen Mirren, without a single moment of truth as Iachimo - a fumbling, external attempt at a villain by an actor outside his natural range.Elijah Moshinsky's direction is of a piece with others of his in this series. Ignoring all Iron-Age references in the script (Julius Caesar is not long dead), Moshinsky's fascination with Old Masters' paintings gives us a coherent through line to the production, with a particularly wonderful mountain snow set designed by Barbara Gosnold. Occasionally the director provides a striking image, as when one character converses with the mirror reflection of another.However, Moshinsky's editing is occasionally clumsy. When Iachimo presents his false proofs to Posthumus, the camera stays on one character or the other for far too long, and often the wrong one. We strain to see the other character, and aren't allowed to. This is distracting, maladroit, and just not good enough.However "Cymbeline" has much to recommend it, and Helen Mirren's performance alone is worth the price of admission.

I really was far from gripped by this; I must admit that I was watching it in my faculty library, for study purposes - but that does not rule me out of having a fair opinion on this production's merits.This is one of the BBC Shakespeare Series, made in the late 1970s and early 1980s largely; 'twas a series that often lacked the necessary budgets to create any visual impact whatsoever. For instance, compare Orson Welles' filming of the Shrewsbury Battle to the pathetic, barely conveyed at all BBC sequence at the end of "Henry IV, Part I"... Really, these adaptations do not measure up (I admit I have not seen all of them, so I am not necessarily speaking about every one) to the many intriguing cinematic envisionings of Shakespeare, and indeed this "Cymbeline" simply does not make use of its television medium.The cast is solid, but uninspired; Helen Mirren, for example, very forgettable in the crucial lead female role. Many barely try to rise above the bare-minimum mediocrity of the production. Some of the costumes are 'nice' I guess - a conscious attempt to place the action in the early C17 - but Moshinsky's direction is pretty non-existent. The action is, however, presented without any zest, slant or variation; this basically seems far too much of a filmed stage-play, although it is of course supposed to be a 'television adaptation'. Some actors acquit themselves adroitly - the irreproachable Robert Lindsay perfect as the silvery jackanapes Iachimo - and most of an experienced, familiar cast are tidy, but fail to add much to their roles: Michael Gough ('Horror Hospital', 'Satan's Slave'), Marius Goring ('A Matter of Life and Death' indeed!), Graham Crowden ('The Company of Wolves', Old Jock in 'A Very Peculiar Practice' and a thumping hiss-the-melodrama-villain turn as Soldeed in "Dr Who"'s 'The Horns of Nimon'), John Kane, Hugh Thomas (inscrutably bespectacled here) and the grand old Michael Hordern in a cameo as Jupiter. Really, this is a competent but undeniably dull near-three hours to trudge through. One of the most curious of Shakespeare's plays is barely adapted; is it a history, a romance, a drama? A problem play...? The director is palpably at a loss as to define the material in his terms. It would take a rather more dynamic and thought through adaptation to bring something more out of the play. As it is, I was left un-enthused and unimpressed with this production, and by extension a play that seems a poor relation of the genuinely fascinating problem-comedies.

Cymbeline has been described as an experimental tragi-comedy, or among the first dramatic romances, but neither is adequate to describe the perfection of the final scene of the play when Shakespeare weaves golden unity from the chaos of loose threads. Mr. Moshinsky breathes life into this production by using the palette of the great Dutch Masters whose paintings minutely chronicle the mundane but serve as visual metaphors for the existence of the transcendent which underscores every moment. In a great cast, two performances really stand out. Helen Mirren's Imogen, the symbol of fidelity, resonates with tragic depth and constancy. The range of her voice is given full sweep especially in the ironic scene in the cave after she awakens from her drugged sleep. Claire Bloom's Queen, a very glacial villainess, scared me much more than if she had been portrayed as a stock evil step-mother.