A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: A Midsummer's Night Dream

Date Viewed: 5/15/99

Details:

Rupert Everett

Calista Flockhart

Kevin Kline

Michelle Pfeiffer

Stanley Tucci

Director: Michael Hoffman

Score: 0

The Review: Shakespeare on a bicycle. There is certainly magic in the effects used for the opening credits, but little elsewhere. The production is staged in a fin de siecle Italian town, as if a Victorian costume drama, but with what sounds like an original Elizabethan dialect, creating a major cognitive dissonance -- and this is not helped by the anachronistic battery-powered lamps on the bicycles. The background music is from Italian opera, as opposed to the Newage chorales heard in the trailers; the latter would have worked better.

The movie was directed, co-produced and the screenplay written by Michael Hoffman (with a little help from the Bard). Michelle Pfeiffer is allluring and sexy as Titania, but we see far too little of her. Kevin Kline as Bottom, on the other hand, is the best thing about this movie. The play within a play -- Pyramus and Thisbe -- is a scream, almost worth the price of admission. Almost.

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