Geoffery Wright's MACBETH

[indianasmith]

I watched this one last night and found it to be an imaginative and bloody retelling of one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies.  In Wright's version, MacBeth is a gun and knife wielding 21st century drug kingpin with a coked out, sadistic wife.  The violence is totally over the top, and the actors do a pretty good job.  It's a much better adaptation than the Leo DeCaprio ROMEO AND JULIET, but not, in my opinion, as good as Ian McKellar's incredible performance in the 1930's setting version of RICHARD III.    The three witches are three red-headed girls in English schoolgirl uniforms (in the first scene they appear; in their later scene they are wearing nothing but tattoos!).  They definitely add a surrealistic and erotic atmosphere to the movie.  This one is definitely worth a look; let me know if you have seen it and what you think.

[soylentgreen]

Indiana, it might be worth it to check out MEN OF RESPECT, a contemporary mob refashioning of the play from 1991 starring John Turturro.  It's nowhere near as surreal as Wright's, but it does an admirable job of conveying the shifting morals of Macbeth and the shrill instigation of his wife.  Plus it's got a lot of those great goomba mob film faces.  It's even got a substantial WikiPedia page!

And if you're a fan of McKellen and Loncraine's RICHARD III, you should seek out McKellen's annotated screenplay.  In a publishing world overloaded with script books, this one truly shines.  He goes into incredible detail about the excitement and difficulties of not only adapting Shakespeare for film, but the effort of transposing setting elements and not losing the soul of the play