Cymbeline (2015)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

The Worst Film Ever

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

I am giving this film 2 for the way the Company hoodwinked me into renting it as a DVD. At no point on the cover does it mention the word Shakespeare. I believed I was renting a good old biker gang vs. bent cops movie with a great cast of Ed Harris, Ethan Hawke etc. It took me a few minutes to realize with growing horror, that this was a Shakesperean play superimposed onto a modern story. Ironically enough, I went to watch a number of Shakespeare plays earlier this year, including Henry V. They were engaging, dramatic, exciting and entertaining. In fact, everything this film is not. I fast forwarded through most of this film which helped tremendously. I can understand what they were attempting to do, but the result is a mess. Ed Harris's status as one of my all time favorite actors has suffered a battering, based on the 20 minutes I did sit through. Ethan Hawke seemed to be struggling just to remember his dialog. Actually, it reminded me of the feelings that I had in school when they taught you Shakespeare. Somehow, you had a vague feeling that this is worthy, but they did'nt appear convinced themselves.

The film idea itself is quite good, the idea of mixing a novel context with the modern times is quite interesting.The cast and acting are good, the first scenes of the film kind of hook you to keep on watching, but afterwards is just hard to follow, watch and understand. The film has a great idea but fells like the film lacks of execution and direction. To start; linking the stories and characters is really hard (try to use paper an pen otherwise you are lost). But probably the worst part of the movie and the reason is so hard to follow and understand is the speeches the cast has to go trough. I get the idea of making a contemporary film based on a Shakespeare novel from the 1600, but is the year 2015, and this kind of speech is to elaborated, complex and not very well suited for today's audience (unless the film is targeted to highly literate people). A novel such as Cymbeline requires time and re-reading to understand, a film should better work on the idea of Cymbeline and focus less on follow step by step the novel speech.Not the best movie example (nor my favorite), but Romeo and Juliet (1996) had some of this novel way of speaking, but understandable. Cymbeline (2015) is all the time that dense, complex and confusing way of narration from the 1600's.The best part of the movie, in my opinion, were the soundtracks, but not only the ones that appear on the credits (only 5 songs), rather the song from the beginning, for example. Couldn't find the artist of those songs, but my congrats to the artist, really good music selection.

This film is a modern plus classical hybrid of the Shakespearean play, Cymbeline.After watching just a few minutes, I already wished I didn't choose this film. It's an interesting idea to put new modern scenes onto Shakespearean dialogue, but it doesn't work at all. Shakespeare fans will be appalled by the millions of anachronisms in the film, while everyone else will be put off by the archaic dialogue. A similar endeavour, "Titus" starring Anthony Hopkins already demonstrated that this hybrid doesn't work, so it's quite unfortunate that the filmmakers attempt it again. I really wonder why so many famous actors agreed to star in it. One more thing, I like Dakota Johnson in "Fifty Shades of Grey", but in this film her forehead is so overly botoxed that she could not even muster a single wrinkle even when faced with much distress. Even Milla Jovovich managed some!I watched " Cymbeline" until the end, and trust me it did not get any better. If you don't like the first scene, then switch it off right away.

Going to the theater to watch CYMBELINE reminded me of times spent being selected to serve on a jury: I had to throw out all my preconceptions and concentrate on the case as presented. Thanks to generally earnest and well-measured performances by the cast, the piece is gripping but by its conclusion is unconvincing and somewhat an empty exercise.There's no denying director Michael Almereyda's creativity in slashing the play's contents to manageable length while retaining the beauty and power of the Bard's language. But this is familiar territory for film buffs, poaching on maverick NYC director Abel Ferrara's vision of a nihilistic parallel world New York, which he explored most successfully in influential films KING OF NEW YORK, MS. 45 and BAD LIEUTENANT. Almereyda's style is quite different, adopting an ultra-serious mood of foreboding, while Abel's explosive approach was far less wimpy, often pushing or breaking through the limits of X-rated (now NC-17) filmmaking.Leavening this heavy, self-important mood is almost non-stop relief (almost comic) provided by anachronisms, with a NY setting imposed awkwardly on the war between ancient Romans and occupied Britons. (Abel would have cast Brits w/their distinctive accents vs. Italian/Americans with Bronx or Broroklyn twangs, but Almereyda employs a disparate ethnic mix on both sides of the equation which I found completely arbitrary apart from its "urban ethnic" slant.) This brand of humor was pioneered by the late British powerhouse Ken Russell in the '60s and '70s with works ranging from THE DEVILS to LISZTOMANIA, and is channeled by Almereyda by way of Russell's only current imitator in cinema, Baz Luhrmann (of ROMEO + JULIET fame or infamy).Strong portrayals of the key adversaries by Ed Harris (Briton Cymbeline, as a meth drug/gang leader king) and Vondie Curtis-Hall (as the local Roman officer by way of upstate NY) are further enhanced by an even greater gravitas displayed by Delroy Lindo as the tough but kindly protector of the king's two missing sons, who he has raised and sheltered to adulthood.Rest of the cast is variable, starting with chief protagonist Posthumus played as a handsome but rather wan figure by Penn Badgley. Overshadowing him in a memorable turn is current It girl (of 50 SHADES OF GREY) Dakota Johnson as Cymbeline's daughter Imogen, the princess, in love with Posthumus. She is very empathetic throughout the film and morphs handily into a Shailene Woodleigh lookalike in later reels when hiding out with hair cut off as boy in the usual Shakespearean cross-dressing mode.Top-billed Ethan Hawke (who previously was a NYC HAMLET for the director) is riveting and thoroughly immersed in the text as the villain of the piece, who sets much of the melodrama in motion via his creepy wager with Posthumus that he can deflower Imogen easily. The film is at its audience-involving best during Hawke's dominant segment, and becomes rather wearisome in later reels as his importance is sidelined.Similarly John Leguizamo commands the screen and steals most of his scenes as an ambiguous go-between character who transitions much of the action. Other standouts in small roles include a surprisingly serious Bill Pullman and sudden songstress (singing Bob Dylan no less) Milla Jovovich, cast against type as the evil step-mother queen. One of the weakest elements is Anton Yelchin as her crazy son, a role I didn't get into at all though he is a key element of the play.So after an hour or so enjoying the intriguing upstate NYC locations and practical interior sets plus oddball elements (apt use of All Hallow's Ever/Halloween imagery throughout but silly American culture references like President Obama on TV), the final reel was quite poor, perhaps due as much to Shakespeare's intricate plotting devices as to the director's adaptation. Like plays or great novels of the period (see Fielding's TOM JONES) the disparate loose ends of the play come way too neatly together for the climax and resolution. I guess the pernicious trend in cinema in the past couple of decades of the so-called Chaos Theory screenplays justifies this sort of dramatic nonsense (CRASH and BABEL come to mind) but the quickie payoffs of a convoluted storyline are unsatisfying to a contemporary (and thinking) audience, and easy outs that give one a "much ado about nothing" final response.