Movie #19 - Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead

[asterroc]

I watched this in two chunks while trying out my new borrowed bicycle stand thingit so I can "bike" indoors. It was definitely funny, in a Monty Python manner, and would've been funnier in a group. I see why all my HS friends were so fond of it. Don't bother watching it if you haven't read (and at least tolerated) Hamlet.

Comments

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

R&GAD is partially just a parody of Hamlet, but it's more than that. It's one of the great works of meta-fiction ever created, a hallmark of post-modern literature. I think the characters' experiences aren't just funny but resonant, and Stoppard's point that it's not just Hamlet who introspects but everyone is incredibly powerful. The absurdity of R&G's lives, living in the margins of Hamlet's story and being inexorably pulled back and forth by the demands of an author who has no sympathy for them... it's a kind of explosion of the David Copperfield question, "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life." Stoppard says that question is only relevant because Copperfield, like Hamlet, is a fictional character. Yet we try to to assign narrative meaning to our lives, to find our place in it all.