Much Ado About Nothing Movie Review

Sometimes as a great fan of Shakespeare, though certainly I am not a studied scholar of his work, I long for adaptations that get away from the stuffy theatrical tradition popularized by Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh. Though I have often found much to admire in Branagh’s work, it still fails to feel truly inspired or inspiring and instead comes across as an exercise in literary interpretation rather than a production of human emotion. But it is exactly that quality in Joss Whedon’s adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing that I admire it so damn much and why I’m willing to call it the best Shakespeare adaptation committed to film.

Serenity Movie Review

Seven years ago I went into the cinema to watch Serenity not knowing anything about it. I didn’t know anything about its writer and director Joss Whedon, who already had a cult following for his “Buffy” TV series and its spinoff “Angel.” I had also never heard of his short-lived series “Firefly,” canceled after a mere 13 episodes, which served as a precursor to the film. All I knew was that I was totally enthralled by the universe presented on screen.

Serenity’s amalgamation of the science fiction and western genres was unlike anything I’d seen to that point and in retrospect it’s almost an obvious combination to make. The premise is that 500 years in the future, the earth has become uninhabitable and the population has been relocated to another system of planets terraformed for habitability. There is an alliance that controls the central planets but at the edges of the system life is governed by a kind of Wild West code of justice.