Spinning Platters

While the echoes of Shakespeare and his work can be felt in the backbones of modern storytelling for the past few centuries, there is really nothing like the actual stories themselves, and they make for timeless tales that can be endlessly re-performed and re-interpreted. The mostly-blank canvas of a play allows for a great deal of re-imagination, and in today’s world of film and television, who better to take up such a task than a director who is known for his marvelous creativity and his own original work? Thus was born Joss Whedon’s modern take on the Bard’s well-loved tale, Much Ado About Nothing, a play highly regarded for its delicate balance of tragedy and comedy and much lauded for its look at relationships and roles of gender. The movie itself has been given a rather arduous task — doing justice to a modern interpretation of Shakespearean play is a concept often wrought with tribulation — but it succeeds magnificently, and is spellbinding in its blend of wry and somewhat slapstick humor, deeply-moving dramatic moments, and the ever-intriguing firecracker romance of its lead characters, Beatrice (Amy Acker) and Benedick (Alexis Denisof).

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