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All right. I went through my list of picks and because it's the holiday season my mind turns to thoughts of Bing Crosby... but I thought we already are getting enough Christmas joy so way not spice it up with something Bing Crosby adjacent! I give a movie according to letterboxd not many of us have seen but stars two funny people in a supposed serious movie. I wonder how this will pan out... I give to you my pick From what I can tell this is free on some streaming sites with ads. If not I apologize.

When my pick comes up you'll get a chance to watch The Ice Capades Presents: Oh! Calcutta! You're welcome.

Deep down, I think I might have known that. That or our Tomax and Xamot powers

I love it when you guys pick movies I bought months ago but haven’t had a chance to watch yet

I believe this was covered in this thread

https://soundcloud.com/ashinyobject/not-a-plug-song-six-flags I've had at least 1 plug song a year used in the podcast since 2011, and I'm hoping to continue that streak if you don't mind. Thank you.

Don't cry for me, Argentina. You either, ArgenSandra and ArgenMonica. There's no crying in ArgenMambo #5.

NAOMI FRY writes a seriously major article about The Boys.

A horse girl, a horse girl, my kingdom for a horse girl!

making a post

Well, this was finally used! Thanx!

I watched this movie around the time it came out, I think later on DVD (not in a theater, because it didn't last long there), and remember thinking it was okay but some things didn't work. On this rewatch I thought the same, but it did seem worse than I remembered. I don't hate it, because I like the kind of big swing Branagh takes here, but in practice it's more like you're going along and getting into the Shakespearean dialogue and then the whole thing stops so they can do a song. The songs don't emerge from the story, they stop it. That's probably not what you want out of a musical, unless it's Gene Kelly and the dance numbers are so good that you want to watch them on their own (spoiler: they aren't). I would say that it would have been better if they'd just done a straight Shakespeare adaptation without the musical numbers, but the problem is that as a play Love's Labour's Lost is extremely similar to Much Ado About Nothing, which Branagh already did and is a much better movie. So I dunno, it's just a weird movie that does some weird stuff and doesn't quite hold together. Also, yes, Gilderoy Lockart was pitch-perfect casting for Branagh.

All of these posts are so thoughtful and well written. I’m bringing none of that. The tap dance in iambic pentameter to me felt like what they probably did on day 1 of their 3 week rehearsal so that Matthew Lillard could understand how to read and deliver the text. That was some real ta-ta-tee-tee-ta 3rd grade music class stuff right there.

I'm razzing the guy but he is primarily responsible for my becoming a Shakespeare junkie in high school with his "Henry V" and "Much Ado". And his directing "Thor" means he cast Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston and those are gifts that just keep on giving. I even think his "Cinderella" is pretty terrific; but man, when he whiffs, he whiffs HUGE. What's interesting is that, in each of the first three Shakespeare films he directed/starred in, he had played the same role (King Henry, Benedick, Hamlet) previously in a long-running, highly-acclaimed stage production directed by someone else. In essence, he got months to sculpt his own performance with a more experienced director before directing the film himself.

I think this podcast would have a grand time with the version of "Frankenstein" he directed/starred in, where he films himself as a shirtless, glistening, golden-maned SEX GOD.

As an English major who is not a fan of the Shakespeare's comedies (I'm a tragedies fan), I've definitely had my fill of the guys plays, but apparently not Branagh who I honestly think wishes he was born in Shakespeare's time just so that he could have had a chance to work with the guy. That's not to say the work he puts out is bad, but he's very much the actor that Alan Rickman was lampooning in Galaxy Quest, who would do a mainstream series like Harry Potter or Jack Ryan, all while bemoaning the fact that he was doing so given that he was a classically trained actor. The fact that he's now apparently moved onto Agatha Christie's bibliography, I can only imagine the ideas he has running through his head in order to keep that mustache and accent going.

Amazing. I totally get why he would want to be in the movie and even Miramax wanting him in the movie. But the idea that he had to be THIS PART for the actors to agree to it? He already was directing it. He thinks Matthew Lillard would’ve been like, “nah, dawg, I get Shakespeare offers all the time, bro... OH I GET TO PRETEND TO BE YOUR BRO? Sign me up!l”

I watched a DVD version and looked at the behind-the-scenes featurette afterward. In it, Brannagh says (I'm paraphrasing) that he decided to be in the cast so that the other actors would agree to be in it. Hubris, indeed. On the whole, I do like his work - just not in this film.

Kenneth Branagh is 100% a talented and multi-faceted artist and also 100% a giant ego with tendencies towards hubris and cheeseball-ness. These qualities can absolutely co-exist.

One thing I think about whenever Kenneth Branagh is mentioned is one of my college professors (English major) said he just played himself in “Harry Potter.” Gilderoy Lockhart steals other people’s work to become famous and is totally full of himself. While I think he does have some good adaptations of Shakespeare, and he is a talented actor. I do think there is an element of hubris to his body of work that is Lockhartian.

Okay, I'm a hopeless Shakespeare nerd plus I manage a small Shakespeare troupe, so there is SO much to say about this movie. I love Branagh's three previous Shakespeare films and I think that the play "Love's Labour's Lost" has some wonderful stuff in it; BUT it is one of the hardest plays to even attempt, and it feels as though every choice Branagh made here just made this disaster more inevitable. First, in any Shakespeare script, there is a LOT of wordplay - puns, dirty innuendo, words with double meanings. But as the meaning and the pronunciation of words have changed over 400+ years (for example, the words "good" and "blood" used to rhyme!,) many of the verbal jokes become incomprehensible to modern audiences. Any Shakespeare play is a challenge because of this but ESPECIALLY "Love's Labour's" - it's one of Shakespeare's earliest and much more dependent on wordplay than nearly every other play - there's very little plot, and the principal entertainment is meant to be the flirty banter between the four couples. Second - as Tall John mentioned, the play ends on an abrupt, MASSIVE bummer with the death of the King of France, and there is evidence to suggest there was a sequel, referred to as "Love's Labour's Won", in which the lovers reunite and their courtship comes to a happy conclusion. This play might be completely lost, but there is a theory that audiences liked the sequel better on its own, and that Shakespeare kept revising it until it became "Much Ado About Nothing". (This may help explain why Branagh cast himself as Berowne, as the dynamic between Berowne and Rosaline strongly parallels the Benedick/Beatrice romance in "Much Ado".) So the play is difficult enough to even try, but to give such difficult text to Shakespeare novices, then ditch HUGE chunks of plot and dialogue to make room for musical numbers, and then to add an entire WAR that doesn't even exist in the play; just begs the question of why even try this play to begin with? I have one final theory - Miramax released this film, and they were notorious for forcing directors to drastically cut the running time of films that they were afraid weren't turning out well. Some of the newsreel footage suggests that some of the funniest scenes and subplots in the play were actually filmed, then cut in the frantic effort to get the movie down to 90 minutes. And I am not trying to start a hashtag-release-the-Branagh-cut campaign, but those smaller roles were being played by actors well-versed in Shakespeare, and may have turned out quite enjoyably even within the incredibly flawed overall idea he had for this adaptation. But clearly, he didn't learn any lessons, because in his next Shakespeare film, "As You Like It", he added ninjas and sumo wrestling.

I actually didn't re-watch the movie for this episode as I've watched it numerous time, and I'm pretty well-versed in it. For me, Love's Labour's Lost makes sense in the overall scope of what Branagh was doing at the time. It was mentioned in the episode, that Branagh thought of himself as "the guy" to update Shakespeare for this generation. The idea was to make Shakespeare's plays more accessible to your average viewer, that they weren't just dusty old words in a text book, but vibrant stories that encapsulated a full range of genres. Branagh was pointing out that Shakespeare wasn't writing for the educated elite, but for the commoners. He was making commercial entertainment for the masses that had more in common with Michael Bay, Nora Ephron, and Mel Brooks than Ingmar Bergman. Branagh's illustrates this throughout his career. He started out making Henry V, an action movie. He then moved on to Much Ado About Nothing, a Rom-Com. Afterward, he did a grand, historical epic with Hamlet. Love's Labour's Lost is Branagh showing Shakespeare doing screwball comedy. It's supposed to be closer to Bringing Up Baby, than Macbeth. It's not meant to have much of a plot. It's pure farce. There's no deeper meaning to it.