Figliomio

Literally. Yes, literally. Everything. Just about everything. No, totally everything, as in every thing detail, performance, line of dialogue, direction, cutting, camerawork. Script. No, especially script. Here, yes, meaning in this film, the particular film featured on this page. Is. Is as in 3rd person singular as refers to the film under discussion here. Is, you know. Wannabe. As in, not really. Nah, does not work at all. As in the director may have thought he was the reincarnation of the three Coen brothers at once. But he is not even one. He is less than one. He is not a brother at all. Nor Coen. He is a wannabe.

To make Macbeth unexciting, boring, plodding, bland, irrelevant, static, tiresome, humorless and did I mention boring? - that must surely be a bit of an achievement in itself. As if to highlight these failures of inspiration, the director goes for the creative coups of shooting in shadeless, digital not-so-black and bleached white, framing statically in academy ratio, having his actors speak directly to the camera and presumably spending the whole of the budget on his own fee. All in all, it looks and sounds like it was made by someone who hates Shakespeare for others who don't care.

This film seems to have been written, acted and directed in the early 19th Century but left unreleased until 1942 (perhaps a squabble over the final cut between producer and director, or maybe the production ran out of money and the rights ended up with the bank).