gabbbbyhayes

I thought it was a very worthwhile effort to retell the Scottish play, in the same sense that west side story told the Romeo and Juliet story. Some things work well across 500 years, among them blind ambition and teen age love. The look of the film is first rate, the set design is amazingly detailed. It was Morrisette's first attempt to direct and (perhaps thanks to the people he selected for the cast) it worked well. There is a lot of social commentary about the modern world in it. It is foul-mounted (Tierney can always come up with the right spin on the F-word) and features a stripper AND a streaker, so watch it alone before springing it on your junior high school English class. I fell in love with Maura Tierney all over again (and she's available! She and Morrisette broke up in March!). Tierney helped out in the writing and editing, by the way. Just a grand effort all around. Fun to watch. A lot of insights in the director's commentary on the DVD.

and SNL was HORRIBLE all season, fumbling, bumbling, badly written. When Lorne was shown the door, they handed producing duties to the woman who had arranged for the bands that performed on the show. I feel sorry for the cast members who replaced the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. I'm sure they were very talented. What happened, as I understand it, was that Al Franken played a little prank on the president of NBC, something involving a limousine. In the telling, it's funny, until you realize how many lives it messed up (including mine--I had to sit through a year of SNL without Lorne). Al was let go, Lorne was let go. Word to the wise: Don't mess with the limo of the president of NBC. So Lorne did this little thing (he's done a lot of little things--like Kids in the Hall) that was occasionally hilarious, but seemed to have no budget and lacked the thrust of SNL (it was too short, for one thing). I loved it when it was on, missed it when it went away. Some people though it was a waste, but really there was nothing like it on television at the time. Anyone who thinks it's easy to make skit comedy funny should sit through the entire run of FRIDAYS on ABC and Kelsey Grammar Presents the Sketch Show.

I wanted to mention that very rarely do the children in the program have lines, very rarely does the action turn on the behavior of the kids. When it does, it quickly changes so that adults are on screen (parents in conference with teacher, for example). I admired this because it took the pressure off the kids. The kids spend most of their time just being kids, playing, running around, laughing. This is in stark contrast to programs from other decades, like Father Knows Best or Leave It To Beaver, where most of the action and most of the scenes were performed by children. Some got through it OK, but others had serious problems. I think that the way this program handled the kids was intentionally kind to them, to ensure that they had a good time on stage. They were all pretty good, particularly Madeleine, who did begin to have lines and some challenging things to do and say as she grew into a young woman. But I recognized from the beginning (when Ray introduces the kids and then, in an aside, says, "It's not really about the kids." Bravo, I thought. Those kids will probably have very positive memories of their work.