CheerupSilver Very Cool!!!

Console best movie i've ever seen.

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

Josephina Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

begob An aspiring actress in Restoration Britain switches dominance with her cross-dressing mentor, but will the switch stick? Good concept with a sound historical basis and the opportunity for clever interplay. The choice of the murder scene in Othello as a plot device makes for comedy in the different styles of performance and delivers a final dramatic rush. And the story moves with pace from playhouse to court, leaving a vague impression of historical London.Biggest problem was with the lead actress, who played a linear part earnestly. Her mentor's story had some twist, which almost came through in his audition before the king, but I was hoping both actors' parts would be mischievous and deceptive, self promoting and self harming. Instead it's all about honest aspiration and just rewards, and misses out the essential weirdness of play acting in a tyranny. But it does come together in the end - a great climax onstage, which had me going with the audience and wondering did they/didn't they? Most awkward performance is in the part of Nell Gwynn - again, on the nose, but I guess that's down to the writing. The king and the company manager are played brilliantly; rest of the cast as good as you'd hope for in a Brit period drama.Music was lush - no historical references, as far as I could tell. Full fathom five.Overall: Entertaining, could have done with more weird.

BatTea Though colorful in a superficial sort of way, this was otherwise a silly movie, which took a subject that might have been used intelligently and trivialized it with, among other things, horrible and distracting music that bore little or no relation to the action, a contrived love-story between the two characters (Danes was unconvincing in all respects, and Crudup was unconvincing as a female-role actor, and, as one reviewer pointed out, he was more "feminine" when he wasn't trying to play a woman), and a drawn-out exposition of thin material. It is possible that it was not intended to be historically accurate, and, if so, it succeeded in that. Trite and predictable, right down to its gag-worthy ending.

Robert J. Maxwell A story of Shakespearean actors that takes place during the Restoration, after the Bard's death, when men who played women's roles on stage were being replaced by genuine women. The young actor being displaced in this instance is Billy Crudup, whose specialty is Desdemona, she being the wife that Othello strangles out of mistaken jealousy. The female dresser who more or less forces her way onto the stage, with the blessings of King Charles, is Claire Danes.Crudup is upset. He's spent his life struggling to master operatic feminine gestures and imitating female voices. He's gotten so confused about his own gender that he plays the female when in bed with another man. (Gasp.) Danes' character is no actress and at first merely mimics Crudup's theatrical gestures when she plays the role of Desdemona. But guess what.She teaches him how to be a man, and he teaches her how to act naturally, or at least naturalistically. When hey finally do "Othello" together, he doesn't lower her sweetly to the bed with his hands gently on her neck. He bangs her around and she shrieks as their antics destroy some furniture. Marlon and Montgomery were no more shocking to post-war audiences sixty years ago. Together Crudup and Danes transform the art of acting.I'd expected a kind of replay of "Shakespeare in Love" but this is better because it doesn't meander so much. It hangs together. It has more élan, more vulgarity (some of it pointless). There is a straightforward narrative with a beginning, a convincing conflict-ridden transition, and a satisfying end. Also it has a tantalizing glimpse of Claire Danes' left breast, in case of any doubt about her genotype. That may mean nothing to most viewers but in the interest of full disclosure I have to admit that I'm deeply in love with Claire Danes. She's not Hollywood gorgeous or sexy. Her features are a bit bulky and her blue eyes are always open, as if she'd just been pinched. But she's my kind of woman -- and rich too. Not that her portfolio is of any consequence as long as it's well endowed. I can't understand why my many proposals of marriage have gone unanswered. Probably intercepted by low-life flunkies. It's a shame too, because I'm supernally handsome myself, for a man over eighty. My five marriages simply go to prove how attractive I am. And though I'm not exactly lettered, I'm very gay and witty, especially when drunk.Anyway, it's an interesting flick and informative as well. Tim Hatley, the coutumier, deserves a medal. You have never seen such outrageous get ups. Richard Griffiths, as Sir Charles Sedley, is a wonder -- a rotund figure buried under a mound of gilt, all shaped like a football, except for two skinny calves propping him up like stilts and a wild and voluminous mop of a long wig of curly hair from which his plump, painted face peeps. That reminds me: Samuel Pepys shows up briefly. Pepys was a man of sublime good taste. He and I both frequented the same pub, The Prospect of Whitby, though not at the same time. The photography is lush and soft. The screen turns into a colorful pageant.Some nice, bitchy exchanges too. Nicely done.

James Hitchcock The early 1660s were a crucial period in the history of the English theatre. The London theatres had all been closed by the Puritans in 1642, and did not reopen until the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660. At this period women were still forbidden from acting on the public stage, so all female parts were played by male actors, just as they had been ever since Shakespeare's day. In about 1662, however, the law was changed to allow women to act in public, and the day of the "boy player" taking female parts was at an end. One of the two main characters in "Stage Beauty" is Edward Kynaston, who was a real-life individual. Kynaston was an actor of the period, who was said to have been a young man of exceptional beauty and was famed for his portrayal of female roles such as Desdemona in Shakespeare's "Othello". The other main character is his stage-struck dresser Maria, who harbours secret ambitions to go on the stage. When the King alters the law, under the influence of his mistress Nell Gwyn who herself has ambitions to become an actress, Maria gets her big chance. Soon, however, a further change in the law forbids men from playing women's parts, and Kynaston finds his livelihood under threat. A further complication is that he and Maria fall in love, even though he has previously been homosexual. This plot involves a few liberties with the historical facts. Kynaston implies that he has been trained all his life to specialise in female parts, rather like the onnagata of classical Japanese theatre, and that he will lose his livelihood if he is forbidden to do this. In fact, Kynaston was born around 1640 and would only have been a young child when the theatres were closed, so would not have received any specialised training in acting. The normal convention in the theatre of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was that female parts were played by adolescent boys who normally graduated to playing male roles in their late teens. During the period 1660-62 the real Kynaston played both male and female roles, and after 1662 had a long and successful career playing male characters only. He would have been around 20 years old in 1660, much younger than Billy Crudup who was 36 when the film was made. (The film takes a generally cavalier approach to the ages of historical characters: King Charles II, 30 years old at the time of the Restoration, is played by the 45 year old Rupert Everett, and the poet Charles Sedley, only 21 in 1660, is played by the 57 year old Richard Griffith!) There is, of course, a reason for these liberties. The film is ostensibly a light-hearted, bawdy Restoration romp, but it does try to raise some Big Questions, about social class, about the relationship between acting and real life, and about sexuality and gender roles. The main idea it explores (which will be a controversial one in some quarters, particularly among the gay community) is that sexual orientation is not an innate part of one's character but rather a social construct, something forced on one by the culture and conventions of one's society, and because the known facts about the seventeenth-century theatre do not altogether accord with this thesis, they have to be altered to make them fit. The suggestion is that Kynaston's homosexuality is connected with his feminine on-stage persona, that he is essentially acting out a role off-stage as well as on. When a change in the law forces him to act out a male role on-stage, his off-stage personality also changes and he finds himself falling in love with a woman for the first time. I never found this aspect of the film convincing. Much of the reason for this lay with the casting. Claire Danes was rather dull as Maria, and I could never believe in Crudup as Kynaston. He is handsome enough, but in a rugged, masculine way- not the sort of man who could ever convincingly impersonate a woman. The role called not only for a younger actor but also one with a more androgynous, almost feminine beauty. The attempt to explore serious themes was never well integrated with the more comic aspects of the film; "Carry On" type romps are not the best vehicles for an exploration of gender issues. There are certain similarities with "Shakespeare in Love", which dealt with the London theatre of the 1590s and also featured a woman acting on stage, and also with "Singin' in the Rain", which dealt with an equally momentous period in the history of the cinema, the coming of sound. It is not, however, in the same class as either of those films. As a mildly bawdy historical comedy it is amusing enough, but as serious historical, psychological or sociological analysis it never succeeds. 5/10