Product Description

Emmy award winner Kenneth Branagh, the man who redefined Shakespeare for a whole new generation with Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet, brings the Bard's most delightful comedy to sensational life! Rosalind is a young woman living in the court of her uncle when she falls in love with Orlando, a young gentleman of the kingdom. When Rosalind is banished, she flees into the forest of Arden disguised as a man...only to encounter Orlando who has also been exiled! But can she win his heart, disguised as she is? With a setting inspired by 19th century Japan and a star-studded cast including Kevin Kline (Dave, A Prairie Home Companion), Bryce Dallas Howard (Spider-Man 3, The Lady In The Water) and Alfred Molina (Spider-Man 2, The Da Vinci Code), AS YOU LIKE IT once again proves that all the world's a stage. Come enjoy!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5647 in DVD
• Brand: HBO HOME VIDEO
• Released on: 2007-09-25
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, French
• Subtitled in: English, French, Spanish
• Dubbed in: Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 127 minutes

Features

• Emmy award winner Kenneth Branagh, the man who redefined Shakespeare for a whole new generation with Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet, brings the Bard's most delightful comedy to sensational life!Rosalind is a young woman living in the court of her uncle when she falls in love with Orlando, a young gentleman of the kingdom. When Rosalind is banished, she flees into the forest of Arden di

Amazon.com
If you think stuffy old Shakespeare could be livened up with some ninjas, Kenneth Branagh (Hamlet, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) has heard your call. Adapter/director Branagh has set the pastoral comedy As You Like It in feudal Japan, where the characters are still British (they live in a community established by Western merchants) but now have reason to dress up in lush Japanese fabrics and engage in sumo wrestling. Due to a feud between two noble brothers, Rosalind (Bryce Dallas Howard, The Village) is banished and ends up disguised as a man in a nearby forest. There she tests the faith of her beloved (and also banished) Orlando (David Oyelowo, MI-5), who can't recognize her because she looks like a Dickensian ragamuffin. Meanwhile, a variety of other star-crossed lovers romp around the forest and zen gardens, sparring about love and melancholy. Branagh, never a subtle director, takes every opportunity to squeeze in slapstick and action (like the aforementioned ninjas), but he also keeps the language clear and the movie is beautiful to look at. The strong cast includes Kevin Kline (who previously frolicked in a movie adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream), Alfred Molina (Spider-Man 2, Frida), Romola Garai (I Capture the Castle, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights), and Adrian Lester (Hustle, Love's Labors Lost). --Bret Fetzer

Customer Reviews

A Review? Simple. It's Beautiful!!
This movie is beautiful! That's right. That's my whole review.
There are stylised Komonos and rich 1890-ish Western costumes. A pallette of amazing reds, maroons and rose colors set against a magical green forest with ancient towering trees and exotic oriental marshes.
The romantic comedy element is all about being in love; being giddy with all consuming love. The Shakespearean words are edited short and crisp and are delivered naturalistically and effortlessly by the likes of Kevin Kline and Brian Blessed. Of the leads, David Oyelowo stands out as a very masculine and handsome leading man and Bryce Dallas Howard (an American) more that holds her own with the mostly British cast.
Perhaps due to Branagh's pruning of the text, I also found listening to, and understanding As You Like It just as effortless as the actor's delivery. I'm not an English teacher nor an Elizabethean scholar and this movie spoke to me, taking me on a wonderful escape. (NOTE: Make sure to watch all the way through the credits!)
It is obvious that Kenneth Branagh puts his whole soul into his movies. Thank you Kenneth!

'All the world's a stage'
Kenneth Branagh, aside from being a gifted actor with an enormous range of creative character abilities, has once again brought Shakespeare to life on the screen. His previous excursions into the bard's repertoire have included 'Much Ado About Nothing', 'Henry V', 'Love's Labour's Lost', 'Hamlet', and 'Othello', and now he adds one of the bard's most successful comedies AS YOU LIKE IT to his list of successes. Branagh has the gift of making the visual aspects of Shakespeare's stories enhance the language and in doing so he makes Shakespeare sound like brilliant conversation (which it of course is) instead of stilted and brittle old English.

The 'gimmick' used here by Branagh in adapting Shakespeare's play is placing the action in 19th century Japan, and while other less sensitive directors might have opted to insert parody here, Branagh instead makes the story seem all the more plausible - the two feuding brothers (one dark and one light) whose struggle over their estate opens the play before credits with an ingenious silent drama of black leather feudal costumed men invading a genteel house party of lovely people enjoying a Japanese dancer's performance. The original brother is banished with his clan to the Arden forest and there the magic begins. Love between several couples is played in all its manifestations with disguise, misconceptions, lust, and poetry until the play's rollicking end in a song of Hey Nonny Nonny!

The lovers include the disguised Rosalind (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Orlando (David Oyelowo), Celia (Romola Garai) and Oliver (Adrian Lester), the court fool Touchstone (a brilliant Alfred Molina) and Audrey (Janet McTeer), and Sylvius (Alex Wyndham) and Phoebe (Jade Jefferies). Brian Blessed plays the roles of both feuding brothers with style and authority, and Kevin Kline offers a fully realized Jaques - the character who is given the most memorable soliloquies in the play. The settings and imagery (Tim Harvey) are artistic and beautiful and captured with style by cinematographer Roger Lanser, and as with all of Branagh's production the music score (here by Patrick Doyle) is letter perfect and atmospheric.

But in the end the kudos go to Kenneth Branagh for his consistent courage and conviction that Shakespeare's plays are timeless, and his devotion to bringing them to the contemporary audience is to be applauded. This is a fine film - one to own! Grady Harp, August 07

Sometimes the Forest of Arden ought to be just the Forest of Arden!
"As You Like It" is one of my favorite plays. Grounded in the tradition of Greco-Roman pastoral, the play asks the following question, via Jaques: If man, who is trying to escape the intrigues of court, escapes to the green cabinet of nature, will he not consequently bring the intrigues of court with him, and therefore ruin nature? Shakespeare answers this question, which seems very timely in our warming world of globalization, in the affirmative.

This film, which is peerlessly acted, gains nothing by its Japanese setting, which, admittedly scrumptious to behold, is merely distracting. I fully expected a mincing Gilbert & Sullivan chorus to break into "If you want to know who we are, we are gentlemen of Japan, on every vase and jar, on every screen and fan." I have no objection to updating, nor to removing the setting to another location--or as Shakespeare would say, to another part of the forest. Such a removal was successful in Trevor Nunn's "Twelfth Night," which was set in a Cornish "Illyria." It was also done with delightful tongue-in-cheek in the 1960s' "Midsummer Night's Dream," which focused on a stately British home, labeled "Athens." Furthermore, I even suspended my disbelief when Brannagh set "Much Ado about Nothing" in Tuscany (partly because I love Italy). In none of these cases, did the change of setting disrupt the illusion. By placing "As You Like It"--most of which takes place in the fantastical "Forest of Arden" (to which the characters refer repeatedly)--in the historical context of a violent nineteenth-century Japan, Brannagh disrupts the magic as irrevocably as if he had placed the first scenes in the 1930s' Leni Riefenstall-inspired glamor of the Third Reich and then had everyone escape to the Forest of Bavaria, still calling it the Forest of Arden.

Because Brannagh has already burst the bubble of Shakespeare's magic, his final metatheatrical conceit, of having Rosalind deliver the epilogue (full of gender-bending innuendo, since the part was originally played by a boy playing a girl playing a boy) among the actors dressing-room caravans, falls flat. I also think that Brannagh's moving scenes around, his making cuts (Touchstone, one of Shakespeare's greatest clowns, got lost somewhere in the forest), spoiled the rhythm of the play which takes on an incantatory magic in the "And I for Phebe, And I for Ganymeade, And I for Rosalind, And I for no woman" scene between the pastoral Silvius and Phebe, and the lovers Orlando and Ganymede/Rosalind.

I am also cross with Kenneth Brannagh for recycling the ending which was delightful and far more effective in "Much Ado" ("Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more!"), complete with the actors dancing in circles--all viewed from above among cascading rose-petals (Perhaps they were cherry blossoms this time.).

On the plus side, English subtitles were available, and, as I said, the acting is excellent and Rosalind is more than lovely to look at, as are the costumes.

Although I am generally a great fan of Kenneth Brannagh, I do wish he had left the Forest of Arden in its magical land of nowhere.