The Tempest - Shakespeare [Christopher Plummer]

Format                                   : Matroska
Format version                           : Version 2
File size                                : 1.07 GiB
Duration                                 : 2h 11mn
Overall bit rate                         : 1 167 Kbps
Width                                    : 720 pixels
Height                                   : 412 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 2.070
Scan type                                : Progressive
Writing library                          : x264 core 120
 
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1683003/
 
http://image.bayimg.com/580c49e62fdab10a9ce2e2cbe45d2551471c129f.jpg
 
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/09/a-terrific-tempest.html

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s 2010 production of “The Tempest,” starring Christopher Plummer as Prospero, is like “The Wizard of Oz” with a wizard who really is a whiz in a land overflowing with marvels. Prospero knows from the beginning what all the characters need and how he’s going to fulfill those needs. We share his exaltation as he prepares to deliver poetic justice to ignoble aristocrats who betrayed him a dozen years ago and are now shipwrecked, by design, on his own mysterious island. But Plummer plays him with a warmth and gaiety that run far deeper than his rage. “The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance” is something this Prospero feels in his bones, no matter how often euphoria or anger distract or confuse him—he doesn’t really require his daughter Miranda or his beloved fairy Ariel to pull him back from the brink of destruction. These characters do something different here: they testify to what a terrific single father Prospero can be. “The Tempest” becomes a wild and crazy revel about the moral generosity of a comic view of life.

Plummer’s unforced panache brings an inevitability to the play’s identification of Prospero with playwrights like, well, Shakespeare. Long before Prospero says “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” Plummer depicts this eloquent intellectual as a man observing and then reshaping life into imaginative flights. Once a sort of absent-minded professor of genius, so wrapped up in his studies that he let his own brother steal away the dukedom of Milan, he’s now a nonpareil magician, controlling the island’s elements and spirits and determined not to waver from his master plan for redemption. The production’s director, Des McAnuff, drolly underlines Prospero as an interpretive artist who’s always spying on his former countrymen from odd slivers of the stage. Plummer has the eloquent hand gestures of an old-school symphony conductor, and when he raises the spirits of Iris, Ceres, and Juno he accompanies them on a spinet.

Plummer sets the production’s rueful, humorous tone when he explains his brother’s treachery in Prospero’s opening speech to his daughter Miranda (the feisty, ardent, funny Trish Lindström). He makes exposition lyrical, and doesn’t merely look back in anger. As he tells Miranda, for the first time, the story of their exile and their lucky landing on the island, they share brainy laughter and heart-to-heart communion. Plummer conveys Prospero’s delight at holding the floor, even with an audience of one; when he says “I pray thee, mark me” or asks “Dost thou hear?” he could be Bill Clinton telling an audience, “Listen up, now.”

This Miranda lives up to her station as Prospero’s daughter. She’s as headstrong as she is naïve—not yet his equal but no longer his unthinking tutee. When Miranda looks at the assembled cast and says “O brave new world that has such creatures in it,” you respond not just to her innocence, but also to her wit. The character Prospero still loves like a young child is Ariel (Julyana Soelistyo), a slippery sprite in a blue-white bodysuit. No Ariel in recent memory has been as bubbly and delightful, as beautifully poised between humanity and the supernatural, and as primally connected to her Prospero. In the cast list she’s been called “an ayrie spirit,” and McAnuff takes off in that direction: when Ariel turns invisible she wafts across the stage as a feather. Prospero’s “damaged and deformed slave” Caliban is even more elemental: truly half fish, as if he just crawled out of primordial waters.

This is the second first-rate “Tempest” to hit cinemas and then discs within the last two years: Julie Taymor’s gorgeous, too-little-discussed fantasia, overshadowed by the runup to her “Spider-Man,” entered movie houses in Christmas of 2010. With Helen Mirren as “Prospera,” it was a more ferocious interpretation all around. Taymor viewed this heroine, and Mirren miraculously embodied her, as “the witch, the scientist, the poet, the ferocious tiger protecting her cub, the steely leader, and more,” a woman who almost allows revenge to get the better of her. Taymor was able to form otherworldly images out of the actual sun, sand, rocks and sea of Lanai and the Big Island of Hawaii, and she pulled off surprising coups, like the fresh, improvisatory rhythms of Russell Brand’s inebriated Trinculo.

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