Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

So... Last night I was surfing Netflix not really sure what I wanted to watch. I have a list of movies I want to watch on Netflix, but none of them appealed at the moment.
I wanted... a period piece... maybe a romance?
No. I didn't want a romance.
Maybe something more... fantasy-ish?
No. No fantasy.
Maybe... funny?

....Okay. Funny works. I wanted a funny period piece.  Well, most of those seem to be romances as well.

What's with history and it's romantic comedies? I mean, I know the best kind of comedies involve confusion and illusion and a lot of people angry at each other for not reason and romance really lends itself to that because how often have you been in a relationship where you don't understand why the other party is mad at you and the other party doesn't know why you're mad at them and it's just a big mess?

But... I didn't want romance.

Well... wait, what's that weird looking one with the half red picture. Is Richard Dreyfuss bowing to me while Gary Oldman hides a chuckle with that guy from Resevoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction or Skellig: The Owl Man or the Edward Norton Incredible Hulk? Seriously, I recognized the face, but not the actor's name which happens to be Tim Roth. So, I clicked to get information and realized that there is, in fact, a movie of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

I thought it was a stage play. Yes, I'd heard of it. It's a pretty bad story too. See, I watched the entire Lion King movie series by Disney. So, Lion King, Lion King 2: Simba's Pride, and Lion King 1 1/2. Yes, I'm sad to say I enjoyed them. I was a kid... and then a romantic preteen and then a teenager who liked stupid pointlessness. As everyone who's read about Disney knows, The Lion King has a lot of similarities to Hamlet. The sequel, Simba's Pride, has more than a few similarities to Romeo & Juliet. Lion King 1 1/2 is Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. As you usually find with Disney, all the ending are nice and happy and no one is hurt or killed who doesn't deserve it.

Shakespeare wasn't so nice, but then Disney shouldn't have stolen material from Shakespeare's TRAGEDIES... and that funny little play that... played with Shakespeare's tragedies.

Now, I've never seen the play. I just knew about it... after I looked it up on Wikipedia (which is God sometimes).  I certainly didn't know there was a movie. I was completely taken aback by the three very familiar faces (and Hamlet himself is played by Iain Glenn who I know from Game of Thrones and Doctor Who). It was very... strange for me.

So... it turns out, the movie was released in 1990, back when all these actors were younger and extremely attractive... to me. The play itself was written by Tom Stoppard and first staged in 1966. It's considered a Tragic Comedy... which makes a lot of send if you've seen the play or the movie. There are some actually touching moments in the midst of the insanity and this is an insane ride.

See, the play basically takes Hamlet and focuses on two minor characters: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two childhood friends of Hamlet who are brought to court to figure out what's going on with their friend. Most of the movie takes place away from the action of Hamlet with occasional appearances of the main characters and some fragments of the play, Hamlet. Obviously, every scene Rosencrantz and Guildenstern appear in Hamlet are enacted in this play. That's not really important, though. What's important are the things that happen when they aren't in Hamlet.

See, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have no idea what's going on or how to go about doing anything. Hell, they can't even figure out which one is Rosencrantz and which one is Guildenstern (by the end, you'll be confused too unless you have it written down). They know they have to figure out why Hamlet is acting... crazy. But, they don't know if his behavior is necessarily unusual because it's heavily implied (to me) that they have no memory of anything prior to the beginning of the play. In fact, they often say that the only guide they have is the words. This confused me because there's pages that look liked the script blowing about throughout the movie, but every seems confused by it. Rosencrantz (or is it Guildenstern?) even makes a paper plane out of a couple pages.

The comedy is in there. You even have two different kinds. There's the comedy from the verbal sparring the three main characters go through. Yes, there are three main characters: Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and The Player. They appear in the most scenes and they make up most of the dialogue and action. However, there's some physical comedy in the movie, most coming from Gary Oldman's Rosencrantz (or is he Guildenstern?). Some of the humor originates from Rosencratz z (or is it Guildenstern?) observing some natural phenomena, like two things of different weights falling and landing at the same speed, but when he goes to show his friend (played by Tim Roth), things don't turn out the same way, usually because he changes something. He drops two balls of different weights from the same height at the same time and they land on the ground simultaneously. He goes to show his friend with a bigger ball and a feather,telling his friend he's think the ball would land first. The ball drops down right quick while the feather meets air resistance and drifts down slowly with Rosencrantz looking on, embarrassed. "You'd be right."

I laughed really hard at that, but I really like physics.

There were a lot of little moments like that throughout the movie. Hell, the movie begins with Gary Oldman flipping a coin seventy-eight times in a row, and it always landing on heads. By the time they meet the Tragedians and The Player (Richard Dreyfuss), they've flipped that could over 150 times and it landed on heads each time.

It's an omen!

Unlike John Dies at the End, these two sad characters do die... at the end. They were as good as dead from the beginning. However, the whole play takes Shakespeare, combines him with the comedy of Monty Python and then adds philosophy in such a way that, by the end, I'm like, "What did I just watch?"

It's good. It's hilarious at times. It's also nonsensical, touching, sad, fatalistic, and... good.  I wasn't dissatisfied at the end. I was just confused because I was satisfied when the movie was so many things. It was like Tim Burton (early Tim Burton) meets Shakespeare. It defied any classification my brain wanted. And I just wanted to laugh while men ran around in tights!

... I'm going to go watch Mel Brooks now.