I watched both O and Scotland, PA in the past few weeks. They were both interesting, but I kept wondering if the movies would make any sense at all if I wasn't aware of (and at least moderately familiar with) the original source material.

Shakespeare tends to compress a lot of emotional journey into a small amount of action, and less than 2 hour movie compresses that even more. Once you've excised the original speeches, you're pretty much left with a very stylized arc inserted into a novel environment. So it becomes more about "recognize the parallel," since everything is now so stylized that the plot arc doesn't necessarily hang together without that outside knowledge.

That being said, O was fine, mostly due to Mekhi Phifer. Scotland, PA was more fun, because hey, Bad Company and Maura Tierney! Cheese factor: 11!  12:32:39 PM  (comments [])