angels in america
so i finally got around to watching “angels in america,” which many have fawned over in the last decade. i’ve never seen the play itself, so my thoughts are restricted to the miniseries.
so here’s the thing… for most of it, the miniseries sucked. every time al pacino was on the screen, i was either bored to death or completely uninvolved. that said, i felt that mary-louise parker, ben shenkman, justin kirk, and patrick wilson were all uniformly excellent. jeffery wright was a revelation, and well deserving of the emmy award he won. i even enjoyed meryl streep.
that said, i felt like the film suffered because it was adapted by tony kushner from his play. this seems to be a common problem in hollywood. tom stoppard, one of the finest playwrights of the century, and a strong screenwriter in his own right, absolutely botched the film version of ‘rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead.’ the even more awful was patrick marber’s adaption of his play ‘closer.’ marber, whose play is a searing dissertation on love in the modern era, butchered his own play, making it feckless and toothless. and perhaps his greatest sin was changing the end of the film to a happier ending than that of the play.
