SOURCE: Bowman, James. “All That Jazz.” American Spectator 33, no. 6 (July 2000): 80-1.

In the following review, Bowman criticizes Kenneth Branagh's treatment of the scenes, context, and meaning of Shakespeare's text in his film adaptation of Love's Labour's Lost.

What? Will the line stretch out to th' crack of doom? For the third time in five months a trendy film director has attempted to tart up Shakespeare in order to make him, in the phrase of the loathsome Jan Kott, “our contemporary.” Early in the year, we had Julie Taymore's Titus, which almost persuaded us that Shakespeare was a postmodernist 400 years before anyone else imagined such a thing. Last month, Michael Almereyda's Hamlet, presented the Prince of Denmark as Holden Caulfield or James Dean. This month Kenneth Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost rips out the guts of the play—its rather creaky and over-learned Elizabethan wit—and replaces them with popular...