Jason Marshall This movie is about background characters in a famous play that I have never seen nor read. Maybe this makes me a dunce. Oh well.In the movie, two men travel around and do a lot of pointless talking. Occasionally, other people barge in on the pointless talking and then quickly exit. My friend who likes this movie explained that these other people are the main characters of Hamlet.When the main characters of Hamlet aren't interrupting the pointless talking, one man plays with clever gadgets to try to keep himself from being bored. The second man rambles constantly and breaks the first man's gadgets. That's the whole movie, as far as I could tell. Three minutes of Punch and Judy would've been more entertaining.

Red-125 Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990) was written and directed by Tom Stoppard. Everyone familiar with Shakespeare's Hamlet knows that it's a play with many subplots. One of the minor subplots concerns two young fellow students of Hamlet--Rosencrantz (Gary Oldman) and Guildenstern (Tim Roth).R & G are famously "sent for" by King Claudius and Queen Gertrude in order to learn what Hamlet is up to. Hamlet immediately understands this, and uses this knowledge for his own purposes. Later, R & G are dispatched to England with Hamlet, with notably bad results for them. The two are really peripheral to the main action of the play, and none of the major characters pays them much attention.Tom Stoppard, who is an absolute genius in his mastery of language, turns the play on its head and puts Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the center of the plot, with Hamlet, the King and Queen, Ophelia, and all the rest at the periphery. R & G know that they're lightweights compared to the other characters, but they do their best to make sense of their lives and their roles in the action surrounding them. At the same time, they carry on a running verbal game, with arcane rules that only they understand.Both Oldman and Roth are superb. In the supporting cast--remember, this isn't Hamlet-- I would single out Richard Dreyfuss as the Player King for particular praise. (Interestingly, Dreyfuss was equally good when he played King Claudius in the BBC version of Hamlet.)We saw the play on the stage many years ago. As far as I can remember, the film follows the play closely. Both are worth seeing. We saw the movie on DVD. I think it would work better on the large screen, but it worked well enough to make it worth renting or buying. This is an outstanding movie--don't miss it.

BrockPace At my last movie night I watched the comedy Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. I have seen and loved other films by director/writer Tom Stoppard, such as Shakespeare in Love and, one of my favorite films ever, Brazil. I have always appreciated these films for the incredibly detailed writing and plot structure that sets them up, so I was pleased to find a film that he created entirely himself. This film was one of the most deftly constructed comedies I have ever seen. I struggled to keep up with the jokes as they jumped from Hamlet references to literature battles of wit to references to scientific properties. The writing was the best part of the film, as it felt like an extended series of in-jokes for the viewer, who would only understand the movie if they had read the play, Hamlet. For example, one of the main jokes in the film is that the characters are constantly getting their names mixed up. You would only understand why that is if you had read Hamlet, as in the play these characters are interchangeable, appearing only in a pair. There was nothing particularly clever about the camera angles or movements, yet the cinematography succeeded by including subtle references, such as the pages that can be found in each scene, containing text from the bible, or the Shakespeare portraits that are located all around the castle. Unfortunately, towards the end the film began to feel tired as the main plots and jokes were constantly repeated while the newer jokes all just seemed to be silly slapstick humor. Overall, I thought it was an interesting picture and a more important supplement to Shakespeare's Hamlet. Grade: C+

Jackpollins Based upon Tom Stoppard's novel, the comedy Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are dead delivers great performances from its three leads, a funny and witty screenplay, and a lot of fun. Gary Oldman is fantastic as Rosencrantz, and Tim Roth is equally as great as Guilderstern. Richard Dreyfuss plays The Player, the fellow they meet while stumbling around. The script is clever because Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two minor characters from Hamlet so as they stumble around, they do not know about how they are scripted. The movie starts off in a clever scene in which Rosencrantz keeps flipping a coin and always gets heads. This is somehow clever. Yes, it's the old I always get heads coin trick. But they somehow cleverly do it. On top of all this, Richard Dreyfuss is great in all his over-the-topness. If you like smart and sharp dialogue, you'll love it. If you watch it expecting a stupid comedy, or a comedy where you don't have to think, however, don't expect to like it. However, if you can get into a sharp, smart, funny, and witty comedy, you should definitely seek it out. A true classic.