![]() What was odd about that scene is that we don’t get Hamlet’s “Now might I do it pat” speech, which is the main reason for introducing Claudius’s confession in the first place. My favourite here is Hamlet listening in to Claudius’s “confession” while he’s driving Claudius’s limo. As with most modern updates of Shakespeare a big part of the fun is seeing how they’re going to play famous scenes in a contemporary setting. People certainly weren’t filming with them, as they would by the time Almereyda made Cymbeline, when their new functionality would be given an essential plot function. And while phones are used a lot throughout the film, they aren’t cell phones, which had still not been widely adopted. I know people today who don’t have any idea what Blockbuster, or, for that matter, a fax machine, were. The “To be or not to be” speech is delivered while Hamlet is wandering through the aisles of Blockbuster. ![]() Hamlet carries around a camcorder and is apparently shooting everything on tape. But like I say, the year 2000 also dates the film because of its heavy use of the technology of that time. Hamlet notifies Claudius of his return to New York by fax, and this is also the means used to send the challenge to the duel. Several speeches are played as answering machine messages or on speaker phones. The Mousetrap play is a video collage Hamlet, who is an amateur videographer, cuts and puts together on his computer. Ophelia wears a wire to her meeting with Hamlet. The Ghost first appears on a surveillance camera feed. ![]() In other words, there was no point in cutting to the shot of Hamlet with the body in the hallway except to play the rest of the scene on the phone. But instead he’s calling his mother and finishing up the previous scene in her bedroom. ![]() When we cut to this I was wondering what part of the play was coming next and assumed he was calling his uncle to have their big fight. After Hamlet has killed Polonius and lugged the old man’s guts from his mother’s bedroom we see him using a payphone in one of the Elsinore Hotel’s hallways, the corpse at his feet. There’s a scene that gives a good illustration of how far director Michael Almereyda wants to pursue this angle. Cutting edge in 2000, so dated as to be obscure today. The reason it’s important is because of the film’s major motif, which is media and communications technology. ![]() I’ve always thought the title of this movie should be Hamlet 2000. ![]()
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