Written and Directed by Casey Wilder Mott
Starring Rachael Leigh Cook, Paz de la Huerta, Avan Jogia, Ted Levine
Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes
MPAA Rating: Not Rated

by Deborah Krieger

When it comes to modernized Shakespeare adaptations, I am inclined to say, “the more, the merrier!” Adapting texts, especially classic ones, from stage to screen can, and should, allow the filmmaker to reshape the text and tell the story from an often completely unexpected new perspective. So Casey Wilder Mott’s Kickstarter-funded adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is right in my wheelhouse of what I want to see in a Shakespeare adaptation. While it keeps the vast majority of the storyline and the original text, it remains true to the surreal, mystic quality of the play’s story by placing it in a setting that contemporary audiences will read as appropriately surreal and mystic: Athens is played by Los Angeles, California, and her forested and beachy environs. It’s why I’ll always argue for the use of contemporary music in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, because it gave the audiences who saw his movie the immediately-understandable equivalent of what those Roaring Twenties parties were like: lush, vivid, hedonistic.