I Love Nothing In The World...

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... so well as Whedon -- is that not strange? It always seems to take a minute, when that Shakespearean dialogue starts sputtering forth, to adjust to the dusty language - the indelible hithers and thithers of it all - and with Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing there's maybe an added note of frisson on board, seeing a who's who of the Buffyverse stomping around a wine country villa tickling Bill's ivory tongue. Fred and Wesley are being so mean to each other! And I have no idea what they are saying! Slowly but surely your ears adapt - I think it was around the time that Clark Gregg showed up, waggling his tongue in a delightfully goofball (at least early on before all the woe is everything's) performance as Elder Statesman slash Daddy Dearest Leonidas, that Joss' take on the material began to feel fruitful, and from there it only snowballed. 

It never quite loses the sensation of being A Very Special Episode Of A Joss Whedon Television Show From Another Dimension - the budget shows - but that's a big part of its charm. It feels like you're at one of those Merry Murder Parties where the guests are suddenly acting out their scenes right around you, only at this gathering they're a bunch of people who had a scene or two on Dollhouse back in the day. (Hey there, Reed Diamond.)

If I'm going to single out anybody for Best in Show I'm going to single out the person Joss has proven his camera and pen to be in love with time and again, and for good reason - Amy Acker absolutely wows as Beatrice; she can do a pratfall with the grace of a perfectly timed gangly disgrace, and her "Oh God, that I were a man!" speech pretty much tears the roof off. Give this woman more work, ye gods of the acting profession! But the delight performance-wise is sprinkled evenly over the whole delightful comic-tragic souffle - Nathan Fillion and Tom Lenk make sturdy wit out of their huffing and puffing dimwittedness, Jillian Morgese and Fran Kranz brew believable love and heartbreak out of the couple that rends marriage and death asunder, and Sean Maher's sinisterly scored asides, a ridiculous ballet of shadows and foggy sighs, is as funny and pointlessly mean as it needs to be. Really the film just works, in its incorrigibly modest way, so much that this being a one-off, a one-time Whedon-Shakespeare co-production, would be cruel and inhuman - I must now insist that the entirety of Shakespeare's plays, from Romeo to King John, get the Nothing treatment.

Oh and yes as that picture attests Joss Whedon was there at the screening last night, and he was about as Joss Whedony as you expect him to be. He knows how to vibe on a crowd of people there to hang on his every word, and hang we did. I considered taping the thing or taking extensive mental notes and then I realized that the internet lives and breathes his every word and somebody else would do the work for me - click on over here for just one of the many examples I've seen today that proved my laziness more than right. Huzzah laziness!

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