I have never watched this movie in its entirety, but I had to sit through a big chunk of it in my Shakespeare class in college and I hope I never have to see it again. This is the kind of production that turns people off to Shakespeare for life. Anthony Hopkins is a great actor, but he gave the worse acting performance in the history of the art as Othello; he wasn't helped any by the horrific hair and make-up job that made him look like a Klingon werewolf. Bob Hoskins on the other hand was a brilliant Iago; even the notoriously hard-to-please critic Harold Bloom thought he was the best Iago he'd ever seen. It's no wonder he went on to become such a big star. Jonathan Miller's dry, academic direction typifies what was wrong with the 1980s BBC productions of Shakespeare, particularly the pedantic insistence on giving everything an Elizabethan English setting. "Othello" takes place in Venice and Cyprus; it's a Mediterranean story that cries out for a Mediterranean setting, as Orson Welles demonstrated in his masterful 1952 version of "Othello," which is everything this movie isn't. Also, why couldn't they have gotten a black man to play Othello? Sure, Welles and Olivier were white, but they were from an earlier generation when it didn't seem as insulting as it does now. Where's Morgan Freeman when you need him? (Samuel L. Jackson would be great too!)
