A fun and funny and inventive contemporary-setting film of Midsummer Night's Dream

I would not suggest that your first exposure to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream be the highly inventing, contemporary-setting take by writer-director Casey Wilder Mott (2018) as her version is so eccentric and unusual and fast-paced as to lose many viewere unfamiliar w/ at lest the basics of the plot - but that said this film is as much fun and as inventive or at least as clever as just about any Shakespeare-on-film project I've ever seen. CWM takes great liberty w/ the plot - many cuts and excisions, some shifting of chronology - but that said she also gets at the spirit of the play, the frenzy and confusion and the strangeness of desire, including the "narcissism of small differences." She keeps the Athens setting but in name only, shifting Athens to Los Angeles, with Duke Theseus a super-agent or studio mogul and his wife-to-be, Hippolyta, a pencil-thin eye candy beauty who has I think 2 lines in the whole film. Of the forest spirits, Puck is a Malibu surfer dude - and we learn of him, in a clever closing sequence (spoiler here) that he's in a sense the writer-director of the movie we're watching; Oberon-Titania, the "fairies, are, as it turns out, the sound machine hired to entertain at the Duke's wedding. The 4 young lovers, whom every reader (and viewer) confuses, which is of course the intention, are contemporary LA industry types; their romps through the forest under various spells play out well, w/ Lily Rabe as Helena ddoing a particularly powerful rant. The highlight , probably, is the Pyramus and Thisby crew, which CWM brilliantly sets up as an AFI (Athens Film Institute) student production, leading to a hilarious "for your consideration" disc that they present to the Duke for a post-wedding screening (His "get her name" to one of his assistants, halfway through the hilariously bad video, is great); special props on this plot thread to Charity Wakefield as Quince, the director. Thought this MSD is by no means definitive, it's as much fun as just about any production of a Sh comedy as I've seen on film