Technicolor Titus



Struck by Anthony Hopkin's blue face on the DVD cover at Blockbuster, I rented 
Titus, Julie Taymor's film excursion into Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. I'm glad 
that I'd set aside some time for it. It's a bizarre and absorbing experience.

Shakespeare has been updated before. Brannaugh's Hamlet, for instance. I think 
there's an Edwardian Midsummer Night's Dream. But Taymor's Titus 
transmogrifies across multiple periods and resonates with the story’s surrealistic 
pastiche. It won the 2005 Oscar for costumes.


The play is a Shakespeare potboiler, plenty violent, and the playwright doesn't 
wink at it. There are consequences. The violence is scarring, accumulative, and 
like a collapsed star draws everything into its annihilating gravity. As William H. 
Macy said, in a criticism of modern operatic film violence... “when you get beat up 
in real life, you stay beat up a long time.” You don't jump into your Ferrari after a 
hit of scotch and get back in the hunt.


But all next day, I was thinking in Elizabethan English. "Now I must henceforth hie 
me to yonder market and there to procure, um, some chips and salsa and a 
lottery ticket... and thence homeward hungry pilgrim to hearth and... House, and 
Dancing With The Stars..."






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pool ku

pairs of lotioned limbs grow tan on white deck chairs sometimes a page turns a hibiscus bud skips across the chalky deck prodded by a breeze crows drop crusts of bread into the blue pool, a few sink to nevermore styrofoam noodles the color of crayons float in bright water the black and white cat crouches, lapping water slyly then feigns indifference a ring of house keys a pair of yellow flip flops lie in striped shade her gaze enjoins the umbrella’s taut shadow of whom does that girl dream?
Read more

Agatha

It must have been close to Christmas, but on which side, I don't quite  remember. I suspect it was sometime in the January doldrums when all was  frozen and gray. My friend Walter decided it was a good day for a dog. To get  one, that is. "I know I'm me, because my little dog knows me," Walter once  quoted Gertrude Stein. With his boyfriend Joseph away in the hospital, the house  had an unaccustomed empty feeling. And it had been without a dog for too long.  The shelter was in Ann Arbor . We piled festively into the car for the outing. It didn't take long to find her, a black and white ragamuffin puppy, so excited to  see us that her tail seemed to wag her whole body. "This one?" I said, my inner  ten year old going can we get her? Huh? Can we? Can we? On the way home in  the car Walter chuckled, "I don't know whose eyes were more pleading - hers or  yours." Walter named her Agatha, in honor of Miss Christie, the doyenne of our  mi...
Read more