Titus

Rating:
Summary: Wasn't Expecting Much & Absolutely Knocked Out!
Review: Sometimes I really like Shakespeare and at other times I am all too happy to give his plays a pass. I certainly wasn't eager to see what has always been regarded as his bloodiest and worst play,"Titus," despite the awesome acting abilities of Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. What I was totally unprepared for was the writer-director's surmounting all obstacles by mounting the most artistic adaptation of this or any other Shakespeare play. I thought I had already seen it this past summer in "Hamlet 2000" with Ethan Hawke in the title role. "Titus" goes even beyond that splendid production. The film has one of the strongest, most well choreographed openings I've ever seen. And it never lets up from there. The essential plot is that when Titus murders the Queen of the Goth's (Lange's) son, she spends the rest of the play wrecking vengenance on him and his when shortly thereafter she marries the young emperor and power comes into her hands. The visual effects are simply astonishing and Shakespeare would be delighted beyond compare if he could but see it himself today. These are the most artistically rendered visuals I've seen in a film since "Prospero's Books," which wasn't as good a film but had stunning visual artistry. This should have won all the Oscars, without question.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliantly Acted and Directed.
Review: This is one of the best films I have seen in many years. Anthony Hopkins is amazing and Jessica Lange out did herself. Though it is necessary to go with the flow with the directer's interpretation of Shakespeare, it is powerful, moving and brilliant. I would love to see this director attempt one of Shakespeare's much stronger tragedies.

Rating:
Summary: bloody brilliant
Review: What a feat Julie Taymor has performed: she, a first-time film director, has taken one of Shakespeare's most garish and lambasted plays and turned it into a work of cinematic art. The original material was brash and barbaric, and Taymor chose to embrace this and in doing so gave its brutality a strange sort of audacious beauty. The film comes at you with its teeth out and keeps a firm lock on the throat until the cataclysmic final dinner, at which point it's hard to know exactly how to react. The stunning sets, costumes, and a beautiful and eclectic score by Elliot Goldenthal place the story in a bizarre alternate universe which combines ancient Rome with Mussolini-era Italy and some sort of aggro-punk future, where mud-caked soldiers still wear armor and carry swords but also drive tanks and motorcycles.
The performances from the large cast are uniformly spot-on. Anthony Hopkins in the title role is his usual grand and charismatic self and particularly fun as Titus slides into a sort of calculating madness. Jessica Lange is perfect as the fiendishly vengeful Tamora, Alan Cumming is wonderfully near hysteria and just campy enough as Saturnine, and there are still Laura Fraser, Colm Feore, Osheen Jones...I could go on. The biggest standout, certainly in part because he has such a great character to play, is Harry Lennix as Aaron the Moor, a fabulously Machiavellian villain as charming as he is despicable.
Indeed it is a movie full of those old stand-bys sex and violence, but the treatment the material is given rises above the bloodbath. If you can stomach it, Titus is more than worth seeing.

Rating:
Summary: I tell my sorrows to the stones
Review: This movie, quite simply put, is stunning. Titus is decidedly not the greatest play that Shakespeare ever wrote but now after watching this adaptation I'd say it's probably the most underrated of his works and with help of Julie Taymor has the potential to be the most memorable.

After watching it last night, I had nightmares. The violence, on the first viewing at least, defies the boundaries of human imagination - I plan to watch it again, trying to concentrate more on the story and the scene-by-scene commentary given by Anthony Hopkins. And yet for all the gore that is served up in this dish, it is surprisingly beautiful. This is, after all, a tale of revenge and mayhem.

Anthony Hopkins as Titus, a celebrated Roman general, makes this slightly long movie well worth watching through to the end. Supporting cast is also astounding - Laura Frazer as Lavinia will haunt me for some time to come, I still shudder when I think about her performance and her character's cruel fate. Jessica Lange as Queen of Goths has a difficult task but she performs admirably. Her goal is making Titus' life a living hell after she becomes a wife of a new airhead emperor. Pay more attention also to the black slave who serves her, perhaps the real villain of the play (there is no shortage of those, although some are just pawns). Together, they succeed admirably but Titus gets a chance to revenge his family once again. The last banquette reminded me of Hopkins' role in The Silence of the Lambs.

Excellent things about the movie besides the stunning visuals and patience in unraveling the story while keeping the brisk pace are: music is great, great, great and the costumes and architecture that get a modernized texture. Something that I would vote for excising out of the movie are the dreamy parts in which Titus has visions of angels and scapegoats. Because the entire movie is so lucid in its unapologetic darkness, they just break the atmosphere.

But the part in which Titus lies on the stones while the faceless crowd moves around him on their way to watch the deaths of his unjustly punished sons, screaming to anyone who'd listen about mercy, is perhaps the most telling of all. There is little forgiveness to be shared between the participants of this play, and in the times when mercy is begged for, the ears on which the pleas fall are always deaf. Including those of Titus.

Buy it, rent it, run to see it, in other words. This is one of the best movies - and DVDs - to come in years.

Rating:
Summary: A wild and literally timeless masterpiece
Review: This movie throws one from all accepted standards of film out into an oblivion where anything can and does happen without reason or explanation. The acting is excellent as are all of the techinical aspects. If you enjoy Shakespeare and confusion brought together in heart-wrenching beauty, buy this film.

Rating:
Summary: Try explaining this to your friends!!
Review: Trying to review Titus is somewhat like trying to hit a moving target. For whatever reason everything works from the pool table, pinball machines, and motorcycles to the swing band at an orgy. Before taking a bite out of this be very open-minded and ready to be stunned. The acting is fantastic and the imagery is like trying to describe your first taste of chocolate. If revenge and heartbreak are your cup of tea sit down and enjoy the over two hours of cinema at its best. Don't be put off with the first few minutes, give yourself the opportunity to adjust your mindset and ease your way into Titus' world. When you get there enjoy. When finished, try to think of a way to tell your friends. Good luck.

Rating:
Summary: Visually entertaining, weak in every other aspect...
Review: Trying to cash in on the popularity of "Gladiator"? Probably not. Just another epic set in the same time period... maybe. Costumes and scenary are splendid, but the story line is questionable at best. I know this is supposed to be a take on Shakespeare's first play, but man, it's hard to follow. It opens up in modern times, then goes back to Roman times, then you think you're still in Roman times (at least they want you to believe it is/was Roman times) complete with electricity and microphones. Where are we? Usually, anything featuring a stud like Sir Anthony Hopkins, I want to see without question. Kind of like buying a new album by Collective Soul or the Smashing Pumpkins; I don't have to listen to it first - I know it will be good. OK, so you throw in another Oscar winner in Jessica Lange, and it's gotta be good. Not the case. This movie is a hard pill to swallow and the average movie goer will be disappointed. Did you see "A Midsummer Night's Dream"? This was another movie that in my opinion flopped. Remember readers... the director is trying to adapt an old Shakespearian play into a movie. This is a huge task, with babbling dialogue and is ear-marked early on for failure. Enough said.

Rating:
Summary: Astounding and complex
Review: I was devastated when I missed the Stratford Festival's production of Shakespeare's earliest tragedy. I have long been interested in seeing a production - any production - of this play after seeing one by the local theatre company that left me dissapointed. Julie Taymor's adaptation of the Bard's bloodiest play did nothing of the sort. It is intricately set in Rome across the ages, some scenes remiscent of imperial Rome, while others were set in more recent times, namely Rome as the capital of fascist Italy. There are also video arcades even more modern than that. Such a setting would normally seem out of place, but Taymor uses the differences in time to her advantage.

The casting was superb in this movie, with a surprisingly seductive Jessica Lange as Tamora, Queen of the Goths, and Anthony Hopkins as a convincingly crazy Titus Andronicus. Harry Lennix is terrific as Aaron, a character tormented by the colour of his skin and devoted only to evil. The portrayal of Tamora's two sons, Chiron and Demertrius as ravers is also very effective and disturbing.

The costumes are terrific, and under any other direction they would seem out of place, but Taymor made them not only fit, but perfectly meld into the plot.

The imagery used in this film is creepy, but also works perfect magic on the viewer. From the gloomy and monumental opening scene of the soldiers' gathering to the flesh pies cooling on the windowsill, bathed by a warm breeze, the genius behimd the film is obvious.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed this film, I would not recommend it to everyone. As a teenager, I would say that I am more open to the artsy qualities of this film, whereas the more conservative would be mortified from close to the beginning by the blood, sex, and carnage. The different settings would offend the moviegoer who doesn't want to be alert through the film, but solely to be entertained. It is slightly long, too, but you get so quickly involved in the plot that the movie flies by.

Rating:
Summary: aaagh!
Review: this was the most boring movie I have seen for a LONG time. The quintessential 'arty' movie that critics praise because they don't understand it. just awful

Rating:
Summary: Stunning, audacious adaptation
Review: I'd like to join the growing chorus of reviewers who confesses to being distracted and somewhat annoyed by the continual "modernization" of the bard. Its now officially a cliche in Shakespeare film adaptations, and even in modern-day theater groups - albeit one that can be used very effectively (_Richard III_, or Branagh's _Hamlet_) or overused poorly (_Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet_). Here we have a bizarre mix of what is probably fascist-era WWII Italy pureed with classic Roman Architecture, cars, radios, and video games. Compounding the confusion, we have an innocent and bewildered child, presumably the director's metaphor for our own innocence. The child mostly acts lost in the continual carnage and bloodbath around him. These are pretentious distractions and can be set aside for the good things director Julie Taymor does for Titus. She's not a blatant postmodernist as another critic here described her as, scribbling graffiti all over the hallowed halls of the bard's home; don't be fooled into thinking this is another _Romeo and Juliet_ debacle. Her use of color and texture is striking, and she puts some images on the screen that are at times hilarious - sometimes offensive - and oftentimes truly terrifying and on par with the subject matter at hand. You'll never be bored by her vision, that's for certain.

The other aspect of _Titus_ I credit the critic Roger Ebert for originally examining in his review, is the racial struggles of the character Aron the moor. Harry Lennix gives just a touch of tenderness and humanity to the seemingly boundless evil plotting of Aron by daring to spare his own child, borne of illicit interracial philandering with Tamora and otherwise doomed to sure death at the hands of an enraged Saturnius. Othello was also a moor, but he was essentially a man dealing with more basic emotions of jealousy and betrayal - not in the context of someone who is discriminated against because of race. The racial struggles of Aron are truly universal and strikingly modern themes, and seem to be central to his bitterness and hatred for the world about him. Im not sure if Taymor played the child subplot up more for the film, but even the cursory and tender examination of such themes makes Aron one of the more fascinating and complex of the Shakespeare villains and truly brings home the universality of the Bard's examinations of human interactions. Lennix gives a brilliant performance, and Aron's final speech, which moves from racial and fatherly empathy to perverse evil, is one of the most riveting scenes of the entire film.

It must be noted there's not a single bad apple of any of the other actors in this movie. Kenneth Branagh, the modern "king" of Shakespeare movie adaptations, has miscast several of his movies with bad supporting actors (Keanu Reeves springs to mind) but here nearly every performance is standout: the aforementioned Lennix; Alan Cummings as the shady Saturninus; Jessica Lange is quite a surprise as the sexy yet ruthless queen Tamora. And Hopkins is a revelation as a nuanced, distant Titus. You can see the apathy grow in him as his family is beset by tragedy after tragedy - approaching his ultimate distance from his final bloody revenge.

Titus is a bloody, overplotted mess of a play, and it does not have the graceful dialogue that his later plays did. Nevertheless, the actors and the director's bold collective vision breathe new life into what could have ended up as simply another "Caligula".