Titus

Rating:
Summary: First rate
Review: Who would have thought that this mediocre Shakespearean play could have made such a powerful film? I watched it three times in two days. The DVD presentation is excellent, with many extras.

Rating:
Summary: Deriving a Very Cool Movie from a Bad Play
Review: This film shows that Shakespeare, even at his worst, is still pretty darn good. The play was an almost unreadable mish-mosh of blood, gore, and pointless tragedy.

This movie version doesn't improve the play so much as salvage and accentuate what was good about it. Perhaps that was precious little, but it was an admirable attempt nonetheless.

For example, Titus Andronicus is not a very sympathetic character, but he does challenge the actor to display a wide array of skills; there are great moments of grief, pride, madness, vengance, even subtle moments of loyalty and blindness. Anthony Hopkins' brilliance really shines through.

Of course, the best portrayal is of Aaron. Harry Lennix does wonders with one of the best roles for black actors today. The Moorish tutor seeths with facinating and attractive evil--like Darth Maul, but with more speaking lines.

Check out the scene where the Goth princes try to kill his son; you won't forget it. Is it racist? Sure. But what African-American actor wouldn't want to say: "Ye white-limed walls! ye alehouse painted signs!/ Coal-black is better than another hue/ in that it scorns ....."

Rating:
Summary: SHAKESPEARE WOULD APPROVE
Review: Was skeptical when I saw the preview and heard the hype, but was more than satisfied with the result. This is not gratuitous violence, this is art. Most interesting film I've seen in years.

Rating:
Summary: Oh my aching head...
Review: A film that had me enthralled for 20 minutes at a time and then made me laugh with pinball machines, pool tables, motorcycles, and microphones, bad costumes and worse haircuts. Anthony Hopkins was mesmerizing in the title role as was his daughter, but the rest of the cast was so far over the top it hurt my eyes. It could have been a great movie if treated more classicly.

Anthony Hopkins = 8 out of 10 stars

Jessica Lange = 5 out of 10 stars

The Movie = 2 out of 10 stars

Rating:
Summary: Weird mess
Review: Titus A. was the first play by Billy boy Shakespeare, about the usual themes of the ol' Billy boy: Revenge, hatred, a little bit of incest, honor, mental cases... The hard part of trying to bring Shakespeare to life through either film or stage production is trying to cut through all of the pompous attitude of the director and making an understandable, comprehensible piece of narrative. However, this weird mess of a film is little more that a deranged hybrid of Dallas, Sweeney Todd and Psycho, as family members chop off one another's hands, cut out tongues, gouge eyes, eviscerate torsos, slit throats and concoct unique recipes (Gee, sounds like everything a great movie needs, eh?) As the plots gets waaaay over-the-top, [director] Julie Taymor follows suit, with Fascist trappings overlaid upon Roman intrigues. While she certainly doesn't lack for original touches (she should start directing MTV videos) her stylistic flourishes amount to little more than an anachronistic jumble, with no rhyme or reason to their application. Now, it *should* be obvious that this is the work of a first time film director experimenting to see just how much she can get away with. All in all, this movie is a simple waste of time.

Rating:
Summary: A Thrilling Masterpiece From Start To Finish.
Review: What more can i add that has not been already said in the above reviews. This is truly an amazing movie,the direction is incredible the acting by all the cast is superb and the story is thrilling from begining to end. Hopkins delivers another amazing part sometimes resembling a real "Hannibal"( see the movie and you will see what i mean)! Jessica Lange also portrays a smart and sexy part throughout the whole movie keeping the audience alert all the time. Alan Cumming gives us probably his best to date performace in this movie keeping the movie alive with his outrageous role. One must also mention the great soundtrack which creates a perfect atmosphere to the movie and the beautiful sets created in the film, also the neat special effects which add more life to the movie. All in all one the best movies i have ever seen. A true Masterpiece worth seeing more than once.

Rating:
Summary: Comic Book Shakespeare
Review: Wow.... like a great magic trick, Julie Taymor has pulled off the ultimate illusion -- making people think that this overblown, cartoonish, Ken Russell rip off is a work of divine art.

Let's see.... First you have Anthony Hopkins, usually so brilliant acting like he was just kicked out of bed (Check out when he says in the "Behind the Scenes" about the horror of having to do more than five takes of a scene.... jeez, Anthony, aren't you getting paid enough? My heart bleeds.) When he first sees the nightmarish vision of his daughter he drones - "He that hath wounded her hath hurt me more than he killed me dead"... which sounded like it should have been followed by - "... and I would like fries with that." Is it any wonder why he didn't get an Oscar nod for this?

Next, you have Allan Cumming as the foppish emperor... screaming just about all of his lines, and gading about like a something out of a horrible drag show. Chilling that he was so great in ten minutes of "EYES WIDE SHUT", and so over the top here.

Angus MacFadyen reads his lines so fast you'd expect to hear his taxi cab beeping outside. As for that frightening spector of my nightmares.... namely the "actor" who played Young Lucius... well, the lest said the better.

And, good God, Taymor directs the Rhys brothers in such a way you're totally confused as why they would want Lavinia... they seem so interested in each other you wonder why they just don't get a room together and blow off some of that sexual frustration.... lives would have been saved.

Harry Lennox shines. The bright spot in a black hole. Sad to say, Taymor has him talk RIGHT TO THE CAMERA! What is that? "Aaron the Moor's Day Off"? It's called the fourth wall, Julie... you can break it on stage... on movie... it's DEATH.

On top of this we have set design that looks like they poured out the entire contents of the prop room and spilled it on stage, hoping something resembling style would come to be.... it doesn't. It dwarfs the actors, and also the real horror of the play. Also, Julie darling.... Shakespeare could write much better than you could ever dream of doing, so next time you cut about 40 percent of the text out, at least be humble an not put "screenplay by Julie Taymor" BEFORE crediting the Bard. He thought of it... you didn't. He baked the cake, you just put every shade of frosting on it, and you laid it on as thick as that meat pie at the end.

Well, that's just my opinion as a lover of Shakespeare and a foe to egomanic, overrated, American Express Card hawking directors.

Rating:
Summary: bold absurdist film
Review: In recent years, a new fashion has sprung up among filmmakers who have attempted to bring Shakespeare's works to the screen. No longer content to keep the plays bound to the historical eras in which they are set, many an adapter has chosen to transport the plots and dialogue virtually intact to either a completely modern setting or a strange never-never land that combines elements of the past with elements of the present. In just the last few years, we have seen this done with `Romeo and Juliet,' `Richard the Third' (albeit this one made it only as far as the 1940's) and even Kenneth Branagh's `Hamlet,' which, although also not exactly contemporary in setting, did at least move that familiar story ahead in time several centuries. Now comes `Titus,' a film based on one of Shakespeare's earliest, bloodiest and least well known plays, `Titus Andronicus,' and, in many ways, this film is the most bizarrely conceived of the four, since it creates a world in which - amidst the architectural splendors of ancient columned buildings - Roman warriors, dressed in traditional armor and wielding unsheathed swords, battle for power in a land disconcertingly filled with motorcycles and automobiles, pool tables and Pepsi cans, punk hair cuts and telephone poles, video games and loud speakers. The effect of all this modernization may be unsettling and off-putting to the Shakespearean purist, yet, in the case of all four of these films, the directorial judgment has paid off handsomely. Not only does this technique revive some of the freshness of these overly familiar works, but these strange, otherworldly settings actually render more poetic the heightened unreality of Shakespeare's dialogue. Plus, in all honesty, Shakespeare's plays are themselves riddled with so many examples of historical anachronisms that the `crime' of modernization seems a piddling one at best.

Those unfamiliar with `Titus Andronicus' may well be caught off guard by the ferocious intensity of this Shakespearean work. Moralists who decry the rampant display of unrestrained violence in contemporary culture and look longingly back to a time when art and entertainment were supposedly free of this particular blight may well be shocked and appalled to see Shakespeare's utter relishment in gruesomeness and gore here. In this shocking tale of betrayal, vengeance and rampant brutality, heads, tongues and limbs are lopped off with stunning regularity and it is a measure of Julie Taymor's skill as a director and her grasp of the shocking nature of the material that, even in this day and age when we have become so inured and jaded in the area of screen violence, we are truly shaken by the work's cruelty and ugliness. Yet, Taymor occasionally injects scenes of daring black comedy into the proceedings, as when Titus and his brother carry away the heads of his sons contained in glass jars while his own daughter, who has had her own hands chopped off in a vicious rape, carries Titus' own dismembered hand in her teeth! There are even meat pies made out of two of Titus's enemies to be served up as dinner for their unwitting mother. Thus, even though we can never take our eyes off the screen, this is often a very difficult film to watch.

`Titus' is filled with elements of character, plot and theme that Shakespeare would enlarge upon in later works. It includes a father betrayed by his progeny (`King Lear'), a Moorish general (`Othello'), a struggle for political power (`Julius Caesar' among others) and - a theme that runs through virtually all Shakespeare's tragedies - the need for revenge to maintain filial or familial honor. Anthony Hopkins is superb as Titus, capturing the many internal contradictions that plague this man who, though a beloved national hero and military conqueror, finds himself too weary to accept the popular acclamation to make him emperor - a decision he will live to rue when his refusal ends up placing the power directly into the hands of a rival who makes it his ambition to bring ghastly ruin upon Titus' family. Titus is also a man who can, without a twinge of conscience, kill a son he feels has betrayed him and disembowel a captive despite the pleas of his desperate mother, yet, at the same time, show mercy to the latter's family, humbly refuse the power offered him, and break down in heartbroken despair at the executions of his sons and the sight of his own beloved daughter left tongueless and handless by those very same people he has seen fit to spare. Jessica Lange, as the mother of the captive Titus cruelly dismembers, seethes with subtle, pent-up anger as she plots her revenge against Titus and his family.

Visually, this widescreen film is a stunner. Taymor matches the starkness of the drama with a concomitant visual design, often grouping her characters in studied compositions set in bold relief against an expansive, dominating sky. At times, the surrealist imagery mirrors Fellini at his most flamboyant.

The fact that this is one of Shakespeare's earliest works is evident in the undisciplined plotting and the emphasis on sensationalism at the expense of the powerful themes that would be developed more fully in those later plays with which we are all familiar. At the end of the story, for instance, many of the characters seem to walk right into their deaths in ways that defy credibility. We sense that Shakespeare may not yet have developed the playwright's gift for bringing all his elements together to create a satisfying resolution. Thus, it is the raw energy of the novice - the obvious glee with which this young writer attacks his new medium - that Taymor, in her wildly absurdist style, taps into most strongly. `Titus' may definitely not be for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach, but the purely modern way in which the original play is presented in this particular film version surely underlines the timelessness that is Shakespeare.

Rating:
Summary: I'd give a hand and a tongue.....
Review: This is a fine and strange adaptation of Shakespere. Not quite modern, not quite ancient. Very visually compelling in that way. Cars take the place of chariots, modern buildings take the place of Roman palaces, and yet there are catacombs and senate halls. The film is well acted, especially Hopkins in the title role, who gives a very good fatalistic, manic performance, but the supporting characters are solid as well. Yes, the word that best describes this movie is "solid."

The dvd set gives a good look at adapting this from stage to screen. The documentaries show the actors working up their parts, giving readings, really getting into the play. A view into their craft. Recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Why not make it as it was written?
Review: Why does ever director who gets a work of Shakespeare in his or her hands feel the need to butcher it with this senseless "artsy-fartsy" crap? This film would have been much better had it remained true to form and been consistant throughout with one era of history. To go from horsedrawn carriages to motorcycles to cars to machineguns back to swordsmen on horseback is frankly very confusing. The Goth brothers playing video games and smoking cigarettes in a pool hall? It really draws ones attention from the story. An often compelling, often disappointing, less than adequate retelling of one of Shakespeares great tragedies.