TITUS with Anthony Hopkins. What the hell?...

[Ian1]

I just watched TITUS with Anthony Hopkins. I am a bit confused by this film. If you have not seen this film and have no idea what I am talking about , please allow me to elaborate. TITUS was supposedly Shakespeare's most controversial play, containing a lot of sex and violence, even more than usual. The movie begins with a kid wearing a paper bag on his head and playing with his toys at the dinner table, smashing soldiers into his food and what not until a window explodes and a guy who looks like he stepped right out of Mad Max grabs the kid and takes him down the basement stairs and into.....the Colloseum! I never saw that coming. After that the story follows a Roman General but is made confuseing by the amount of anachronisms in the movie. I am referring to Moors in cars, Romans on motorcycles, enemy legions with guns, I am lost. Well I figured some of the people here might have seen this film and might have an interesting point of veiw because I don't know what to make of it. There is also one more thing I found particularly disturbing, the daughter of Titus was raped and had her hands cut off and tounge cut out. It was rather terrible. Anyway if anyone else saw this film I am interested to hear what you thought.

P.S. Jessica Lange redefind the sexy older woman for me in this movie, she was great.

 

[Mensa]

It loses something in the translation

Shakespeare you say?? It's been awhile since I read " Titus Andronicus" but motorcycles? cars? guns? That doesn't sound at all familiar.

I've got to re-read the thing because I must have missed something!

 

[Ian1]

Exactlly! The main characters name is Andronicus! Everything was all Roman but with a ton of things that were twentyth century and had no place in anceint Rome, however the movie ignored this and created an artsy-fartsy "modernized" version of this play. I think they were trying to do what Kenneth Branough did with Hamlet but it did not work.

 

[RonG]

To be or not to be. No that's my line!

You wanna see confusing Shakespeare? Find a performance of Hamlet ESP. This bizarre interpretation of Hamlet has three actors portraying Hamlet's Ego, Superego, and Id and all three are on stage at all times with each one belting out lines that a psychologist would attribute to each of the psyche components. Confusing, exhilarating, maddening, and challenging. It is one of those performances where you admire it more than you like it but definitely worth seeing to make you think about a classic in new ways.

 

[Ian1]

Holy Shit. Who thinks of that shit and why?

 

[Skibum]

A lot of Shakespeare has been done in anachronistic formats. I have seen "Midsummernight's Dream" done in 1890's costumes, "Romeo and Juliet" in contemporary garb, and I know there have been others. Some producers try to show how "timeless" the plays are by setting them in different eras than the author intended. I don't like this idea, but Hollywood has a way of doing things to make the actors and directors look good at the expense of the writers.

 

[April]

Holy Shit. Who thinks of that shit and why?

LMAO! That's the best question I've seen all day!

 

[Ian1]

I can understand doing the play in a modern format but this one was done in Roman times just with a few modern "conveinces" thrown in to the mix. It was like a huge plate of seafood linguine with a few chocolate chip cookies on top. It was just out of place. I really can not explain it as well as possible, it must be seen (or endured) to be believed.

 

[Dixon Carter Lee]

You have to remember that when Shakespeare wrote the plays he was already taking ancient stories (many based on previously produced works) and adding modern touches -- this is why the plays lend themselves so well to re-telling. You think Hamlet or Julius Caeser spoke in English colloquialisms? You think "Henry the Fifth", a history, wasn't written to speak to the militaristic ambitions of "today's" Elizabethean England? Putting the plays in modern or alternate settings isn't only intertesting, it's essential (from time to time).

And, yes, it's easy to screw up, which is why there are so many bad attempts. And some strange ones...

I saw a production of "Taming of the Shrew" in Central Park with Tracy Ullman as Kate and Morgan Freeman as Petruchio set in the early American West. Cowboys and pistols and Padua. Strange. But it worked, because the "wildness" of the west, where a stranger could come into town and act crazy without impunity, fit well with Petruchio's personality.

I saw a verison of "Twelfth Night" right after "Star Wars" first came out. Instead of a shipwreck they did a space-ship wreck. The characters came from a different planet, not across the sea -- and it worked. I particularly liked the way two minor characters (pages or messengers) were incorporated into a single beeping "'droid", which was actually a bird cage with glowing buttons that the actors carried around from place to place. It was interesting because all of the origninal lines written for the pages were deleted and relaced with the R2-D2 like "Beeping" sounds that came from the 'droid, but you understood what it was saying from the context of the other character's speeches.

Often creative attempts like this just blow -- but when they work they truly provide a keener insight to the mind of the playwright. After all, the most important charater in a play is the audience. If you can't see "yourself" on stage, if the play doesn't speak to you and your time, then you might as well just read the sucker as a history project.

Theatre is about dramtaizing the human condition. If that's accomplished it doesn't matter if MacBeth wears a kilt or spandex tights.

 

[RonG]

The two skinny ones balance out the fat one

DCL is right about Twelfth Night being very versatile. I have seen it done traditionally and two ways other than he describes. The best was set in a 1950's backdrop with kind of a Honeymooners-type feel by Cleveland Public Theater in their old Shakespeare at the Zoo series (watching Shakespeare with all of the animals making jungle noises is pretty cool, I don't know if they still do that series up there anymore). I also saw it done once in a 1920's Gatsby-esque thing and it was so-so. But the play basically just works.

It was short and a bit ragged, but the Atomic Shakespeare episode of Moonlighting based on Taming of the Shrew was pretty damn original and certainly took chances for a TV show.

One thing about having three Hamlets on stage at a time, it sure made his winning a duel more likely.

 

[Cheri]

Perhaps if you had been more familiar with the story you would have better understood the allegory that was intended by the weird stuff (chocolate chip cookies). Heck, dig out some cliff notes on it now and you might figure it out.
I did want to see that movie though, because I love watching Shakespeare in movies or plays, it doesn't matter. It just moves me in a way little else can. Kenneth Braunagh's St. Crispin's Day speech in Henry VII is one of my favorite scenes of all time.

 

[Ian1]

Heck, dig out some cliff notes...

Well I must admit that I have never read the play, but I feel that I must blame the director for the problems in the film. He should have stuck with a modern setting or an anceint setting, but not mixed worlds. Again, this is the opinion of the uneducated man, but I felt this was a film-making disaster on the scale of what Paul Verhoven did to R.A. Heinleins "Starship Troopers".

 

[Cheri]

Oh man, education has nothing to do with it. I think it's always hard to understand Shakespeare without being familiar with the story. I remember seeing Much Ado About Nothing with friends and during the opening scenes they keep looking at me like why are we seeing all these people running down a hill and tearing off their clothes? It was because I sort of knew the story that I could tell them what I though was happening. Besides if this was a sucky film, as it sounds, it doesn't matter.

 

[insideShiraz]

I like this thread...

Ian and all,

I just saw this movie and have been looking forward to its video release for a few months now. Of course for me, it WAS because I wanted to see Jessica Lange in such a role. But when I began to watch it, I couldn't understand a damn thing they said although I actually kinda liked the anchronisms, in an MTV era sort of way. ("The Wizard of Oz" in the movie "Wild at Heart" by David Lynch is another retelling of an old story). So I said to hell with this and turned it off. But the next day I decided to try and watch it with Closed Captions turned on. And Wow! This movie is so wonderfully bizarre, and oh so tragic. I never really got into Shaekspeare because of the language aspect (plus I like the argument that Lord Byron is the true author of much of these works). Also to reiterate, anachronisms written by William S. himself are to be found throughout his writings (clocks in ancient Rome, etc.)

insideShiraz

 

[Dixon Carter Lee]

Just to be clear, Lord Byron is not a candidate for the plays of Shakespeare. He didn't even live in the same Century. And ancient Rome had clocks made out of all sorts of things. They had water clocks, candle wax clocks, sand clocks and possibly even springwork clocks. It wasn't until the 17th century that the modern "clock" came about.

 

[insideShiraz]

DixonCarterLee

DixonCarterLee

I don't know what century Lord Byron lived in, but it is an argument that William S. took much of his ideas from letters/writings that Lord Byron wrote concerning his escapades. It doesn't seem likely that William had the intricate inside knowledge about aristocracy that Lord Byron would have had. Much of what W.S. wrote could be found in the writings of Lord Byron (that rascally devil). Not to take away from the brilliant copycat work of William. It really involves did this come from William's brilliant imagination, or from the pen of Lord Byron?

insideShiraz

 

[April]

Dude, Lord Byron lived way after Shakespeare, so I don't see how Byron could have written anything attributed to Shakespeare.

 

[RonG]

Dear insideShiraz,
This almost hurts but Lord Byron lived from 1788 to 1824 and wrote poetry, seduced men, and travelled throughout Europe with a fascination for Greece. Unless he found the ability to time travel, the odds of him having written any of Shakespeare's sonnets or plays (The First Folio appeared in 1623, which is the first written collection of his plays) are long at best. The two largest sources for Willy were Holingshed's Chronicles and the Ruling Family in Britain at the time (Shakespeare was no dummy, he did write English historical plays that played up the nobility of the royalty as any Richard III Society member could tell you).

Since you do bring up the notion of ghostwriting, most of the theories actually involve Sir Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe. Each of the theories require disbelieving various written facts of publication (Marlowe died in 1593 and new plays appeared on stage as late as 1613 and there are conflicts with Bacon's whereabouts at key times). When it is all said and done, the theory that requires the least number of assumptions (normally a good route to follow) is that Shakespeare did his own writing. Makes a good yarn though and if it increases interest in the classics (real classics, not William Bendix classics), keep the rumors flying.

That is enough brainwork for one day. Time to find some mind candy.

 

[insideShiraz]

No way Jose...

Thanks.

I'm cracking up (cuol) over that one. I knew it was ONE of those Lords. It may be Sir Frances Bacon that I'm thinking about. I saw it on Discovery channel a couple of years back and it sounded like a pretty good theory. Anyway, I enjoyed the movie Titus. This board cracks me up. Some pretty good humor and bright intelects to boot.

insideShiraz