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Blood, Love, and Rhetoric
So Charles Schulz died this weekend, showing eerie timing. Some people stay alive to finish what they have to finish. There are too many cases of people wrapping up that last big thing and then passing on to be coincidence.
If you live in the South, you may not have noticed the Schulz story because Tom Landry also died this weekend. If you don't live in the South and are not a sports fan, you don't know who he is.
No matter where you are, you don't know who Walter Marshall is. He's one of the chief confectioners for the New England Confectionery Company (Necco, to you,) and among other things he's been responsible, for the last decade, for choosing the slogans on Necco's candy hearts from customer submissions. Their "Conversation Hearts" were the first candy hearts to be printed with slogans, and the company has sold 250 billion. Marshall is retiring; this is his last Valentine's Day.
The Improper Bostonian did a set of anti-Valentine's articles as their cover story this week. They showed a mocked-up candy heart with the slogan "LOVE STINKS." I thought about telling Patrick this, in light of his Anti-VD page, but figured he'd probably seen it on his own.
My own feelings about Valentine's Day can be found in a longish piece I wrote for mouth organ today.
And that's enough about the heart stuff.
I'm trying frantically to keep up with my workload. In addition to the house shopping, which has only eaten one day of my life so far but will eat much, much more before it's done, I have stiff code deadlines which are making my brain hurt. So there won't be a lot of writing in the near future, I think. When I get home these days, what I mostly want to do is sit back, vegetate, and play computer games. Which is what I did quite a lot of this weekend.
Oh, but we did go see Titus this weekend.
Since I suspect Diane is not likely to give you "Titus: The Review" anytime soon, I'll tell you what she'd tell you if she saw it: Julie Taymor needs to learn to cut. This film is at least a half-hour and possibly an hour too long. Mind you, the film is a testament to wretched excess in many ways - in fact, it's at its best when it's being wretchedly excessive. I'm not proposing to trim the excessive parts which work, because those are the most fun, even as over-the-top as they are. I'm proposing to trim the ones which don't work. For excess to succeed, it must never be boring, not even for a second.
We can start by killing all the hallucination sequences, which don't work at all and don't convey any information the viewer didn't already know. In fact, they're kind of insulting, since by spelling out the film's already heavy-handed metaphors, they reveal that Taymor thinks we're idiots.
We can't trim any of the speeches - Taymor is keeping the spoken-word aspect of the Shakespeare mostly intact, and good for her. But there are some lingering shots where nothing is spoken which outstay their welcome - particularly Young Lucius walking out of the coliseum endlessly at the end of the film. Enough! Roll the credits already!
And is the film good or bad? Does it really matter?
This is the kind of film that transcends good or bad: It is a Spectacle. It's like asking whether The Ten Commandments is good or bad. The answer: It's both, and more besides.
The audience left this film making fish faces: opening their mouths as if to say something, then realizing there was nothing they could say, and closing them again. Um. Um. Um.
But, if you're going to insist on a qualitative judgment:
The sets and costumes are first-rate. In particular, the way Taymor and her merry crew have chosen to mix metaphors (elements of contemporary dress mixed with Roman; a cohort of legionnaires with a motorcycle-guard escort, a modern office space as gilded temple) works very well.
All of the acting is as good as it can be, given the material. There's the rub. How shall I put this delicately?
This is not Shakespeare's best work. I joked afterward, "This was what Shakespeare did when he was still in his horror-movie period." Seriously. This is the Shakespeare equivalent of Sam Raimi - a director who can do Great Serious Work - romping through his Evil Dead movies. This is Shakespeare as Young Indie Punk. Some of the devices in this tale are things not even he himself would dare try to get away with later. I don't want to give anything away, so I'll just point out that, among other things, severed hands are very important to the plot. 'Nuff said.
Under the circumstances, Jessica Lange channeling Theda Bara-crossed-with-Katisha and Anthony Hopkins having the time of his life overacting as an old fart of a general are right in line. And of course Alan Cumming(s?) is always excellent, although he'd better watch out or he's going to get typecast in these bitchy eye-makeup roles. Besides, the makeup here makes him look like Pee-Wee Herman, which is probably not a good thing.
(Side assignment for film geeks: Compare and contrast his role as Saturninus - called Saturnine in the movie; it's a pun, see? - with the part of Zorg, played by Gary Oldman, in The Fifth Element. Same hairstyle even!)
The actor who plays the insidious Moor, Aaron - I didn't catch his name - is also excellent, although this underscores another problem with young master Shakespeare: Later he learned to give his villains a backstory, that we would be more involved in their doings if we understood their motivations. Aaron has no motivation; he does evil for the sheer joy of it.
Everyone else does what they're called upon to do, which in the case of Titus's four sons, is to look upstanding (and cute); for his daughter Lavinia, to be rather unhinged and tormented (and cute), and for Tamora's sons Demetrius and Chiron ... well ... that's one of the more interesting reinterpretations Taymor and Co. attempt, so I'll leave that to you to discover.
It's good spectacle and I recommend it as such, but do not see it with any illusions about what you're getting.
Also, with three severed hands, two severed heads, a really cruel and unusual mutilation, several nasty murders, and a man making drawings with his own blood, it's probably not for the squeamish.
© Columbine
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Player: They're hardly divisible, sir - well, I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can't do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory - they're all blood, you see.
Guildenstern: Is that what people want?
Player: It's what we do.
- Tom Stoppard
"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead"
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