SoftInloveRox Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Jenna Walter The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Rexanne It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

moonmonday "Titus Andronicus" is objectively a terrible mess of a play, and it's a good reminder to anyone that Shakespeare was not all great, nor was he always well-received. It's his first major tragedy, and it shows; it's a disaster, with little to redeem or recommend it. Similarly, this film is a disaster, with little to redeem or recommend it.Taymor is an unquestionably talented and skilled artist, but she had not come fully enough into her own style and ability while doing this film. Excellent actors like Jessica Lange and Anthony Hopkins are wasted in directionless roles that are clumsily moved from one point to another, and very little connects anything into coherency of any kind. The movie comes off mainly as extremely self-indulgent, full of things that only Taymor wanted to see, and nothing much else. It smacks of a vanity project, making it all the easier to resent due to the waste of great actors. At its best, it comes off as clunky, aping Peter Greenaway's vastly superior work on his adaptation Prospero's Books.The thing about Greenaway is that even in an adaptation of a simple enough play of Shakespeare's, he managed to bring a different perspective and vast sensory engagement. Taymor, here, shuffles through an intolerably bad play and brings nothing at all novel to the table, but every part of the production acts like it's something never before seen. Even Reign: The Conqueror was a far better production along these same fundamental storytelling lines, bringing so much new and engaging even if elements of its story were not particularly good. Closer to the material, Derek Jarman's take on "The Tempest" also brought modern elements and accessibility to an aged work and proved that Shakespeare could still be daring and even avant-garde, hundreds of years later.It's unimaginable that anyone could really enjoy this, especially as it vastly overstays its welcome at an over-two-hours running time. None of the characters are sympathetic, and the only slightest charm brought to any of the proceedings comes from the actors...neither direction nor script contribute much of anything to the proceedings. Frankly, starting off with an obnoxious modern child and clashing with the pseudo-historical setting of the story was a massive mistake. Don't cultivate resistance from your audience straight off the bat, not in "Titus Andronicus" -- they're going to hate the characters and the story anyway, and irritating them from minute one is a poor choice.It's admirable to have the ambition that this adaptation takes. It's just that Taymor is only ambitious enough to tackle the project, not enough to actually do anything with it. Her anachronistic touches are lazy and don't work most of the time, as well as taking away what little meaning the play originally had with its specific context. She's simultaneously too married to the play and not attached enough to it, in favor of what she imagines is a dazzling artistic message. The problem here is that most people never experience "Titus Andronicus", and that's because it's one of Shakespeare's absolute worst: cartoonish, clumsy, laughable, and a base attempt to crowd-please. But she never manages to bother making the story accessible to an audience likely to be unfamiliar with it, made even more difficult by literally none of the characters being written sympathetically or even interestingly. It's every bit as poor in her presentation, because even the best actors can't pull something out of so much nothing. It's still hilariously bad, even in its most dramatic, tragic moments, and it's not a joke people are missing the humor of or a tremendous wit: it's just a poorly-written play that fails in everything it sets out to do.The production overall suffers, as no version of this I could find had any decent sound to it. Lines are mumbled and drowned out in parts, blathered incomprehensibly in others. The soundtrack dwarfs everything else sometimes, and at other times it barely registers. Whoever was responsible for sound, I hope they've learned how to do actual sound production since 1999. Likewise, costumes are as easy to criticize as any of Taymor's well-known work: they're either lazy and boring or ridiculous and impractical, but not in an engaging enough manner to forgive them. They all also scream "costume", no matter what the scene or character.If you want to watch a good Shakespeare-inspired film, watch Prospero's Books. If you want to watch Taymor do Shakespeare well, watch her version of The Tempest. If you want to watch a good, straightforward adaptation of Shakespeare, watch the Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet. But under no circumstances should you watch Titus. It will cure you of your delusions about Shakespeare's greatness and, if you have any affection for the actors involved, depress or anger you with the resentment of someone doing nothing so much as wasting their time. It's a waste of these actors' time, and it's a waste of the viewers' time. And that, especially in art or entertainment, is unforgivable.

alr126 Since I can't go below a "1", that will have to do. I was never fan of Shakespeare, let's stat with that. That being said, I could barely make it 25 minutes into the film. It was not at all what I expected. I was looking for a period piece about a Roman General, I really didn't need the symbolism, I found the boy a major distraction, when the motorcycles came into the film, I turned it off. That was absolutely enough. I wanted to see some fine acting by Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange, that was not to be found. All in all, I found the symbolism taking more away from the film than adding to it. Guess it's partially my fault, I should have researched the film more before watching it. All in all, the short part of the film I watched was horrible.

chaos-rampant This is a handsome, sorrowful, flourishing, heavyhanded retelling of Shakespeare. I went for a walk afterwards and it felt cleansing to breathe in the cool night air after all the despair and hate of this. Much of it comes down to the play itself. It is bloody and mad, heavyhanded itself. A gloried general who puts Rome above his sons. A vengeful mother and queen who will not return pity when she was given scorn. A pathetic king, a monstrous moor, and various sons and daughters as playthings for the mad.It is clumsy in spots. The whole ruse in the forest with slain Bassianus must have felt far fetched to even Shakespeare. And a Roman general who slips out and returns against Rome with an army of the Goths he helped vanquish a few months ago? But overall it is powerful, gripping stuff because it's in the right hands here.The question how to visualize Shakespeare must be as old as the medium. The filmmaker here made a simple concession. Keep the original language. This means she can't film the metaphor, which would make a superb film of itself. Her brilliant choice was to create a modern stage for it. A Roman orgy plays out like a party from the roaring 20s. Cars and cigarettes coexist with tunics and armor. But the main thrust is still cthonic and medean.We don't have a calligraphic weave where character urges appear as encounter. But she has managed to address another, equally difficult problem of cinematic narrative. So many films are a passive exchange. What she has done in this odd way is carve a vital space for the story that avoids the pitfalls of both the usual period piece and on the opposite end the arbitrary imagination of something like the Cremaster films.It jars for a while but settles as a coherent world that is different enough to demand attention to it. It feels alive, freed from a historic stage, neither realistic nor without reality, puzzling the logical thought (why cars?) yet remaining implicitly recognizable for the eye.And yet it's all that rich, image-based language of the original that I find myself drawn to.In Shakespeare's time, plays were apparently performed with only bare essentials of stage craft. I know very little about him and the time, but this film surprised me enough to want to change that. Anyway, the word carried the cinematic stitch, the visual horizons. Here we have both word and stream of images, which may dampen the impact of the first. Yet I urge you to really pay attention to the word here, always in conjunction with the story. On the top dramatic layer we have sin and madness. Deep down, though, it is all about realizing what is truly vital and matters in life: intuition, not structure. It is not the loss of queendom for her, nor for Titus the loss of prestige that truly hurt. What Titus deprives of the Goth queen and is turn torn from him tenfold is this human background of connection to loved ones that we often take for granted as we plot careers, this being love. Not the same as passion, it is exactly the sense I have when I feel happy, the spontaneous assurance provided by things, the deep anchorage in the world that can only come from caring about things other than myself.This is not poetry, but mechanics of awareness. Being happy and whole entails a sense of rootedness in the world around me.The play is stitched throughout with metaphors about exactly this: the earth accepting rain, trees blowing in the wind, gnats flying in front of the sun, rivers overflowing their banks, branches, deer, earth, rain. Wonderful, wonderful cinematic flows in words. It is not the word itself that appeals, the literary quality. The word carries the insight, capacity for horizon. All cull from nature the same observation, the same motif. Transient, violent motion yet always anchored in the world with capacity to bear it.My world is Taoist, out of personal choice, worlds apart from Shakespeare. I am always riveted by his work but need that cleansing walk afterwards that restores things. And yet here I find him drawn to the same realization as the Chinese masters in their meditation, that of a (perceptive) field beyond suffering and nonsuffering where things hold each other in place by virtue of being what they are.Shakespeare's Tao.

pontifikator The best film of 1999, directed by Julie Taymore and starring Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange, Harry Lennix, and Alan Cumming.Taymore brings Titus into the modern day in some of her staging of the film, but the dialogue is all Shakespeare, and the cast is excellent. It's a pleasure to see Hopkins playing a real character with many facets instead of Hannibal Lecter.In classic tragedy, the hero fails, brought down by a flaw which would have been a good trait if the hero had not had so much of it. In Oedipus Rex, for example, Oedipus would have been fine but for his overweening curiosity. In Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare's title), our hero is honest. Too honest for his own good. He has returned from war with Tamora (Jessica Lange) a Goth queen as his slave, and the emperor has died, leaving two good-for-nothing sons as his heirs apparent. When offered the crown, Titus rejects it out of hand: Of course not, the crown goes to the eldest son. Titus should have accepted the wreath. All his woes befall him for not knowing he would do better for Rome.Before you see the movie, I recommend getting a copy of the play in one of the several editions that explain the language as you read the script. Read it before you see it so that you have some understanding of the beautiful Elizabethan language. The Folger Shakespeare Library or Arden Shakespeare edition should be at your local library. When people ask why Shakespeare's plays are written as they are, I've heard it answered that it's because that's how people talked back then. I assure you, no one ever talked that way. Read an annotated script so that you understand the Elizabethan English these consummate actors spread before you.Hopkins, Lange, Lennix, and Cumming all get to chew the scenery, the screen, the frame, and even some of the seats. My shirtsleeves were in tatters when I left the building. It's a great piece of Shakespearean theater, and Taymore lets it all out. That said, this is a true tragedy, and there is no happy ending for Titus Andronicus and his entire family. Where in "Fracture" Hopkins plays the guy who pulls the rabbit out of the hat, here in "Titus" Hopkins's character has to gnaw his paw off in a vain attempt to get out of the snare set by Tamora. Never has integrity been so ill repaid. Taymore does a remarkable job of bringing the play to the screen. And it got nominated for Best Costume Design. Feh.