| DGT ranks THE 12 BEST FILMS OF 1990-1999!; 2K posts in this goddamn shithole | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Dec 4 2011, 02:59 PM (2,299 Views) | |
| Thailandsurvivor | Dec 21 2011, 07:36 PM Post #141 |
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Unregistered
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"Does this suit make me look fat?" "No, your face does." I think there are better comedies from the 90's, but I wouldn't complain. |
 
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| <span style=recyclehumans | Jan 7 2012, 08:33 PM Post #142 |
BOOM! CROASTED.
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#9 posted tonight. Thanks to last night giving me a chance to get to it, it's now about 90% finished. |
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| <span style=Mister Plum | Jan 7 2012, 08:37 PM Post #143 |
SurviBoy
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Yay |
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| <span style=recyclehumans | Jan 8 2012, 06:58 AM Post #144 |
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BOOM! CROASTED.
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Time for #9, finally. #9. TITUS  (1999) written for the screen and directed by Julie Taymor adapted from Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare starring Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange, Alan Cumming and Harry Lennix Titus Andronicus has long been my favorite Shakespeare play. That alone has been enough to make my Shakespeare-minded friends say, "What the fuck is wrong with you?" The answer is, of course, a lot. Any fool can see that. But I digress. Julie Taymor is a director who honed her impeccably sharp and one-step-away-from-lunacy style of sumptuous, elaborate direction on the stage. Most acclaimed (and rightly so) for her genius work in bringing to Broadway The Lion King, her clearest mainstream work, she's also established herself as a madwoman of concept and delivery. She has a singular vision with every production she puts on, and TITUS quickly becomes a signature piece for her. She produced a stage version of Titus Andronicus several years before this film was conceived and filmed, giving her all the more insight into how best to expand and open it out to the world of cinema. What we get is a cornucopia of visual and thematic splendor. Truly, few films can be presented as certifiable proof of a director's insanity like TITUS can -- and I say that in the most loving, positive way possible. I'm not going to spend this review being a Shakespeare scholar. Much smarter writers have written much better analyses of the material itself. Titus Andronicus has, for almost the past 200 years, been lambasted as vile trash, easily the least savory (ha I made a funny) and respectable of his works. This is because Victorian Era people were fucking prudes, the kind of stuffy cods you can imagine hand-fanning their faces and exclaiming "Why, I never!" to the sight of a boy picking his nose. They regarded Shakespeare's more palatable works to be his finer quality, like Hamlet, King Lear, Othello and so on. Interestingly enough, Titus Andronicus was, is, and likely will remain Shakespeare's most modern play, no matter which time period it exists in for audiences to absorb. It speaks so currently to the nature of humanity, and does so with utter bleakness, that it's almost indigestible when it confronts you. Julie Taymor recognized that when producing her stage version of the play earlier in the decade, and when she was able to bring it to the screen, she wisely looked for ways to open the themes up even further for audiences. "This could be Brooklyn or Sarajevo." That's how Taymor begins her script, and with that and how she stages the very first scene, she puts this piece in a severely anachronistic setting. There's a blend of time and location, of sentiment and substance, one that immediately allows TITUS to be a timeless story, a brutal story with no expiration date. And when we're thrust into the Colosseum and have chariots and Roman clay-caked soldiers marching next to men on motorcycles, we're left with a world beyond our own experience. This is in every way its own world, its own set piece. We're going to watch a parable play out on a pedestal before us (at one point, literally on a pedestal), one that is far more symbolic of the terror and tragedy we inflict upon ourselves now in the 21st century.  "Hail! Rome! Victorius!" Titus is a man of honor, duty and precision. He is purely military, and he lives to serve for those to whom his loyalty is pledged. He's a man of unbreakable tradition, and it's this very rigidity, if you want to even call it inflexibility, that begins the spiral of the story. Upon returning from battle, victorious against the Goths and bringing back to Rome prisoners of war -- Aaron the Moor, Queen Tamora and her sons Chiron, Alarbus and Demetrius -- Tamora begs for the life of Alarbus, the firstborn. Her pleading sobs fall on deaf ears -- Titus has lost all but a few sons in the conflict, and religiously, those losses ask for an honorable sacrifice. Alarbus must be it. For Titus, it is without debate. It's practically muscle memory for him. This is not revenge and it's not malice. It's faith. It's tradition. It's what he believes and defends and honors. For Tamora, it is a spitting insult right to her face, a kick to her gut when she's already curled on the ground, dying before his eyes. It is at this moment, as she stares at Titus, the fire of the sacrificial cauldron burning between them, that the die is cast. As she spits with venom right to us quite soon after, "I'll find a day to massacre them all." It's Titus's adherence to tradition that begins to be the undoing of all. But for now, especially him. The Emperor is dead, and his two sons are campaigning for the right to be installed in the vacant seat. The Senate of Rome looks instead to Titus, honored and revered General, to take the crown as Rome's emperor. It's one he refuses without even a moment of thought. He is a general. He's military. He isn't a politician. He's not bred for that world. So the Senate asks for his opinion in what they should do. Should the crown go to Bassianus, the more even-tempered son? Or should it go to Saturninus, the volatile and aggressive son? Titus recommends without hesitation that the crown belongs to Saturninus. And so the Senate follows. Does it matter that Saturninus is a godawful leader and proves it quickly with his decisions? Of course not. Does it matter that Titus's daughter Lavinia is betrothed to Bassianus and so has a vested interest in his ascension? Of course not. What matters to Titus is tradition, always tradition. And tradition dictates the crown should always pass to the eldest son. Which happens to be Saturninus. Oops. In the span of just a few scenes, Titus's world will crumble. He watches as Saturninus claims Lavinia to be his bride, to which he has no objection. You better believe Bassianus and Lavinia object, and when they run out of the palace to escape, Titus's sons and brother supporting them in fleeing, a melee ensues during which Titus slays his son Mutius. In a heartbeat, he goes from General to pariah of Rome by the word of Saturninus, along with his children. He watches as Saturninus chooses Tamora to be his bride and his Empress, instantly elevating her from prisoner to royalty -- and superior to Titus. He watches as his faith in tradition, in so many words, has anally raped him without protection. Titus and his family have fallen. Oh, and thanks to Aaron the Moor being a complete asshole (Iago truly has nothing on Aaron), a plot unfolds for Chiron and Demetrius to murder Bassianus and have it pinned on Titus's other sons, Martius and Quintus, both of whom are condemned to death by Saturninus. Oh, and also for Lavinia to be raped by the Goth boys and silence her from being able to name them by cutting out her tongue and lopping off her hands, replacing them with ghastly sticks and twigs crudely inserted into the stumps.  "Twas my deer, and he that wounded her hath hurt me more than had he killed me dead." Oh, and when Aaron, now handsomely dressed as an employee of Tamora (allowing him more convenient access to continue being her secret lover), comes to Titus and tells him that Saturninus demands a hand in exchange for Martius and Quintus, Titus chops off his left hand to go right to Saturninus. Aaron laughs all the way back to the palace. Because Aaron is a dick. And this is why. "For thy hand, look by and by to have thy sons with thee. Their heads, I mean. O, how this villany doth fat me with the very thoughts of it! Let fools do good, and fair men call for grace. Aaron will have his soul black, like his face." Yeah. Aaron sends back Titus's sons. As in, only their heads. Crudely chopped off and placed in glass containers like mantlepiece decorations.  "If there were reason for these miseries, then into limits could I bind my woes!" …oh my. What makes this powerful -- what makes this work -- is the elevated presentation. This material is not performed at face value for us. Taymor smartly realized that the production of such wretched material in a "realistic" way would grossly undercut the power of the themes. TITUS is a combination of parable, morality play, shock theatre and reality. In a way, almost too much reality. Take any sharp piece of science fiction, for instance. One of the hallmarks of the genre is its ability to highlight a social condition or issue, something that plagues us in our current lives, and tackle it directly and unapologetically by contextualizing it in the guise of aliens, ghosts, monsters and other fantastical gobbledygook. I still look at "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", an episode of the original Star Trek that now is almost offensively obvious as racism condemnation. But back in the 60s, when the Civil Rights Movement was still going strong, the episode hit hard. And in a time when network censorship was severe and commenting directly on an ugly mark of American society such as racism was quite taboo, the show managed to do exactly that simply by making it about aliens and not about humans. Boom. Censors let it slide. Not because they didn't care, but because they didn't see it. They didn't recognize the true message. Such is the case in TITUS. The full power of the play and the film isn't effective without, yes, the proper staging. Realism in these kinds of stories is, frankly, overrated. Surrealism, fantasy and hyperbole can make all the difference in the world for the power of a narrative to hit the hardest. This is a story where violence begat violence. One good turn deserves another. An eye for an eye. Reason need not apply, for a sword in hand can do all the talking. Peace should only prevail once one side's been obliterated. This is already a story where the themes are on a pedestal, much like Lavinia when left to suffer after her brutalization (though her pedestal is a rotten, dead tree stump in the middle of an almost necrotic swamp). It is Taymor's job, along with the actors and filmmakers, to contextualize those themes and elevate them further, not bring them down closer to us. To do so would be a false instinct, especially with this sort of material. And elevate she does. As mentioned before, Taymor is batshit in the best possible way. She brings that batshittery to the table in exquisite ways. The film is at times opulent, at times grotesquely thread bare. Some moments are as simple as an extreme closeup of Titus as he weeps to the earth, his face pressed against cobblestone. Others are nightmarish, hallucinatory fantasies (which Taymor lovingly called the Penny Arcade Nightmares) that amplify the undercurrent of the narrative. Nothing detracts. Everything enhances. It's the moment Titus sees the heads that it's believed he finally loses his. As his final living son Lucius rages to get revenge (for a revenge of a revenge of a revenge) and his brother Marcus weeps for the state of their family, and as Lavinia kisses her father's cheek with only silence that she can provide, Titus… laughs. Why? Because… "Why, I have not another tear to shed." Titus cries no more for his sorrows. He doesn't realize it, but he is now just as Tamora was upon his sacrificing of Alarbus. The weeping is at an end. The soul has died, and what crumbs of it are left have hardened and become smoldering with rage. He tells Lucius to go to the Goths and raise an army with them, to fight against Saturninus with Roman skill and knowledge combined with Goth strength and brutality. And as Lucius does, Titus plots. But does he plot? Or does he just lose it, descending into madness from which he never recovers? Are his loopy machinations deliberate or the result of the last shred of his sanity dying at the sight of the heads of his sons? That's for us to determine as we watch the, um, light shenanigans unfold. It's here that the story splits for a time. We follow both Titus and Aaron as significant revelations unfold. With Titus, we watch as Lavinia becomes obsessed with books and desperately indicates to her family the story of Philomela, a character mute like she is now and violated just as obscenely. Philomela "wrote" the name of her accuser, and when given a stick to use to scrawl in the dirt with her arms, she spells out the names of Chiron and Demetrius. The secret has been revealed. Titus, perhaps losing it even further, is so seething with incensed rage that he writes letters of prayer to the gods, ties them to arrows, and shoots them into the sky with his kinsman -- arrows that land in the Emperor's palace for Saturninus, Tamora, Chiron and Demetrius to read and mock. For Aaron, things take a slightly more negative turn as well. Tamora delivers a child -- and it's Aaron's fatherhood that's responsible. Oh my. Immediately, the delivering Nurse brings the child to Aaron, wrapped in newspaper to hide its shame (you know, shame that he's half black), so that Aaron may dispose of him. Chiron and Demetrius, aghast at what Aaron has done, also scream for the child to be killed. Like hell I will, Aaron thinks. But he also knows that the Emperor can never know of this, for Aaron would be executed quite promptly (and with good cause, one would think). Because Aaron is, if you haven't yet gathered, a villainous dick, he murders the Nurse and flees with the child. Before long, he's captured by Lucius and his new Goth army. Lucius does not fuck around -- he commands Aaron's cooperation or else he will hang the child before his very eyes. And so Aaron spills everything. And I do mean everything. The plots and schemes that have destroyed everything and everyone just the way he wanted them to? Out in the open. I'm sure everyone will be fine.  Truly, a portrait of sanity. Now is when Taymor really lets loose. Watch and tell me where else you'll see such a perverse, hypnotizing display of phantasmagoria and brutal reality. Tamora believe Titus is complete mad at this point, and goes to fuck with him, along with her sons. They present themselves to Titus as Revenge, Rape and Murder. Not just to tease him, mind you, bur for a purpose. Tamora tries to convince Titus that as the spirits of such woeful inhumanity, they know how much Titus wants to exact those very acts upon Tamora and company. The spirits would be willing to grant Titus revenge if he convinces his son Lucius to call off the Goth army from an attack against Rome. Titus agrees and calls to send word to Lucius to come to a feast, at which he will also invite Saturninus and Tamora. And it's precisely at this moment that we get clued into what's going on in Titus's mind. And the dude has not lost it. As he's telling Marcus the instructions to go fetch Lucius and the Goths, Marcus is giving him a "bitch what the fuck" look, because right behind Titus, Marcus is staring at Tamora and her sons. Tamora and her sons. Right fucking there. And Titus is going along with whatever she's telling him? HUH? Nope. Watch Titus's face. Watch the subtlety there. Listen to how he speaks his line to Marcus. "This do thou for my love, and so let him, as he regards his aged father's life." This is the one and only cue Titus gives in regard to his sanity. Everything about this moment can be summed up as a gentle wink and an unspoken comfort. "Trust me. I got this." It's a moment so perfectly constructed. Tamora's satisfied and is about to leave with her sons, but Titus asks for Rape and Murder to stay with him. He has more work for them to discuss, and he stresses that he needs their services more, or else he'll call Marcus back, keep Lucius with the Goths and everyone goes back to square one. Since she and her sons think Titus is a lunatic, he's (ironically) a completely safe person for them to be with. Once again -- oops. The second Tamora is gone, Titus calls for his kinsmen to come out of his home. Titus: "Know you, these two?" Publius: "Why, the empress's sons, I take them. Chiron and Demetrius." Titus: "Fye, Publius, fye! Thou art too much deceived. The one is Murder, Rape is the other's name. And therefore, bind them, gentle Publius." Boom. Point for Titus. He's got Tamora's sons. And oh, does he have plans. Titus has his men chain Chiron and Demetrius upside down, naked, hanging by their ankles. He steps in casually, wearing his bathrobe, Lavinia by his side as she holds a large, empty basin. He wants to make sure Lavinia is there so she can savor the retribution he will finally get to exact against the villains that have destroyed his only daughter. And holy shit, does he do exactly that. Before he cuts their throats and has Lavinia collect their blood in her basin, he addresses them. What follows is by far my favorite Shakespearean monologue, one that I've had memorized for well over a decade now. It's just so… yeah. I'm retyping the film's version of it from memory, so all the Shakespearean spelling choices may or may not end up being precise. "O villains, Chiron and Demetrius. Here stands the spring whom you have stained with mud. This goodly summer with your winter mixed. You killed her husband, and for that vile fault two of her brothers were condemned to death. My hand cut off and made a merry jest. Both her sweet hands, her tongue, and that more dear than hands or tongue, her spotless chastity, inhuman traitors, you constrained and forced. What would you say if I should let you speak? Villains, for shame, you could not beg for grace. (Titus picks up a butcher knife and starts brandishing it around their faces) Hark, wretches, how I mean to martyr you. This one had yet is left to cut your throats whilst that Lavinia, 'tween her stumps doth hold the basin that receives your guilty blood. You know, your mother means to feast with me and calls herself Revenge and thinks me mad. Hark, villains -- I shall grind your bones to dust. And with your blood and it I will make a paste, and of the paste a coffin I will rear and make two pastries of your shameful heads. And bid that strumpet, your unhallowed dam, like to the earth, swallow her own increase. This is the feast I have bid her to and this the banquet she shall surfeit on. And now prepare your throats." Jesus fucking Christ. What follows? Besides one of the most perfectly done gallows humor edits in the film -- cutting from the bodies of the boys as they hang to steaming hot baked meat pies cooling by a window -- is a scene that I can only link you to for proper, ha, consumption. There's nothing I can say that can deliver what takes place better than watching it. [utube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCwKozdkzms[/utube] Just a note -- Titus's final bellowing? His final explosion? "Why, there they are! Both baked in that pie, whereof their mother daintily hath fed, eating the flesh that she herself hath bred! Tis true, tis true! Witness my knife's sharp point!" And then the instant after he plunges the knife into Tamora's neck, the serenity that washes over his face, stepping away almost non-chalantly? To me, this is more terrifying work by Anthony Hopkins than any single moment he ever performed as Hannibal Lecter. That is just my own personal feeling on how it hits me, and I'm very much in the minority. But this is the moment when Titus actually DOES lose his mind, and it happens for just this one moment. And when it snaps... it chills me. It's such an amazing performance from Hopkins, from start to finish. Titus accomplishes his final revenge. Saturninus murders Titus in retaliation with a candelabra. Lucius murders Saturninus with a spoon and a gunshot. This is a circus of violence. A complete and utter circus. But what makes this matter is one person. And it's the one person we started the movie with. And it's the one person we end the movie with. Someone who has had a consistent presence at all key points. It's Young Lucius, Titus's grandson and son of Lucius. When the film begins, it begins with the boy. Just him, watching some TV while eating his lunch, his toys surrounding him. These are war toys. Little army figurines, Roman soldiers, helicopters, plastic rifles and more. And he starts to play with them. And I mean play. Rough, aggressive, almost sadistically hedonistic levels of violence are savored by the boy. And why not? It's not real, right? They're just toys. Playthings. He doesn't care when he can play god for whatever reason he likes. And so it expands onto the stage of Titus Andronicus. As the boy is thrust unwillingly into a world where the bullets are real, the swords can maim and the wish to murder can be realized, he becomes, in a small way, our eyes and ears throughout the film. And as it reaches the conclusion, and the boy watches his own father pull Saturninus across the table, shove a serving spoon into his throat, spit in his face and put a bullet in his head at point blank range, it's a moment frozen in time forever for the child. And what violence it is. At the start of the film, the first death happens off-screen. It's almost an afterthought when Alarbus is sacrificed and dismembered (dismembered!) and his entrails tossed into a cauldron. As we move further throughout the film, the violence becomes more and more explicit, though only in small steps. By the time Chiron and Demetrius have their throats cut, and Tamora has a knife skewered through her neck, it becomes ghastly and disturbingly graphic. Not gory, either. But it's graphic. In fact, to me, the most horrifying death of the film is Titus breaking Lavinia's neck in a mercy killing. It's so shocking, so exact and so… tender. And the fact that it's tender makes it all the more frightening. That is what this boy now has burned in his mind forever. And that is what the film expands on as we go from the dinner table of the circus of death… to the Colosseum again. Back to where we started. Only now, there are spectators watching all throughout the Colosseum. Men, women and children of every race, religion, creed… all watching, their eyes seemingly almost glazed. Almost hardened to what they have witnessed. Much like the customs of the past, this was a circus played out before their eyes as a show. As entertainment. Entertainment of the most wretched kind. And no one really seems entertained. But they're still watching. Bread and circuses for the Internet age. Doesn't sound like modern times at all, does it? "This could be Brooklyn or Sarajevo." Lucius and Marcus speak before the Colosseum's crowd, imparting the fates of the Andronici and Tamora. Titus and Lavinia will be buried in their clan's monument. But Tamora? She's to be thrown quite literally to the animals to be ravaged and devoured as she wished to do to them. How lovely. Glad those lessons were learned. Aaron? Oh, Aaron leaves us with the last moment of wordsmithing. He's buried neck-deep in the earth, bound to a crucifix to prevent him from having any ability to free himself. He's to starve to death, die of thirst, of exposure, as animals peck at him and passersby spit on him. And it's proclaimed that anyone who dares to help him or even take pity on him will be condemned to the same fate. Yeah. Lessons learned big time here. And Aaron's final lesson? His culmination? The grand wisdom he has acquired from this ordeal? "If one good deed in all my life I did, I do repent it from my very soul." …This is almost like a Seinfeld episode, since everyone seems to have that lovely edict of "nobody learns anything". Except Young Lucius. The boy. In the text of the stage play, it is not stated what exactly has happened to Aaron's newborn son, his half-breed child. In Taymor's performance on the stage, she answers the question as to the child's fate -- there is a small coffin on stage as the play draws to a close. But with TITUS, she saw the opportunity to make a different commentary on how a story of such awful depths can come to a conclusion.  Aaron's son is alive and held in a small cage. Young Lucius, still dressed smartly from the circus dinner of death, opens the cage. Stares at the child. The sound of the infant's cries start to echo around the boy, transforming into bells to our ears. And then we dissolve to Young Lucius holding the child, slowly walking out of the Colosseum, heading for an archway leading to a pitch-black night. Only the night does not persist. Slowly, ever slowly, dawn is beginning to break over the horizon. Deep blues give way to hints of purples and wispy clouds streaking across the morning sky. As Young Lucius crosses the threshold of the Colosseum arches, the first glimmers of the sun peeking into the sky show. As Young Lucius takes his next step, holding the infant, the sun breaks over the horizon. And the instant it does, the image freezes. And fades to black. For the first time in the entire film, there is hope. There is the very start of a glimmer of hope. This hope may not come to fruition, as if we're not able to see the full rising of the dawn of a new day, trapped in that last moment to only be teased by the hope of a sunrise, perhaps we're only to be disappointed that the next generation, one we pray is a better and more civilized one than ours, is as doomed as we are. But perhaps that's not it. Perhaps there is hope. Perhaps Young Lucius, as he leaves the arena of bloodshed with new life in his hands, life he intends to protect, will be the one to usher in the start of a new generation. Perhaps. So why THIS movie? Technically, I think it's a marvel. Flawed as some moments can be from a production standpoint, it's one of the most surrealistically brave examples of filmmaking vision seen in a long time. Taymor's genius is especially well-fitted to the heightened sensibilities and grand thematic strength of Shakespeare and together, it's a match that creates a powerfully unique blow to the senses. More than that, though, what this film does is give credence to what has been persistent in our lives for quite a while now -- the emphasis and gluttony of brutality while simultaneously and hypocritically condemning the presence of that brutality. Violence of all kinds -- emotional, physical, spiritual, romantic, etc. -- is practically idolized in our world, presented to us in all kinds of ways for our consumption like any other product one could buy at a grocery store. And yet we're told at the same time to turn our noses to it, to treat it as something detestable. We're told to hate that which is glorified to us, making it in its own way taboo and at the same time a perfectly acceptable and conforming one. TITUS (and the play itself) comment on this so perfectly, so precisely. Watch it for what it's really saying. This is not a film about showing a bloodbath of crazy people. It is so much further beyond that. If you let it in to show you. SCORE SAMPLE: "Victorious Titus" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TvOaMlKI-E Hint for #8: "Stop telling your stupid story about the stupid desert and just die already." |
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| <span style=Kitty Pryde1 | Jan 8 2012, 07:52 AM Post #145 |
Queen of the Furries
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The English Patient XD |
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These're my stats! And this is to stretch the pages a little bit wider. 
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| <span style=Mister Plum | Jan 8 2012, 08:03 AM Post #146 |
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SurviBoy
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Never heard. poor me |
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| <span style=Teighteen | Jan 8 2012, 02:51 PM Post #147 |
Clinically Cocky
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omw I never even knew there was a big Hollywood adaptation of Titus Andronicus. I love that play too.  I should watch this. |
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| <span style=spnintendo | Jan 8 2012, 03:13 PM Post #148 |
Purple Domination
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I had to watch this in class.   I was beyond disgusted. I heart Shakespeare tho. 
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11:40 AM Jul 13