Maybe her stock theatrical gimmicks work on the stage - let's give her the benefit of the doubt - but she doesn't have the foggiest idea how to make a movie.
Not that I think this nonsense would work on stage. "Titus Andronicus" is CLEARLY set in Ancient Rome - would it be TOO MUCH TO ASK to have a production that respects this fact? I'm sick of leather jackets and motorcycles and arcade games and all the other paraphernalia from The Compendium of Tiresome Postmodern Clichés - for once I'd like to see a creative rendition of the era in which the action is supposed to take place, and DOES take place, whatever efforts the director may make to suggest otherwise. In what kind of simple-minded fashion does Taymor expect us to think? "Look, a microphone. Why, that's a modern invention! I guess this means Shakespeare IS a relevant kind of dude, after all!" Please, don't tell me modern audiences are so stupid.
Making it all the more embarrassing is the film's clumsy use of music. Whenever twentieth-century artefacts make a "surprise" appearance, Taymor asks her poor captive composer Elliot Goldenthal to underline the point with a saxophone riff. Wow, a saxophone! That's almost only a hundred years old - I guess Shakespeare IS a relevant kind of dude, after all.
Taymor's affectations undermine an already weak story in too many ways to count. Take the scene where Titus is begging the tribunes to spare his sons' lives. Do we have any sense that it matters? No, because the whole production is so dadaist, and we have so little sense of what can and can't happen in this universe, that none of it seems real - it would be in keeping with the rest of the production for his sons to spring back to life after being executed, so why worry about them? Or take the scene at the Goth's camp outside Rome, which takes place in a quarry with high tension power lines running overhead. Yes, Julie, very Brechtian, but if you'd remove your theoretically-tinted spectacles for just a second, you'd realise that it just looks clumsy. Power lines almost always look clumsy. In this case they not only make it impossible to think of these Aryan extras as being an army of Goths, they make it impossible to think of them as being an army at all. What is Lucius planning to do, follow the pylons? In any case, the last thing this scene needs is the visual suggestion that the army has just passed Rome's power plant (without disabling it), and will shortly come across the arterial highway.
It's bad enough for Taymor to assemble such ludicrous costumes, sets and locations; it's unforgivable for her to think that all she need do is assemble them, without giving any thought to how they'd look on film. It's tragic, really. Taymor's many lame ideas are ALL visual - none of them have to do with story or character or theme - yet because she was concerned with what things look like in the flesh, not how they would end up looking on film, even these are half-lost. You'll struggle to find one arresting image in the entire two-and-a-half hours. And the acting and music fall just as flat as the images do. It's Shakespeare's, rather than Taymor's, fault that the language also falls flat; but she knew this was Shakespeare's weakest play, so she knew what she was letting herself in for. Even so Shakespeare's poetry is all the film has to recommend itself. If, in the last half hour, the film picks up just a little from the aimless drizzle it was at first, Shakespeare alone can take credit.
Show me someone who praises "Titus", and I'll show you someone whose critical judgment is clouded. The film is so dismal and flabby that one is surprised to discover it's even in focus (that is, when it IS in focus). For two hours Taymor does nothing but wave her avant-garde credentials in our faces, and of course, the world is full of people intellectually insecure enough to accept them.
Not that I think this nonsense would work on stage. "Titus Andronicus" is CLEARLY set in Ancient Rome - would it be TOO MUCH TO ASK to have a production that respects this fact? I'm sick of leather jackets and motorcycles and arcade games and all the other paraphernalia from The Compendium of Tiresome Postmodern Clichés - for once I'd like to see a creative rendition of the era in which the action is supposed to take place, and DOES take place, whatever efforts the director may make to suggest otherwise. In what kind of simple-minded fashion does Taymor expect us to think? "Look, a microphone. Why, that's a modern invention! I guess this means Shakespeare IS a relevant kind of dude, after all!" Please, don't tell me modern audiences are so stupid.
Making it all the more embarrassing is the film's clumsy use of music. Whenever twentieth-century artefacts make a "surprise" appearance, Taymor asks her poor captive composer Elliot Goldenthal to underline the point with a saxophone riff. Wow, a saxophone! That's almost only a hundred years old - I guess Shakespeare IS a relevant kind of dude, after all.
Taymor's affectations undermine an already weak story in too many ways to count. Take the scene where Titus is begging the tribunes to spare his sons' lives. Do we have any sense that it matters? No, because the whole production is so dadaist, and we have so little sense of what can and can't happen in this universe, that none of it seems real - it would be in keeping with the rest of the production for his sons to spring back to life after being executed, so why worry about them? Or take the scene at the Goth's camp outside Rome, which takes place in a quarry with high tension power lines running overhead. Yes, Julie, very Brechtian, but if you'd remove your theoretically-tinted spectacles for just a second, you'd realise that it just looks clumsy. Power lines almost always look clumsy. In this case they not only make it impossible to think of these Aryan extras as being an army of Goths, they make it impossible to think of them as being an army at all. What is Lucius planning to do, follow the pylons? In any case, the last thing this scene needs is the visual suggestion that the army has just passed Rome's power plant (without disabling it), and will shortly come across the arterial highway.
It's bad enough for Taymor to assemble such ludicrous costumes, sets and locations; it's unforgivable for her to think that all she need do is assemble them, without giving any thought to how they'd look on film. It's tragic, really. Taymor's many lame ideas are ALL visual - none of them have to do with story or character or theme - yet because she was concerned with what things look like in the flesh, not how they would end up looking on film, even these are half-lost. You'll struggle to find one arresting image in the entire two-and-a-half hours. And the acting and music fall just as flat as the images do. It's Shakespeare's, rather than Taymor's, fault that the language also falls flat; but she knew this was Shakespeare's weakest play, so she knew what she was letting herself in for. Even so Shakespeare's poetry is all the film has to recommend itself. If, in the last half hour, the film picks up just a little from the aimless drizzle it was at first, Shakespeare alone can take credit.
Show me someone who praises "Titus", and I'll show you someone whose critical judgment is clouded. The film is so dismal and flabby that one is surprised to discover it's even in focus (that is, when it IS in focus). For two hours Taymor does nothing but wave her avant-garde credentials in our faces, and of course, the world is full of people intellectually insecure enough to accept them.