Titus (1999)
Directed by Julie Taymor
Titus Andronicus returns from the wars and sees his sons and daughters taken from him, one by one. Shakespeare's goriest and earliest tragedy.
10 connections found
View:
10 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Titus to
Taking the most recent crack at this Shakespearean black sheep, Julie Taymor, perhaps best known for directing "The Lion King" on Broadway, pulls out all the stops.
Screenwriter and director Taymor -- the Tony-winning, micro-managing visionary behind the extravagant Broadway adaptation of Disney's "The Lion King" -- gives 110-percent in bringing this ambitious, catastrophic drama to the screen.
Best known for her fantastic staging of Disney's The Lion King, Taymor has bitten the bullet.
Award-winning theatre director Taymor (The Lion King) adapts Shakespeare's first play, the gruesomely funny and violent Titus Andronicus, for the big screen with an ambitiously unusual production design that mixes the classical and the modern.
If that's not bizarre enough, the film was directed by Julie Taymor, who staged Disney's "The Lion King" on Broadway.
American director Julie Taymor won acclaim for her stage direction of "The Lion King" on Broadway and in London, but this is something else again.
In fact, in terms of production design, this neo-modernist piece looks like it could have been inspired by oddball filmmaker Terry Gilliam ("Time Bandits," "Brazil"), while its content (which includes murder, rape, sex and cannibalism) recalls the work of Peter Greenaway ("The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover").
Feeling directly lifted from the prologue of Julie Taymor's Titus (or maybe "St.
Harry Lennix ("Titus") is on hand for an Obama drone jab.
Advertisement
A need for armor repair on account over currency adds female blacksmith Kate (Laura Fraser, "Titus") to William's entourage.
Period and contemporary mixtures of speech and behavior are also given to the characters played by Mark Addy ("Down to Earth," "The Full Monty") and Alan Tudyk ("28 Days," "Wonder Boys") as the comic relief squires, Laura Fraser ("Titus," "Cousin Bette") as a liberated female blacksmith, and Shannyn Sossamon (who makes her feature film debut) as the obligatory fair maiden.
Lending adequate support are Mark Addy (1997's "The Full Monty") and Alan Tudyk (2000's "28 Days"), as William's lovable sidekicks; Paul Bettany (1998's "The Land Girls"), very funny as writer Geoffrey Chaucer, who becomes William's spokesperson; Laura Fraser (1999's "Titus"), as a canny, resourceful peasant girl who befriends William; and Rufus Sewell (1998's "Dark City") as the token bad guy, and William's competing nemesis.
And besides all that, it's so good to see Jessie doing comedy again, after the long drought since Tootsie, and after all those waspish meanies from Hush and Titus .
Television producer Nina Veronica (Jessica Lange, "Titus") and entertainment manager Uncle Sweetheart (John Goodman, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?") are desperate people in a fictional country in the throes of civil war who join forces to produce a television special benefit concert for the government's network.
It's only necessary to think back a few months, to Julie Taymor's " Titus ," for a film set in ancient Rome that's immeasurably better to look at.
Here, he constructs a place and time that never were and never will be a setting as synthetic as that in Julie Taymors Titus , only less hyperbolically fashionable or playful in its wild amalgamation of time periods.
The Cell outdoes every cinematic extravaganza of recent years, even The Matrix and Julie Taymor's bold, underseen Titus , in mounting dense, opulent spectacles that defy description.
Advertisement
Sir Anthony Hopkins ("Titus," "The Mask of Zorro") gives the film some dignity as the story's occasional narrator and Jeffrey Tambor ("Meet Joe Black," HBO's "The Larry Sanders Show") appropriately plays the town's conceited mayor.
Anthony Hopkins peaked with "The Silence of the Lambs" and since then his career has involved many a sidelong reference to it in lesser films, i.e. "Titus."