randy_byers | Entries tagged with julie taymor

Well, I'll be wanting to see this one again.

Update: Okay, now that I've had something to eat, here are some actual thoughts about the film. Perhaps above all, Miranda and Ferdinand are vivid and appealing in a way they have never been for me before as the innocent young lovers. Mirren is powerful as Prospera, and yet at times I wondered if the anger other characters say they feel from her is more in the text than in the performance. Prospera is more melancholy and stern than angry in this version. Speaking of which, the cast is pretty much perfect from stem to stern.

There are some major cuts, especially in the final act. The wedding masque is gone, replaced by a beautiful piece of symbolic astral animation that still feels a little abrupt on first viewing. Yet despite cuts and modifications, this is true to the play. So much so that in some ways it doesn't feel like a Julie Taymor film. Or maybe that's because there are no puppets.

As an interpretation, I guess the other thing that stuck out for me was Prospera's relationship with Ariel, which is tender and sweet, except for the scene where Ariel demands freedom and Prospera rebukes him/her. (Ariel is depicted as a sort of sexless hermaphrodite.) But on that level, this version wasn't as good as the live version I saw last year at showing Ariel pushing Propero toward forgiveness in the end. That scene, in itself, plays very well here, but Prospera seems more sympathetic from the get-go than you need to feel a real conversion.

Djimon Hounsou's Caliban is also fascinating -- almost moreso visually than as a performance, although his performance is very fine too. He is a patched, piebald creature -- a black man-monster with patches of white and one blue eye. One of the best interpolations in the film is a silent exchange of glances between Caliban and Prospera as they part at the end.

I'll have to see it again to digest it further. It's full of beautiful intimacies and cold distances. The heavy metal guitar chords are jolting in more ways than one. Does it modernize the play, or does it lend it newly pearly eyes? It's a live act of interpretation and embodiment, gritty and eccentric, lyric and layered. I think there's something there to chew on.

I woke up in a crappy mood yesterday, but nonetheless I got a fair bit done in the morning, including some writing, hurrah. As usual, I started off with breakfast at Roxy's, and the streets of Fremont were already lined with chairs and blankets that people were laying down in anticipation of the Solstice Parade. It was raining. I was in a crappy mood. Let's call the whole thing off?

The neighbors were setting up down by Nectar, which was too jammed with people for my taste, so when time I wandered down Albion to the same intersection where I've watched many an edition of the parade. The rain had relented, but I was irritated by all the people being people -- saying stupid things, wanting to walk through the space where I was standing, and having a good time when I was not. I had also come down late enough that I missed the nude bicyclists but early enough that I had to wait 45 minutes for the parade to get there. Still, after all that, the parade was the usual fun and worked a bit of magic on my mood. Probably the standout float was a Yellow Submarine, with a full complement of Blue Meanies and Beatles (including one cross-dresser, of course) singing songs from the movie. There was also a pretty great Shakespeare puppet advertising Shakespeare in the Park. I spotted Sarah, who used to be a barista at Bulldog but quit to focus on her acting career -- which includes doing Shakespeare in the Park this summer. Before she quit she invited me to come see Romeo and Juliet, in which she's playing Lady Capulet. Sounds like fun.

After the parade I went to the neighbors' for a BBQ. (This meant I had to miss

jackwilliambell's tiki birthday party, for which I apologize, but it seemed like a good day to stay close to home.) The other guests this year were other parents and children from the school the neighbors' daughter attends. With my crappy mood and all, I was dubious about hanging out with strangers, but it was fine. The mothers were all a kick in the pants, in fact, full of bawdy good humor and good-natured flirtation. It was interesting to watch them parenting, as well, as the various kids went through their various spats and stumbles. Other than the almost chilly weather, it was a perfectly pleasant way to spend a few hours out on the back deck. Probably good for me to get out of my comfort zone and rediscover that I can do just fine out there, even if the lives these people lead and responsibilities they deal with are far beyond my capacity. I guess the charismatic drunken uncle role I've learned to play comes in handy in other situations too.

After the BBQ I watched Julie Taymor's Titus (1999) all the way through for the second time (the first was in the theater -- a special showing at the Cinerama with Taymor in attendance). This is her adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, and I can't say I like the story much. I've never read the play or seen another production, so I can't really compare the movie to anything. It's visually gorgeous, and there are a number of powerful scenes. However, the villains are so over the top that I find them very hard to take, and Titus is just about as difficult as Lear to sympathize with. The only truly sympathetic character is Lavinia, and even she is a bit unfeeling in her comments to the Goths just before they exact their revenge on Titus against her. Still, an amazing scene when she begs Tamora to kill her rather than let her sons rape her. But the series of savage atrocities wears on me as it goes on. Terrible people doing terrible things to each other, and a villainous Moor giving mwa-ha-ha speeches worthy of a comic book. Not sure what to make of the final image either. New day rising? Whence this sense of hope and renewal? Well, I give Taymor a lot of credit for taking on such a challenging, difficult project as her calling card in the film world.

Finally caught up with Julie Taymor's second movie, Frida, which is a biopic about the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, starring Salma Hayek in the title role. I had an intense, uneven reaction to this movie. From the very first shot, I was arguing with it. We see a Mexican courtyard with a peacock. The peacock's tail is an unnatural shade of green. Okay, I tell myself, this is supposed to look like a painting, but it actually looks like film of a peacock with fake-looking tail feathers. Hmph. Ten minutes later I was bawling my eyes out. And so it went throughout the whole movie. I kept arguing with Taymor's choices, and I kept bursting into tears every ten minutes or so as I got swept up in the story.

Now, this doesn't tell you much about the movie, and I'm not sure how much I'm capable of telling you about the movie, given my response to it. One of the things it famously does is incorporate some of Kahlo's paintings into the flow of imagery, so that a painting will come alive and become a scene in the movie, or a scene in the movie will transform into one of the paintings. I found myself wishing the whole movie had been based on her paintings, that the film had just been narrative fragments linking the paintings. I also felt that as much as we do see of her artwork, the movie is strangely silent on her creative process and her career as an artist. When Sharee and I were in London in 2005, we want to an exhibition of Kahlo's paintings at the Tate, so I know that she did a lot of portraits for hire. Why is this not mentioned in the movie? We see more of Diego Rivera's career than of Kahlo's. We never get the sense that she made any money off of her work or that she had any reputation in her lifetime.

I remember that one review of the movie I read back in 2002 complained that it was too much about her relationship with Rivera and not enough about her. It's a legitimate complaint, I think. It feels at times less a movie about her than a movie about them. At the same time, however, I have to admit that one of the things I respond to most powerfully in Taymor's movies (at least this one and Across the Universe) is her treatment of romantic relationships. I'm not sure I can articulate it, but she has a knack for showing both the beauty and the sorrow of relationships at the same time, like two sides of the same coin. Love and loss go hand in hand, and it goes both ways. Love becomes loss becomes love becomes loss becomes love. That's how Frida and Diego's relationship is portrayed in this movie, and it just kept hitting me in waves of emotion. I mean, I can relate, you know?

But back to the things I argued with: the depiction of Kahlo's fling with Trotsky didn't work for me. This was one of the few times where the film seemed to suffer from typical biopic problems, where something is included not from any narrative need but because it's historically interesting or important. To be fair, there is an attempt to fit it into the narrative: Frida has a fling with Trotsky as a way of punishing Diego. But because Trotsky is such a grand historical figure himself, I kept looking for a deeper meaning that wasn't there. I dunno. Maybe this is something that will make more sense on a second viewing, when I don't have my own expectations distorting things.

The award-winning score by Eliot Goldenthal really is great, and I'll be buying it. It made me yearn for more Latin music. I have so little, just a collection of songs from Pedro Almodovar movies and an album by Concha Buika. I need more, more!

I guess I will end by saying that the movie was a cathartic experience, much like the exhibition of Kahlo's paintings was. I really didn't know that much about her artwork before I went through that exhibition. By the end of it I was emotionally exhausted. The amount of pain expressed in her work was overwhelming. The movie doesn't dwell on the pain (caused by a horrific accident that shattered her body), although it does keep coming back to it. Yet it still probes enormous, overpowering, transformative feelings, just as Kahlo's paintings do. It's more than can be absorbed in a single viewing, for sure. I'll be watching this one again.

Well, this is exciting news. Julie Taymor, who has previously directed a powerful, idiosyncratic film adaptation of Titus Andronicus (as well as the wonderful Beatles musical phantasmagoria, Across the Universe), is in post-production on an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Seems that Prospero has been turned into Prospera for this. Hm? But Prospera is played by Helen Mirren. Hmmmmmmm! Wow, I like it. The rest of the cast looks pretty good too: Chris Cooper, Djimon Hounsou (as Caliban, yikes!), Alan Cumming, Alfred Molina, David Straithairn, Tom Conti. Ariel is played by Ben Whishaw, recently seen as the wispy John Keats in Bright Star. Miranda is Felicity Jones, whom I know nothing about. Never heard of the Ferdinand either.

Anyway, it's Taymor, so I'm sure it will be a visual marvel if nothing else, and it's very likely to be more than that, at least if she sticks with Shakespeare's brave new words. It's currently scheduled to come out sometime in 2010. Can't wait! Makes me want to reread the play immediately.

Last night I watched Across the Universe on DVD. I bawled my eyes out in several places. It felt good. For whatever reason, I needed a good cry.

I have no idea why this movie gets to me the way it does. I mean, I love the Beatles music, so there's that. (Much as my love for Velvet Goldmine is partly my love for Eno and Roxy Music.) But the sensibility at work just really touches some raw nerves for me, some hot spots that I can't claim to understand. Why, for example, do I love Lucy's mother so much? She gets the best line in the Thanksgiving argument scene when she is able to name Kerouac's On the Road, much to Lucy's shock. "I read," Mom explains matter-of-factly. Lucy's conversations with her mom are always full of interesting clashing perspectives, and while Mom comes across as a square, her love and concern for her daughter is always palpable and feels personal. (It's one of the things that made me cry last night.) This film definitely passes the Bechdel Test.

This is the first time I've watched the DVD, and it's not as visually impressive as it was on the big screen. The waves turning into newspaper headlines in the opening credits doesn't seem to work as well as it did when it felt like the waves were going to crash on my head, and some of the color tweaking doesn't look quite right. But the flowing, unfurling development of the story is still there, getting richer and deeper the more I watch it. Not sure how it gets under my defenses, but maybe part of it too is the abiding sense of the impermanence of love. All those Beatles love songs used to express such a variety of attitudes toward and phases of love. "All My Loving" as a brush-off song, with the heard-it-before but still wistful reaction of the girl: "You bastard!" It all builds to the grand all-you-need-is-love reconciliation of Jude and Lucy, but along the way it's a magical mystery tour of every way that love goes wrong and awry.

Update: Oh yeah, forgot to mention that Evan Rachel Wood is starting to look like Ginger Rogers to me. Her face has a similar pert, insouciant look.

Update 2: I also bounced off Dreyer's Vampyr last night for the second time, and I'm setting it aside. It's like a dream, but so far it seems like kind of a boring dream.

Took the anonymous housemate to Julie Taymor's Across the Universe for his birthday last night. It's a mess, but a beautiful, groovy mess. Taymor previously directed Titus (1999) and Frida (2002).

Comparisons of Across the Universe to Moulin Rouge are fairly apt. It's a post-modern musical using songs by the Beatles sung by various cast members, including at least a couple who don't have professional-grade voices (not to mention Eddie Izzard, who speaks his rendition of "Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite"). As in Moulin Rouge, the use of normal voices lends a winning feeling of naturalism and vulnerability to what is otherwise an entirely artificial concoction. The dramatic structure and flow is nowhere near as coherent or powerful as Moulin Rouge, however.

Basically, it's a bunch of really imaginative eye-candy matched to groovy tunes. The way that much of the dancing is developed out of normal, mundane movements is quite clever as well, particularly a typically crowded sidewalk scene in Manhattan that becomes a massive dance and also a football practice that becomes an acrobatic ballet. Some of the set pieces, such as the gospel version of "Let It Be" used for a montage of simultaneous funerals for a soldier killed in Vietnam and the victims of a race riot, are very moving.

The movie was apparently taken away from Taymor and re-edited against her wishes. It's hard to say without more knowledge how much of the narrative mess is a result of clashing aesthetic choices. The story meanders. It does not pull its many strands together. It leaves many questions. (How did Jude learn to draw? How did Max kick the habit -- or did he?) But this is a visual feast, and I'm tempted to see it again just for the swirling spectacle. Then again, I'm a sucker for post-modern musicals.

Update: Looks like I was wrong about the re-edit. The production company was apparently unhappy with Taymor's original edit and did their own much shorter edit, but what was released in the theater was apparently pretty close to Taymor's original edit.