In Contention

Tag: Russell Brand

  • REVIEW: “The Tempest” (*)

    Venice Film Festival

    If any one title in the Shakespeare library has been sufficiently fiddled about with on screen, it’s “The Tempest,” among the most tonally malleable of his comedies, and a fantasy that gifts filmmakers with obvious opportunities for spectacle.

    “Forbidden Planet,” a terrific 1956 sci-fi riff on the play, perhaps took this adaptability furthest, but it only set the ball rolling for assorted free interpretations: Derek Jarman gave it a homoerotic spin in 1979, Paul Mazursky rewrote it as a neurotic modern-day sex comedy in 1982 and Peter Greenaway played all manner of metatextual games in 1991’s “Prospero’s Books.” At this point, about the most radical thing a filmmaker could do with “The Tempest” on screen is play it straight.

    That is evidently not a view shared by one Julie Taymor, whose murky, lunk-headed and signally boring new film tricks out Shakespeare’s text with gaudy CGI saturation, a wardrobe from “Zoolander”‘s Derelicte collection and a key sex change in the lead, as sorcerer and doting father Prospero here morphs into Helen Mirren’s Prospera, a highbrow voodoo priestess of sorts with a permanent Patty Hewes-style scowl.

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  • Taymor’s ‘Tempest’ to bookend Venice fest

    Days after naming Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” as the festival’s curtain-raiser, the Venice Film Festival’s have picked another not-entirely-expected title to close the fest on September 11: Julie Taymor’s long-delayed Shakespeare adaptation, “The Tempest.”

    The decision to bookend proceedings with highly anticipated U.S. productions suggests the Venice brass are aiming for higher star wattage on the Lido than at last year’s low-key edition, which opened with Giuseppe Tornatore’s misfire “Baaria” and closed with the little-seen Chinese portmanteau pic “Chengdu, I Love You.” More strategically, this choice of closer seems calculated to compel journalists to stay for the full duration of the fest — something of a challenge when Toronto begins but a few days earlier.

    I admit I hadn’t counted on seeing Taymor’s film, which stars Helen Mirren as a gender-switched Prospero in the director’s typically loose interpretation of the Shakespeare standard, in the fall festival pack — though distributor Disney (picking up where Miramax left off) had already confirmed a December release date.

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