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Julie Taymor
With a thorough background in various theatrical arts around the world, and best known for her Lion King Broadway production, Taymor entered the film-making industry. Her emphasis is on set design, costumes and visual creativity, resulting in movies that are pointlessly whimsical or visually stunning, and stories that are adapted either arrogantly or boldly, both depending on your tastes. Her discipline and talent lies not in plots, characters, intellectualism or meaning, but in imaginative production, resulting in anachronisms, bizarre costumes, whimsical theatrics and pretentious art. Reviewed until 2016. Artistic adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story about a jester who takes revenge on his king for humiliating him and another little female entertainer. As this is a creation by Julie Taymor, the focus is on the costumes and sets, in this case the jester is a midget, surrounded by huge people with grotesque, fat, twisted masks and costumes that make them look like puppets. Stagy, almost expressionistic sets decorate the movie as well as his nightmarish flashbacks and dreams. Interesting. A musical montage of the 60s, revolving around dozens of reinterpretations of Beatles songs against a backdrop of the hippie culture and the Vietnam war. The plot is completely subservient to words in songs merely so that songs and visuals can be tied in with the writing. Superficial characters like Jude (named that way for the sole purpose of being able to sing Hey Jude) fall in love, argue over war and go through a bizarre theatrical draft, musical battle scenes, and wistful violent protests. A lesbian called Prudence is thrown in for no good reason, and actors reinterpret Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin as if they were Broadway figures. An example of the so-called creativity is to sing Strawberry Fields with an MTV-style visually striking montage of strawberries being mutilated to symbolize the gory violence of war. Painful. A rich production of the bloodthirsty Shakespearean play that attempts to combine many different artistic sets and scenery, using deliberate anachronisms and carefully choreographed battles and sequences. At first the movie seems to be saying something about fascism and other modern issues, but it quickly proves to be pointless pretentious art with fashionable factors and enough aimless, avant-garde creativity to satisfy the art critics. Some rare scenes are good, but Shakespeare is butchered for the sake of extravagant costumes, and this arrogant artsy carnage continues endlessly. |
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