Word: titus
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...cheerfully endures her suffering while incidentally creating her art and carrying on her endlessly tormented love affair with the muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina). The result is a trivializing movie, especially disappointing because it was directed by Broadway's lionized Julie Taymor (The Lion King). Her first theatrical film, Titus, was distinguished by a bold and visionary sweep. In Frida that inventiveness has diminished to a kind of strained cuteness. Everything that makes an artist an artist--the obsessions, the egotism--is ignored in favor of upbeat movie conventions. --By Richard Schickel...
Watching Frida, the new biopic of the famed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, it’s difficult to not remember director Julie Taymor’s last effort, the much-lauded big-budget adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus. That film was notable for, if nothing else, its brash and overwrought self-indulgence; it was a true exercise in almost surreal stylization. It marked Taymor as a new visual force in American cinema and was simultaneously criticized for its over-the-top severity. Strangely enough, the occasionally laughable audacity of Titus is sorely missed in this lush but uninspired...
...flaw that colors everything in the film, however, is Taymor’s hesitant and wobbly direction. While the ballsy Titus knew well that it was visually arresting and never forgot, Frida oscillates nervously between an intense visual palette and boring displays of ho-hum period cinematography and horrendously contrived narrative set-ups that bore more than they evoke. Early in the film, the trolley crash that renders Kahlo periodically unable to walk is shot and edited with a shocking visceral quality and a brash artistic confidence. Immediately after, Taymor gives us a shamelessly trippy, grotesque animated sequence that quite...
...thespians have been adding a little raunch and raciness to the theater scene in a city severely lacking in adult entertainment. In the past two weeks, student actors have served up a double-helping of sexcapades with the student-written buck and the Loeb Mainstage’s Titus Andronicus...
...from the bedroom intimacy of the Adams Pool, the Loeb Mainstage offered sex writ larger in Titus Andronicus’s 15-person undie-clad orgy. With cast members still being recruited just days before opening night, there was no time for touchy-feely get-to-know-you games. “The idea of being in a mock orgy was weird,” says James L. Stillwell ’04, “because we didn’t know each other.We were all cracking up. That was a way for us to diffuse the tension...