Come and anticipate Roland Emmerich's Shakespeare biopic ANONYMOUS

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1521197/

uh-huh

Come and asassinate Roland Emmerich

A political thriller about who actually wrote the plays of William Shakespeare-- Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford-- set against the backdrop of the succession of Queen Elizabeth I, and the Essex Rebellion against her.

uh

you can't just SAY that

A political thriller about who actually did 9/11 -- the Jews-- set against the backdrop of the the early-'00s Lower East Side art scene.

So this is The DaVinci Bard?

this is going to be good for the level of discourse in the english speaking world

a scientific whodunit about what's responsible for autism - mercury in vaccines - set against the backdrop of a jenny mccarthy monologue

A carefree musical biorama about who actually wrote Last Splash - Hank Williams - set against the backdrop of the fall of Communism

An animated SF adventure about the twelve-foot lizards that rule the world--set against the backdrop of David Ickes' long-lost sanity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PaliLAQT8k

my most anticipated movie of the year imo

when this trailer played before x-men, my friend leaned over and was like "i'm gonna need 15 minutes to let this sink in"

I feel like the existence of this movie prompts us to coin a new word that means "more insane than insane".

Legit question: given the framework and the subject matter, how is Emmerich going to figure out a way to kill millions of people in this particular movie? Maybe Shakespeare was actually a genocidal warlord instead of a playwright?

kind of lol that joseph fiennes is in this

anway, oxonians rank up there with birthers and anti-vax people with me

Roland Emmerich : "Shakespeare never wrote anything ever!!" :: Jenny McCarthy : "Vaccinations give babies autism!!" :: Glenn Beck : "Circling random letters on a blackboard proves my insane point!!"

"we all know william shakespeare."

tamtam did u see this?

Lorax did u see this?

"Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous is a well-polished cowpat that will confuse and bore those who know nothing about Shakespeare and incense those who know almost anything." David Edelstein

xp lawl

i love how this film -- THIS film -- is roland emmerich's "prestige" move

i guess he can't help being dumb

Fuckin title of this movie sucks

Sing it to the tune of the Replacements' "Androgynous"

s/b "Six degrees of Francis Bacon"

Expectations

In James Shapiro's judgement, supporters of de Vere’s candidacy as author of Shakespeare's plays have awaited this film with excitement, though, in his view, they may live to regret it.[49] Emmerich is on record as believing that "everybody in the Stratfordian side is so pissed off because we've called them on their lies."[50] The screenwriter, John Orloff, is convinced that the film will reshape the way we read Shakespeare.[51] Derek Jacobi allows that making the film was "a very risky thing to do", and imagines that "the orthodox Stratfordians are going to be apoplectic with rage." [52] Oxfordian blogger William Ray writes that, "This is one of the few instances where the artistic community is going to revolutionize the Western world's educational system."[53]

lol

people gonna be taking this way too seriously ala jfk

i doubt this will be 1/4th as entertaining as that flick though

2012 was really some bullshit, I don't see why this will be any different

I will give it extra credit if the soundtrack features Kanye rapping over the entirety of "Another Brick In The Wall" tho

is oliver platt in this?

yes, he is playing Vanessa Redgrave

If only this were an O. Stone joint.

Or an M. Gibson.

The film was to be the first major motion picture to be shot with Arriflex's new Alexa camera. However, Disney's 2011 film Prom made it to theatres first.[43]

I love this beautifully insane asshole.

there was a nyt (i think?) profile of emmerich's house, which is the awesomest thing ever

he's gay, right?

this is the house: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/08/07/garden/20080807-EMMERICH_2.html

oh my god, that house

that almost makes up for the sickeningly offensive class dynamics of all this "oh, an actor from stratford who was only the son of a glover and didn't do greek at school could never have produced such ~art~" bullshit

yeah totally

is this out already

im excited for this in theory but i doubt i'll enjoy watching it much

Opens Friday.

im excited for this in theory but i doubt i'll enjoy watching it much

― The sham nation of Israel should be destroyed. (Princess TamTam), Tuesday, October 25, 2011 2:01 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

otm...i have a feeling it'll just end up being a dour, subpar wannabe costume drama rather than the over-the-top absurd melodrama it really needs to be.

The film was to be the first major motion picture to be shot with Arriflex's new Alexa camera. However, Disney's 2011 film Prom made it to theatres first.[43]

― lagerfeld of modern despots (latebloomer), Monday, October 24, 2011 6:31 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

almost shot my short with this but couldnt afford to :(

It's the camera that finally won Roger Deakins over to didge

s1ocki have you been to the deakmaster's online forum. he answers peoples questions on there, on the reg!

Ya a DP friend of mine claims its his assistants but IMHO it is actually tha deak

Okay wait a minute about Emmerich's house.

The library coffee table is made of a missile from Iraq and holds an Arabs-and-Americans chess set commissioned by Mr. Teall. (On the Arab side, pieces include an oil rig, Saddam Hussein and a suicide bomber, and on the American side, an exploding World Trade Center, President Bush and Rambo.)

touché

OCCUPY EMMERICH

michael bay gets all the attention, but i don't think even he'd have the balls to have that house.

I'm not convinced Ifans could write his own name.

true story: real name is Russell Evanston, stage name was just what the clerk thought he scrawled on his Equity form

(not a true story)

Ifans aint bad at all in this, considering

here's a nutty unsupported theory emmerich totally SHOULD do a movie about:

http://io9.com/5848192/giant-prehistoric-krakens-may-have-sculpted-self+portraits-using-ichthyosaur-bones

People who don't think that Shakespeare wrote his plays are as bad as birthers.

― bouquet beatdown (Nicole), Tuesday, October 25, 2011 3:16 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

idk wouldnt it just mean another guy was shakespeare

idk wouldn't it just mean another birth certificate was obama's

think abt it

I don't give a flying fuck who wrote the plays, even if these de Vere ppl are fantasizing.

btw Timothy Spall's son is quite funny as Will, playing him as a lecherous vain drunk.

Has anyone seen Shakespeare's birth certificate? Didn't think so.

Actually, given the subject matter I'm surprised no one has questioned Emmerich's authorship of this film.

I interview the guy once, and he took offense at the idea that all he did was make disaster movies. "Godzilla" is not a disaster movie; it's a giant lizard. "Independence Day" is not a disaster movie; it's about an alien invasion. And so on. But the guy was clearly frustrated at his (lucrative) lot in life.

well, he didn't write the screenplay. The guy who did Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole did.

Much Ado About Ga'Hoole

well, he didn't write the screenplay. The guy who did Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole did.

Why didn't you say so! Consider my ticket bought. Is it in 3-D?

legends of anonymous: the bards of stra'tford

I'm pretty sure the Sunday NYT piece on Emmerich is the first time a subject's penis folk-sculpture collection has been mentioned in that gray paper.

Anyway, my 2c:

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/anonymous/5872

Your "slant," if you will.

i kiss you for that review Morbz

thx doll! I actually think it's like a witless Sherman & Peabody cartoon, but figured the readers wdn't get the ref.

3-1/2 stars from reliable Ebert! (who adds that Shakespeare wrote the plays)

is it true the REAL shakespeare wrote the screenplay

lippy male ingenues

Thought this was amusing:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_spectator/2011/10/anonymous_a_witless_movie_from_the_stupid_shakespearean_birther_.html

David Thewlis is exquisitely terrible in this, but I assume the whistling sound he makes through his teeth is intentional.

You know, I'm sure this is a POS, but what does it say that Hollywood greenlit and actually made a big-budget movie about the contested authorship of Shakespeare's plays?

what DOES it say?

it's just riding dan brown's long coat tails, isn't it? "you know this thing you learnt in school that everyone knows? well, it's wrong" <-- passes for high concept in an age when the distrust for established cultural authority is at a high ebb

But at least Dan Brown had the religious aspect to it, which brings in the rubes. As far as conspiracy theories go, this one is sort of ... high brow. No?

shakespeare wrote plays for teh masses, maaaaaan

xp for a very weird value of highbrow!

surely it's a way of finding something you can say and think and declare about shakespeare that doesn't require you absorb all that so-called scholarly expertise (or indeed, actually read the plays and poems): it frees him from the clutches of [insert academic/fancypants bugbear here]

also there was that ep of doctor who

dan brown's "code" was also about "da vinci"

shakespeare was jesus, the REAL jesus

my line on chariots of the gods -- i saw the documentary when it came out in 68-ish, at towyn cinema in mid-wales -- was that people loved the look and the thought of all this ancient stuff, the aztec pictures, the egyptian gold, it was great to look at, and the "pictures of aliens" stuff was an easily grasped "theory" to give you an excuse for talking about it and enthusing and saying "hey folks! look at this stuff, it's AWESOME!"when obviously very few of us have the actual archeological-ethnological chops to know anything about the relics or what they actually meant

so i think these kinds of theories can be consciously (if not particularly helpfully) counter-highbrow: they function as a sort of "set the information free" for historical or literary material -- there was an element of that in dan brown, or more accurately "holy blood, holy grail", which is where his stuff all comes from: it was the first place i ever read anything about the merovingians, for example

(i argued on some other thread -- the one on the Supreme Court? -- that i suspect the fashion among writers like twain and whitman for bacon-wrote-shakespeare was a complicated mix of american counter-highbrow cheek and resistance to the vulgar populism of how shakespeare was actually played in 19th-century new york especially, which was VERY riotous and street)

I know there's a populist bent to these conspiracy theories and whatnot, but isn't the premise of this film/theory not that anyone can do it, but that Shakespeare couldn't do it because he was a common man and writing plays was the provence of the elite?

im guessing that's something you can easily read into this movie, but i doubt it's the whole PREMISE

what does it say that Hollywood greenlit and actually made a big-budget movie about the contested authorship of Shakespeare's plays?

It's reported to have cost $30 million, a fraction of Emmerich's usual budgets. He also green-screened a ton of it rather than build Elizabethan London. (And the script's been around for 15 years.) So chalk it up to R.E.'s previous gross grosses.

It would have been awesome if it was, like, 1/4 Shakespeare mystery and then it fast forwards a few years to the Great Fire of London.

The "authorship" thing really isn't what the bulk of the movie is about. Simpleton's version of palace intrigue, bastards' identities, incest etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeKjKWXWZOE

provence is the provence of the elite

and yes, it's the combination elitism&populism of middlebrow dimwits

the combination elitism&populism of middlebrow dimwits

New name for the politics thread?

From Film Freak Central's review:

In Emmerich's lone gesture to watchability, he gets just about the worst of it out of the way first, panning down from a laughable God's-eye-view of New York City to hone in on a scarf-decked Derek Jacobi strolling importantly into an old theatre with "ANONYMOUS" emblazoned on the marquee. Surely this is meant to signal maturity, trading in Godzilla's Big Apple smash-and-burn for the more academic (!) interiors of Broadway. And probably we're meant to think of the city-symphony of Manhattan, but Emmerich, high as he's aimed, accidentally recreates that moment in "Siskel & Ebert"'s opening credits where the cab driver gives Siskel a too-wide grin and an enthusiastic thumb up. No matter. Jacobi's task: to recite the WIKIPEDIA entry on "Oxfordian theory" to a bunch of chumps who've no doubt paid good money for a bad show, and to advance an alternative origin story for Shakespeare.

Future camp classic in the making right here.

Jacobi also wraps things up, strides off, and leaves the audience to buzz and leave (no applause).

ouch

a scarf-decked Derek Jacobi

Isn't that what he looked like in Branagh's Henry V?

http://www.independent.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00507/radio_507764a.jpg

it's in his rider

and this is not even a fictional W.S. "biopic" -- Rafe Spall is in it for about 10 minutes. He seems to kill Marlowe offscreen tho, and crowd-surfs the groundlings.

and yes, it's the combination elitism&populism of middlebrow dimwits

― mark s, Friday, October 28, 2011 9:23 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

should go on the poster.

You know, I'm sure this is a POS, but what does it say that Hollywood greenlit and actually made a big-budget movie about the contested authorship of Shakespeare's plays?

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, October 28, 2011 9:00 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

it says emmerich just had a huge hit and he's using his juice to do something 'serious' while he can

might as well put this here

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2011/11/william-shakespeare-gangster/

bump