Come and anticipate Roland Emmerich's Shakespeare biopic ANONYMOUS

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