Come and anticipate Roland Emmerich's Shakespeare biopic ANONYMOUS

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