Video surprise

After arising late Friday afternoon, my path took me by the local video emporium, where I stopped to see what was available since my last visit a couple of weeks ago. Galina generally likes something light, comedic, or romantic (or all three), which suits me - except for those times when I want to view some of Hollyweird's more violent offerings (a good example of this genre that I liked was The 13th Warrior). It's not that I particular like the violence, it's just that stories of conflict and adventure and the overcoming of great odds generally have violence as a prime ingredient.

At any rate, after passing by nearly all of the new releases, I finally beheld a video slipcase featuring a rather tired-looking Anthony Hopkins in blue face paint and wearing a similarly painted blue helmet. His co-star was listed as Jessica Lange, and the movie was titled Titus. The back of the box told me little, past the usual marketing slime describing the film as a "coup de cinema" and a "wild ride," topped off with: "a shocking journey into the depths of the human heart - a place where vengeance and passion reign supreme."

How could I resist?

The opening scene made me think I was watching a movie in the spirit of Brazil. A boy wearing a paper bag with cutouts for eyes and mouth proceeds to go berserk in a modern kitchen setting, sitting at a table covered with many different kinds of toy soldiers, which are the object of his violent passion. Suddenly, there is an explosion just outside the kitchen window and the boy, who hides under the table, is rescued by an individual dressed like one of Mad Max's minions and carried out a door into the center of a Roman arena, to the roar of an unseen crowd.

As an army of blue-painted soldiers, weilding swords and spears, appears to close in on the boy from all sides, accompanied by pall-bearers and a melange of mounted (and apparently some mechanized) units, including light armored vehicles that resemble something Leonardo DaVinci might've designed and a horse-drawn cart filled with prisoners behind barbed wire, I begin to think that this is setting up to be a hell of a movie.

And it was.

The one thing I did not expect was the fact that the screenplay is an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. That small fact is acknowledged on the film box, in small print, in that tall, thin font that tries to stuff way too much information into too narrow a space.

Be that as it may, I knew something was afoot when the players began to say their lines in the manner of Shakespeare, and when Hopkins - who plays the title role - orders the eldest son of the queen of the Goths sacrificed despite her pleas, it tickled a long-ago memory, and I knew we were no longer in Kansas, so to speak, but in Elizabethan England.

At least verbally. The director, Julie Taymor, mixed old and new props throughout (in addition to the light armored vehicles I mentioned above, I recall seeing automobiles, motorcycles, Pepsi cans, a refrigerator, video games, a pool table, and a Mauser pistol). The technique is disquieting, but has two saving graces. First, is not terribly hard to get used to - after all, most of any attempt to be historically true to either Shakespeare's time or that of Titus himself would be wasted on me and on modern audiences. Second, I'm sure the props form the foundation for many of the symbols that fill the film. Some of these - such as Saturninus' Hitler-like hairdo - did not escape me, while a bunch of others just register as "probable" symbols (is it my imagination, or do Titus' friends in the latter part of the film dress like stereotypical Italian fascist thugs of the 30s? why did the Mauser appear in the hand of Lucius at the very end? and why does the boy walk toward the rising sun carrying the baby?).

Symbolism aside, through the nearly three-hour length of the film, Galina and I sat riveted - and revolted at times - by a spectacle of murder and mayhem in service to honor, evil, and revenge. No Brazil this, but a story that really grabbed me, and disturbed me, and did not let go. Galina's been kinda quiet, too.

On a different note, Titus demonstrates that appalling violence is not a recent conceit of those who stage our entertainment; the tradition goes back at least to Shakespeare and, I'm sure, well beyond. Nevertheless, the way the story and the characters are presented in the film allowed the violence to made sense, as opposed to many contemporary entertainments where violence seems little more than a vehicle for padding the film's run time.

I really wasn't in the mood for a film like this, yet having seen it, I am entertained. Though we got our money's worth from this rental, it will be a long time, I think, before I'll want to see this film again. Then again, it will be a long time before I'll forget this film.

Cheers...

Beholding Saturday...

Another one of those lazy, hazy, crazy days as summer winds down.

Spent the day on and off looking at a translation I have to do this weekend. My heart's simply not in it. I have enough of this stuff to do - or will, now that a key player in the office has gone back to school - during the week.

Galina's been getting ready for her trip, and every available surface outside my room and above floor level is covered with "candidate" items, i.e., things that might, ultimately, go into a valise, a duffel bag, and in her carry-on. I'm sure the selection process under way out in the living room makes the process used by both major parties to choose vice presidential candidates seem tame by comparison.

It's not as if she's this way all the time. After all, it's not every day one can go visit one's sister in Russia after a 13+ year hiatus. Two years ago, when we hoofed it the hard way to Málaga, neither of us checked any luggage, and though we did not go the whole Rick Steves rucksack route, we did travel relatively lightly. Me, I'd like to try Steves' method and travel with only what I can carry comfortably on my back. The appearance and reappearance of his shows on the local PBS channel helps me focus on what, partially, I want out of life.

Napped again today - maybe some would call it sleep - from about 3 to 5 in the afternoon. Lee came back (finally!) around 5:30 just as I was pulling out to go to the video store. Later, we went to the mall, where I purchased a voltage converter (for the sister), though I must stress to Galina that her sister should think about what kind of stuff she's plugging into the unit, else she'll burn this one out the way she did the last one. Don't get me wrong, I like my sister-in-law, but she is of that class of human that does not pay much attention to the technical side of living (which only puts her in the overwhelming majority, but that's another issue...).

It's nearly midnight right now, and I'm feeling nicely worn through. Galina and I watched Eye of the Beholder a little while ago, and it contrasts nicely with what I said about last night's Titus. In Eye, some kind of surveillance wizard/superagent for the British embassy is set the task of following a young man suspected of pilfering money. Our hero, who is so geeky that his wife gathered up their daughter and disappeared many years ago, diligently follows the suspect to a museum, photographs a meeting with a young woman, and then follows the pair ot a love nest, where our hero witnesses first the titillation and then the savage murder of the young man.

Our hero becomes increasingly obsessed with the woman and follows her from city to city as she leaves a trail of corpses. If there is a psychological angle here, it never gets developed very well past the level of stark pathology. We know something drives the woman to kill, and there are hints here and there in brief flashbacks, but her character could have just as easily been made, say, a kleptomaniac, and story line would not be too very different, except we'd be missing all the blood and bare flesh, and nobody would pay money to see it.

At any rate, what makes Titus a more powerful film, in my opinion, is that the emotions played out there are clearer and perhaps closer to what we - as presumably normal people - are capable of feeling, even if the actions are beyond our nature. The people in Eye, on the other hand, are so clearly "out there," and their violence, while graphic, remains so clearly purposeless, that the story is a celebration of the aberrant.

I was interested in how the film would end, and hoped there would be an explanation - or at least a clarification - of what drove the characters to do the things they did. Though the end sort of fizzled out like a cigarette butt in a snowbank, it made a kind of sense, assuming you never really cared in the first place.

I can't say the rental was a complete waste of money, but my life would not be measurably less full if I hadn't seen this flick.

Cheers...