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Julie Taymor’s The Tempest Is Your New Late-Night Drunken Pizza Orgy Movie By Charlie Jane Anders, io9 Shakespeare’s magic thrives in darkness. Many of his most memorable, transformative plays include unfathomable horrors. And The Tempest, perhaps his most overtly magical play, must beguile us but also confront us with madness. Julie Taymor’s version doesn’t quite get there. I loved Taymor’s movie of Titus Andronicus — called simply Titus — because she managed to find the beauty in the absolute degradation and raw nastiness of one of Shakespeare’s seldom-staged plays. (I have a whole theory about why Titus Andronicus is an underrated Shakespearean masterpiece, which I’ll spare you.) Titus was one of my all-time favorite movie adaptations of a Shakespeare play, which left me with high hopes for Taymor’s Tempest. And when I saw that Helen “god of acting” Mirren was playing a female version of Prospero, Prospera, the excitement was doubled. Sadly, Taymor’s Tempest didn’t really work for me, for all the same reasons that I loved her Titus. I think it’s the balance between beauty and horror — filming Titus is all about finding the little flashes of nobility and loveliness in the midst of an incredibly brutal story about mutilation and rape. Filming The Tempest would have to be sort of the reverse — find the darkness in between all of the pretty speeches and fancy magic. In particular, Prospero/Prospera has to be one evil motherfucker, the sorcerer and aristocrat who’s been banished from her home and stuck on an island for years. And Taymor gets seduced by all the prettiness and goes all-out with the gorgeous imagery and swoony loveliness — in a sense, she falls under Prospera’s spell. continued at LINK – – – http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/12/the-tempest-review/?pid=2241&viewall=… added by: remanns