Monday, February 1, 2010

Breaking News: Julie Taymor's Tempest in a Teapot?

Tempest. Dir. Julie Taymor. Perf. Helen Mirren, Djimon Hounsou, Felicity Jones, and Ben Whishaw. Chartoff Productions, 2009.
According to this New York Times' Carpetbagger blog entry, the closed doors at Miramax may mean that Julie Taymor's Tempest "will be shelved, to gather dust, or win a tepid release" (Sharon Waxman, qtd. in the blog entry).

In other words, Tamor's Tempest is a teapot (in a household full of coffee drinkers): potentially dusty, lukewarm, and /or ignored. Shudder.

Bardfilm has been looking forward to the film for nearly a year! Tamor's intensely visual style, Helen Mirren's Prospera, and the intellectual challenges of the play itself are so tantalizing that even a tepid distribution would be agonizing.

We hope that this production will not go under. Please think about the dollars in the film-going public's wallets and purses and recognize that, in Ariel's words, "They cannot budge till your release" (V.i.11). Release the film!

[N.B.: Comments are encouraged below.]

Links: Taymor's Tempest at IMDB.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i hadn't heard of this until now, but it sounds fantastic! i hope it makes it out to the viewing public.
i'm in : )

Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
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The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest