Four of Them

-So Aaron the Moor, played with randy, fourth-wall-obliterating relish by Harry Lennix, has impregnanted the avenging mother Tamara (Jessica Lange, so very intense and so very badass). She gives birth to his kid, quite obviously his kid, and a nurse comes in, all a-twitter, to show Aaron and Tamara's rapist sons (Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Matthew Rhys). They are pissed off, and one of them screams "You hath undone our mother!" No joke, I kid not, get out, this is an actual line from the actual movie and the actual play: "Villian...I hath done thy mother." Does that not say it all?

-If this is the worst--most unsubtle, uncouth--of Shakespeare's plays, you must admit, it has spawned the most interesting film adaption.

-With no apparent time frame--ancient buildings, speech, and politics, but the casual, alternating presence of carriages and cars, wine and Coke, armor and T-shirts, tights and hot pants, aside from the already-screwed historical figures, that vary decades. And arcade games.

-The actors chew their lines like gum, tirelessly and complusively. Harry Lennix spends much of his time lecturing the camera with a clownish smile, even Young Lucius gets in on the action. Anthony Hopkins is, as always, esteemed and epic.

-Girl Who Plays Lavinia (my computer is screwy, I can't look up the name) gets one of the most unsettling, creative scenes (I think), underplayed spoken while music swells to make it all the more devastating. As her uncle discovers her, in a bloody underdress and chopped-off stumps for hands, which now grow tree branches (to coincide with the line that refers to the hands as branches), he begs her why she won't talk, and she opens her mouth, blood literally pouring out.

-Alan Cummings plays the new kind of Rome, who is introduced riding the Popemobile.

-For a revenged tragedy, this is more of a twisted comedy.

-My chief reason for always giving Julie Taymor another chance.