A Bard's Tale

I was first introduced to Shakespeare in the seventh grade. Well, that not be entirely true. Even by that point I was aware of the enormous impact the writer had made upon not only the the literary world, but the English language as a whole. But for all intents and purposes I first read his work while at school here in Boston, and to some extent I took to it right away. The Bard is not exactly 'light reading', and many passages might have been all but unreadable to someone my age without the teacher able to explain certain convoluted passages. Shakespeare wasn't meant to be simply read: he was a playwright whose true popularity didn't come until long after his death, and the books we read growing up were always meant to be seen on stage, in performance, and there have also been numerous film adaptations of his works directed by the likes of Kenneth Branagh, Peter Hall, and Baz Luhrmann. So with this latest adaptation by stage and screen director Julia Taymor (that I saw last week alongside my friend The Opinioness) it is funny that the title is both the first of Shakespeare's plays to which I was introduced while also considered the last of the plays that he alone wrote.

See how moody we can make this?

The Tempest begins with exactly that, as the sorceress Prospera (Helen Mirren) summons a storm to sink a ship with the King of Naples Alonzo (David Strathairn) and his subjects aboard and wash them ashore. There, she plans to extract her revenge for being usurped by her brother Antonio (Chris Cooper) when he accused her of using witchcraft to kill her husband, the Duke of Milan. Having been stranded on an enchanted isle for the past 12 years, Prospera has raised her daughter (Felicity Jones) alone, with only the slave Caliban (Djimon Hounsou) and the mischievous spirit Ariel (Ben Whishaw) as company, Prospera is taking this opportunity of all her enemies being  in one place to teach them a lesson they won't soon forget.

Caliban is what they would call a "happy drunk"

While the language doesn't always survive intact, this IS still Shakespeare. That means that there are constantly more words than necessarily needed to describe a scene we can already can see with perfect clarity. Of course, Shakespeare HAD to overly describe the scenes for the audience since his performers were usually on stages devoid of all visual descriptors. While some passages and lines are cut, the presence of his words remain and in a way Shakespeare is the film's main character, as he's always at the forefront of the story; Even while watching you often overlook the acting of Mirren or the direction of Taymor and think, "This is Shakespeare," so obvious is his verbiage.

How utterly unimpressive

Sadly, this is one of the film's main faults. Despite the performers' best efforts, they are often overshadowed by the words they are speaking, when they're not being overshadowed by flies buzzing in the background. I'll see Mirren in just about anything. Possessing a powerful voice, she can make just about anything interesting, and she had the best performance in this cast. The problem is her character. Prospera (adapted from the Duke Prospero in the original Shakespeare) has a revenge plan for those that wronged her, but she doesn't seem much more sympathetic than any of the other characters, even the undoubtedly bad guys like Antonio or Caliban. Taymor tries to imply a bit of feminism in the role by indicating that she was banished because she was a woman, but it doesn't come off as legitimate here, and there's really not much difference between her and the original Prospero. At least she's better than Felicity Jones, who plays daughter Miranda, and Reeve Carney, who plays Alonzo's son Ferdinand. Both are cringe-worthy actors, and when Ferdinand sings a Shakespeare poem as a love song to Miranda, we want to cover our ears because he CAN'T SING, which is hilarious since Carney is currently the lead on Taymor's stillborn stage show Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark. Perhaps it's just not his singing style on display here, but his scenes with Jones are boring and trite, reveling in the worst of Shakespeare's literary work.

Prepare to be bored to tears by Jones

The rest of the cast are mostly hard-working actors and many of them have done Shakespeare before, though some were odd selections to say the least. Djimon Hounsou is fairly powerful as the angry slave Caliban, but the truth is that he could have probably played just about any character in the film better than it's existing occupant, possibly including Mirren. So why does the film's only black actor play the trod-upon slave? I'll let that one hang, though the way his character is treated does speak volumes to issues of colonialism and slavery, as pointed out in a review by The Opinioness here. David Strathairn is an actor I love, but he seems to be mailing it in as King Alonzo. In truth, he doesn't have much to work with (I don't remember if that was the same in the play) but his performance seems surprisingly uninspired for an actor of his caliber. Tom Conti is great as the the noble Gonzalo, and Alan Cumming is well cast is not necessarily the best for the role of the King's ambitious brother Sebastian. Alfred Molina is hilarious as the drunkard Stephano (who was one of my favorites when I first read the play) and appears in some of the film's best (and, sadly, worst) scenes. Ben Whishaw plays the spirit Ariel to good effect, though I had issues with thew character that I'll get into later.

The setting and language are beautiful... Everything else, not so much

The two characters oddly cast were those of Prospera's brother Antonio and the jester Trinculo. Chris Cooper seems more at home playing modern-day blue collar characters, but he surprising comes off as effective as Prospera's loathsome brother. He's not the best, though this might be due to poor direction rather than his acting abilities. But the other odd casting choice was that of comedian Russell Brand as Trinculo. Though Brand might at first seem the right type to play the fool, he can't escape the fact that this is a work Shakespeare, and his line deliveries are often too whimsical or too often place heavy emphasis on certain words that sometimes comes with inexperienced actors tackling works like these. Brand is on occasion funny, but too often the best he could illicit from me was a  raised eyebrow and a question of when the scene would be over.

Thankfully not shown: Ariel's man-boobs

It's obvious the $20 million spent on the film's budget wasn't for special effects. Though filming around the volcanic areas of Hawaii provided scenery as beautiful as anything you've seen before, the few scenes were digital effects are used look horrid and detract from the film's natural elegance. Scenes especially with Ariel flying around at his mistress' bidding look ugly, and a recounting of him causing the tempest to sink the ship looks overly-stylized, And let's not forget his distracting man-boobs, which like a highway pileup I couldn't draw my eyes from no matter how hard I tried. The film then apparently ran out of money, as there are many more scenes that might have benefited from a digital make-over but come off more as stage tricks than cinema magic, especially towards the film's conclusion. Speaking of the film's conclusion, while I was glad to see it come I was startled by how swiftly it came, as while Taymor seems to anticipate that Shakespeare buffs appreciate the film's final act, it comes off as merely swift and a "well, that's done" attitude before the final credits.

Ah, the old "ring of fire" routine, an old favorite

Despite some interesting bits, I found myself epically bored by this version of The Tempest. I'm not sure how this happened, as you can't simply say that Taymor didn't understand what she was doing with the Bard's work. After all, she's directed Shakespeare on stage and screen before, most notably with Titus in 1999. Though her films have usually gotten mixed reviews in the past, boring is the one thing they've never before been described as. It's not too often that you can get a cast together with this much talent and fail miserably, but kudos to Taymor for doing it in style. Now Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark won't her only missed shot of 2010.

There's No Place Like Home...

This week, The Latest Issue sets the WABAC machine for 2007, and the airing of the Emmy Award-winning miniseries Tin Man. This series was one I'd had my eye on for a while, but only providence and a Netflix streaming account brought it back to my immediate attention quite recently. Between the diverse cast and steampunk re-imagination of the original story, Sci-Fi's (now SyFy) huge miniseries event may have been three years late making it to my consciousness, but my interest in this piece did not wane even in it's absence from my immediate attentions.

The first thing you have to realize while watching Tin Man is that this is no Wizard of Oz. Whether you loved the original 1939 film or thought it was overrated, you can rest assured that while the spirit of the story is here (magic tornado sends girl to a mystical alternate world and she must find the Wizard), Tin Man is most certainly a total recreation, more inspired by the original idea than the story itself. It bears little to no resemblance to either the film or the series of L. Frank Baum books that created the whole franchise.

Zooey Deschanel stars as D.G., a waitress in the middle of nowhere, Kansas,  living with her loving parents while wishing for a more interesting life outside her family's farm. She's a fantastic artist, and constantly illustrates her fantastical dreams, which adorn the walls of her attic loft. Little does she know that there is another dimension, and it's evil ruler Azgadellia thinks D.G. is the only thing that can stand between her and total control of the O.Z., or Outer Zone. Unfortunately, Queen Azgadellia's plan to rid herself of this nuisance backfires, and D.G. finds herself alone and very shocked when she arrives in the O.Z. Gradually we're introduced to Glitch (Alan Cumming), a man with a zipper on his head and his brain removed; Raw (Raoul Trujillo) a "viewer" who's hairy race has been subjugated by Azgadellia; and Wyatt Cain (Neal McDonough), a "Tin Man", or lawman, who was locked up in an iron suit for defying the queen. They of course are this edition's representations of the Scarecrow, Cowardly Lion, and Tinman. They're all lacking in the same areas their previous incarnations had; While Glitch and Raw share the exact issues (a brain and courage), Cain's problems stem more in his coldness due to the loss of his family. Glitch even says to Cain at one point: "Oh, come on Tin Man, have a heart!"

Unlike in the earlier film, there's not much wait for our new quartet to reach Central City to speak to the Wizard (Richard Dreyfus), who was once the great ruler of Central City but has been reduced to a drug-addicted parlor act in the wake of Azgadellia's conquest. Throughout the story in which D.G. tries to understand who she is and where she belongs, there are many sly references to the first film (for instance, D.G. once refers to the O.Z. as being "in technicolor") that make their way seamlessly into the story, including a Toto you didn't see coming. For all that, it's never a show that you need to have seen the original movie or read the books to enjoy, though if you were to not understand at least half of the references I'd be forced to assume you were either naive or sheltered and only had these three episodes to keep you company. Either way you'd have no problem keeping up, the story is that easy to follow.

As for the acting, Deschanel is solid as the heroine placed in an impossible situation. She's not great, but I can't tell if that's just because watching her walk is unsettling. Remember the Seinfeld episode "The Summer of George"? When Molly Shannon plays the woman who doesn't swing her arms? Remember how that weirded everyone out? See, Zooey Deschanel is Molly Shannon. Good acting, dialogue delivered well. Doesn't swing her arms. She's regularly upstaged by her cast mates, which is a good thing. Cumming is very effective and perfectly cast as Glitch. If it was feasible for someone to not have a brain, Cumming could play them. In a heartbeat. He has regularly the best dialogue, and always delivers in spades. Trujillo is better known for his dance career, but of his sporadic acting appearances Tin Man might have been his biggest opportunity and he handled it with aplomb. There are fewer scenes for Raw to shine as compared to his friends, but what he does do, he does very, very well. McDonough rounds out the group admirably. Unlike Cumming or Trujillo or even Deschanel, he has to play the straight man, and for a man to play someone who's normal except for the fact that his surroundings are NOT normal to us is a challenge that he pulls off admirably. It's a shame McDonough has not had a star career that some might have predicted for him since his stint on 2001's Band of Brothers but his biggest role may not have been filmed yet: He's rumored to play Timothy Aloysius Cadwallader "Dum Dum" Dugan in the upcoming Captain America movie. He certainly did well by himself here.

Outside the main foursome, the casting gets a little weird. Kathleen Robertson portrays the evil Azgadellia, and unfortunately she's long on sexy and short on talent. As an evil sorceress, she's unbelievable, and that's not acceptable from a lead role. One of the more interesting things about Azgadellia are the tattoos on her chest. These tattoos are actually her flying monkeys and releasing them requires her to... um... unstrap her corset and shove her bosom at the camera. Then we see the tattoos change into flying monkeys and fly off. Well, at least Robertson had the cleavage (or at least outstanding support) for the role. Much better is Callum Keith Rennie (of pseudo-BSG fame) as Zero, captain of the guard who's got it out for Cain. He's the one who took Cain's family away and locked him in the iron suit in the first place, so their scenes together are definitely worth watching.

Then we get to the Wizard. I'm still not sure Dreyfus brought anything special to the role, though he certainly hammed it up a lot. Perhaps that was all the role asked for, so if that was it, he certainly did that. It's a success for Dreyfus just being in something good (Seriously, he's been in very few good things since Jaws in 1975!) so we shouldn't be too hard on him. He doesn't hurt the story, so we'll give him a pass. Other great performances by Blu Mankamu, Ted Whittall and a young Alexia Fast help add character to the story.

The world of the O.Z. is both beautiful and ugly, inspiring and reprehensible. It has many faces and many sides, and a populace to match. On the special effects side, much of the 3D animations are done very well, and the costume and set designers did quite well building places and people who would reliably inhabit these types of scenes, and should be commended (in fact, they won an Emmy for best makeup in a miniseries, and were nominated for four Emmys related to effects) for their hard work. The only instances that didn't look right or real were some blue screen moments, ones involving our heroes running and the camera looking up at them from below. It's painfully obvious that the actors are running in place, and the movement behind and above them looks like it's happening somewhere else, with the actor edited in later. It really kills the atmosphere when something like that happens. Thankfully, it's not often enough to really disassemble the otherwise outstanding visuals.

I may have been 3 years late reviewing this, but Tin Man was everything I hoped it'd be. Sure, some of the casting was a little skewed, and I'm sorry but the ending was a little anti-climactic (although perhaps ironically appropriate). What this series showed was just how much the Sci-Fi Channel could accomplish with it's own original material and an open license. After all, this is the same channel that's brought us Eureka, the new Doctor Who, and Battlestar Galactica, probably one of the best shows on TV, period. Tin Man, though not a regular series like the previously mentioned shows, had all it's strengths and was a lot of fun to watch. If you haven't seen this yet, I definitely recommend it.