Tag: Vanessa Redgrave

Coriolanus gets the disctinction for being another movie that took me a long ass time to watch. It came out roughly the summer of 2012, and I got it then too. Just. Never. Watched it. Shit, my parents watched it right away, and somehow I just forgot about it. Well, the opportunity came up for me to watch it on Blu-Ray instead, so I rented it, despite owning it. Why? Because then I had a time limit to watch it! If I didn’t watch it before today, I would have wasted money.

I can’t be wasting money. Unless you call renting a movie you own anyways wasting money. Remember when I said I forgot about it? I mean literally forgot that it existed. Whoops. Fuck.

Never forget about Voldemort and The Phantom. They don’t take kindly to that.

Initially, the plot description confused me. “A banished hero of Rome allies with a sworn enemy to take his revenge on the city.” Alright, a period piece in Ancient Rome, sweet! But when I saw the pictures, I saw modern looking stuff. I forgot that Rome was still a city in Italy, so I guess that is what is going on with it?

Nope, Coriolanus is a Shakespeare play. Should have guessed it. Directed by Ralph Fiennes (his first ever director role), this is one of those modern Shakespeare plays, which I guess will get me prepped for when I finally see the new Much Ado About Nothing.

Caius Martius (Fiennes) is a great Roman warlord, who kind of hates the Romans themselves. He finds the plebians to be silly. But he kicks so much ass, and wins so many fights he eventually wins them over. Heck, he also almost takes out the nearby Volscian army, lead by Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler). They both survive, but it is clear Rome won the bout overall.

Eventually he wins the public over and decides to run for Consul, the leader of Rome. The senate fears his power though, so they begin a smear campaign against him, attempting to turn the public against him as well. Caius has quite a temper, so he eventually gets pissed off, curses everyone and quickly gets branded a traitor and exiled out of Rome. Surely they won’t regret sending out one of their greatest generals, super pissed off, out of city gates? I hope he doesn’t get the urge to come back…with force.

Jessica Chastain plays his wife, and Vanessa Redgrave his mother.

Oh shit, he is really really mad. Rome is totally going down.

Shakespeare. Are you familiar with his words? Well, for the untrained, it is easy to get lost in the words and get confused, which is why I watched the movie with subtitles.

Coriolanus presumably follows the script to a letter, which means the movie feels overly dramatic. There is a lot of monologue-ing and yelling by the various characters. Lots of yelling, because that means passion, and everyone is passionate in a Shakespeare play.

Which felt really annoying. Overall, Coriolanus is good in that it is trying something new. There are other modern Shakespeare things, but they usually never work for me. This one was different enough that it seemed to be okay they were speaking in such strange ways but with guns.

But the story itself is a let down. I guess I could blame that one on Shakespeare. It wasn’t one that kept me interested. Way more talking and not enough doing. Interesting movie to see once, but ehh…

Also, the Blu-Ray isn’t Blu-Ray quality, those bastards.

A historical drama and political thriller about the works of Shakespeare? Alright. Why the hell not.

That shit was like a rock show back then.

In case you didn’t know, Anonymous is a movie saying that William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall in the movie) did not write the works accredited to him. No, he was from a family of illiterates, and just an actor who was in the right place at the right time. No, instead it was Edward de Vere, an Earl of Oxford at the time who might have wrote them all! And he is played by Rhys Ifans.

Oh okay. Well why does it say that? Pretty much explains it over the whole movie.

According to the movie, play writes who got out of line back in the day got imprisoned. Nothing too raunchy, nothing against the crown, etc. Some guy named Ben Johnson (Sebastian Armesto) get arrested early on for being such a crude guy, I guess.

But the movie has an Earl doing all the writing, and in secret at that. Writing is also frowned upon for some reason. But he gives his plays to others to publish, under ‘Anonymous’, until Shakespeare takes credit after (Henry the VIII maybe?). Which he is fine with. Good, someone to “direct” all his works. Great.

Theres also the major plot about Queen Elizabeth 1 (Vanessa Redgrave) having sex with EVURRYBODYYY. And having secret children, even if its with people she was related to. Eventually this stuff leads to heir questions, possible revolts and mobs, and some war stuff. Beheadings too.

The movie also begins as if it was a play in front of a live theater, and ends that way too. But don’t worry, it turns into a real movie after the intro, and before the outtro.

“Your mother is an outtro.”

I can tell you I know very little about Shakespeare’s work. Never really cared. Also historically, I like ancient, but that means older than Renaissance. So any of that stuff wasn’t as interesting to me.

With all the sleeping around and fake babies, it just felt like a modern drama set in the past. I don’t even know how the movie explained that no one would be able to notice the Queen was pregnant all those times.

Also, a lot of the characters looked alike in my head. Kind of like the six fingered man in The Princess Bride. At least half of them. That made it harder for me to just follow along with the plot, which was important, given all the characters. The play also took place over 4 different years, over about 35 or 45 years though. It was more confusing, because I didn’t know when it went super far in the past. The other years at least showed “Five Year prior!”. Maybe the super far in the past one did too. But I missed it.

Shouldn’t be hiding time cues like that!

But anyways. The movie looked pretty, but the plot seemed kind of silly.

Before you get confused, Letters to Juliet and Dear John are different movies. Both are romantic comedies starring Amanda Seyfried with “letter” themes. Or at least I assume Dear John has that in it. But Dear John is a Nicholas Sparks book/movie, while Letters To Juliet came out…well damn, after Dear John and in the exact same year.

What the hell Amanda Seyfried?

“Oh, my bad.”

Amanda is a fact-checker for a new york newspaper! Oh man! But she wants to be a writer. Too bad. Oliver Platt don’t care. She is going on an early honeymoon with fiance, Gael Garcia Bernal, to Italy! For he is Italian and opening an Italian restaurant in NYC and needs to meet with suppliers. But when they get there, it seems like he only wants to do work. For shame!

Amanda scurries around on her own, bored, and finds the “Juliet House” from that Shakespeare thing. For some reason, a whole bunch of women write romantic queries to Juliet and hope she responds. A group of women write letters back with advice, because they are bored. She finds a 50 year old letter, and decides to respond.

A week later, very British Christopher Egan appears on her doorstop. Oh, with his grandmother, played by Vanessa Redgrave. She has determined to return to Italy and find her long lost love when she was 15, and see if he remembers her. Amanda agrees to go on the journey with him, since her fiance doesn’t mind, as they travel the country looking for the right old dude.

As you can imagine, the thought of old people love and growing old with the person you actually love is discussed a lot. Turns out Amanda doesn’t love the husband that cares about his restaurant more than her (Selfish). So yes. Another movie where a woman travels and changes her mind about marriage, choosing another foreign person.

I knew this would happen! Why did I watch this movie in the first place?!

This is NOT an answer.

Only a few moments did I find amusing. At the end, where the balcony scene was “accidentally recreated” before Amanda officially started to get it on with British dude was pretty funny though. After all, NYC is kind of overrated.

For some reason (not that one, damn it) I did find this one more enjoyable. I thought they were good together chemistry wise, and the old woman love story was fantastic. So it is decent, you know, for a RomCom.