ANDRONICUS!!!

Just saw Julie Taymor's Titus on DVD. Very violent, very beautiful (except for a few special-effects bits that I thought were stupid), very sad.

Best line in the movie: (after the Empress Tamora has a baby with dark skin, so that her affair with the Moor Aaron is revealed)

Chiron: Villain! You have undone our mother!
Aaron: Villian, I have done your mother.

[He delivers this line without any emphasis on 'done' or any smirking, which I think is almost humanly impossible.]

I bet Shakespeare would be impressed if he was around to see this.

Aaron makes a particularly cool villian in this production. Yeah, he's evil - aren't all the Moors - but Harry Lennix's acting shows him as one who's willing to go down fighting, not whimpering in their pants like Chiron and Demetrius. In a twentieth-century movie, the part where he's brought into the Goth camp was just begging to be be turned into a Nazis vs. black man scenario anyway.

The one part I really couldn't stand was the idiotic angels with trumpets. What was Taymor thinking?

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Jonathan Rhys-Meyers: I like! JH and TA and I also saw him in the Patrick Stewart version of The Lion in Winter. At the time we were eating dinner and chatting with the movie in the background because the speakers on my laptop are fairly bad. War...nah...political intrigue...nah...gay kiss? That's when we started paying attention. Maybe they put him as Philip because the French are the nationality that English and Americans traditionally love to hate. Worked well.

Alexander is on my 'watch at some future point' list, because I like historical fiction. And he was Steerpike in Gormenghast? I didn't know there was a Gormenghast movie! Must see must see! Ahh! He's such a hot bad guy! Well, he was okay as the football coach in Bend it like Beckham, I guess. Malaysia's recently made a rip-off called Gol & Gincu ("Goals & Lipstick")

Ok, enough drooling. Between this and the post about my date on Saturday I've drifted well away from science/science fiction topics.