Wednesday, January 26, 2011

The Tempest (2010)

Director Julie Taymor’s Tempest is the perfect storm: the cast, the effects, the costumes, the make-up – everything about this production is phenomenal.  The shame of it is that with Taymor busy trying not to kill anybody on Broadway in her exceedingly dangerous musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and with virtually no distribution for the film’s December 10th 2010 release – can you even call four theaters in the whole country a release? – the spectacular Tempest has yet to receive the attention or the reception that it deserves.  Having been severely disappointed to realize on December 9th, that my geographical region was not to be one of the four graced with a single theater playing The Tempest, I was furious to read blurbs in the press about the financially disappointing performance of the film after the opening weekend.  So allow me to briefly vent to all of those writers before I proceed with the review:

Hello, film industry geniuses.  If a film isn’t released in more theaters than I can count on one hand, THEN IT CAN’T POSSIBLY MAKE ANY MONEY!  That is, unless there are some 100,000 seat theaters somewhere in America that I don’t know about.

Sorry about that, I just love this film, and I was super salty that people were trashing it just because none of the power players involved made its release a big enough deal.

The irony is that the film itself is a testament to the power of great decision making.