1999: The Podcast #064- Titus – “There Shalt Be Blood” with Carmen Paddock
Released December 25th, Christmas Day, Julie Taymor’s debut feature Titus was 187th-highest grossing movie of the year, going on to gross just about three million dollars worldwide on an 18 million dollar budget.
Titus, adapted from the Shakespeare (or possibly not Shakespeare) play came on the heels of Taymor hitting the cultural spotlight with her enormous Broadway success The Lion King. Titus makes great use of her maxilamist sensibilities, given that it is Shakespeare’s most violent, sensationalist play – which also explains why it is among his least-popular, and generally considered one of the worst not titled Henry VIII.
With an incredible cast and eye-catching style, and with Shakespeare adaptations as popular as ever, many assumed Titus would ride a wave of critical success and award accolades to boost its box office, but it was not meant to be.
Beautiful, violent, over-long, absurd, inspired, and tonally inconsistent, Titus is more a curiosity now than a classic.
This week, we talked about it with film critic Carmen Paddock, who, in her own words, “specializes in changing distribution methods and cross-media adaptations, where the limitations of film, literature, music, and time are explored and exploited to reveal new sides to old narratives.”
Find Carmen on Bluesky @carmenchloie
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