Snarkfall
It's coming down thick and fast now. I'm out here in my old galoshes, making angels in the snow.
Much Ado About Very Little, says the Village Voice headline. "The Shakespeare exposé no one has been waiting for." Nick Pinkerton provides a garland of garlicky pull quotes interwoven with some shrewd brief analysis:
"Shakespeare/de Vere pronounces that 'all art is political, otherwise it is just decoration.' In terms of the film, this means that the corpus attributed to Shakespeare is merely pretext for political cartooning . . . ."
"It is the particular idiocy of our time that the past is apparently only marketable via Da Vinci Code conspiratorial jabbering, here degrading the canon to the level of the potboiler."
But oh! how I'd love to see this poster:
"A self-serious faux exposé . . . Sporadically enjoyable trash . . . This is high camp, nothing more."
And from I Heart the Talkies, reviewing at the London Film Festival:
"Roland Emmerich’s hymn to ludicrousness is a camp fiasco."
After that, I started Googling Emmerich + Anonymous + camp.
This beauty was written back in June, merely on the strength of the trailer:
"Anonymous could prove to be an own goal for the anti-Stratfordian camp.
"Could it be that Emmerich’s desire for blockbuster success via the most controversial and bizarre plot possible has overridden the anti-Stratfordian desire to maintain an image of legitimacy? Anonymous runs a serious risk of exposing them to ridicule.
"In fact, the choice of such a bizarre theory seems so poorly considered that an intriguing, and just as unlikely, conspiracy of its own could be considered. What if Roland Emmerich is in fact a Shakespeare supporter, is deep undercover in the enemy camp, and has gone to the trouble of shooting a multi-million dollar film that contends that Shakespeare did not write his plays, but with the most preposterous storyline possible - all as some kind of cunning ‘false flag’ operation to discredit the anti-Stratfordians. But, like the conspiracies themselves, this is an unreasonable theory based on zero evidence."
Dancing in the snow, I'm dancing in the snow . . . .
Nine
Much Ado About Very Little, says the Village Voice headline. "The Shakespeare exposé no one has been waiting for." Nick Pinkerton provides a garland of garlicky pull quotes interwoven with some shrewd brief analysis:
"Shakespeare/de Vere pronounces that 'all art is political, otherwise it is just decoration.' In terms of the film, this means that the corpus attributed to Shakespeare is merely pretext for political cartooning . . . ."
"It is the particular idiocy of our time that the past is apparently only marketable via Da Vinci Code conspiratorial jabbering, here degrading the canon to the level of the potboiler."
But oh! how I'd love to see this poster:
"A self-serious faux exposé . . . Sporadically enjoyable trash . . . This is high camp, nothing more."
And from I Heart the Talkies, reviewing at the London Film Festival:
"Roland Emmerich’s hymn to ludicrousness is a camp fiasco."
After that, I started Googling Emmerich + Anonymous + camp.
This beauty was written back in June, merely on the strength of the trailer:
"Anonymous could prove to be an own goal for the anti-Stratfordian camp.
"Could it be that Emmerich’s desire for blockbuster success via the most controversial and bizarre plot possible has overridden the anti-Stratfordian desire to maintain an image of legitimacy? Anonymous runs a serious risk of exposing them to ridicule.
"In fact, the choice of such a bizarre theory seems so poorly considered that an intriguing, and just as unlikely, conspiracy of its own could be considered. What if Roland Emmerich is in fact a Shakespeare supporter, is deep undercover in the enemy camp, and has gone to the trouble of shooting a multi-million dollar film that contends that Shakespeare did not write his plays, but with the most preposterous storyline possible - all as some kind of cunning ‘false flag’ operation to discredit the anti-Stratfordians. But, like the conspiracies themselves, this is an unreasonable theory based on zero evidence."
Dancing in the snow, I'm dancing in the snow . . . .
Nine