Julie Taymor's The Tempest

I know you were interested in the new Julie Taymor "The Tempest" movie, Dr. Sexson, so here you go. I found this Boston Review review of the movie online, and the critic, Alan A. Stone, is not impressed (you know he is pretentious if he ostentatiously uses his middle initial as if it were a royal title). He claims that the movie is just too self-endulgent, too full of art, and wishy-washy, elitist cinematic tropes. I haven't seen this movie, or Julie Taymor's "Titus Andronicus", but I hear the latter is very good yet horrifying gory. However, the article Stone wrote about the two films is informative and interesting to read, at the very least. Here's what he has to say about "The Tempest":

Earlier in the century, The Tempest had remained a puzzling text. Scholars thought it incomplete and attributed parts of it to Ben Jonson. In an ingenious essay about the play, Henry James imagines that the author is a great composer and performer who goes home in the evening and begins to improvise on the harpsichord [musical instrument played with a keyboard]: the themes are familiar but different; he is revisiting the possibilities of the instrument and his own superb art. The neighbors can listen as the music wafts out the open windows, but what they hear is not for them. The analogy is apt. One can find many familiar Shakespearean themes in The Tempest, and James’s sense that it was not written for an audience is certainly not wrong. However, the standard modern interpretation is that The Tempest is Shakespeare’s farewell to the theater, that he is Prospero, the protagonist, and the books drowned at the end of the play contain the mysterious magic of his unsurpassable greatness.

I think what the author is getting at is that Shakespeare was being self-indulgent himself when he wrote this play--that it was really for him and not an audience at all. I don't think that's entirely true. Everyone wants people to enjoy their work, and there is so much magic and mystery he dulls out, that an audience can't help but be entertained. Julie Taymor does take some liberties with the play however. She casts a woman in the role of Prospero and renames her "Prospera". Her movie is apparently about feminism. I suppose it would be, but I have to think there are more apt plays to choose than this one. Why not something like "Hamlet", "Othello", or "King Lear", wait, wait, wait... all those cast men in a bad light. This is why I can't stand feminist thinking sometimes. I mean, I realize Prospero is like the impediment of awesome but wouldn't it be slightly more progressive to see a woman with real flaws who really screws up her life? Wouldn't that be even more realistic, and hell, equal, and hell again, a more interesting portrayal?