As the director of Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, 10,000 BC, and Godzilla, Roland Emmerich is to large-scale, CGI disasters what Michael Bay is to explosions and sassy black people. When it was announced a few years ago that he’d be making a film about Shakespeare, we just assumed it’d be the most OOH WHA-AH AH-AHiest take on Shakespeare ever made. TO RUN OR NOT TO RUN??? (*meteor smashes Eiffel Tower*) RUN!
Today, Anonymous has a trailer, and it starts with narration which lifts almost word-for-word the tagline of Eli Cash’s fictional novel in The Royal Tenenbaums: “Everyone knows Shakespeare wrote hundreds of the most respected works in the English language, and they were all boring. What this movie preSUPPOSES is… maybe they weren’t?”
Set in the political snake-pit of Elizabethan England [THEY SAID ‘PEDAGOGICAL TIGER WRESTLING’ SO WE FOCUSED ON THE TIGER WRESTLING] , the September 30 release speculates on an issue that has for centuries intrigued academics and brilliant minds ranging from Mark Twain and Charles Dickens to Henry James and Sigmund Freud, namely: who was the author of the plays credited to William Shakespeare? Experts have debated, books have been written, and scholars have devoted their lives to protecting or debunking theories surrounding the authorship of the most renowned works in English literature. Anonymous poses one possible answer, focusing on a time when cloak-and-dagger political intrigue, illicit romances in the Royal Court, and the schemes of greedy nobles hungry for the power of the throne were exposed in the most unlikely of places: the London stage. [ComingSoon]
This. Sounds. Awesome. Now repeat after me:
CANNONS! DUNGEONS! SWORDFIGHTS! SLUTS!
CANNONS! DUNGEONS! SWORDFIGHTS! SLUTS!
CANNONS! DUNGEONS! SWORDFIGHTS! SLUTS!
CANNONS! DUNGEONS! SWORDFIGHTS! SLUTS!
CANNONS! DUNGEONS! SWORDFIGHTS! SLUTS!
Is my mantra.