Why is Roland Emmerich, purveyor of disaster-movie schlock, wading into the debate over the authorship of Shakespeare's plays?
Roland Emmerich knows there's a subtext to the compliment when people tell him they like his new film, Anonymous. "Were my other movies so bad?" asks the Stuttgart-born director in his clipped Teutonic accent. But it's not so much that those other movies were bad – it's that they bore almost no resemblance to reality. In the last 15 years Emmerich has presided over an alien invasion (Independence Day), the trashing of New York (Godzilla) and the end of the world not once but twice (The Day After Tomorrow and 2012). So it comes as quite a surprise that his latest project, though just as rich in CGI, is quite an intelligent, if somewhat broad historical drama that portrays William Shakespeare as a drunk and posits the Earl of Oxford as the true genius of English literature.
Roland Emmerich knows there's a subtext to the compliment when people tell him they like his new film, Anonymous. "Were my other movies so bad?" asks the Stuttgart-born director in his clipped Teutonic accent. But it's not so much that those other movies were bad – it's that they bore almost no resemblance to reality. In the last 15 years Emmerich has presided over an alien invasion (Independence Day), the trashing of New York (Godzilla) and the end of the world not once but twice (The Day After Tomorrow and 2012). So it comes as quite a surprise that his latest project, though just as rich in CGI, is quite an intelligent, if somewhat broad historical drama that portrays William Shakespeare as a drunk and posits the Earl of Oxford as the true genius of English literature.
- 10/27/2011
- by Damon Wise
- The Guardian - Film News
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