Tesla (2020)

Tesla is a Peter Greenaway film but, like, not as good as Peter Greenaway? I don't like Greenaway, so I'm definitely insulting Tesla. Michael Almereyda has done something... quirky (?) here. Tesla and the other characters play scenes in front of giant projections of locations. They are interrupted by a character in the present day talking about how many Google results come up when you look up Thomas Edison. All of this means that we should be learning about Tesla and Edison and what happened with electricity in the 19th century, but in fact we learn very little about Tesla, the people he worked with, his dreams, the politics behind the feud with Edison, the politics behind Morgan's squelching of Tesla's plans, all of it. We know about it, because a character is reading us a Wikipedia entry on it, but there's no need for this to be a film. It's like a kind of report done by undergrads as a group project. And when Nikola Tesla sings (very badly, I might add) a karaoke version of Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" near the end of the film, I was positive I hated this movie. Like... why??? I still can't believe that actually happened in the film. I have no idea what Michael Almereyda might have been thinking with that.

When you google Nikola Tesla x number of results come up. This is historiography?

I watched Tesla on Hulu, where, I suppose you could watch it too, but you don't want to do that. It's embarrassingly bad.

Revengers Travesty

Alex Cox's updated version of Cyril Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy (or is it Thomas Middleton's?) is a big huge mess. It stands on the shoulders of other adaptations of English Renaissance plays, of course. Derek Jarman's Edward II (1991) comes to mind, as well as Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996), Julie Taymor's Titus (1999), and Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000), but Revengers Tragedy (the definite article and the apostrophe are both jettisoned for the new title) isn't as good as any of its predecessors.

Christopher Eccleston is fine as the aggrieved Vindici, but Derek Jacobi's Duke is imagined as an early modern Karl Lagerfeld with dark purple lipstick. It's a bizarre film that doesn't seem to be about much of anything, and lacks depth of any kind. There are strange (and misplaced) references to Princess Diana, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth II and the bombing of Hiroshima. It's a near-useless pastiche without focus or a clear narrative, and a moral landscape that defies sense altogether. Skip it absolutely.

I should also mention that last night we (most of the MAs) all went to see Florida State's production of Lanford Wilson's A Sense of Place. I don't want to say anything about the production itself, because the production doesn't matter at all. The play should never have been chosen to open this or anyone's season. It is a truly useless play with nothing to recommend it. Why it is opening our season, and utilizing the time of some of our best designers is completely beyond me.