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Augustus
Category: DVD |
List Price: $14.94
Our Price: $9.49 |
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As of: January 09th, 2009 09:46:47 AM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 WORTH WATCHING FOR AN HISORY BUFF
The details are often inspiring. The sets, interior and exterior, are excellent and look very accurate. After a careful watch, it occurred to me that this production may be using the sets of the HBO production of a couple of years ago, ROME. One has the impression that these sets were built in and around Cinecitta if only because over the last twenty years or so the Italian government found and excavated many previously unknown interiors when the Roman subway system was being dug. Thy had to be particularly careful as they dug and blasted, and it's been documented that Fellini was inspired by the opening by engineers of an ancient house with extensive murals, which initially vivid murals began to fade once they were exposed to the air. More recently excavation has been going on near Augustus' mansion on the Palatine hill. That modest palazzo is close to what is though to be the original cave home of the legendary founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, and it is largely intact. Some decorated walls remain standing. I's likely the set used in this film mirrors the actual rooms.
The exterior sets are equally interesting and focus on public and private buildings of different kinds; on streets, alleys, doorways and galleries, demonstrating a creful knowledge of the originals. As the story is acted out on these sets, one has something of the feeling of immediacy one experienced while watching the Fellini SATYRICON. Prior to that film little effort was made to create sets that gave the viewer a convincing feeling of what it must have been like to walk through colorful Roman streets, or to live in a Roman apartment house. And the Romans themseles look the way they do in paintings; that is, a dark-skinned, dark-eyed people often with curly hair. The female extras in the film look very much like today's Indian women, because Roman women wore garments almost identical to the traditional sari.
About the story: It is based on historical fact and does indeed mirror the rise and succcess of Julius Caesar's adopted son Octavian called Augustus, who was the first Emperor. It gives us a good picture of the methods he used to acquire the position, and how he managed to keep it until the end of his life. (He died peacefully in bed, remember. Few of his successors did.) The film confounds Robert Graves' idea that he was poisoned by Julia, his wife. It's the scene when as an old man he's treated by his doctors to an extreme temperature cure: He's put in a bath of water and ice, soaked, and then taken out of it and wrapped in hot cloths and dried. This looks like an ancient attempt to treat the fevers and chills of Malaria. That's probably what killed hm. Not poison. Rome was built on a swamp, and Malaria was rampant in Rome for centuries, because people didn't know how the disease was spread. (Remember, it was only during the Spanish-American War that military doctors were able to idenify the mosquito as carrier of the illness.) In the 1400's Pope Alexander VI (de Borgia) and his son Caesare both suffered a massive attack of the disease after an evening banquet under the trees. The Pope died of it, but his son survived. The Romans of Borgia's time thought of poison, as they did in the time of Augustus. Julia, though she appears to have been a robustly unpleasant woman, may have been maligned. Probably just another Evita Peron. But all that's acted out well in this film. And though the incidents shown are less vivid than they are in the I CLAUDIUS series, the contrast between the shows is very exciting. (Much to talk about.)
The Mark Anthony/Cleopatra episodes are not good, except that the actress playing Cleopatra is beautiful and almost always nearly naked. But the sets are meagre, if not tawdry, and the dialogue crude. One can't imagine this Cleopara as an actual Madedonian heiress and ruler any more than one can imagine that Anthony as a potential Roman Emperor or an eventual Egyptian king.
Of primary interest, to me anyway, is the demonstration of how Augustus kept control over the state for so very, very long. It was fear, of course. First, like Napoleon, he came to power after years of war and like Hitler, after years of civil and financial anarchy. Like Napoleon, he encouraged fear of invasion and civil war, and encouraged the Senate to essentially declare Marial Law and to put him in sole charge of the military. Rather than have himself crowned, he ruled from term to term, preserving an outward show of democracy, with the Senate voting him one extension after another, the way the U.S. voted FDR 4 terms in office. Only Augustus served longer because he began at a younger age. No election. This was before the age of political parties, don't forget. Like Napoleon III, he was not royal, but a military Dictator. Though there were a number of plots to kill him and to overthrow the hold his aristocratic wife's family had on government, his service was marked by ostentatious clemency. After the initial bloodbath following Julius' assassination, Octavian changed tactics and sought to make friends with the Senatorial Oligarcy. He did it shis way: First, he terrified them, then he encouraged them to believe he wanted them as friends. This form of paternalism is not gone into in sufficient detail, to my way of thinking. As far as I know, the only clear picture of Octavian/Augustus' method of control over his opponents appears in Corneille's play, CINNA. (Two years ago I completed a translation.) That neglected dramatic masterpiece -- never seen in English -- shows the Dictatator's psychological skll at its height. He was a superlative manipulator. He ruled not by his own strength, but by the weaknesses of his opponents.
Cicero was murdered not because he opposed Octavian, but because he believed in the integriy of the Republic.
Augustus did exile his beloved daughter to a small, barren island, and she died there under house arrest. The movie has her return to Augustus' bedside at the time of his death. My recollecton says no.
O'Toole plays his Old King role well enough here. He's done several versions lately, he most memorable being Priam in the Pitt TROY. The actor playing him as a young man is plausible.
Low point: Presenting the youngest and shortest member of the Triumverate as a flaming poufter in the style of Anthony Blanche in the BBC version of BRIDESHEAD REVISITED. Overkill. At least they didn't give him a boa!
 Augustus Review
Not a particularly good production. It does not have the fine qualities of "I, Claudius" or the recent HBO "Rome" series. More like a spaghetti western.
 Augustus/DVD
You sent the DVD for a zone 1 showing/I'm in zone 2: Thus not possible to play on my system.Thanks! T. Johnson
Wretched
I couldn't finish this. It was full of cliche, clumsy exposition and had no real sense of humor. Steer clear of this one.
 Terrible!
I'm always suspicious of one-star reviews. It sounds like somebody has an axe to grind. I read some negative reviews about this movie but I bought it anyway. (Used, fortunately, at a low price.) Well. A one-star movie this definitely is. It has "made-for-TV" and "low-budget" written all over it. The sets vary in quality from pretty good to really bad (a Roman camp looks kind of like a corrugated pole barn without a roof). The acting is wooden, to put it mildly. But the really bad part is the script. It's about ninety percent speeches. By that I mean that everything everyone says is a stock cliche, like "The greatness of Rome is more important than the greatness of our family!" At no point does anyone say anything unexpected or funny or interesting or striking. Cliched speech after cliched speech.
Another really unpleasant thing about this movie is the painfully obvious way that all of the sound was re-done after the filming. It always seems like you're watching a movie whose images are disconnected from the sound. And the sound effects are relentlessly bad. When troops are digging, there is a perfectly rhythmic clinking sound. When small children are playing, they simply keep saying, "Yay! Yay! Yay!" When Augustus has a cough, boy does he have a cough. It's hard to put this into words, but if you see the movie, you'll know what I mean. Plus, throughout the movie there is a symphonic score playing, vague and repetitive and not at all interesting, sounding suspiciously like the kind of symphonic soundtrack you'd hear while playing a computer game about Rome.
At least a game lets you turn the music off!
It's the awful, clunking script, along with the awful, clunking soundtrack, that really doom this movie. It's hard to say whether the actors are really as bad as they seem, or if they were in a hopeless situation.
I watched about two-thirds of this monstrosity before I finally gave up. I kept hoping there would be at least a few scenes that would relieve the tedium.
Denied!
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