kristenrobertson

Bloomsday 100 should have yielded a fitting tribute to Ireland's great James Joyce. Unfortunately, this was not to be. I was insulted by this movie on so many levels. First and foremost, this film had the potential to blow audiences away. With material as rich as Ulysses, the filmmakers had a unique opportunity to bring a novel that has a reputation for being difficult to a whole new audience. What they achieved instead was a pedestrian annotation of a few of the novel's plot points. Additionally, the acting was stilted (especially the part of Stephen Dedalus), the lighting was abhorrent, the art direction lacking and the shot selection shoddy. With a veritable army of Joyce scholars spread across the globe, one would think SOMEONE would have been consulted about important themes, artistic interpretation, and the smorgasbord of visual, musical, literary and historical references in Joyce's text. And the music - absolutely insulting. Joyce included literally hundreds of references to music in Ulysses. All those fabulous resources were abandoned in favour of the singsong simplicity of the original score. Digital features can be done so well these days and independent film-making, especially with the rich textually of Ulysses behind this production, should have freed the filmmakers to follow in the revolutionary spirit of Ireland's great epic. Instead, they produced hardly the epic film the book deserved, but something akin to a first year student film. Farcical. However, this production does leave the door wide open for an artistic visionary to tackle the book properly and produce a film worthy of the monumental Leopold Bloom.