Film: Anonymous

I don’t believe John Orloff wrote the script for Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole or any of his ‘work’, including ‘his’ most recent ‘film’ Anonymous. I refuse to believe that any normal man could have written such lyrical beauty, nor have been capable of such complex plotting. Anonymous is just too clever and there is no way that anyone of Orloff’s low birth in society could know so much about William Shakespeare and how he didn’t write any of his plays. Sure, you can wave all the ‘facts’ in front of my face, all the videos of John Orloff sitting down to write his ‘film’, but it doesn’t matter. You can prove anything with facts, can’t you? John Orloff is a fake and Anonymous director Roland Emmerich is colluding with whoever the real ‘Orloff’ is, in hiding the truth from everyone.

It’s all there in the film. If you’re going to prove that the plays were written by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford and William Shakespeare was a gibbering baldy child of a petri-dish you pissed in, what you’ve got to do first is claim it is a fiction, to try and throw everyone off the scent. Then you can pretend it’s all a bit of harmless fun, when instead you’re dramatising an argument based on there being only 5 of Shakespeare’s signatures surviving from the 17^th century on that fire-proof paper they had that we don’t know how to make anymore. John Orloff -- I mean, just look at him, he isn’t a Lord or a King or anything -- is obviously not capable of such a clever ruse. Like William Shakespeare, there’s a de Vere behind him, feeding him gold.

So, the genius starts the film by hitting them between the eyes with a professor. Not a real one, as they are very ugly, but a man who gives off the aura of a lifetime’s research into the intricate day-to-day history of Elizabethan and early-Jacobean England, without having the inconvenient baggage of being one and knowing that. Like Derek Jacobi. You get Jacobi to introduce your film, so now the audience knows there is a case to be made, and one of some considerable gravitas.

The god-like brilliance of Anonymous now kicks into gear. First, the story: exposition heavy and flits from time period to time period so those mortals can’t ever know what year it is. The dialogue: melodramatic high language, but clunking enough to be weirdly dull, thus removing any dramatic worth or claim to be fiction – now the audience knows this is truth they’re watching. The acting: your Earl is very clever and knowledgeable because he’s the real playwright, so you get the make-up girls to sellotape Rhys Ifans’ face into a disparaging shape. Shakespeare is an idiot, remember, so you contrast him against the whole rest of the film by digitally adding Rafe Spall’s performance from some late-night sitcom on BBC3. And finally, the twist! ‘Shakespeare’s’ work defies any criticism, so to prove his perfection, ‘Orloff’ shows us that not only is the Earl mixing it up in political events of the time, inspiring rebellions with his powerful words and getting jiggy with the Queen, he’s actually the first born son of that very same Queen Elizabeth. The divine right of Kings makes him infallible, so you can forgive him the incest! Director Emmerich colour-grades it in post-production with a light sepia period-wash, to magnify the truth of it all.

Now if that’s not how to make a convincing argument and hide it in a ‘film’, so you can get it past those pen-pushers down at City Hall, I just don’t know what is, I really don’t.

And yet, because it is so boring it must be the truth, the man hiding behind the front that is John Orloff reveals his identity (!!). The only way anyone could know all this truth in such detail, is if they were omnipresent. The real John Orloff is – yes – God.

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