Nobody hurts Mrs Lopsided.
Newsflash - from 5th to 15th July members of Tower Theatre Company will be performing Graham Linehan's adaptation of The Ladykillers at the Gatehouse Theatre, Highgate, London. Hopefully it will be wildly funny and entertaining. That's for others to say, not me - 'cos I'm in it. So rather than discuss the prospective merits of the Tower version, let me provide you with a brief overview of Ladykilling history.
The original film version of The Ladykillers was produced by Ealing Studios in 1955, the last of the classic 'Ealing Comedies'. Ever since my first viewing it's featured on my Desert Island Films list - one of the eight I'd take with me if I were marooned in the Tropics with a Blu-ray and a decent solar-powered surround sound system. Why do I love this quaint British comedy so much? Well largely because its quaintness belies something dark and deliciously subversive.
This quintessentially English tale was written by the American William Rose and directed by America-born Alexander Mackendrick, two possible reasons why it transcends its old-fashioned North London trappings to become something very different. The story is of five bank robbers planning a heist while masquerading as a musical quintet, having rented rooms from ostensibly sweet and fragile widow Mrs Wilberforce. But Mrs W proves much more doughty than the thieves anticipate, resulting in all manner of grim consequences.
The film's delights are plentiful - the eccentricity of Mrs Wilberforce's wonky dwelling, the contrast between her chintzy world and the ultra-shadowy one of the crooks, the physical comedy sparked by her bad-natured parrot General Gordon. Most memorable, however, are the gleeful characterisations of the gang and their elderly nemesis. The villains are a fabulous range of archetypes - borderline-insane mastermind, gentleman criminal, dim-witted muscleman, cocky spiv and sinister assassin (played by notables including Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers and Herbert Lom). They're also mis-matched and ludicrously incompetent, while still managing to be deeply threatening - a tribute to performance and murky cinematography.
As for the darling old lady - in reality she's hard-as-nails spirit-of-the-British-Empire, to the point of parody. One scene that doesn't make it to the stage adap has her interfering in a dispute between tradesmen, inadvertently ending several careers as the cons look on aghast. There's something quietly formidable about 'Mrs Lopsided'.
The Ladykillers is a beautiful oddity of a film, one which captured the imaginations of the Coen Brothers, whose remake came out in 2005. Their version is a curio all its own - transferring the story to America's Deep South and casting Tom Hanks as the gang's leader. Katie Jones' sweet old lady from the original becomes a hectoring church-woman played by Irma P Hall. It's that rarity in the Coens' canon - a semi-failure, albeit an interesting one. Something crucial seems lost in translation. Much of the original film's joy existed in its post-War English setting, with all aspects of story and background deeply familiar to the audience, but given a subtly demented twist. Best keep it there.
Graham Linehan got that, with his 2011 Ladykillers stage play. All the key elements are preserved - period setting, sly characterisations and story beats. (Even General Gordon makes it into the script.) Cunning writing and inventive stagecraft are used to convey the exterior scenes without the action moving once from Mrs Wiberforce's home.
But the creator of Father Ted, Black Books and the IT Crowd has added much from his own febrile comic imagination. The entire script is reworked - it's sillier and more surreal, and laced with additional character quirks. The relative restraint of the film's humour is replaced with something very different - wild slapstick in the opening act, before a nosedive into pitch-dark farce later on. Linehan's love of the source material remains apparent throughout, but the comedy anarchist who brought us Mrs Doyle, Maurice Moss and Bernard Black grinds his unique stamp into the stage experience.
The results could and should be hilarious. It's now up to us at Tower to deliver. Our efforts will be noble, I assure you - and on view over the dates mentioned above, at the specified location. Come and see if we can take the vision of Rose and Linehan - and bring The Ladykillers to glorious, dark-hearted life.
I will fight, for those who cannot fight for themselves.
Blog readers of a certain age will recall Lynda Carter, the TV incarnation of Wonder Woman, in her spangly costume and bullet-deflecting wrist bands, righting wrongs on a weekly basis and never turning a well-coiffed hair. Given that warm and kitshy show's popularity, it's a wonder all its own that only now has a film version come along. Gone is the kitsch, with Diana Prince/WW getting a full origin story that explores her Amazonian roots (as in upbringing, not hair). It's a film I wanted to like, and - in parts - I really did.
The DC Comics cinema universe (forever playing catch-up to Marvel) introduced their Wonder Woman in last year's Batman Versus Superman. Played by Israeli actress and martial artist Gal Gadot, she cut an impressive figure, easily stealing the boys' thunder in the latter part of the film. This time around she has proper screen time, her 21st century self thinking back on her youth as the princess Diana on Themyscira, secret island of the Amazons. Costumed up, she seems like a woman well out of modern times, so it's fun to see her embracing her powers within this mythological context. Here she is trained up by her aunt - Robin Wright's impressive Antiope - until able to pit herself against the toughest of her Amazonian sisters.
Taking a similar route to Captain America: The First Avenger, the film then morphs into a period piece. Diana leaves her island and adopts the cause of US air force pilot and spy Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) during the final days of the Great War. Nurtured on stories of the god Ares and how he brought conflict to mankind, she has a goal both simple and noble - the end of war itself. Nice idea if you can pull it off.
Gadot is the centre of this film and its greatest asset - beautiful, powerful and empathetic, thankfully without being fetishised at any point. (Yes she's in the iconic glam outfit, but it's because she's a mythological warrior, not because she's totty.) Visually the whole enterprise is splendid - from the glittering Mediterranean vistas of the opening act to a well-realised period London and the grit of the Western Front. The action sequences are more about one-on-one combat than the city-shattering CGI of DC's other recent offerings, and are enhanced by the balletic grace of the Amazon warriors' fighting style. In fact the movie is never more alive than when its title-character is wading into a sea of trouble, shield slung about her and sword at the ready, her memorable theme-tune kicking in full-blast, as she strides purposefully forward.
Sadly not all is so wondrous as those stirring moments. The script (and the blog risks becoming repetitive here) does not serve the actors well, with stretches of rather limp dialogue linking together to action scenes. Pine's hero remains two-dimensional eye candy as a result (and he's the young Captain Kirk!), while character roles played by such as Lucy Davis and Ewan Bremner simply aren't provided with enough clever, witty dialogue to chew on. At the risk of sounding like a Marvel fanboy, this is what DC's rivals do so much better - they make their films sharp and funny and interesting, even when characters aren't knocking seven bells out of each other.
Nonetheless Wonder Woman is worth your time for its splendour, its superbly choreographed action and its noble ass-kicking heroine. If the screenplay had a bit more humour and philosophical heft, this film would be wondrous indeed.
Ed's Verdict: It's Gal Gadot's moment, and she shines along with the rest of the glorious visuals. Just polish up that damn script to match!
Spoilers!
A few weeks back I had the pleasure of watching William Oldroyd's Lady Macbeth at the Vue, Islington. Nice theatre. The experience was considerably enhanced by the fact that I'd seen no trailers for the film and knew nothing about it, short of a one-line summary and all the sinister connotations of the title. I was able to enjoy the story as it unfolded shot by well-judged shot, every character interaction and dramatic turn a welcome surprise. Nothing, in short, had been spoiled.
It made me think as I wrote the review - how do I convey what I enjoyed about Lady Macbeth, without preempting the story itself? By giving anything away about the plot, am I potentially robbing someone else of the experience I had - that wonderful cold-start viewing?
Keeping my blog entries spoiler-free is something I try to do on a point of pride. I've read certain other reviewers, who think they're being terribly cryptic in their comments, while giving away massive plot twists to anyone with basic powers of inference. I've also heard the film critic I respect most explode a movie's central story development, when even the trailer had avoided it. (The movie was Passengers, a passably good science fiction tale I reviewed back in December; the most intriguing feature of the film was that twist, and anyone listening to the review would have been robbed of the big reveal's impact.)
So I make a big noise about giving nothing away. 'Trust me,' I've been insisting since last September, 'my reviews are 100% spoiler-free!'
Well I've been lying. They're not, not ever. Because in truth there's no such thing as a spoiler-free review.
If someone tells me that a film is all style over content, my view is inevitably coloured from the opening credits. If they comment that the final act drops the ball, I'm anticipating the downturn. If they say that the dialogue is clunky, then I'm listening out for each clunk. It's why the easiest reviews to write are the ones where my enjoyment of the film was pure. That's when I can give the least away, bathing everything in glowing but vague positivity. Even then, however, I'm building a viewer's expectations sky-high, so that they might well come tumbling on the actual viewing. I enthused about Arrival, but not everyone had the same blissful experience. I loved Fantastic Beasts as well, while my cinema-going companion that day fell asleep halfway through.
It all begs that potentially fatal question - why review anyway?
Okay, I suppose I'd better answer that or never blog again.
There are two reasons, I think - each backed up by the responses I've had since creating Filmic Forays. The first is that I'm providing a bit of a service for those who, like me (before I left my full-time job - hooray!), don't get to the cinema very much and want to know what they're getting themselves into before they fork out their ten pounds plus. Maybe that's the difference between them ever seeing Lady Macbeth or not. True, our views on the finished product might not match up, but at least I can give them a rough notion of the experience they might have. Then they can decide whether Get Out or Guardians of the Galaxy is more their cup of tea.
To those people my promise remains - I'll tread as lightly as I can around key advancements in plot.
The other reason is that having seen a film, most of us like to hold up our opinions against other people's to see how well they match. (I'm talking here about those who only read reviews after they've seen the film themselves.) It's great when I get comments along the lines of 'Your review nailed it', but possibly more fun when readers' opinions fly in the face of my own. My qualified liking of Alien: Covenant was met by one blog follower with 'It sucked. Sadly. Such a wasted opportunity', and reference to how no scenery was left because Michael Fassbender had 'eaten it all'. Thanks, Dave - your scathing assessments of films I quite liked will always be hugely welcome.
It's all part of the great cultural debate - the cut and thrust over stuff that in the grand scheme doesn't really matter. And that, in this depressing messed-up world of ours, is precisely why it matters. The trivial has never been more important.
So whether you read these reviews before or after watching the film, I'll keep on writing them. Hell, it gets me out to the flicks at least once a week, so that's reason enough. And yes, I'll put as much artistry as I can into avoiding those pesky spoilers. Otherwise Professor River Song will be aiming that banana at me.
You're a piece of work, Elizabeth.
Zero Dark Thirty. Interstellar. The Martian. You want steely determination, Jessica Chastain is your woman. And as the Elizabeth Sloane of this film's title she has never been more single-minded - to the point of ruthlessness. Take the film's opening moments, when Miss Sloane is being grilled by her own lawyer in preparation for a congressional hearing that may break her. The camera lingers on Chastain's icy features, as if trying to make her flinch. Not a prayer. Not yet. The screws will really have to turn in this taut political drama before her cool exterior even threatens to crack.
Sloane, you see, is that 21st century political animal - a lobbyist for hire in Washington DC, who's paid to influence America's legislators in their decisions. She's also highly successful due to her cunning, foresight and willingness to trample over opponents and allies alike in pursuit of her professional goals. A woman to admire from a distance, but never to tangle with. The fight of her career comes when a small lobbying firm attempts to steal her services; they want her to lead the charge to have a bill passed tightening background checks on US gun ownership. Fired more by the challenge than by any ethical considerations, she agrees to take it on.
And so the scene is set for an old-fashioned David/Goliath story, that's if David were a pill-popping borderline sociopath with no discernible moral boundaries.
Miss Sloane is a slick and compelling piece of entertainment, driven chiefly by Chastain's power-dressed central performance. Yes she can be endearingly vulnerable elsewhere (see her in The Help), but here she's a study in severity, admirable and appalling in equal measure - pushing the audience's sympathy to breaking point. She's backed up by a smart supporting cast including the ever-dependable Mark Strong as her wary new boss, Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a colleague with an emotional stake in the gun control issue and Alison Pill as the trainee lobbyist she left behind when jumping ship. It's to the film's credit that women are shown to have agency throughout, in the traditionally masculine environment of Washington.
John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) directs with a steady hand, but the movie's other great strength is its script. Unusually for a Hollywood film only one writer is credited - Jonathan Perera with his first ever screenplay. Reminiscent of The West Wing it's sharp in both wit and intelligence, giving the cast plenty to chew on and trusting the audience to keep up. I've bewailed some below-par screen writing here of recent weeks - well here's an example of how to do it properly, kudos to Perera. And if the latter section of the film sets off too big a dramatic fireworks display, it's forgivable.
Miss Sloane as played by Chastain, you see, deserves room to breathe as a character. It's why this very good piece of cinema might make even better television. She and the other lobbyists, on both sides of the issue, are much too complex and fascinating to be summed up in two hours of screen time. On the small screen subtlety need never be sacrificed for explosive denouements. But that's a whole other issue, all to do with the new Golden Age of TV.
For now enough to say that Miss Sloane is a fine political thriller for the big screen, driven by that central powerhouse performance. See it and relish every duplicitous moment.
Ed's Verdict: The plot twists get outlandish, but Jessica Chastain rocks it to the end.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
1979 gave us a horror film hard to match in terms of sheer naked dread. Alien, with its floating house of horrors the spaceship Nostromo, introduced cinema-goers to a new brand of claustrophobic terror. The sequels had their pleasures (Aliens stands out as a superb action film), but never yet have they matched the cold-sweat intensity of the original. So does Alien: Covenant come close? Answer - at points. But in truth this prequel is attempting to do more than scare its audience silly.
The film acts as a bridge between 2012's Prometheus and Alien, as director Ridley Scott expands the storytelling universe he helped create. Prometheus told the story of archaeologists delving into space for the origins of human life and discovering threats on which they hadn't bargained. Alien: Covenant manages to take that story further, reintroducing the nasty critters of the 1979 film and splicing it all into a larger whole.
The 'Covenant' is a spaceship carrying two thousand deep-sleeping Earth passengers to the planet they hope to colonise. The fifteen-strong crew are awoken by a planetary distress call - yes, the same one that will interrupt the sleep of the Nostromo crew years later - and so they descend to a world recognisable by fans of the franchise. Of particular interest are second-in-command Daniels (Katherine Waterson), wrestling with a very personal grief, and 'synthetic human' Walter (Michael Fassbender as an upgrade of the android character he played in Prometheus). The numerous surprises they encounter on the planet surface prove fascinating and deadly in equal measure.
Covenant is, on many levels, a refreshing Alien addition, managing to be more than a stalk-and-slaughter reprise. It tells a fresh story, one that advances Prometheus' themes of life's origins and the relationship between creator and creation. When the horror elements do kick in, they're thrilling and revolting in equal measure, resulting in much clutching of cinema armrests.
Waterson is very much in the Alien tradition of capable female leads (we last saw her helping Eddie Redmayne with his Fantastic Beasts and she probably wishes she was back wrangling nifflers), while Fassbender lends all his charisma to the enigmatic Walter. Fassbender fans - trust me, you will not be short-changed here. Add to all that the bleak-but-beautiful aesthetic that Scott brings to his science fiction films and there are pleasures aplenty.
Shame about the script then. The ideas are intriguing, as is the universe building and accompanying literary allusions - but the dialogue is often second-rate and, aside from our leading two, no characters get adequately sketched. The plotting needs work too - I'm no health-and-safety fascist, but the number of basic protocols this bunch ignore is absurd. Logic gets sacrificed in the name of story advancement a few times too many, and that's harder to stomach than all the body horror on display. Cliched scripting is always a shame - but never more so than in a film of genuine ambition and scope, which this most certainly is.
Alien: Covenant does much to compliment Prometheus, while establishing a broader context for the original Alien. For those reasons alone it's worth a viewing. Add some decent writing and this would truly have been worthy of the Nostromo's ill-fated crew. Note - when your script borrows quotations from Shelley, the rest of it should really try and match up!
Ed's Verdict: A welcome expansion of the visually splendid Alien universe - but call in the screenplay doctor please!
It's your fault. All of it. I wanted to tell you. I thought you should know.
As part of the creative team on Tower Theatre's forthcoming production of Love, Love, Love I'm not in a position to write a review. I mean I'd like to tell you what a scintillating evening of drama the show is going to provide. How a highly talented group of actors is going to bring Mike Bartlett's words and story to life in ways that will make the audience laugh uproariously, bridle with outrage and cringe with recognition. How it'll be moving and thought-provoking and divisive and an all-round riveting piece of theatre... but I'm involved, so I can't. Shame, that.
What I can do is talk a bit about the play and its writer, in my usual non-spoilery fashion.
Bartlett is a darling of stage and screen in Britain right now (King Charles III, Doctor Foster) and has pulled off the trick of being both unerringly smart and populist. I could go into detail regarding his CV, but frankly it's all on Wikipedia and safe to say it's impressive. Love, Love, Love is one of his crowning achievements, showcasing as it does key Bartlett attributes - painstakingly crafted dialogue, wit and emotional savagery. (His language and the way he structures it is truly something to relish. Every word, every pregnant pause is scripted with care. For that alone this play is worth experiencing.)
The most striking aspect of Love, Love, Love, however, is how massive themes (of social change and politics and class) are explored within the confines of one family unit, albeit over several decades. The play leaps during three acts from 1967's Summer of Love to 1990 to the present day, its central characters aging from their late teens to their mid-sixties. What other dramas have done anything similar? Well I can think of Peter Flannery's TV epic Our Friends in the North (nine episodes covering thirty-one years) and the Trainspotting films if you watched them back-to-back (twenty years). But on stage, in a single three-act drama? None spring to mind. (Set me straight with multiple examples in the comments section below, please.)
The remarkable thing about the Love, Love, Love time leaps is how the play creates an impression of lives lived in between - of shared memory and experience. From three glimpses of these characters and their children on key occasions in their lives, we see an entire family trajectory - full of love, acrimony, hope, disenchantment, anger, accusation and... well, more love. There are enough emotional fireworks here to burn down a theatre - and they pay off because Bartlett has written his characters like they've lived in each other's pockets a hell of a long time. It's as funny as it is tragic, as moving as it is infuriating. But that's family life, right?
So ultimately, what's the play about? In essence it's a story of the post-War Baby Boomers and whether or not their actions screwed over subsequent generations. Yes, that's all. It's a bit like that line from Don Henley's Boys of Summer about seeing 'a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac' - the Grateful Dead fan who's traded in his '60s idealism and embraced the capitalist dream. However Bartlett goes a step further and questions the whole meaning and validity of the Summer of Love in the first place.
Oh - it's also about parents and children and trying to bridge the generational divide and about whether love can sustain over a lifetime.
Basically, it's about a lot of stuff. But one thing it's not about is easy answers. Are the post-War generation smug and complacent sell-outs? Are their children a bunch of slackers who won't take responsibility for their own lives? Those questions are best thrashed out in the pub afterwards. This is primarily a play to make us laugh, to make us angry and to make us think.
Tower Theatre's production of Love, Love, Love can be seen at Theatro Technis, Camden from 23-27 May (7.30pm, matinee Sat. 27 at 3.00pm). It may well be a vital and enthralling piece of theatre, taking you on a roller-coaster of emotion laced with satirical wit - a razor-sharp revisiting of a modern classic. Again, that's not for me to say.
But you'll want to have an opinion, won't you?
Through hell and high water I will follow you.
The first thing to know about Lady Macbeth is that the ferociously ambitious queen from the Shakespeare play doesn't actually feature as a character. The second is that the spirit of that formidable woman infuses every second of the running time. The protagonist Katherine runs deep under a still, brooding surface, much like the film itself. She's easy to underestimate - but only a fool, it transpires, would make that mistake.
Set in 19th Century Northumbria, Lady Macbeth introduces us Katherine, the bride in a cold and clearly arranged marriage. Trapped in a remote and austere country house, her role is as a corseted doll to an older man - mistress of the house in name only. Her husband is boorish, her father-in-law tyrannical and her prospects grim. The attentions of a maidservant only serve to reinforce her life's soul-crushing routine. Respite comes when both men are drawn from home by business, and it's then that she experiments with how she might best alter her situation. The results will stay with you a long time after the closing credits.
Based on Russian novella Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, this is a hugely impressive first feature by director William Oldroyd. In an era of 'louder is better' excess, this is a welcome exercise in stripped-back cinema. The screenplay is intelligent and spare (courtesy of another first-timer Alice Birch), with natural light and sound used throughout in service to a bleak and harsh vision. Any incidental music is saved for critical moments, with the ambient noise of rural Northumbria (and good old silence) serving to build up dramatic intensity. Indoors it's the clump of shoes on hardwood floors, clack of shutters and tying of creaking corsets that convey the extent of Katherine's oppression. Every shot counts too, the story built with economy and clear, striking visuals.
Then there's the performance of Florence Pugh in the lead.
Previously seen in The Falling with Maisie Williams, Pugh is nothing short of magnetic. Starved of dialogue in the early scenes she does most through her eyes and her stillness, and it's mesmerizing every time. Here is a girl mired in stultifying boredom, but quietly willful - craving freedom both moral and physical. It cannot be long, we feel, before she attempts on some level to break out. Christopher Fairbank and Paul Hilton do good, scowling character work as father-in-law and husband respectively. Naomi Ackie draws sympathy as hapless Afro-Caribbean maid Anna, while Cosmo Jarvis impresses as cocky stableman Sebastian. All, however, remain firmly within Pugh's orbit as her character evolves relentlessly.
Lady Macbeth is an absorbing drama, not least because of its power-plays in a world where gender, race and class all play a role. (This isolated community has one complex and fluid pecking order.) It's also got enough windswept moors and broiling passions to make Emily Bronte proud - eroticism and violence both lurk beneath its calm, threatening to assert themselves.
As for the extent to which Katherine channels the iconic Shakespearian lady of the title - I suggest you find that out for yourself.
Ed's Verdict: 8.5/10. Engrossing drama with a dark, compelling heroine and a surprising power to shock.
