Thinky thoughts: Shakespeare on screen/Coriolanus review

I recently traveled to my local multiplex to see Ralph Fiennes’ directorial debut effort Coriolanus, which was, in my opinion, a grand spectacle of not-quite-epic proportions (I’m not sure it was cinematic enough to work on the big screen, and think that maybe it would have been better as a one-off telly special). Despite this, I thought it was bloody good, bottom line, and my apprehensions about not being able to follow it as quickly as I wanted to were quickly quashed within a few minutes. My knowledge of Shakespeare is limited to what I studied in high school and what I’ve seen onstage throughout the years, and I will never pretend to be an expert. However, the dialogue is delivered clearly and – I think that this has as much to do with the strength of the acting as it does on John Logan’s brilliantly adapted screenplay – I was able to follow the story easily, and most importantly, with interest. What a great pace it has, what a great sense of tension, despair, power and anger.

Rafe has just found the last kit-kat in the biscuit tin

Of course, being an Orange Wednesday and being at the (see above) local multiplex, there were some punters who didn’t actually realise what was in store for them. “I think it’s based on Shakespeare…” someone muttered as the trailers ran. “You never told me this was a foreign language film!” one woman behind me guffawed to her partner, thirty minutes in. Oh dear.

Then I went home to look at some of the reviews online, and while most of them were extremely positive, Little White Lies coughed up something positively damning. Bit of a shot in the foot, really – especially considering that this was brewed up by the magazine’s editor. It’s a publication I hold in high regard (and own a subscription to), and was extremely disappointed to read such nonsense as “there’s no place for William Shakespeare in cinema”.

A bold statement. Do you agree with them? I don’t. There have been plenty of Shakespeare adaptations (cinematic and on TV) that I’ve enjoyed and have thought worked very successfully. whether modern adaptations or traditional, with original Early Modern English or the tongue we’re used to today.

A tiny Scottish man - James McAvoy in Macbeth

Take the BBC series ShakespeaRe-Told for example. Broadcast in 2005, the series was a collection of four modern adaptations of popular Shakespeare plays – Macbeth (above), Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was an ambitious project and its stand out for me was Macbeth,  the titular character played by James McAvoy as a mad, egotistical (and not forgetting Scottish) chef working in London.

Another favourite has to be the camp, multicoloured spectacle that is Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, set in present-day Verona, where swords are swapped for guns and a garish Hawaiian shirt is a must-have fashion accessory if you’re a Montague. Starring the particularly dreamy Leonardo DiCaprio and adorable girl-next-door type Claire Danes, this 1996 version of the play made use of original Shakespearean dialogue and was a huge hit worldwide.

Oh, Romeo...

Then there’s not forgetting Michael Hoffman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1999, 2004′s The Merchant of Venice directed by Michael Radford and starring Al Pacino as Shylock and Kenneth Branagh’s multiple efforts. Even films you might not think to associate with Shakespeare are based on his plays – The Lion King (Hamlet), My Own Private Idaho (Henry IV), 10 Things I Hate About You (The Taming of the Shrew)… but to name a few.

So what do you think? Has Shakespeare on screen had its day? Were you a fan or Coriolanus? What are your favourite adaptations?

Dreamboat of the Month: Michael Pitt

So the first season of Boardwalk Empire has been recently released here in the UK on DVD. Suddenly everyone has gone gaga for it (again), and I’m seeing constant tweets of ‘OMG I have just watched all of the BW episodes back to back and it is AMAZEBALLS’, and also, more amusingly, ‘Michael Pitt’s quite good, isn’t he?’

Yes. He is good. Very good. I’ve only just seen the first episode myself, but have been a Michael ‘Pillow Lips’ Pitt fan for a long time. Ever since my secondary school BFF and I discovered him in the ghastly psychological crime thriller Murder by Numbers in 2002 (starring alongside another Enid favourite – none other than Mr Ryan Gosling), I have thoroughly delved into his back catalogue and kept up with his current projects. Early favourites include the fun, fabulous but ultimately heartbreaking Hedwig and the Angry Inch, where he co-stars as the egotistical Tommy Gnosis; Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers where he plays a young American student in Paris obsessed with film and drawn into the fantastical and seductive world of French siblings Isabelle and Theo; flawed but worth the watch Last Days, Gus Van Sant’s veiled attempt at documenting the final hours of a mentally ailing artist. More recent turns from Pillow Lips that have caught my attention have been the 2006 Tom DiCillo film Delirious, where he stars alongside his Boardwalk Empire costar Steve Buscemi as a homeless twenty-something who forms an unlikely friendship with a paparazzo; also worth noting is Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his own film Funny Games, where Pitt plays dominant villain Paul alongside Brady Corbet’s Peter. He is slick and chilling, charming and repulsive.

Back in the day, Pitt was kind of your go-to crush for the discerning teenage girl, the kind of guy who looked like he knew how to play two to four guitar chords in sequence, who may or may not smell like a foot (but who cares? the unwashed look and ratty hair was SO hot). He might even read poetry, his favorite band almost certainly was Nirvana or Mudhoney, his bedroom would consist of one barely covered mattress, water stained walls and broken, ethnic art, ratty mismatched converse trainers, funky ashtrays in the shape of Elvis’ head, mix tapes, bejeweled tarot cards, melted candles and othersuch charity shop junk. Sigh.

So unkempt, so dreamy!

30 year-old Pitt has since cleaned up his act. During the dawning success of BW, the New Jersey-born actor has been sporting a rather dashing undercut mop-top, has been spotted sharply dressed in tailored suits – and is even the current face of Prada. A far cry from the holy trousers and cigarette-ash stained tank tops of yesteryear. No worries, though – Pillow Lips Boy has grown up into a beautiful man and is still wonderfully talented to boot. His arresting onscreen presence is sure to carry him well for the rest of his acting career, and I look forward to fully catching up with Boardwalk Empire very soon.

love always,
teri

hello universe

Hello!

I have first post allergies. You know, where you freeze up, not really sure what to write because you don’t want to come across like you’re writing your ‘About Me’ page (that’s what the ‘About Me’ page is for, after all) yet you don’t want to jump into writing about kittens or Korean horror movies (depending on the subject of your blog) when no one really knows who the hell you are, besides your friends who have promised to read this and will probably be the only people to do so.

So… this is an anti first post. I will tell you who I am. I’m Teri, I’m in my mid-twenties, I live in London and I geek out about a whole manner of things. I will also tell you about my blog – the dumping ground of said subjects that cause the chemical and emotional reaction ‘geeking out’. As of yet, I have thought about regular features I am going to post here, but nothing set in stone. Set, if you will, in plasticine.

Doodles, mood boards, film reviews, Dreamboat of the Month, musings and rambles and opinions, Really Good Bad Film of the Month, TV reviews and previews, lists, swag features, coverage of festivals and fairs, music videos and everyday thoughts of a girl geek. That’s what you can expect. Hold onto your pants, people. It’s all downhill from here.

love always,
teri