ON WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON WITH MY BLOGGING...

Um well... I think I owe you guys an explanation. No really, I do. I want to make it short - you are not here to read my life stroy after all - but do bear with me because I want to make it honest.

I work as a waitress as a lot of you know by now. It means I keep unsocial hours, unsocial hours that I need to balance out with some vestiges of a social life and training to become an actress some day. It is exhausting but by and large I love my life and with slightly less sleep than the average gal, I even find time for some movie reviewing on the side.

Now, January and Febuary is always a very, very dry season for events. There aren't any. So for us freelancers there is no work.No work, unless you take some even more unsociable hours, locations and other stuff you would not usually prefer when figuring out your work. When making a living became a bona fide struggle in my own place of work I have had to branch out. This has meant shifts starting at 07.00 in the morning which means me getting up at around 4.30 (I live in a rather uncommutable bit of town). I am getting an averyage of about 3 hours of sleep a night (and another 2 - 3 hour nap during the day) and my body clock is on its head as a result. I will not be able to keep this up ad infinitum, but I am ok for now. The problem is of course that the rest of my life continues to be as busy as ever! I am learning to function on much less sleep but it IS a struggle. Especially when it comes to both acting and writing which need a high level of core energy and alertness as you can do neither on auto-pilot. I have been channeling what core energy I have left into my acting (I have several performances in the offing that need my attention) and the writing has suffered. And I am sorry about that. Not least because on a personal level I miss it terribly...

I am trying to get back into an update a week. But I have a feeling I may well slip up. Please accept my humble appologies, keep a weather eye on Twitter where I will at least try and give some clue as to whether I will be able to put anything up this week and have a lovely weekend.

Thank you for sticking with me!
Essie

ALL HAIL MACBETH THAT SHALT BE KING HEREAFTER...

So, as you guys may have noticed, I have finally popped my Shakespeare review cherry with my look at Henry IV parts 1 and 2. Moving up to a review of one of the greats – or at least one of the great stories – only seems appropriate. Macbeth is actually the kind of story I adore. You know I have a soft spot for gangster films and the like. You know I have a soft spot for psychological films. Well he we have a man who murders about a dozen innocent people to fulfill his own political ambition and is driven slowly mad with remorse…  In essence, the granddaddy of all the stories I adore - I absolutely HAD to watch it – and the fact that I loved the story is, in essence, no surprise.

Even if you do not know the story of Macbeth per se, you will, without a doubt, recognize it. Macbeth (Michael Fassbender) is a Scottish clan chief who is loyal to the King of Scotland during a time of civil war. He has just won a decisive victory in battle for his liege when he is accosted by three witches who prophecy that he will first be made the chieftain of another clan and then King of Scotland. Macbeth is inclined to laugh it off, but then,  news arrives that the King has made him the chieftain of the selfsame clan the witches had prophesied as a reward to his services. From this moment on Macbeth, first egged on by his wife (Marion Cotillard) and later on by his own crumbling sanity and insatiable ambition will set off a string of murders Macbeth feels he absolutely must commit – or have committed – to secure his place, his throne, his lineage, with tragic consequences. After a while it becomes a matter of whether the Macbeths can get a handle on the violence they have unleashed or whether Macbeths already crumbling sanity will give way completely first…

Now there have been more adaptations of this tale than anyone could hope to count. This, to my way of thinking, makes every single new adaptation of the play a little trickier. After that long of a lineage standing out is hard, seeing as a lot of intelligent and creative people have been thinking about it a lot and have had a lot of good ideas about it. There are some strong films out there. It’s a big competition. And it has to be said, this particular adaptation has a lot of good things going for it. First of all, the aesthetics. The film is categorically one of the most visually stunning things I have recently seen. It is a fittingly cold, bleak, unforgiving and stunning visual aesthetic that runs through every aspect of the film from the backdrops to the scenery. I honestly felt as if I could stop the film at a million different random points and just hang the scene up on your wall.

It goes without saying that this choice and aesthetic bleeds into the choice of actors. The choice of Michael Fassbender as Macbeth created a lot of ripples and excitement among the fans. Having seen him perform… Well I can see why he was picked but I am not sure I have seen the best rendition of Macbeth ever performed… Visually Fassbender fits the bill perfectly. Handsome, rugged, a sense of lurking danger under the surface… There is a lot of good stuff in there. I just thought that Macbeth should have been a bit more emotional than the one Fassbender portrayed him. Until the middle of the film I found him almost inscrutable (which is sad really because I would have liked some turmoil as Macbeth struggles with himself before killing Duncan). When his sanity begins to crumble it’s a bit better, there is flickers of some strong stuff there but there was, for my way of thinking, a lot of scope to push the boat right the way out there. This, I felt, was a stark contrast to Marion Cotillard who absolutely glowed as Lady Macbeth – from her initial greed right down to the bitter end when her sanity collapses as well. I have always had a bit of girl-crush on Cotillard. And I devoutly hope her work in this film will be recognized too. Now, before Shakespeare experts jump down my throat, yes, I am aware there is artistic merit in all of this. Pitting the more silent and sullen (talking about his acting style, not necessarily his role in this film) Fassbender against the lively and absolutely electric Cotillard may have been a choice. It is, after all, Lady Macbeth who pushes Macbeth into action and to fulfill his true potential as a king (and, to call a spade a spade, a serial killer). And after all at the beginning of the play Lady Macbeth prays to be unsexed (less like a woman) and before Duncan so much as sets foot in her household she is ready  (or would be ready – were she a man) to kill him herself, with her bare hands. This choice – these choices – set the roles of the two characters off. Lady Macbeth must really push Macbeth to catalyze him and get him to act. Macbeth has to drag himself and his own convictions, as if he and they were made of lead before he can muster up the mental strength to act. I get all that. My point is that the lid seems to have fallen off the jar of sullen Fassbender was using. There is more subtlety there than he is not moving – oh wait now he is. It does not come across in this performance.

So I see why this production of Macbeth garnered so much criticism, especially from the diehard Shakespeare fans. But then again we must be charitable. Every adaptation between mediums (even though in this instance it is from one performance art to the other) loses some of the initial magic by definition. And Kurzels Macbeth has a lot of good things going for it. I would watch it if I were you. I just wouldn’t expect it to change my world… 

NOT SO MUCH A "LEGEND" AS A CHANCE MISSED...

I approached this film about the infamous Kray twins with a lot of caution. Reviews about it has been mixed at best. Still I entered the film armed with a love of gangster movies and a deep appreciation of Tom Hardy’s acting talent. It cannot be that bad, I thought, probably a bit too violent or something. I love true stories – and it doesn’t come much gorier than the Krays – so all in all it should be a good watch. It very soon turned out that Tom Hardys acting was literally the only thing that was going to get me through to the end of the film. I have been flipping through some reviews of the film and it turns out that I (along with the film as it turns out) suffer a great deal from lack of knowledge of the Kray story. Well it just goes to show doesn’t it, if you don’t have a really good story, all the rest of the talent involved can only get the film so far…

Basically the film tells the story of notorious London gangsters and identical twins Ronnie and Reggie Kray. Told from the perspective of Frances, the wife of Reggie, the story charts the rise to power of the twins and their ultimate fall from it – the latter due in no small part to Ronnie Krays mental health issues…

Now, like I said I only know bits and pieces about the Kray story. But I do have a sense of why people would say that. Because watching the film, from a completely outside perspective as it were, I could feel bits and pieces missing although I did not know what they were. I mean, to put it in a nutshell, the film does give some small detail of the twins dealings with other gangs, their ownership of various nightclubs and casinos and hints at dealings with the police but in all honesty it shows absolutely and categorically nothing that would warrant them being accuse of having a criminal empire. I mean wheeler dealers yes. Not an empire though. Don’t get me wrong, when the time comes the film doesn’t shirk from showing violence. In fact the violence contains, in my humble opinion, some of the best bits of the film (I am the type of girl who a day later is still smiling at the line – I have a joke for you. Paranoid schizophrenic walks into a pub…- ).  Instead, the film centralizes by and large on (what else) the relationship between Reggie and Frances with Ronnie as something cross between comic relief and the impending doom that will ultimately be the undoing of them all (ultimately he is both). Again, this is a sensible choice in a way – Reggie was the more charismatic twin who was better at… Well better at being alive to be honest. But he wasn’t exactly boy scout of the year either. It enhances his struggle with his increasingly unhinged brother to have a positive light shone on him through the eyes of Frances. It harks back to that age old story of the gangster, trying to be good but ultimately being unable to avoid his past. Which would be all very well and good if we had a clearer, more grim and dire picture of what this evil empire the twins lived in was all about. Cue the complaints about how unfaithful to actual events the film is. I can sense what they left out. A couple of hinted talks with American mafia bosses and a few drunken brawls really don’t cut it.

And if the real Kray twins are left underdeveloped by the script, poor Frances definitely is. She is slightly reduced as your typical Mol. Your typical East End girl. There is clearly more to her than that, which is evident by how her story ends, but the film doesn’t do a very good job into going into detail about her. She mainly seems to exist to cast the positive light of love onto Reggie Kray. Now Reggie Kray is also, to be fair, a bit of an offshoot of a certain type – or at least in this film he is portrayed as such. He is the lovable rogue with street smarts and a flair for business. Every other British gangster film has one of them in it. The difference here of course is that Tom Hardy plays him perfectly, to an absolute T. What every other British gangster film doesn’t have, it needs to be said, is Ronnie Kray. Ronnie Kray is a paranoid schizophrenic who is left at the head of the family business when Reggie has to go into jail to serve out the tail end of a sentence. Already both eccentric and highly suspicious (all this despite medication, which he takes sporadically) I will leave you to discover how Ronnie unravels and how he brings the downfall of most if not all around him. Hardy portrays both twins with fluidity and conviction, so much so that you positively cringe at Ronnie’s antics for Reggie’s sake, completely forgetting that they are in actual fact the same person. Boy is this film a showcase of acting talent!

Violence is a strange one isn’t it… I honestly think at the end of the day it’s about striking a balance. I mean if you check out my review of The Revenant on Film Debate, you will find me complaining there was far too much violence. Now I have sort of ended up saying there is not enough. I think the problem here is that the story is in fact a well-known story of two very violent gangsters. They are almost part of the fabric of London. Turning their story into one they could have been cut out of and replaced with any gangster type from any British gangster film anywhere really, really takes something essential and important away from the films potential. We are left to the talent of Hardy, who uses these two characters a lot better in delivering the lines given to him and giving us a hint of what the film could have been…