Hell or High Water, The Infiltrator and The Girl with all the Gifts

Taylor Sheridan should win the Oscar for best original screenplay for Hell or High Water, a wonderful heist movie set in the dazzling backwaters of Texas. Director David Mackenzie has also to be given great credit for the staging and filming of this little masterpiece. Jeff Bridges is superb as a Texas Ranger near to retirement. The best thing I have seen him do since The Big Lebowski. It will take something special to prize awards away from him come the end of the year. Chris Pine and Ben Foster are also truly believable as the bank robbing brothers. Just one great movie.

The Infiltrator is a decent undercover drugs thriller. Unfortunately the first half hour is all over the place, it was hard to work out who was who. But then it settles down into the dangerous operation to set up high ranking members of the cartel. Bryan Cranston is terrific as real life agent Bob Mazur, a shame that the rest of the cast was disappointing. Maybe that was because of the dodgy script by Ellen Brown Furman and messy direction from her son Brad. But the story was good.

A small budget British post apocalyptic thriller, The Girl with all the Gifts just shows how to spend money wisely. I read the book a couple of years ago and was decidedly underwhelmed. However, it made for a good movie. The zombies are infected with a fungus, but the introduction cleverly avoids telling us too much. Why are all these children strapped to wheelchairs when they leave their prison cells for lessons? we soon find out. Gemma Arterton as their teacher gives a solid, if undramatic performance. That is left to Glen Close and Paddy Considine, both under pressure when the chips are down. Mike (M.R.) Carey has adapted his own book and has been allowed to be faithful to it, even the classy ending. Colm McCarthy has directed with enthusiasm. One more thing to add. The sound design and supervision by Dillon Bennett is absolutely amazing. I was mesmorised by every click of the strap on the wheelchair. Dillon has a long, long list of movies to his credit. This might be his best.

 Three good movies in succession, but none at my local Odeon!

Tring Book Club - Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

An extraordinary book, if a little depressing. A number of interlocking stories held together by Olive herself, a retired schoolteacher. (In one she is only referred to as Rebecca's teacher). The construction of this book is quite original and works really well. Olive herself is not a nice person, bitter and self righteous, in denial about her relationship with her son Christopher. She must have some endearing qualities for her husband Henry has stuck by her all these years, I never quite worked out why.

Elizabeth Strout deserves her Pulitzer Prize. She can create a real sense of emotion in her writing. There are so many classic lines. "The natural rubber band around people's lives that curiosity stretched for a while". My favourite of the thirteen stories was "The Piano Player". As with most of the others, sad but at the same time uplifting.

The Other Place Tour and The Two Noble Kinsmen at the RSC

THE OTHER PLACE TOUR

A day in Stratford-upon-Avon started at 11 am with a tour of the newly opened The Other Place. It incorporates three rehearsal rooms and a 200 seat studio theatre. It also house a huge costume store. I loved the collection of helmets and armour.

Our tour guide started with a description of how The Other Place had changed over the years. Originally the tin shed in the picture above, it was closed in 1989 for two years of rebuilding, and reopened its doors in 1991 with a permanent brick building. This is the building with blue cladding in the picture below. This is how I remembered it in the year 2000 when I went to see a modern dress Richard II. It was still a rectangular box with 200 banquet seats on three sides. In my front row you could feel the actor's breath they were that close. Samuel West was Richard and David Troughton was Bolinbroke. This was the first play in the complete history plays performed that season. Why it started in the tiny Other Place before a transfer to The Barbican, I shall never know.

This building later closed in 2005 to be adapted as a foyer to The Courtyard Theatre (the rusty tin shed at the back) which allowed performances to continue during the transformation of the Royal Shakespeare and Swan theatres from 2006 - 2010. The shell of The Courtyard Theatre's auditorium was kept and used to create a new The Other Place.

We followed our guide as he took us through the building, ending up at the Studio Theatre which in some way replicates the original space. This tour is a must for anyone who loves theatre.

LUNCH AT HUFFKINS

Alison came with me to Stratford and after my tour we met for lunch. Their website says:
Huffkins in Stratford sits inside a glorious grade II listed building positioned directly opposite M&S on Bridge Street and a stone's throw from the home of the RSC. The tearooms seat around 85 indoors with a further 8 seats outside in the sun-trapped Red Lion Court. The tearooms are split across a ground and mezzanine level with the most wonderful exposed beams - many still marked in wax from their former life as ships' timber. You will find a large bakery shop stocking a full selection of freshly made cakes made by hand in our Oxfordshire craft bakery and delivered fresh every morning. We offer a great selection of hot and cold dishes, breakfasts and afternoon teas freshly prepared to order.

We had a superb lunch at this independent cafe. Highly recommended.


THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN

As I came new to this rarely performed play, I wasn't at all sure what we were in for when the first lengthy scene seemed a garbled and rushed introduction. The three widowed queens begging Theseus for the return of their husband's bodies seemed to go on and on. Fortunately things got decidedly better at the end of that scene with the entrance of the two cousins (the kinsmen) Palamon and Arcite. There scenes together are excellent all through the play.

They are both very athletic performers, especially when they climb the walls of their prison. The minimalist, modern set by designer Anna Fleischle is outstanding, with concrete straight from the brutalism of the sixties National Theatre.

I also liked Francis McNamee as Emelia, the object of their desire.

But the stand out performance was that of Danusia Samal as the Jailer's Daughter. Her soliloquies were a delight. Looking at the reviews, I wasn't the only one who was bowled over by this young actress. Her plight is described in the programme:
For women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, love and attraction were dangerous things: strong enough to lead men to fight each other (the kinsmen over Emelia) : powerful enough to send women (the Jailer's Daughter, over one of the kinsmen) mad. If only the writers could have stuck to this, the main theme of the play.

It was just a shame that Shakespeare and Fletcher couldn't have come up with a better ending. No wonder it is rarely performed. Such a shame, as some of the dialogue is brilliant.

Eight Days a Week- The Touring Years

I was amazed at how many people showed up for the nationwide screening of a Beatles documentary. I was the last to arrive, an hour after the official start time for the introductory "red carpet" event. Whilst there was a lot of familiar footage, it was good to relive the songs from the early sixties.

One notable missing song was The Beatles' first hit Love Me Do. I was seventeen when the single made the charts in October 1962, only reaching number seventeen in the charts. It was my brother John (he played a little harmonica like the instrumental part on the record) who said the this group would be big. We had no idea how big.

But one song included was I Saw Her Standing There from the first LP. I remember dancing to it at the outdoor school leaving party in July 1963. There was only a very short clip from A Hard Day's Night. I went into the West End to see the movie the week it was released. I had never seen the band live, although working in Hammersmith in 1964/5 I could have found a ticket for one of their forty shows over the December / January of those two years. My eardrums could not have stood the screaming.

So the movie was a great alternative (no screaming). The documentary had an interview with the director, Richard Lester, but not the writer. Alun Owen was a neighbour of ours on Napier Road in the fifties. Mum was particularly friendly with his wife as brother Paul was close in age to their son Jonathon.

I bought the Beatles' second LP With The Beatles, from a record store at the top of King's Road in Hammersmith the week it was released in November 1963. At eighteen, I was in digs in Chiswick and played it over and over, night after night. That might be why it's no longer my favourite album.

What was really interesting last night, was how the boys changed. Or should I say matured. It showed in the difference in personality and musicality from the early years to Sargent Pepper.

The Town in Bloom, Slade House and The Past

After having loved Dodie Smith's "I Capture the Castle", I wondered if this later novel could be as good. I needn't have worried, The Town in Bloom it is almost in the same class. Written in 1965, we visit London theatre land in the nineteen twenties as eighteen year old Mouse lands her first job at the Crossway Theatre. Her adventures are so well and wittily described, this is a real feel-good story.

Not everything is sweetness and light, an undercurrent of doomed relationships pervade the book. But Mouse is lucky when Miss Lester offers her a job as her assistant. Mouse hesitates with "I can't think why you should (want me). I'm not really efficient". To which the reply is "The truth is I rather like you. And I can't work with people I don't like, however efficient they are". Mouse describes Eve Lester as a faded beauty; "or perhaps only a dimmed beauty which might have shone if she helped it to".

I have never known a writer that can give you such a warm glow. The last half dozen pages, where Mouse contemplates her life are exquisite. If any writer can conjure up a lump in your throat, it's Dodie Smith.

After the disappointment of "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoot" and passing on "Cloud Atlas" and "The Bone Clocks", David Mitchell's Slade House is a far more mainstream and short easy reading fantasy. Every nine years .... but I've already said too much. Not so much five short stories as five witty visits to the mystery that is Slade House. More please Mr Mitchell.

Somewhere in The Past by Tessa Hadley, there was a great family drama trying to get out. It just seemed to be padded out with well written but uninteresting events and long descriptions of the landscape. I don't mind a bit of introspection, but not this much. "She believed that social occasions ought to be lubricated with agreed civility, limited and shallow". Nice writing but please. I did enjoy the relationship of the sisters and brother who meet at the old isolated family home for a short holiday. If only some tough editing had been deployed.

The Shallows, Nerve and Cafe Society

The Shallows is an excellent thriller about sea, a shark and a seagull. Blake Lively is terrific as the surfer who visits the remote Mexican beach found by her dead mother. Her fight to survive when menaced by a predatory shark could have been tiresome but instead director Jaume Collet-Serra (who made the well received Orphan) keeps up the tension with a number of twists along the way. It reminded me of (mainly) one actor movies such as Buried, All is Lost, Moon, Castaway, 127 Hours and parts of Gravity and The Martian. In a summer full of super heroes, animations and gross comedies, this made a refreshing change.

Somehow the interesting concept of Nerve got lost along the way. Based on the 2012 novel by Jeanne Ryan about online gaming, "players" are sent dares by "watchers" with cash rewards. Shy Emma Roberts stumbles into playing against her better judgement but soon finds her "nerve" with the aid of the experienced Dave Franco. Each set piece just feels a little cheap, but I guess that is more down to the less than creative directors. I did like the location photography of Manhattan and Staten Island and with a much better screenplay, it could have been great.

Woody Allen is back on form with his wonderful Cafe Society. Jesse Eisenberg reprises his role from Adventureland; this time more grown up as Bobby Dorfman, all alone in 1930's  Hollywood, trying to get high powered wealthy agent Uncle Phil (a strong performance from Steve Carell) to give him a job. Eventually he does and so Bobby meets secretary Vonnie played superbly by Kristen Stewart. And so we are set for romantic entanglements that could have been predictable, but in Allen's capable hands have much to say about human relationships.  The contrast of California and Jesse's New York home is cleverly depicted, his family there could have made a decent movie on their own. Jeannie Berlin and Ken Stott as Jesse's mother and father are quite excellent. Woody Allen's Jewish background is firmly seated in the family and their witty comments on their religion crackle and spit. The costumes, production design, cinematography are all worthy of awards, but it is Allen's screenplay that makes this a classic.

National Theatre Live - The Deep Blue Sea

It is quite something to watch a play when you don't know the plot, especially one such as Terrence Rattigan's classic The Deep Blue Sea. And one as brilliantly arranged and performed as this National Theatre production; the camera on this live transmission is up close and personal. This is an intelligent, thoughtful and intimate representation of a woman who cannot accept that the intensity of her love cannot be reciprocated. Her new man Freddie does love her in his way and is completely faithful, but that is not enough for Hester. Her failed suicide attempt is not a cry for help but more a cry of exasperation.

At the centre is a fantastic performance from Helen McCrory. The critics have described her Hester as many things, but for me it was her a fierce charm and manipulative cleverness that made her so dangerous to know. She could even make her besotted ex-husband, a judge no less, feel small. The director Carrie Cracknell (reunited with McCrory after their amazing Medea) has set the play exactly as Rattigan wrote it: in 1952. The clipped accents never let you forget where we are. The set is quite extraordinary. Instead of the claustrophobic one room of a kitchen sink drama from that decade, the Lyttelton stage is opened up with one apartment on top of the other.

As for the performances, Helen McCrory is at her superlative best. I also liked Peter Sullivan as not quite yet ex husband Sir William Collyer. However it was Nick Fletcher as neighbour Mr Miller that was outstanding. Not a big role, but he was devastatingly measured on stage. I thought Tom Burke as Hester's lover Freddie was a bit of a let down but Marion Bailey as Mrs Elton was terrific. However it is McCrory who will hoover up the awards.