TMINE's publisher and Official Movie Reviewer in Residence. I've written for numerous magazines, including Death Ray and Filmstar, and I've been a contributor to TMINE since I was at university and first discovered I really wanted to write about movies, oh so many years ago. Sob.
This month’s issue of Black Widow is out today. Yes, her off The Avengers:
And the observant will notice from the front cover that CNN’s Anderson Cooper is a guest star in this issue. No, really.
Odd, hey? Still, anything to get people reading it, I say. But you’d have to be very observant to spot the crossover with The Unit in this issue as well:
Spot it?
Blink and you’ll have missed the fact that ‘Dirt Diver’ was the call sign of The Unit’s Mack Gerhard.
It is, of course, bizarre that before a Black Widow solo movie even gets the go-ahead, we’re getting a Guardians of the Galaxy movie from Marvel studios, doubly bizarre once you’ve seen Captain America: Winter Soldier.
Still until then, we can look forward to imagining what it might look like, thanks to this trailer for Luc Besson’s Lucy, with Scarlett Johansson as Lucy. It’s not a traditional superhero movie yet clearly is a superhero movie at the same time, and acts a bit like a melange of recent ScarJo movies, including Her and Under The Skin. Looks fun and different at the same time.
Where: Riverside Studios, Crisp Road, Hammersmith, London W6 9RL When: 5-22 March 2014, 7:45pm; 2pm matinees: 18, 20, 22 March How long: 1h30 Tickets:£17
Euripides is probably my favourite playwright and I’d be hard-pushed to come up with a favourite of his many wonderful works – okay, it’s Helene – but Medea is certainly up there in the top three. It’s an extraordinary play that’s still shocking, with Medea killing her own children partially in vengeance at the way her husband, Jason (of the Argonauts fame), has deserted her in favour of a new wife. Not only did it effectively wipe out previous notions of both Medea and Jason, with much of what we know about both actually likely to have been inventions of Euripides, it largely overshadowed later inventions, with only the occasional innovation (such as her chariot being drawn by dragons or serpents) having stemmed from later sources. It also has one of the most memorable feminist speeches in theatre history, one that not even Shakespeare can really challenge.
Now it’s been revived again at the Riverside Studios by Theatre Lab, a London-based group of fringe actors who every year put on a new production of a Greek tragedy, with Antigone, The Oresteia and Lysistrata among their previous productions. As I’ve remarked before, it can be hard to perform Greek tragedy for a modern audience, since it can be very static if not done right; it can also be very inaccessible or even laughable if adhered to too closely, since it can involve song, dance and even masks, depending on how rigorous the director wants it to be; and if directors decide to innovate too much, in can be very silly and even pointless (“I decided in this production of Agamemnon to explore the parallels between the Greek women and Albanian sworn virgins”).
Theatre Lab are a pretty reliable bunch and of the various fringe performers that put on Greek tragedy, they’re the best of the lot. Indeed, I’d rate their production of Antigone over the National’s recent version starring Christopher Eccleston, which despite some fine acting missed the mark by a country mile.
Theatre Lab try to be as authentic as possible to the original text, while using modern production values to bring it to life. And on the whole, Medea fits into this ethos very well, sticking closely to the text while coming up with innovative ways to depict, for example, Medea’s god-gifted escape vehicle in the absence of any flying chariots that they could use:
Their continued use of Daemonia Nymphe to provide live, ancient Greek-style music, singing and even dancing is creditable and gives a unique atmosphere to the production as well.
However, at times the production crosses over from the merely innovative into the somewhat mannered and pretentious, evoking unprompted laughter from the audience. Marlene Kaminsky is charismatic and compelling as Medea, her accent also making her Colchis-born character suitably foreign in contrast to the English-sounding Greeks. But her vocal and glossal gyrations tend towards the Xena-esque at times, while her physicality, often used well, sometimes becomes an excuse for artificial dance movements, designed mainly to add motion to the show rather than because they’re necessary for the character.
She’s not alone, however, with the play’s chorus of Corinthian women doing synchronised leaning and even self-strangulation at various points. And in the absence of any child actors for Medea to strangle, either on-stage or off-, director Anastasia Revi gives her some, erm, child-sized trainers to focus her attention on and even wear when necessary.
Appropriately enough, George Siena reprises his role of Creon from Antigone, doing well in the additional parts of Aegeus and the messenger, too. However, Tobias Deacon, who was Orestes in The Oresteia, here is Jason and appears to be in a different play from everyone else. While it’s a good, naturalistic performance, Deacon is very much interpreting it as a comedy – until the inevitable happens, of course – and it’s hard to imagine him being the Jason who sailed to the ends of the Earth and slew a giant serpent. Whether or not it’s because Deacon can’t quite imagine in a post-feminist age anyone seriously mouthing some of the misogynistic statements Jason posits, I couldn’t say, but while it does help an otherwise dark play to be more endurable, it sits oddly with the rest of the production.
Nevertheless, if you can control your natural tendency to titter when it all becomes a bit too I, An Actor, this is a very good, accessible production that brings out the play’s many meanings, gives depths to the characters and is always engaging. As with other Theatre Lab productions, a must-see if you like Greek tragedy done well.
Starring: Jason O’Mara, Alan Tudyk, Justin Kirk, Michelle Monaghan, Christopher Gorham, Shemar Moore, Sean Astin, Steven Blum, Bruce Thomas, Rocky Carroll, Zach Callison, George Newbern Price: £13.99 Released in the UK: February 4th 2014 (iTunes)
For those who don’t know, quite a sizeable number of superhero comics are produced by DC. You’ve probably heard of the likes of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and The Flash, perhaps even Cyborg and Shazam. Collectively known as the Justice League, they’re DC’s top team of superheroes.
Obviously they’ve mostly all been around for a quite few decades now (70+ years in some case) and with comics out every week with different writers, over the years, a lot of contradictory stuff and repetition sets in, so every so often DC likes to ‘reboot’ its universe and go back to the beginning, giving us new angles on characters.
The last time DC did this was a little over two and a half years ago with the so-called nu52/new 52, which effectively reset every character’s history, origins, et al. Sometimes the changes were minimal (Superman’s adoptive parents are both dead again, Batgirl is Barbara Gordon again); sometimes they were quite big (Wonder Woman got an entirely new father, the god Zeus; Barbara Gordon can now walk again).
However, outside the world of comics, things have been a bit laggardly in catching up, with films, merchandising and the like all largely using pre-nu52 imagery and ideas. So behold Justice League – War, the first of DC’s animated movies set in the nu52 mythos. Based on the first six or seven issues of the revamped Justice League comic book (more or less all of which were reviewed on this ‘ere blog when they came out), this is a nu52 origins story for the Justice League showing how the disparate superheroes (and superheroine) came together to fight the DC Universe’s ‘big bad’, Darkseid.
As well as featuring an entirely different, considerably more famous voice cast to previous animated movies, Justice League: War is more adult and better than most DC animated movies that have come before and, in fact, the original comics on which it was based.
Oh yes, and as in the nu52 itself, Superman and Wonder Woman are something of an item. Steve Trevor and Lois Lane? Left standing in the background.
Where:Donmar Warehouse, 41 Earlham Street, Seven Dials, London, WC2H 9LX When: 6 December 2013-8 February 2014. Broadcast to cinemas on 30 January How long: 2h30 with 15 minute interval Tickets from: £10 (you’ll be lucky, though) Starring: Tom Hiddleston, Mark Gatiss, Birgitte Hjort Sørensen
Coriolanus is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays, Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus one of my favourite Shakespeare films/productions, and Tom Hiddleston’s one of my favourite current actors, so the Donmar Warehouse production of Coriolanus was something I was looking forward to considerably. The story of a Roman general whose love of Rome is matched only by his hatred of the average Roman, it looks at the nature of democracy, how much we rely on people who might not have our best interests at heart but without whom we couldn’t survive, and the nature of politics and loyalty.
It’s also one of Shakespeare’s war plays. This is an important point because the Donmar is an intimate venue and having armies clash on stage isn’t really within its purview. Indeed, bar a couple of fight scenes employing some reasonably good stage jiu jitsu and swordfighting, the Donmar production is a resultantly somewhat talky affair, something that the director goes to considerable lengths to obscure, perhaps with one eye on the fact this will be beamed into cinemas at the end of the month. There’s all manner of things dropped from the ceiling, when the cast aren’t sat on chairs at the back of a scene watching proceedings they’re marching up and down stage to rearrange on them and stand on them, Tom Hiddleston gets his top off and has a shower, there’s climbing up and down ladders and walls – the list goes on.
Hiddleston is the headliner and although he’s very good, he’s slightly miscast for the role: Coriolanus is a cold, imperious eagle of a man, whom no one but another soldier could love; Hiddleston, despite his best efforts, is effortlessly charming and even amusing, light because of his age, rather than a venomous ball of entitlement. It doesn’t help that the director, Josie Rourke, aims for comedy whenever possible, which detracts from the play’s hard edge, or that Coriolanus’ arch-enemy, Hadley Fraser’s Tullus Aufidius, is equally young and not especially threatening. Indeed, with his Saxon/Viking outfit and his army of Northerners ranked against Hiddleston’s Southerners, it sometimes feels like an episode of Game of Thrones, except Hiddleston is the Rob Stark of the piece, Fraser the Theon Greyjoy.
Also in the cast is TV’s Mark Gatiss (Doctor Who and Sherlock writer and actor, but let us not forget The League of Gentlemen), whose Menenius is perhaps more lounge lizard than need be, but he deals with both comedy and drama well. Birgitte Hjort Sørensen (Borgen) plays Hiddleston’s wife, but gets roughly five lines so you wonder why she bothered coming over from Denmark at all, other than for the experience. In fact, it’s Deborah Findlay, who plays Volumnia, Coriolanus’ wife, who comes out of the play best, effortlessly dominating every scene she’s in, in part thanks to a generous performance by Hiddleston.
It’s a good production, imaginative in many ways, but perhaps one that thinks its audience will balk at its relative bleakness and over-compensates.
Where: Riverside Studios, Crisp Road, Hammersmith, London W6 9RL
Coriolanus is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays, Ralph Fiennes’