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Showing posts from April, 2020

Love Wedding Repeat

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This Netflix film is going for Four Weddings status. What were things like before Four Weddings & A Funeral ? The costume and situations around a big posh wedding, and posh people swearing, a man in a kilt, and revelations from the lives of the people in the wedding… all are present plus a slightly sweary voice-over at the beginning. There’s an introduction scene with Jack ( Sam Claflin ) concluding a fantastic holiday where he has had good times with Dina ( Olivia Munn ), but their farewell is interrupted when Jack is waylaid by an old friend. Several years later Dina is at the wedding of Jack’s sister Hayley ( Eleanor Tomlinson ). The film takes a turn from classy wedding comedy to a Judd Apatow type film or maybe The Hangover films, when there’s an ex-boyfriend of the bride on the scene, and he has to be silenced. The method of doing this is to slip a sleeping drug into a champagne glass, but the table names get swapped around by a gang of out of control kids, and so ...

Jane Eyre

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Thanks to the National Theatre, the Covid-19 Lockdown is being ridden out by many enthusiasts at home, with their Live filming of recent productions going out on YouTube. And Charlotte Brontë’s rich tale of a spirited woman’s journey through Victorian hypocrisy and Gothic romance is such an engaging work that it’s up there with the very best television. Jane (Madeleine Worrel) is seen at birth, and she’s on stage all the time amongst the wooden frames and ladders that comprise the modernist set. She makes the baby crying noises as, elsewhere, her parents love her and yet give her away to her wicked aunt Reed and her awful children. She is bullied and brutalised by all, not least the unpleasantly pious and wicked Mr Brocklehurst (Craig Edwards), a character whose wickedness was so plainly laid out in the novel that someone threatened to sue Brontë at the time of the book’s publication. Brontë had to assume a male name, of course, and all productions and adaptations of t...