California cool kids Kisses released their debut LP The Heart of the Nightlife this week. You could say it’s an ironic title, as the Los Angeles two-piece’s intricately layered electro-indie beats lie in stark contrast to Jesse Kivel’s melancholy murmuring. Kisses radiate the blasé, beachside hipness that this year propelled fellow slacker-rockers The Drums to fame; yet their sound is much more effortless, the lyrics more relevant.
Opening track ‘Kisses’ pivots on a finger-snapping pop beat which, thankfully, doesn’t devalue the soft, sombre vocals. ‘Bermuda’ would sound at home on The Cure’s Disintegration, were it not for the jovial handclaps in the background; similarly, ‘People Can Do The Most Amazing Things’ undercuts Kivel’s reverberating dirge with Miami Beach-style guitar licks.

In fact, the whole album tightens around the juxtaposition of slow, sobering vocals and a restless backbeat. ‘Lovers’ is a mellow number with a quirky romanticism to it, while ‘Midnight Lover’ is high-tempo electro-funk under some charmingly preposterous lyrics about steak dinners and sexily sashaying West Coast women.

On Nightlife, Kisses craft a wonderfully alluring microcosm of their laid-back little world. The carefully chosen instrumentation – from steel guitar to vibrant synths – comes together with meticulous production, lending a velvet texture to their songs. Overall, this is an exceptionally confident debut from the talented two-piece.

The films:

Where the Wild Things Are

I would never deny the original work’s brilliance. It’s a book that everyone loves, and has become, along with The Hungry Caterpillar, an indispensable part of every child’s bedtime. However, the gradual loss of my childhood imagination means that I can now only appreciate it on a nostalgic level; I see the wonderful illustration, I remember how it used to make me feel, but I’m no longer stirred. Spike Jonze’s adaptation, coupled with Karen O’s soundtrack, makes for a picture by turns epic and playful, and tips me headfirst back into Max’s mad world. The Wild Things are exactly as I remember them, but a feature length film allows for far greater depth of characterisation and closer exploration into Max’s home life which is welcome to the child in every grown up.

Hannah Riley

Gone With the Wind

Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable’s performances in Gone With the Wind bring Margaret Mitchell’s uninspiring Civil War translation of Vanity Fair to another level; as a novel it’s a tediously dull and decidedly unadventurous attempt at creating a classic, but as a film it’s an eviscerating portrait of the slow death of a relationship and the dangers of romantic illusion. Scarlett’s obsession with the milquetoast Ashley ossifies her, and Rhett attempts to buy her heart and fails. The film imparts a skepticism toward fairy-tale romance that makes the famous ending far more final – and affecting – than Mitchell intended. Gable and Leigh take the characters further in four hours than Mitchell does in 1,000 pages, proving that images often do speak louder than words.

Jenny Glennon

Harry Potter

This week, Harry Potter comes to an end. Well, not quite. So enormous and important is every detail of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows that the filmmakers have made the financially savvy decision to split the film into two parts. So, what we get is a rather truncated experience, mostly consisting of the three friends wandering around the countryside for two and a half hours. Critics’ reactions have been, on the whole, fairly underwhelmed, but even if the newest instalment of the series is a disappointment, it must still be acknowledged what an incredible achievement these seven (or eight) films have been. It may be an occasionally ungainly leviathan, but the gargantuan Potter franchise has done a huge amount of good.

The British film industry has had a huge boost from these home-grown films, while you’re unlikely to see such a prestigious cast elsewhere outside the Oscar ceremony. It’s also provided a launchpad for Alfonso Cuarón, director of Azkaban (still the high point of the series), to go on to great things – without Potter, we wouldn’t have Children of Men, one of the great dystopian visions of the new century. Purists may cry treason if one were to suggest that the films surpass the books in quality, but even if this is not the case, this is a franchise has undoubtedly had a hugely positive effect on the British film industry. You’ll miss it when it’s gone.

Ben Kirby

The books:

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

De Bernières’s is a decent book. Its characters are credible, its plot successfully interweaves the life of a small Greek island with the larger narrative of war, and moments of violence and beauty are brought together through the motif of a mandolin. Sadly, John Madden’s 2001 film adaptation attacks the novel like the cinematic equivalent of an evil jellyfish.

Oh, the tragedy of Penelope Cruz’s life. She’s clearly too pretty to die in the German siege, and she pouts far too much to stay un-rescued for long. And why – why – would you make Nicholas Cage pretend to be a dashingly amorous Italian? The result is a frankly embarrassing display of Mr. Cage’s ability to look doe-eyed, and little else.

Worst of all, after a second or two of separation by war, Penelope and Nicholas are reunited in a stunningly truncated version of the book’s ending – still young, still beautiful and practically wearing the same clothes.

Gone is the rather sweet, stumbling conclusion to the book in which a crusty old Pelagia finally meets her wry Italian musician again. The whole point is surely that Corelli and Pelagia’s love must develop over decades of enforced distance from one another, so that it contrasts with the other types of love on show in the novel. Their romance in the film has barely more weight than Mandras’s initial lust for Pelagia.
Of course, no two-hour film can attempt to include every nuance of plot and description in a 500-pager (in Madden’s version the Greek, German and Italian characters understand each other with remarkable ease). But that means the film should concentrate on a few things and do them well, not just wash over the whole beautiful lot with a depressingly bland Hollywood patina.

Annabel James

The Iliad/Troy

My old Latin teacher used to love Troy. He’d get fed up of trying to explain the finer points of the deponent verb, throw his hands up in the air and fast forward the opening scene of Troy through to the bit where Achilles takes a running jump and plunges his sword up to the hilt in an eight-foot-tall man’s aorta.

Then I went to university, and instead of deponent verbs they made us handle 18 books of the Iliad in the original Greek. It was boring. It was really really boring. And then, quite suddenly, it was amazing. Homer builds up subtle structures of repetition and variation which look like a lack of imagination to the naked eye, but if you concentrate really hard you begin to notice just how the slightest difference in description or action can change an entire character.

And the violence – my God, the violence! One warrior gets hit by an arrow, and his head is said to bow like the head of a poppy weighed down by the rains. Another time, the Trojans are right up against the barricades of the Greek camp, and the Greeks are so desperate that they begin hurling stones from the walls, and Homer writes that the rocks fall like gusts of snow. Achilles’ artery-busting acrobatics seem a bit tame by comparison.

I went back to watch Troy again after Mods. To my astonishment, I couldn’t hate it. It’s crass, it’s reductive, it’s overacted and underscripted, but I felt a patronising affection for the film that is the real mark of the superiority of the book. It’s the kind of attitude where you think, ‘yeah, I see why an American would do that…’ I begin to see why my teacher used to play the film to 13-year-olds who couldn’t handle deponent verbs.

Oliver Moody

Northern Lights/The Golden Compass

While there were many worthy contenders for the coveted final slot and perhaps more ‘literary’ ones, it seemed churlish not to include one of the big fantasy films of the last ten years. We’ll cede that the Lord of the Rings adaptations are pretty good and that Harry Potter doesn’t completely destroy the magic of the film, but the film of Northern Lights is just dreadful. Pullman has generally been supportive of it, even saying that, ‘every film has to make changes to the story that the original book tells’ but it is difficult to suppose that he wouldn’t have been disappointed by the outcome.

The casting and look of the film are actually quite good. Dakota Blue Richards does a good job depicting the stormy heroine and the film won both the BAFTA Award and Academy Award for special effects, beating off the robots of Transformers. It is in the nuances of the book that the film falls so disappointingly short. In order to create family friendly fare it takes Pullman’s skyscrapers of thought, detail and imagination and replaces them with bungalows of boringness.

The film loses a lot of the structure, tension and violence of the original. It has been completely covered with sanitizing hand gel, any excitement spotted and painstakingly removed with tweezers. This is most obvious in the arena of religion, where it shies from portraying the strong anti-religious opinions put forward by Pullman in the books so as not to offend the key demographic of angry Christians. The Golden Compass shows that however much CGI and however many top quality actors you throw at a film, it just can’t beat the magic of a book.

Jamie Randall

I’ve been tasked with stating the case for how and why movies trump those palpable, pulpable things they call books. This might all get too technical, but fear not – this article is being adapted for the big screen, starring Morgan Freeman as a misunderstood student film critic. He’s so wise.

First up, the obvious: film films the world. What’s on the reel is real, and so what we see has a very deep connection with the literal. This changes the relationship between the literal and the allegorical, when compared with literature.

The literary trick of smuggling extra meanings under the folds of language isn’t much of an option, so films have to communicate meaning to their audience through images. A downgrade, you might think – but this is precisely the case in real life. Reality provides us with no narrational paragraph explaining what’s on someone’s mind when we’re with them. And, barring the occasional voice-over, it’s the same in film. It is our world; the world of exteriors, wherein to read another human isn’t to be given a legible code, but a mixture of their speech, their actions, their universe. Cinema is the moving image of psychology.

Narrative literature then, in its telling of events entails a translation of media (from the visual, audible and physical to the linguistic). Film has to make no such leap, and moreover its narrative mode is arguably far richer. The novel, with few exceptions, is told from either the third or first person.

And film? Well, it’s a weird hybrid: narrational point of view in films doesn’t step out of them to describe the action – it is the action. It goes beyond depicting realistic circumstances to commenting on them.

Take The Social Network – it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s story, so the camera often sides with him. But it’s also a movie about social surveillance – shown by a critical distance of the camera, which then becomes an (inevitably judgemental) onlooker. So cinema’s unique contribution to narrative is its subtle blend of subjectivity and objectivity.

There’s also the factor of actors – think about Johnny Depp. Watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you’re never able to forget that this is Depp’s rendition of Willy Wonka; it is his borrowing of the role, just as Gene Wilder wore it before him. In film then, character and actor are intertwined. Film is not just about characters, but the performance of characters. Various layers of consciousness and self-consciousness are chewed up in a giant Wonka gobstopper of reality and fictionality – hence our girlish giggles as movies import the character of their performers.

To claim a picture is worth a thousand words may be a cliché, but it’s rooted in truth. Only a fraction of what we feel, communicate and understand is through language: movies pick up the slack. As David Lynch put it, when asked what one of his movies meant, ‘If I could express it with words, I’d have written a book.’

With over 90% tickets gone two weeks before the show opens, and the first 3 performances sold out, it is clear why the team behind A Streetcar Named Desire decided they didn’t need an official press preview.

Director Anna Hextall says that she has been trying to shield the cast (and by the sounds of it, herself) from the ticket sales and excitement surrounding the play for fear of overwhelming them. “They’re a very talented cast, but they’ve got to have the confidence to be fearless on stage”, she explains. “Stanley, for example, has got to be full of raw emotion, but he can’t throw himself around. It’s very important not to overplay it and James [Corrigan] has got that”.

Tennessee Williams’ iconic play, which won him the Pullitzer prize in 1948 revolves around Blanche DuBois, a Southern Belle, whose arrival in New Orleans to stay with her sister Stella and husband Stanley, a member of the rising industrial class, generates a clash of cultures. As Blanche’s delusions and Stanley’s animalistic brutality spiral out of control, and as Blanche’s past begins to catch up with her, the consequences lead to tragedy.

This is clearly a different kettle of fish from some of the recent student Playhouse productions, which have of late become one epic ensemble piece after another – visually stunning, but perhaps lacking the script to support it. “Obviously parts of Streetcar are surreal,” Hextall admits, “but I much prefer the natural grittiness and depth that you get with such a great script. It’s such a sexy, beautiful, vibrant piece, but at the same time very moving and shocking”. The Playhouse had suggested she take an original spin on such a well-known play, maybe by putting Stanley in a wheelchair, but she eventually decided against this. “I’m just not that kind of director, and the play is enough of a challenge – you don’t need to do anything crazy like switching gender roles”.
But although it might not have Royal Hunt’s gold leaf or The Odyssey’s epic fight scenes, Streetcar’s set is not being overlooked by any means. Designer Anna Lewis and her team of 17 set builders will be in the Playhouse workshop 9 hours a day for the next week, and the famous spiral staircase which is currently lying in 110 pieces is estimated to take between 2 hours and a day to put together. Hextall shows me photos and models of the set, which have been carefully thought through to look like a real house. “I wanted a functional set, one where you open a drawer and there really are forks and spoons inside. When we move into the theatre, I’m going to get the cast to practice running up and down the stairs and sitting on the chairs and beds. They’ve got to instinctively know the heights of all the surfaces – there’s nothing worse than watching actors move around a ‘house’ they’re supposed to have lived in for 20 years as though they hardly know where anything is”.

Making it realistic and believable is evidently an important aim of the production. The New Orleans setting, with two of the characters from the Deep South, makes the accents a big hurdle for the cast to overcome. As Hextall says bluntly, “either an accent sounds real, or it doesn’t”. But with the help of OUDS voice coach Margo Annet, books, videos and recordings, the medley of accents seem to have come together. Blanche (Ruby Thomas) and Stella (Hannah Roberts) have as good as perfected the southern drawl, in contrast with the men’s New Orleans’accents; the divide particularly significant in the final scene (which I watched being rehearsed).

Ruby Thomas, who has already starred in TV show Lewis and blockbuster Wild Child as well as a dozen plays in Oxford, confesses to being “really nervous” about playing lead Blanche DuBois: the accent, the size of her part, and the extent of her character’s experience. It is one of the potential difficulties with the play: a challenging and controversial role because of Blanche’s past and the events that take place towards the end of the piece, which has also been played by the likes of Vivien Leigh, Rachel Weisz and Cate Blanchett. Hextall too says she can’t let herself think about the magnitude of the production: “I’ve got to keep my head over the water”.

But despite the fears, it seems that the hype is not unjustified. It is hard to judge how the play will turn out from a snippet, but the final scene, even when still in rehearsal, is genuinely moving – those who know the end of the story will realise how tricky that is to carry off. The last moments of the relationship between Stanley and Blanche, with Ruby Thomas unable to hide her fragility against Corrigan’s domination of the stage, made me want to witness the events that led up to such a conclusion. Of course one scene doesn’t make a production, but it certainly looks gripping – and at this rate the remaining tickets aren’t going to last long.

II’m risking falling into a southern Californian colloquialism here, but the upcoming production of Dennis Kelly’s play Love and Money is intense. Sure, it’s success has been attributed to its prophetic treatment of the debt crisis and credit bubble that have become the miasmic tragedy which has become emblematic of our generation.
But Chris Adams’ production owes its intensity not to the play’s timely relevance but to the performance of the actors across the board. Kelly’s dialogue is direct and, more often than not, delivered directly to the audience. In the mouths of the protagonists David, played by Jeremy Neumark Jones, and Jess, played by Sarah Perry, it is impossible to escape the hard-hitting emotional intensity of the themes. The story, in brief, is a non-linear telling of David and Jess’ awe-inspiring love and their equally awe-inspiring ruin through their descent into debt, mental illness and murder.

Neumark Jones’ bleary-eyed portrayal of David is enough to provoke our sympathies but at times you wish to see him as more of a fighter, resisting despair as he becomes a victim to it. Felix Legge and Louisa Hollway provide one of play’s only humourous hiatuses, albeit darkly, with their perfect depiction of parents negotiating the finances behind burying their daughter.

The counterpoint of their dialogue is exact and, a rarity in Oxford drama, they actually seem to embody the middle-aged middle class with a well-balanced touch. Etiene Ekpo-Utip shines in as some sort of con-artist and gives bubbling energy to a scene wherein he repeatedly pushes his business card to Isabel Drury’s Debbie.
But ultimately it is Sarah Perry’s depiction of Jess that both gives this play its beating heart and ultimately keeps it from falling into a despairing portrayal of materialism, debt and the price of love. Her final monologue is delivered in an air of breathy hopefulness but it is her physicality and embodiment of Jess’ character beyond her words that makes her so utterly convincing.

This production’s only risk is that it promises to be exhausting to watch. Each scene has the actors thrown into the height of emotional intensity, with little reprieve in the textual banality that usually makes emotional moments in theatre all the more powerful. But this ensemble carries off the constant emotional high with flying colours and ultimately serves Kelly’s language to the utmost. Love and Money is a meditation on the two conflicting motivations for every young person trying to make their way in the world and deserves to be seen simply for the reason that it paints the picture of the world our generation is scrambling to find a place in. You may leave this show emotionally exhausted but unlike most Oxford student drama, you will leave having intensely felt something worth feeling.