Films
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Stylish Films: Back To Black
Amy Winehouse is a musical heroine of mine. Back to Black has been the soundtrack to many of my life events, and I feel lucky enough to have seen her perform live, in Manchester, when she was at the peak of her powers. Her tragic life, and its end is a well known story, and her death is one that continues to haunt, a real story of what ifs, and what else she could achieve. Now, Sam Taylor Johnson has turned Amy’s life into a film, Back to Black, a film which has been accused of everything, from whitewashing Amy’s life, playing down the role her husband played in her…
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Spiders Web – An Agatha Christie Rarity
Spiders Web is a bit of an Agatha Christie oddity. a 1950’s play that was written at the request of Margaret Rutherford during Rehearsals for ‘Witness for the Prosecution‘. It was Agatha’s 2nd most successful play after The Mousetrap, and was turned into a novel by Charles Osborne (who did the same for Black Coffee), and yet it is certainly not up there with the best of Agatha, despite having a great heroine in Clarissa. I first read the novelisation during the first lockdown, when I made a decision to read all of Agatha’s books and plays, and found it very stagy, something you would expect as it started life…
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The Motive And The Cue – Live From The National Theatre
Many cinemas are now showing National Theatre productions on the big screen, and last week, The Light Cinema in Walsall showed a new play, The Motive and the Cue, written by Jack Thorne and directed by Sam Mendes. This premiered on 21 April 2023 at the National Theatre in London, and is now having sporadic filmed showings at selected cinemas around the country. The film of the play portrays the behind the scenes history of the 1964 Broadway modern-dress production of William Shakespeare ‘s Hamlet which starred Richard Burton as the title character in a production directed by Sir John Gielgud . The history of this play was fraught due…
