In 2002 The Tolkien Audio Collection was released, containing snippets of the author reading from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. This 1952 recording of Tolkien feature the author reading the famous ‘One Ring’ poem which forms the epigraph to each of the trilogy’s novels. It is fascinating to hear him pronounce the words of his invented languages – listen to the guttural way in which he rolls the ‘rs’ in ‘Mordor,’ giving the dark land a harsh and foreboding feel. Before speaking these lines in his role as Gandalf in the Peter Jackson movie adaptation, Sir Ian McKellen listened to this recording and strove to imitate Tolkien’s accent. 

As well as an author of fantasy literature, Tolkien was a prolific scholar of medieval English, and was closely associated with Oxford. He was twice pointed Professor of Anglo-Saxon, as well as the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature. The influence of his studies on The Lord of the Rings is huge: Mordor, for example, derives from the Old English word ‘morthor,’ which means murder, and Middle Earth, the setting for Tolkien’s stories, is taken from the Anglo-Saxon ‘middengeard’ – a term they used to describe the inhabitable world. Tolkien single-handedly invented several languages, and it is an immense pleasure to hear these beautiful and alien tongues spoken from the creator’s mouth. 

 â˜…★★★☆

Four Stars

On a black screen, drum rolls develop, building up in intensity. In the first scene, we discover the drummer responsible: Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller) is a first year student at the fictional Schaffer School of Music. It is allegedly the best music school in the country, but that is not enough for Andrew. He will stop at nothing to be a great jazz musician like Charlie Parker. He listens to Bobby Rich religiously, and he spends his spare time practising, occasionally taking a break to go to the movies with his father. It is evident that he has enormous drive and ambition, in contrast with the laid-back attitude of his family, in particular, his father.

The drums stop. Terence Fletcher (J. K. Simmons) fills the door. Emerging from the darkness like a mysterious character out of film noir, it is immediately obvious that he is the one to impress. He is the conductor of the studio band, and a place on there could potentially lead to greatness. It is also immediately obvious that this is a difficult task, and he does not suffer fools gladly. After stretching Andrew to play in double time, he leaves as quickly as he came, seemingly unimpressed. The door swings open again. Surely an offer to play in the band is on the cards? No: he came for his jacket. This is not the film you were expecting.

This is also not a movie about the kindly mentor/protégé relationship. Far from that; it is the tale of obsession with an art, and the means someone will go through to achieve their ambitions. After gaining a place on the band, Andrew is initially ecstatic. Although brutal to his band, Terence seems to genuinely care about him, asking him about his family situation and what he hopes to achieve in jazz drumming. When he allows Andrew to practise ‘Whiplash’ with the band, he pauses at a part where there is a change of rhythm. He turns to Andrew.

“Not quite my tempo.“

These four words will be etched upon your memory having seen the film. Initially gentle, it is clear that this was merely a façade for Terence, the Sergeant Harman of this Full Metal Drumkit. After repeated failed attempts to play the correct rhythm, Terence hurls a chair at Andrew, hurling abuse about his family and slapping him. He is obviously a man who cares so much about art, like Andrew, that he will stop at nothing to achieve great results, even if it means physical abuse and inflicting psychological terror on members of his band. He also has the very best lines. Gazing into the terrified face of Andrew, struggling to hold back tears, he berates: “Oh my dear God – are you one of those single tear people?“

J. K. Simmons is wonderful as the intimidating Fletcher, and it is no surprise that he has mopped up every Best Supporting Actor award in the run up to Oscars season. He delivers his lines perfectly, frequently humorous but always with a malicious edge. However later we also see another, more vulnerable side to him in the film, and both sides are effectively captured by Simmons. In Whiplash, the character he plays is not merely just the head of a jazz band. He also embodies drive and ambition, and is the man that Andrew needs to see him on the way to greatness. The pairing of these two characters is electrifying to see: it is an unhealthy relationship, with both members exacerbating each other’s worst characteristics, but together they can produce something great.

We also cannot forget Miles Teller, who is shaping up as one of the best emerging actors of his generation. Every single scene contains Teller’s Andrew, and although unsympathetic at times in his interactions outside the world of jazz drumming (one notable scene with Andrew’s girlfriend is reminiscent of – and equally biting as – the opening scene from The Social Network), Teller is very effective in conveying Andrew’s feelings to the screen. Watching the film, it is possible to feel the pain, both physically and emotionally, that Andrew goes through, and the contrast between the beauty of the jazz and the visceral reality of drumming.

For a film about music, the soundtrack is exceptional. Even for non-musicians, the film makes it possible to appreciate the hours of practice put into a performance and the pure joy of performing music. The ending scene in particular is quite possibly the best 15 minutes of cinema I have enjoyed for a long time. It is amazing that such a simple scene on paper can evoke such tension and rise to such breathtaking heights, and I defy anyone who watches this scene to not feel the same way.

Whiplash is effective because it tackles age-old themes of aspirations, sacrifices, motivation, and the mentor-protégé relationship, and although many films have dealt with these principles, Whiplash turns much of this on its head and possesses an incredible script and wonderful actors. Compared to the other Best Picture nominees, there is also a refreshing brevity about the film. All the scenes are perfectly structured, and there are none that are excessive or lacking. Feeling self-conscious, perhaps this review has been rushing or dragging, but similar criticisms cannot be levied against Whiplash. It is an interesting, entertaining film with two amazing performances, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

★★★★☆
Four Stars

Somewhere between that spine-tingling sense of déjà vu and severe clinical paranoia lies the tone for Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy, which draws its plot from José Saramago’s O Homem Duplicado – literally, “The Duplicated Man”.

The bleak, morose feel of Richard Ayoade’s doppelganger dark comedy, The Double, is here, but Enemy is less interested in the comic, and more concerned with some Orwellian sense of a society controlled by fear. Jake Gyllenhaal is Adam, a history professor of tragic isolation (despite a seemingly long-term relationship with Mélanie Laurent). Gyllenhaal is a masterful chameleon, and the reserved, introverted subtlety of Adam is as far from the seedy, electrically creepy Lou Bloom from Nightcrawler as you could imagine. The role is doubly juicy for the actor because – as the original title suggests – Adam meets his doppelganger (a charismatic actor named Anthony Claire) and Gyllenhaal of course plays him too. It’s a delicious role for any actor to play two contrasting figures – two sides of the same coin, to exhaust that cliché – within the same space, as Nicolas Cage demonstrated so aptly in Adaptation and Jeremy Irons did in Dead Ringers.

Adam first spies his apparent clone when watching a film on the recommendation of a colleague. It’s a double-take moment, and he pauses the screen to get a closer look. Immediately, as one might expect, he googles the actor in question and is flabbergasted to find that they appear to be exact carbon copies of each other. But the story doesn’t end there for Adam. This isn’t going to become just some anecdote he tells to people at work (he doesn’t really talk to many people anyway). He becomes bent on tracking down this actor – this mirror – and seeing for himself whether they truly are identical. Adam has no plan, he has no grand vision of what he’s going to do when he finds Anthony, but he knows that this is something he has to do. He later explains to the actor what motivated him when they finally do meet: ever so simply, it was that he “needed to know”.

It’s a harrowingly entrancing scene when Adam and Anthony come face-to-face for the first time. Aside from sharing the same face, they have the same voice, they even have identical scars on their abdomen. It’s as if they were separated at birth, but they weren’t. They are a completely coincidental phenomenon. Anthony, hot-headed and lecherous, is elated by the prospect and wants to use this unique opportunity to arrange a sexual liaison with Adam’s girlfriend, Mary (pretending to be Adam). Adam offers little resistance and proceeds to break into Anthony’s apartment and lie with his girlfriend, Helen (Sarah Gadon). Adam isn’t interested in sex. He just wants to know what it’s like to live in another person’s shoes.

Villeneuve doesn’t get hung up on trying to tell us what Adam needed to know, or why he needed to know it so badly. Adam’s actions require no logical coherent trail of thought because he isn’t dealing with a logical coherent situation. We’re not supposed to just happen upon our doubles in the middle of our everyday lives. We’re not supposed to feel like there’s somebody else living in the exact same body that we are. We have grown up in a society that has repeatedly told us to value and accept our individuality, because we are all different. Clearly, our society is not one Villeneuve is interested in exploring – not literally, anyway.

The central irony is that Adam – a history professor, supposedly an expert on totalitatian governments – cannot see the web within which he entangles himself so deeply. He lectures about how totalitarian states execute their authority so well because they censor any means of individual expression. Isn’t that what’s happening to Adam? By encountering his doppelganger – his exact replica – he is now the furthest thing from “individual” a human being could be.

It wouldn’t be right to talk about this film without mentioning the ubiquitous spiders. Yes, spiders. They continuously crop up throughout the picture. At the beginning of the film, we see a naked woman on the verge of crushing a live tarantula with her stiletto. At another point, a monumentally huge spindly spider crawls across the Toronto skyline. These arachnids come and go with seemingly no purpose, and certainly no explanation. I won’t spoil the perplexing final shot, but yes – as you’ve probably guessed – it involves a spider. So why spiders? Are they a symbol of something? What do they represent? It’s probably got something to do with webs – metaphorically – and how Adam doesn’t realise just how sticky the totalitarian webs of his society are until he is well and truly stuck in them. In any case, the spiders make for an intriguing, if at times distracting, symbol.

When Adam, curious, subtly asks his mother (Isabella Rossellini) if he ever had a twin, she replies very assertively: “You are my only son, I am your only mother”. But this isn’t about mothers and sons. This isn’t about blood relations. This is about our relationships with strangers – people we have never met, people who we’d assume couldn’t be further from us. Villeneuve brandishes a society wherein to meet one’s identical double is not the most fascinating or bizarre thing to happen, but to be happy, to be self-contented and to have no desire to want to exchange places with and live for a moment as that double – that would be a very unusual thing indeed. 

The cast has only two characters: Richard Parker 1, and Richard Parker 2. Poor Player Productions’ Richard Parker, directed by James Watts, and starring Jake Boswall and Ieuan Perkins, is a play about two unfamiliar men with the same name thrown together on the deck of a ship at sea. Their chance encounter is one part in a chain of events linking the two Richards. Being stranded at sea for without food or fresh-water, the two undergo an intensely cathartic and revelatory ordeal with their relationship exploring the links between fate and coincidence.

Jake Boswall as Richard Parker 2, with his wearied cabin-fever and voice of sanity, brilliantly complements the frivolous and enigmatically nonchalant Richard Parker1. We, the audience, can identify with Boswall’s physically and emotionally drained character, prone to panic and melancholy, whereas Perkins’ Parker offers an extremely watchable and comically immature characterization in the face of palpable hardship. Both characters are steeped in writer Owen Thomas’s comic style, an incongruous surrealism in wild and uncomfortable crises. Such a style is exemplified in Parker 1’s melancholy lament about his first experience of death, which he wistfully explains was when he poked a piece of chicken down a plug hole. Parker 2’s ignorance of his own character flaws, and his inability (or is it refusal?) to grasp the gravity of the situation lends his character to some hilariously absurd moments of normality and calm in the storm.

Such conflicts of character give rise to a black comedy which releases itself in the intensity of the situation. Ieuan Jones aptly described his relationship with Jake Boswall’s character almost being “domestic” at times. There’s much truth in that, despite the two being relative strangers to each other; their physical and psychological isolation forces them to clash and meld their personalities, much to amusement of those watching. There’s an evident rapport between Boswall and Jones which makes this two-man play first and foremost about their fascinating relationship.

Central to the play is the clash between chance and fate, with Richard Parker 2 obsessed by fate and historical coincidence. The mystery of what has brought these two stranded namesakes together promises to hold a gripping attraction throughout the progression of the narrative.

The script itself is sharp and memorable, and I have no doubt it contains many a quotable line, and it crucially enhances the atmosphere of discord, tension, fear and thought. Under the direction of James Watts, the lines have been lifted to convince the audience very early on to invest in these characters and their relationship. This is best seen in an electrified moment in which Parker 1 deceives Parker 2 by dramatically claiming to see a shark in the water, in order to eat the last sardine of Parker 2’s tin – which he absurdly refuses to share with the deliriously starving Parker 1.

The play is going to be performed in the intimate – to recycle its overused epithet – Burton Taylor Studio, whose minimal design and space should definitely contribute to the claustrophobic restlessness and to the personality clash over the mundane and existential which should make this show a raucously laugh inducing treat of black comedy.

Richard Parker will be performed from Tuesday to Saturday of Second Week at the Burton Taylor Studio, at 19:30.

Into the Woods has just hit UK cinemas, offering a silver screen take on the much loved Stephen Sondheim musical. Starring big names like Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt and Johnny Depp, there’s a big chance that at least one actor you might like is starring in it. At first glance, this might seem like a box office gimmick but in fact it’s very much the performances of these much acclaimed names that makes the film such a delight. The film follows much of the original musical’s plot: we take the well known stories of Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk and Rapunzel, and cross them over in a story focusing on a childless couple that is offered a bargain by a witch. We see the consequences of each of the characters’ desires, whatthey must go through to get their happy ending and, of course, what happens after that…

Of all the things that first hits you about the film (aside from the constant music, of course), is its colour palette and tone. Draped in dark blues, murky golds and blacks, this is no fluffy Disney story. Into the Woods is called that for a reason – the woods are dark, dangerous and conjure up all manner of things. Aside from the bright glowing red of Red Riding Hood’s cloak, Rob Marshall has evidently gone for a specific tone for a reason, and it works beautifully. 

Though I’m a fan of the original musical via the soundtrack, I’ve never seen it live in the theatre and therefore cannot offer a direct comparison. However, Rob Marshall’s translation of the many storylines onto the screen is successful. Some stories that are given more time in the musical are perhaps a little lacking: the ending and the development of Rapunzel’s story, for example. I don’t necessarily think it cheapens the points that are being made in the film, but in comparison to the musical, it makes it a little weaker. The scene changes are smart and snappy, whilst the choreography is cleverly done so that there’s no lagging time in which the audience can get bored. It’s easy to be held in rapture all the way through.

This brings me to my point about the performances offered in the film. With such a big ensemble cast it’s easy to lose some people along the way – I sorely missed what Christine Baranski and Simon Russell Beale could have brought to the table had they been given more time. But that’s just part and parcel of it. However, characters like Chris Pine’s Prince or Billy Magnussen’s Prince’s Brother fill up their limited screentime with incandescent performances that have more depth than other actors might give. It’s fair to say that the four main leads are formidable: Meryl Streep is untouchable but so are Emily Blunt, James Corden and Anna Kendrick, all veterans of musical and costume drama who we knew would be able to accomplish their roles when we heard they were cast.

Overall, there is much to like about Into the Woods. At first, I was worried about the running time, and how this might alienate those with no predisposition to musicals. Coming from a fairly musical-averse household, two hours was not met with enthusiasm. I felt that the sharp characterisations of Cinderella and the Prince amongst others were great enough to make the material compelling, enabling the time to fly by in a blur of excitement. For certain, the ending (and by that I generally mean, from the second half) is not as dark or brooding as the original musical. That being said, Into the Woods still manages to place itself in the better half of musical film adaptations thanks to a strong cast and just as strong production: see it if you have the chance. 

Amidst the swarm of collections and first week tutorials, you may find yourself wondering what all the academic toil and strife is for. Testament of Youth, based on the memoirs of Vera Brittain, gives us the perspective we need at this time of tears, presenting the tale of a fearless young woman whose brother has to insistently persuade her father to let her apply to Oxford. The First World War interrupts her dreams and she leaves Somerville
College to give, love and lose all in the War. Yet, somewhat surprisingly, this is a film of remarkable hope. Despite the fact that other, perhaps more beautiful, Oxford colleges posed as Somerville, it is nevertheless a thrill in the cinema to spot the streets that are well-worn by our feet. In the context of such bravery, however, it is humbling to think that we have the privilege to follow in the footsteps of so many students who have aspired to such great things.

The film offers insight into the challenges faced by women trying to break down the barriers of inequality. “Her degree won’t even be officially recognised by the University, you know,” Vera’s brother says to her father as he pleads with him to let her sit the entrance exam. Without formal tuition or schooling, Vera has a strong disadvantage. But nevertheless, with the face of bravery which she wore for the rest of her life, she remains determined. When staring at a Latin paper, which she was not expecting, she instead writes her entrance exam in German.

Swedish actress Alicia Vikander (Anna Karenina) stands out with her effortlessly graceful acting and enigmatic eyes, which captivate the audience’s imagination. In a Q&A at the British Film Industry on Monday, she commented, “It’s rare that a strong female lead comes up, so when you see one, you just grab at it,” and that this was a “female perspective I’ve never come across. As a woman, I connected greatly.”

Kit Harington (Pompeii, Game of Thrones), Colin Morgan (Merlin), and Taron Egerton (Kingsman), play her lover, her friend, and her brother respectively, all giving strong performances. Golden Globe nominated Dominic West (The Affair, Pride, The Hour) also brought charisma to the screen as Vera Brittain’s well-to-do father and mill owner. 

The director, James Kent, and producer, Rosie Alison, were present at the BFI event, along with Baroness Shirley Williams, the daughter of Vera Brittain. Baroness Williams astutely remarked, “Inspiring figures are those that are
not conventional.” The director hoped that the “glorious young men [of the film would] come alive again and [will] never be forgotten by the new generation.”

More than anything else, however, what truly brought Testament of Youth together was Rob Hardy’s incredibly moving cinematography, especially in his evocative shooting of landscapes and the perfectly capitulated chaos of the battlefront. Testament of Youth brings Vera Brittain’s searing memoirs of the First World War to the cinema in an ethereally crisp and cathartic manner. It is rare to find a tale so truthfully poignant and moving, and cinematography so flawlessly breath-taking.