Frank Wendekind’s play was banned in the 1890s for the same reason that its recent musical adaptation has enjoyed such success: its vivid exploration of the tumult and trials of puberty. Spring Awakening is a musical about tension: sexual and sensual; repression and expression; death and maturity; authority and responsibility.

The 6th Week performances by the Magdalen Players in Keble’s O’Reilly Theatre will be some of the first seen of the play since it left the West End. If you missed the show in New York or London, don’t make the same mistake twice. The play is powerful and confrontational. It unabashedly asks questions of itself, the audience, and society. The music, folk-rock hybrid, is stunning and the vocal talent of this cast is impressive.

James Carroll, the show’s director, intentionally echoes some features of the Broadway and West End productions while deliberately breaking with conventions concerning accents. The set and choreography are highly reminiscent of previous professional performances. The set relies mainly on lighting to set mood and location, a minimalistic convention which helps to modernize the play and highlight the actors. While convention works for the set, it falls flat with the choreography. The play is about the chaos of pubescent minds and bodies, but mimicking the choreography of the original productions lends itself to stale numbers. ‘The Bitch of Living,’ a punk-infused number bristling with sexual frustration, is meant to reflect the raw and confused passions of the characters, yet the production’s choreography seems stilted and rehearsed. It gives the whole experience a contemplated feel which works at cross-purposes with the chaos of the number.

On the whole, however, the production feels professional. Alice Pearse captures the innocence, desire, and sexual curiosity of Wendla. Her voice shines like crystal, which is, in some ways, a problem. In this punkish musical, her clarity comes off as simplistic – even if her melody and harmonizing are spot-on.
It is Cassie Barraclough (Ilse) who focuses our attention on the pain, confusion, and dangers of the quiet repression of sex and sexuality. Brain Earp’s portrayal of the protagonist, Melchior, effectively captures his character’s inner strength and confidence. In ‘Totally F**ked,’ his interaction with the cast demonstrates his power over his peers – a power which frees them all, through suicide, through rebellion, and through the pains of pregnancy. This play destroys the power of shame, and if the actors don’t balk at the responsibility their empowerment could be contagious.

As a general rule, comedy and cash don’t make for a good mix. The cheaper the film, the stronger the script has to be – just watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail, or (though no-one did) Evan Almighty. By now, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost should really know this. Shaun of the Dead, still their best film, was also their cheapest, and from there the price of their films has climbed while the quality has declined. Now they’ve written their first film together (Pegg usually writes with Edgar Wright), and it’s disappointingly average.

Paul follows Graeme and Clive, two nerds on a road trip across the alien hotspots of America. Before long, they run across the eponymous alien, voiced by Seth Rogen, who has been living secretly on Earth for decades, advising film-makers about alien technology. At the press conference afterwards, Pegg is proud of this idea, as it allows them to ‘retroactively rip everything off by saying it was all Paul’s idea. It’s very clever, when you think about it.’ Paul needs their help to get him to his ship and escape the planet before the secret service catch him and cut out his brain. Along the way, they pick up Ruth (Kristen Wiig), the naïve daughter of a Creationist as they try to escape Jason Bateman’s emotionless, sunglasses-wearing agent.

If nothing else, Pegg and Frost have incredible on-screen chemistry, which the former attributes to their genuine friendship: ‘Nick and I were best friends before we were colleagues, so we channelled a bit of our own little bromance.’ The tender, loving looks they exchange, the lingering of a hand on the other’s shoulder for just a bit too long – these little gestures elevate their relationship above mere laddy banter. However, their comic sensibilities are unavoidably British, and their quaint jokes about tea-making sit ill-at-ease with Rogen’s pot-smoking alien slacker, who (as is typical of Rogen) always seems to be laughing at his own jokes more than the audience.

As a road movie, it inevitably moves at a fair old pace, but the frenetic forward momentum of the plot makes the film seem slapdash rather than exciting. Most glaringly, they choose to give Ruth her own road away from Damascus moment, and in a split-second revelation, she loses her faith. Though her subsequent indulgences in naïve swearing offer some of the film’s funniest moments – including the immortal line, ‘Get away from me you vaginas’ – Paul never quite recovers from this U-turn in the plot.

Much of the blame lies with the direction. Both Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz had a genuine charm to them, yet here this is lost. Instead, we get the slick but unadventurous guiding hand of Greg Mottola, of Superbad fame, and the result is a visually bland film. Paul himself is a convincingly rendered CGI character, but the film as a whole never really engages as it could. The nerdy eagerness of Frost and Pegg to cram their script with as many sci-fi references and nods as possible eventually drags the whole film down, while the style seems too weighed down by its budget to try anything truly original.

Mark Romanek is a polite soft spoken man from Chicago with only three films to his name so far: Static with Keith Gordan, One Hour Photo starring a dark and twisted Robin Williams and recent release Never Let Me Go with young actors Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield. Many readers might be familiar with Romanek’s music video history. He has got to work with some of the greatest artists of a generation including Iggy Pop (‘Beside You’), Madonna (‘Rain’) and Jonny Cash (‘Hurt’) to name just a few; of course his most famous music video is ‘Scream’ with Michael and Janet Jackson, which the Guinness Book of World Records has as the most expensive music video ever made. Strangely Romanek is not happy with this achievement and constantly protests that he doesn’t like ‘being known as the guy who makes all the big budget things’, and that in fact this is inaccurate as the most expensive music video of all time is ‘Michael Jackson’s ‘Black and White’, which was $10 million as opposed to the $7 million ‘Scream’. ‘I am waiting for one of these interviews to get back to the Guinness people so they can correct it,’ Romanek adds. No, Romanek, brought up on avant-garde and independent film makers such as John Cassavetes, is much more proud of his less expensive projects: ‘I did a music video for Beck of about $200,000 and it is one of the best things I have ever done.’

After about ten years in the music industry that were ‘a lot of fun’ Romanek has developed enough of a reputation to get on the radar of the studios and get into making films which, as a self-confessed ‘film brat’, was his true calling. He may only have a few films under his belt and it is clear from the way that he talks about them that he holds a soft spot for each one. His first major production was One Hour Photo, which was released in 2002 and starred Robin Williams as mini-lab photo technician who becomes obsessed with the Yorkin family whose pictures he prints for over ten years. The film got overall positive reviews and demonstrated a darker side to Williams that the audience had not seen much of before. Of course Romanek, who comes across as tirelessly modest, takes no credit for William’s transformation in the film, saying that Williams ‘felt a really deep connection with the character and understood him intimately’.

Romanek’s new release certainly has a lot to live up to and has been gaining a substantial amount of hype around it since its first première back in the summer of 2010. Adapting Kazuro Ishiguro’s powerful novel Never Let Me Go for the silver screen is a risky move since many people will have strong opinions about what is left in and what is taken out but Romanek doesn’t seem intimidated by any of this: ‘Alex Garland did a great job with the adaptation … I wept at the end of the script like I did at the end of the book, so he successfully transferred the emotional mechanism of it.’ Romanek certainly has a lot to be confident about: screenwriter Garland has already gained a reputation with his novel The Beach and the screenplays for films Sunshine and 28 Days Later. On top of this, Kazuo Ishiguro himself was on board to help out and visited the set once or twice. Romanek describes how Ishiguro ‘always thought he would just be in the way, but it was a tremendous morale boost.’ The author even gave his seal of approval by having tears in his eyes when he saw the final product. For Romanek this was a huge relief as ‘it would have been horrible if he had hated it.’

As well as a strong team working on the script, Romanek was fortunate enough to get an equally strong cast in front of the camera. Andrew Garfield, who recently made his name in Oscar-nominated The Social Network and has now been cast as the new Spiderman, was Romanek’s first choice to play Tommy. Romanek says ‘I wanted Andrew because I saw his performance in Boy A, which was astonishing but not widely seen which is a shame’. Keira Knightley‘s agent approached them for the part of Ruth which just left the part of Kathy to be filled: ‘We were having trouble finding a Kathy because we just couldn’t get the right person and at the time we knew about Carey [Mulligan], but she couldn’t get a film financed with her as the lead. But then the head of the studio at the time saw the world première of An Education at Sundance and sent a text to all of us saying “Hire the genius Mulligan”.’ All these factors make Romanek sure that his film will be well received here in Britain, saying ‘we have screened the film and it seemed like British audiences were deeply moved by it, even though British people don’t like to admit when they are moved by something.‘ In fact at the time of the interview, Romanek was more nervous about the speech he had to give when the film opened the London Film Festival than how the film will be received. ‘I have to get up and speak in front of 2,000 people, my friends and family are there,’ he complained, ‘I have my little spiel but it is still terrifying. Public speaking is the scariest thing – people are more afraid of it than death, which means they would rather die than give their own eulogy.’

Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise) is a man who can never say I love you, or at least can never mean it. From the moment Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.) forces him to yell ‘Show me the Money’ like he means it, we hug our pillows and hope that he will eventually be able to shout ‘I love you’ with as much gusto. How can we be so naïve? The walls of Gooding Jr.’s dressing room are covered with meaningless motivational plaques like ‘A Negative Attitude is a Positive Nothing’ but why does Jerry’s impassioned ‘Shut up, play the game, play it from your heart’ mean something to us? Surely it’s dribble and the script is pure rom-com slush. Why do we invest ourselves so earnestly in this one?

Even fans of the genre suspect that anyone who enjoys romantic comedy too much is, at best, a bit of a sap or, at worst, plain weird. As Tom Cruise sits in first-class describing his action-movie-style marriage proposal, Dorothy Boyd (Renée Zellweger) is back in economy, peering down the centre-aisle and snuffling popcorn. Is this not a pretty cruel reflection of the film’s target audience? The seminal question raised in High Fidelity was ‘Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?’. Substitute music for ‘romantic comedy’ and you might find a hint towards the peculiar depth of this film.

If you’ve seen the film four or five times then you might remember that scene when, elated after managing to keep hold of a client, Jerry is tuning his radio and the riff from ‘Bitch’ by the Rolling Stones doesn’t quite do it for him but Tom Petty’s ‘Free Falling’ touches a nerve. The soundtrack is provided by men who are too man to cry, from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen. More often than not, it is Jerry himself who is choosing the soundtrack to his own life. Even though the tracks sweat machismo, they somehow seem right because they are chosen by and for someone so anxious and self-critical. Again, don’t we see something of our own impulse to cinema-fy our love-life?

It takes a while for Jerry to find his soundtrack; in the same way the film takes a while to get started. For the first hour or so it does not seem to make up its mind about what kind of story it wants to tell. It is a film full of false starts and it knows it. The flawless ten-minute sequence that opens the film feels like a pitch for a different movie. A dissatisfied sports agent finds out he is ‘just another shark in a suit’ and sets out to ‘start his life’ for real. We see Tom Cruise’s mission statement bashed out in an inspiring montage of running in the rain, wiping away tears and tapping on 1990s computers. It surprises us how short this narrative lasts, but, then again, the ‘memo’ wasn’t all that hard to write. For the audience, the pace-y opening was an easy roller-coaster to ride. Jerry Maguire, when it gets going, is a struggle towards a happy ending. The emphasis upon characters’ efforts to face up to reality rather than live in fantasy are strangely brutal for a film that sells itself as a simple romantic tear-jerker. ‘On the surface, everything looks fine’ says Dorothy. It’s a frighteningly honest couple who ask each other, half-an-hour away from what we can only hope is a happy finish, ‘why do you love me?’.

‘We enjoy watching other people invent their own love stories; Jerry Maguire reminds us, gently, what we already know: that it’s all a bit of a fantasy. So the film has to be loud and cheesy and full of crap songs. It’s about hearing clichés: the words of Jerry’s old mentor, or the lovers who tell each other ‘you complete me’ or the lyrics of a Springsteen song.It’s a rom-com that we’ve seen plenty of times before but this one offers us some reflection. It seems to say ‘This is how we love and it is entirely unoriginal’.

Jerry is right, ‘we live in a cynical world’. But the fantasies and the clichés matter: we can’t help replaying and regurgitating them, rattling them back to someone we love. We’ve just got to deal with it, pay attention and take it seriously.’