Tuesday, 19 April 2016

G322 AUDIENCES AND INSTITUTIONS (FILM): LEGEND

Link to last year's blog here



Tom Hardy divides and conquers as the Krays

Legend review by Mark Kermode 

3 / 5 stars 

Tom Hardy is bang-on as both Ronnie and Reggie in a cartoonish but entertaining account of the Kray twins’ East End reign.
Any retelling of the over-mythologised Kray twins’ tale walks a thin line between the glamorised cliches of Ronnie and Reggie nostalgia and the pin-sharp parody of Monty Python’s Piranha brothers’ Doug and Dinsdale sketch. A “combination of violence and sarcasm” fuelled the Piranhas’ reign of terror, and the same could be said of these latest screen Krays, with writer-director Brian Helgeland deploying much deadpan humour amid the beatings, stabbings and shootings of East End folklore.
Hinging on the double-barrelled blast of Tom Hardy’s bang-on central performance(s), Legend is a brash, cartoonish affair, happy to bask in the reflected glory of its subjects’ bizarre cultural icon status. With an eye on the international market, Helgeland (who co-wrote the screenplay for LA Confidential) tips his hat to Scarface, White Heat and Sunset Boulevard, investing his British anti-heroes with a stateside pizzazz entirely befitting their Rat Pack aspirations. This may be a British-French co-production, derived from John Pearson’s insider text The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins, but Helgeland’s worldview is more Goodfellas than The Long Good Friday, a portrait of glittering London as artificial as the Krays’ star-struck vision of themselves as the last of the famous international playboys.
Tom Hardy as Reggie Kray.
‘The film’s real sucker punch’: Tom Hardy as Reggie Kray in Legend.
We begin with the Krays already ruling their East End roost, eschewing the traditional traipse through childhood, leaping straight into their turf war with the Richardson gang, which would come to a head in the Blind Beggar pub in 1966. Frances Shea (Emily Browning) proves our unlikely narrator, recounting the twins’ glory years through her relationship with Reggie, of whom she declares “it took a lot of love to hate him”. As a character, Shea is fragile and understated, but her voiceover puts the ripe in tripe; it’s a credit to Browning that she gets through its hackneyed “gangster prince” cliches without laughing. Meanwhile the screen is a heady swirl of shiny streets and spangly nightclubs, with Duffy belting out Timi Yuro’s Make the World Go Away to celeb-packed crowds as flat-footed cops (Christopher Eccleston’s uptight Leonard “Nipper” Read) and lairy villains (Sam Spruell’s nicely drawn Jack “the Hat” McVitie) drift in and out of carefully choreographed frames.





The film’s real sucker punch, however, is Hardy – both of him. Having originally offered Hardy the role of Reggie, Helgeland was persuaded to let the actor wrestle with Ron as well (both on and off screen), a dual role to which he brings the same commitment – physical, intellectual, emotional – as Jeremy Irons essaying both Mantle brothers in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers. The result is a striking portrait of a single divided self: Reggie, the calculatingly cool charmer, whose sharp suits mirror his businessman’s mind; Ron, the paranoid schizophrenic, whose lust for random violence is matched only by his passion for handsome young men (“I’m homosexual, but I’m not a poof”) and his dear old mum’s tea and cake. With his pursed lip, protruding jaw and bulldog absurdism (he parades a dinner-jacketed donkey through a nightclub), the heavily bespectacled Ron occasionally resembles Matt Lucas doing an unkind impression of Mark Lamarr, with a touch of Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge and Patrick Marber’s Peter O’Hanraha-hanrahan thrown in for good measure. In Hardy’s hands, Ron is a tragicomic character, a madman whom Chazz Palminteri’s Angelo Bruno wants muzzled, but to whom Reggie remains devoted, even as the pair are beating seven bells out of each other.When Gary and Martin Kemp played the leads in Peter Medak’s 1990 film The Krays, both were overshadowed by Billie Whitelaw’s matriarchal Violet, the true focus of Philip Ridley’s script. There’s no chance of anyone overshadowing the mesmerisingly physical Hardy here, not least because the supporting characters remain just that – thumbnail sketches of secondary roles, albeit elegantly filled by the likes of David Thewlis and Paul Bettany. The Krays always longed for the spotlight (David Bailey told the BBC that “their big mistake was posing for me”) and that’s exactly what this faintly ridiculous but undeniably entertaining movie gives them. From the title down, Ron and Reg would have loved Legend. Whether that’s a criticism or a compliment remains a moot point.

For your essay:

OWNERSHIP: A Working Title film. 
AUDIENCE: "Legend is a brash, cartoonish affair, happy to bask in the reflected glory of its subjects’ bizarre cultural icon status. With an eye on the international market, Helgeland (who co-wrote the screenplay for LA Confidential) tips his hat to Scarface, White Heat and Sunset Boulevard, investing his British anti-heroes with a stateside pizzazz entirely befitting their Rat Pack aspirations. This may be a British-French co-production, derived from John Pearson’s insider text The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins, but Helgeland’s worldview is more Goodfellas than The Long Good Friday, a portrait of glittering London as artificial as the Krays’ star-struck vision of themselves as the last of the famous international playboys."
Would YOU see it? Many did:
"Now arrives Legend, which lands with a stunning £3.70m plus £1.49m in Wednesday/Thursday previews, for a five-day total of £5.19m. Brian Helgeland’s film certainly benefits from the UK audience’s existing awareness of, and interest in, the film’s subject – the Kray brothers remain the most notorious London gangsters. However, Hardy is also a key selling point: given his reputation as a highly committed actor, his performance in the dual roles of Ronnie and Reggie Kray exerted a powerful curiosity factor.




 




G322 TV DRAMA


Welcome back. In today's email, you will find exemplar answers for G322 (former Claremont student scripts). More are on the way. Please create a folder on your laptop labelled G322 for them. We read through one example and practise exam techniques (terminology, examples, explanation / analysis / argument).

We then watch the BBC TV drama Murdered By My Father and analyse the representation of ethnicity. Description from website:
Every parent wants the best for their kids, and Shahzad is no exception. Ever since his wife died he’s been trying to keep his two kids Salma and Hassan on track. Salma is growing up quickly, and Shahzad wants to make sure she’s set up with the right guy to settle down with. It’s a promise he made his wife, and part of what he considers his duty as a dad. But what does Salma want? Unbeknown to Shahzad, she’s caught up in a whirlwind romance with charismatic charmer Imi. Salma knows Imi is not what her dad is expecting, but can she find a way to make everyone happy? A hard-hitting drama with a devastating finale, Murdered by My Father is a story about the power and the limits of love in communities where ‘honour’ means everything.
Review by Ceri Radford in The Telegraph:
"The father in question, Shahzad (Adeel Akhtar), did not start out as a monster. A widower, working hard in the building trade and raising two children alone, he had a touching bond with his teenage daughter Salma (Kiran Sonia Sawar). She teased him, he slid a gift of hair grips onto her bedside table as she slept. But he had expectations that she would honour the marriage he had planned with her late mother, linking their family to his business allies by settling down with the gormless Haroon (Salman Akhtar). Meanwhile, Salma had fallen in love with someone else: the charismatic charmer Imi (Mawaan Rizwan), who was very far from Haroon, and very far from the match her father felt he needed to be able to hold his head up in his community....Murdered by My Father, which followed in the same vein as 2014’s Bafta-winning Murdered by My Boyfriend – a drama based on a real case - could easily have strayed into stereotypes. But in the hands of the young screenwriter Vinay Patel, the story felt both nuanced and unbearably heart-breaking. His script drew on testimonies from those involved as well as input from charities expert in this area to paint a portrait of a tragic clash between tradition and individual freedom." 

Kasia Delgado writes in The Radio Times: "Written by young screenwriter Vinay Patel, the drama is based on the 12,000 cases of so-called "honour-based" violence reported in the UK since 2010. These include abductions, beatings and an estimated 60 murders, with around 9,000 calls made to helplines. If you've always taken for granted that you could love whoever you want, it's hard to get your head around the idea that young women are killed for defying their family's wishes – but this drama goes a long way to explaining the psychology behind these murders, without in anyway justifying them. "

By next Tuesday, please watch the 2013 exam extract Fingersmith (please collect your disc on Wednesday). You must be ready to offer oral textual analysis using exam techniques (terminology, examples, explanation / analysis / argument).


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