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Reviews
Doctor Faustus (2012)
Elizabethan drama from the comfort of your sofa.
I've been to Shakespeare's Globe - it's fun and if you can get there it's certainly worth doing. If you can't get there, this provides the next best thing: the stage production filmed in a way that does its very best to capture the experience of watching the live performance although of course nothing is quite like being packed in with other audience members and potentially participating in some of the action (various things, including an extracted tooth, get thrown from the stage and with the way the Globe works, there's nowhere for them to go but into the audience!).
Paul Hilton as Faustus and Arthur Darvill as Mephistopheles both give sound performances and deliver the text as if they mean it - no mean feat with Elizabethan blank verse that can prove tricky to modern ears. There are some nice set pieces and the "special effects" are in keeping with feel of the Globe - great use of costumes, make-up and puppets to provide a sometimes surprisingly disturbing vision of hell. The odd modern quirk (a helium balloon, for example) adds to the tongue-in-cheek feel of the humour.
And there is humour - despite being a bleak piece overall as one man sells his soul to the Devil and then fails to find redemption, Christopher Marlowe was a man who knew the audience of the day so there are plenty of humorous interludes. Darvill brings a sardonic touch to Mephistopheles that makes the darkness at his core all the more disturbing.
If you're used to the very naturalistic approach of modern drama, this might feel like a bit of a stretch but as a slice of Elizabethan drama, presented in a theatre that comes as close to an original as modern health and safety allows, it's certainly worth an evening's viewing.
Forget Me Not (2010)
More than a stock romance, a thoughtful and involving film
Categorising the film as a romance may have done it a disservice. Yes, it's a love story but it's also about how we create a place for ourselves in this life through the stories we tell and our relationships with other people. Will is utterly decent, Eve is free-spirited and perhaps a little rootless but they're both in the process of changing their view of themselves and how they present themselves to others.
As a viewer, you always know more about Will than Eve does which develops a certain investment in the story. There are clues along the way to the secret we already know - it's easy to see how she misses them and the fact that she does means we develop an empathy for her simple optimism. There are also clues, right from the start, to the secret we don't know. Knowing what we know from the outset, it's easier for us to spot those clues and add them up than it is for Eve so the revelation is perhaps less shocking for us than for her; for us it perhaps feels more like an inevitability. It's a clever device that tends to pull viewers in rather than feeling overly manipulative.
Tobias Menzies as Will and Genevieve O'Reilly as Eve both give wonderfully natural and believable performances, making it easy to just lose yourself in the world of the film. Conversations ebb and flow, some things are unsaid, some things are never finished, just as they are in real life (what's the kicker in Will's most embarrassing story? We'll never know!). The London locations give it a "bigger" feel than many low-budget films.
It may be a romance, it may even be a weepy but I think it goes beyond that with a message that is ultimately positive and optimistic - don't be afraid to care and don't be afraid to let others care for you.