There’s been a few films at this year’s London Film Festival that have been adapted from plays, the most ambitious of which is Coriolanus, based on one of the more rarely-performed Shakespeare’s.
I saw the play at the National Theatre years ago and was hugely impressed. The film, directed by, and starring, Ralph Fiennes, sets the epic in the war-torn Balkans.
Fiennes is Caius Martius Coriolanus – a horrible git with about as much fun in him as a bag of grenades. After quelling a rebellion, he gets kicked out of this mythical Rome for being too big for his boots.
So he starts a trend for shaved heads among his followers, he returns in league with his old nemesis and leader of the rebel forces Tullus Aufidius played by Gerard Butler… and that’s about it.
Ho bleeding hum. There’s the rub. On stage, powerful Shakespearean soliloquies work brilliantly, but in cinema, without the weight of physical presence, they seem long-winded, grandiloquent and (dare I say) dull.
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Hari Kiri: Death of a Samurai
Heading the opposite way (ie. a modern take on the 17th century), Hari Kiri: Death of a Samurai, directed by the great Takeshi Mike – the man behind the brilliant 13 Assassins (now available on DVD) – is astonishing.
A remake of Masaki Kobayashi’s 1962 Cannes Jury Prize-winning movie, it stars Nippon TV star Eita as Motome – a ronin impoverished by peace who travels to the House of Ii, and uses the warriors' courtyard to commit the most gruesome act of seppuku (or hari kiri).
Like many desperate ronin, he hoped he’d actually be sent away with a small sum of cash but, instead, his fellow samurai call his bluff and force him to cut his stomach open with a blunt bamboo sword (he’s so dirt poor, he’s sold the rest of his collection).
The story is retold by Kageyu (a brilliant Koji Yakusho) who had made the same appeal a few months before but emerged unscathed.
And just like my review from Cannes, I will not reveal much else, as the exposition is crucial. But I urge you to see it as soon as possible.
Viva La Madness
After the screening I attended the launch of my old friend J.J. Connolly’s new book Viva La Madness, the sequel to Layer Cake that made an international star of Daniel Craig as a brighter than average cocaine dealer.
The bash was held in the now revamped Dover Street Arts Club – it’s part-owned by Gwyneth Paltrow and very swish
Will Craig star in the possible adaptation? “I hope so,” says JJ. “He signed up for the last and went on to be Bond which is funny as I described my man as the James Bond of drug dealers.”
In my opinion, Viva... is a better book than Layer Cake.
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