Ian McEwan’s 2007 novel On Chesil Beach was adapted for the big screen in 2017 with the eponymous film starring Saoirse Ronan and Billy Bowle. Ronan – who also starred in the adaptation of McEwan’s Atonement – shines in the leading role of Florence Ponting, a budding violinist. She has just married Howle’s Edward Mayhew, who is from a family of considerably lower social and financial standing. The story picks up just after their wedding reception as they’re heading to their hotel on Chesil Beach.
Inside, they encounter a few difficulties as they attempt to consummate their marriage. From this point on, the film alternates between the present and the past. Viewers come to know who Florence and Edward were before they met, as their romance bloomed, and the conflicts that ruled over their respective families.
The film’s atmospheric setting of 1960s England is accentuated by its beautiful, colorful cinematography. Here are thirteen of the best stills from On Chesil Beach.
After revealing the first teaser trailer for her forthcoming directorial debut, Music, Sia has received backlash over casting a neurotypical actress as the autistic lead character.
The film revolves around the character of Music, a young girl with nonverbal autism, who finds herself in the care of her older half-sister, the newly sober Zu (Kate Hudson). However, many people were not happy with Sia’s decision to cast her longtime collaborator Maddie Ziegler as Music rather than an autistic actress.
Responding to critics on Twitter, Sia wrote: “I actually tried working with a beautiful young girl non verbal on the spectrum and she found it unpleasant and stressful. So that’s why I cast Maddie.” In a separate tweet, she added that “casting someone at her level of functioning was cruel, not kind, so I made the executive decision that we would do our best to lovingly represent the community.”
She also stated that she “cast thirteen neuroatypical people, three trans folk, and not as fucking prostitutes or drug addicts but as doctors, nurses and singers. Fucking sad nobody’s even seen the dang movie. My heart has always been in the right place.”
However, several autistic actors asserted that they were available and willing to work on the project, and that they were subsequently ignored. Sia responded to one such actor by belittling them, saying, “maybe you’re just a bad actor”
I actually tried working with a a beautiful young girl non verbal on the spectrum and she found it unpleasant and stressful. So that’s why I cast Maddie.
I agree. I’ve never referred to music as disabled. Special abilities is what I’ve always said, and casting someone at her level of functioning was cruel, not kind, so I made the executive decision that we would do our best to lovingly represent the community.
I don’t believe I’ve ever referred to autism and suffering in the same sentence. I have said, flourishing or suffering depending on where you are on the spectrum, but obviously this was very dear to my heart.
I’m sorry we were never introduced. My character was pretty low functioning and after attempting a few actors on the spectrum they suggested I use Maddie.
I’m so sad and confused that you think I didn’t research and utilize my friends on the spectrum! So many assumptions. I hope you love the film. It’s beautiful.
I’m so confused. The character is based completely on my neuro atypical friend. He found it too stressful being non verbal, and I made this movie with nothing but love for him and his mother.
I cast thirteen neuroatypical people, three trans folk, and not as fucking prostitutes or drug addicts but s as doctors, nurses and singers. Fucking sad nobody’s even seen the dang movie. My heart has always been in the right place.
The movie is both a love letter to caregivers and to the autism community. I have my own unique view of the community, and felt it is underrepresented and compelled to make it. If that makes me a shit I’m a shit, but my intentions are awesome.
“Every time I put on Future Islands my impression of the human condition improves,” Matt Berninger said in a statement. “Their remix of ‘One More Second’ kills me.”
Future Islands issued their most recent album, As Long as You Are, in October. Serpentine Prison arrived later that month.
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Matt Sweeney have shared a new collaborative song called ‘Make Worry for Me’. Recorded at Nashville’s Butcher Shoppe, the new track follows the Superwolfcollaborators’ charity single ‘You’ll Get Eaten, Too’, which dropped back in March. Check out ‘Make Worry for Me’ below, along with the single artwork, made by Harmony Korine.
“An apparition you can’t explain is cutting through the viscous mist in your brain. The contents of your pockets are suddenly unfamiliar. That sound again –
This year of super wolf moon brought A Visitation and the message, “You’ll Get Eaten, Too.” Now, in the earthly chaos of total celestial blackout, one body containing two galaxies is once more among us…
This is no miscount – this is the bestial duo, the two headed dawg, the Superwolves: Matt Sweeney and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, talking directly to our face. They know no fear, only curiosity. “Make Worry For Me” is manifesto, and we can only hope to learn from it. To grow from it. For limbs to extend, beneath its blue, electric sky. To become Super, like the Superwolves.
The gauntlet is thrown. You’re dancing with the wolf again. Brooding and grooving upon their prey. Succumb to their ritual. Move your ass. Sing their song. Fight. Or die.”
In recent weeks, Will Oldham and Bill Callahan have been sharing a series of collaborative covers, offering their take on Steely Dan’s ‘Deacon Blues’, Yusuf / Cat Stevens’ ‘Blackness of the Night’, and Dave Rich’s ‘I’ve Made Up My Mind’. Their rendition of Hank Williams, Jr.’s ‘O.D.’d in Denver’ also featured Matt Sweeney.
Car Seat Headrest were the musical guests on Thursday night’s episode of the The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Crammed in a small bedroom, Will Tolledo and the rest of the band performed their single ‘Can’t Cool Me Down’, from Car Seat Headrest’s most recent album Making a Door Less Open. Watch the performance, featuring masked member Trait, below.
Making a Door Less Open was released back in May. It marked the follow-up to Car Seat Headrest’s 2018 project Twin Fantasy.
“We first fell in love with ‘Sending My Love’ by Zhané because our parents would blast it all around our house in Atlanta,” Chloe x Halle said in a statement. “We fell in love with the fact that they’re a duo as well, and how their voices blended so nicely together. It was very inspiring to us as a duo too!”
Ungodly Hour, Chloe x Halle’s sophomore LP, came out back in June. It follows their 2018 debut The Kids Are Alright.
In a sense, the casino is the ultimate movie prop. It can act as a simple way to build tension – think of Martin Campbell’s direction of James Bond in those brilliant Casino Royale poker game scenes. It can also act as a device to build drama, conflict, fun, excitement and just about every other emotion. It’s little wonder that casino scenes pop up so frequently in Hollywood movies.
But the casino scenes in movies also tend to perpetuate myths that don’t happen in real life, and they can imprint that on viewers who believe it to be true. Below we are going to discuss five of the more common myths and explain what the really goes on:
Counting Cards Is Difficult
The main culprit here is Dustin Hoffman’s autistic savant, Raymond Babbitt, in Rain Man, but we could also point to Doug (Zack Galifianakis) in The Hangover. While Raymond has the mathematical skills to be a very good card counter; it’s really not that difficult. If you have a look at the blackjack online @MansionCasino, you could come up with a card counting strategy within minutes. It’s really just about keeping track of whether high or low cards have come out of the pack. Card counters also come up with simple systems to help them remember. It’s as easy as learning a phone number. Another thing: Card counting isn’t illegal – far from it. However, it’s not likely to earn you a fortune either. Card counting could tip the balance slightly in your favour, but just enough for you to profit – not win millions.
Winning at Roulette Is Easy
We are basically taking the opposite line to blackjack here, with a big caveat. Winning an even money bet in roulette is very common; you’ve around a 47.4% chance in American roulette, for instance. What we are talking about is the straight-up number, 32 red, for example. The probability is about 2.60%, and yet we see it time and time again in the movies with the big win in an all or nothing situation. This is not indicative of how players usually play the game, nor is it very likely that your number will come up. Of course, roulette in the movies often shows the fix in play, as we saw with Humphrey Bogart’s Rick in Casablanca. That’s another fallacy.
All Those Big Poker Hands
You will all have seen plenty of royal flush hands pulled out at heart-stopping moments in the movies; Maverick with Mel Gibson is one such film, where the hero (Gibson) pulls out a royal flush to win the prize of $500,000. The odds of the royal flush in this five-card variant are 649,739/1. Not bad, Mel. In addition, two of the other players had a straight flush (72,192/1) and four of a kind (4,165/1). Again, the film doesn’t reflect the realities of poker play – professional poker players might spend their entire lives playing and not get those types of hands. It doesn’t stop them from winning millions, however.
The Hot and Cold Tables
In The Cooler, William H. Macy plays a downtrodden schmuck who is employed by a casino as “a cooler”; basically, someone who is so unlucky that they only have to approach other people and touch the table to make them lose. Of course, this is nonsense, and few movie-goers would believe that casinos employ these type of people. But it taps into the whole idea of superstition, lucky numbers, hot and cold games, and so on. What we are dealing with at the casino is pure random chance – nothing else. The movie-makers tend to lean on this to romanticise the casino, which is fair enough.
The Debauchery and Anything Goes
Perhaps this is a little more about the concept of Sin City than the casinos alone. But, by and large, casinos are quite serious places, and it’s not recommended that you visit one when you are hammered. Most likely, you’ll not get in through the door. Copious drug use? Forget about it. Getting caught with drugs in Nevada can lead to a long prison sentence. If you wrecked your hotel room – The Hangover, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – you would expect the hotel to phone the police straight away. Of course, there is some hedonism in casinos – they are supposed to be fun. But if you ever visit one, you will see that the drug and alcohol-fuelled folks tend to stand out like sore thumbs.
When it comes to stories that have lasted throughout the ages, there are few better examples than the tragic love story of Romeo and Juliet. The five-act play, written by a giant of English literature William Shakespeare, originally premiered somewhere between 1595 and 1598, yet the story has lived on. In the hearts and minds of the generations who have come since its premiere, the enduring cultural fascination with Romeo and Juliet is a testament to its literary power.
Romeo and Juliet has been adapted countless times, for the stage, television, the screen and beyond. Its constant readaptation means that the story has never been far from the public consciousness, and is one of the most featured culture magazine pieces and studied works for students in school literature classes. A whole host of academic writing explores the different interpretations of the star-crossed lovers’ story. Any student tasked with writing such an essay can check out free examples on Romeo and Juliet with https://eduzaurus.com/free-essay-samples/romeo-and-juliet/ which will enable you to better interpret the tragedy of William Shakespeare in your student work. The sheer range of different ways in which Shakespeare’s tragic tale has been reimagined is a fascinating subject for study and reveals a lot about the text.
The screen versus the stage
Romeo and Juliet has been adapted for the screen perhaps more than any other play or book. These adaptations are not restricted to mere restagings of the historical play, but can take the setting and characters into almost unrecognizable directions. Samples of the plot can be found in some of the most iconic romance movies of all time. Beloved movies such as West Side Story, Titanic, and Romeo + Juliet are, in fact, all modern adaptations of Romeo and Juliet. What’s so powerful about Shakespeare’s story is that it can resonate with audiences across time and culture.
The way each generation and society adapts the original work serves as a reflection of the values of that time. Funnily enough, this often means that some of the original meaning is often greatly misinterpreted of the play when for Romeo and Juliet historical context is ignored. One great paradox in Romeo and Juliet reimaginings is the fact the depiction of the lovers’ fate. While, indeed, the original play’s depiction of two lovers from different backgrounds who ultimately fall in love goes to prove that love knows no boundaries, many adaptations fail to emphasize the unhappy ending that the characters meet.
Both Romeo and Juliet fail to survive the curtain call of the original play, and this is down to their families’ unwillingness to relinquish their historical feud. Many Romeo and Juliet movies simply go as far as to depict two lovers from opposite sides of society falling in love despite their differences, and call it a day there. This makes sense from the commercial perspective of Hollywood, as it can be hard to turn a profit out of such a tragic ending. The idea of our two main protagonists dying without a happy ending can be a hard pill for modern audiences to swallow, but back in Shakespeare’s time this kind of tragic ending was run-of-the-mill!
Versatility
Even if the glamorous Hollywood reimaginings of Romeo and Juliet’s story sometimes fail to capture the tragedy of the original, their prevalence is still a testament to the thematic power of Shakespeare’s work. The strong construction of plot, and emphasis on the rawest of human tendencies, has given this play an unrivalled versatility in its capacity for reinvention. Shakespeare’s ability to take themes such as family, love, hate, and forgiveness and put them in a captivating dramatic form is exactly what has driven the constant reinvention of the story since its first staging. The theme of defiance, in particular, has made Romeo and Juliet a potent story for highlighting the mistreatment of marginalized groups, as is the case in modern tales of star-crossed lovers such as Titanic, Carol and Brokeback Mountain.
Hundreds of years after its premiere and the death of its author, we still have William Shakespeare to thank for Romeo and Juliet in its original form, and the wide variety of adaptations it has since inspired! The enduring cultural fascination for this play serves as a testament to storytelling and the power of a good love story!
Following the release of their new albumLove Goes, Sam Smith has shared a new Christmas song called ‘The Lighthouse Keeper’. The track was written with and produced by Labrinth and arrives with an accompanying animated video conceptualised and directed by Smith. Listen to it below, and watch the video on Smith’s Facebook page.
“If any year could make me look forward to the sounds of Christmas, it would be 2020 as more than ever before we are yearning to be around our friends and family once again,” Smith said in a statement. “Christmas symbolises that for me and earlier this year I was inspired to write a Christmas love song. Labrinth and I poured our hearts into this one and it has honestly been pure joy to create and make.”
Labirinth and Sam Smith also collaborated on the title track from Love Goes, which arrived in late October. Read our review of the album here.
The Network, aka the band that’s definitely not just Green Day dressed up, have announced a new album and released an EP called Trans Am. You can listen to the four-track project, which includes tracks like ‘Ivankkka Is a Nazi’ and ‘Flat Earth’, below. The Network’s upcoming album, Money Money 2020 Part II: Told Ya So!, is set for release on December 4 via Warner.
The Network – Snoo, Fink, Z, Captain Underpants, Van Gough, and Balducci – formed mysteriously in 2003 and released their debut album, Money Money 2020, that same year. “Back in 2003 we, The Network, warned mankind of the fate they would meet in the year 2020,” a press release states. “To no surprise 2020 is upon us and it looks exactly as our prophecy predicted. As one final warning on December 4, 2020 we will release Money Money 2020 Pt II: We Told Ya So! We are at Threat Level Midnight. For now, hop in and set your transistors to the Trans Am EP, out everywhere now.”
