People My paradoxical personality is wrapping itself around the Kate Winslet story. I'm in a spin because I hate celebrity gossip - most of it lies or statistics. But here is someone I genuinely like as an actress and a person - and it's hard to see someone go through this kind of thing in the glare of the media. Rather like Minnie Driver, Winslet is an actress first - anything else is a by-product. We have a girl who has appeared in one of the biggest (although not greatest) films of all time. Yet decided not to even try and build on the position (realising a once in a lifetime moment) and made a string of quite personal small films of greater quality and depth which in the stretch of a career she is more likely to be remembered for (something co-star Leo would do well to remember). I mean you've got love the fact that after Titanic one of the only TV shows she 'did' was 'Ready Steady Cook'. Libby Brooks insightful article in 'The Guardian' today uses slightly longer words to make the same point: "Kate Winslet has always stood apart from the celebrity panoply of talents, teases and tragic heroines. A redoubtable actor, she radiates a fearless emotional honesty in person as well as in performance. Intelligent, immoderate and inconsistent, she calls a spade a bloody shovel." *
Book The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film is a string of essays describing the problems involved in adapting what is essentially a theatrical form to cinema. It's an academic work and so the writing is quite dry at times and because we have essays we have repetition - how many times you can write about Olivier's 'Richard III'. There are three essays of note. 'Videos and its paradoxes' looks at the use of video as a study aid, and how the productions on show can colour the student's view of the play - so Anthony Hopkins characterisation of Othello in the BBC production is wildly different to Lawrence Fishburne's in the recent film - neither is necessarily correct, but the student might not make that connection. 'Filming Shakespeare's history: three films of Richard III' offers the best and most honest review of Pacino's 'Looking for Richard' I've read, treating the film on it's own merits and not as a version of the actual play. Finally, 'Flamboyant realist: Kenneth Branagh' again tries to re-dress the critical mauling his films have been subjected to - there really isn't anything like the four hour 'Hamlet'. The one disappointment is 'Shakespeare's cinematic offshoots' which looks at adaptations which are re-imaginings of the text. It's cursory, anodyne and misses out 'In The Bleak Midwinter' and 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead'. Why?
Games Unlike, seemingly the whole entire rest of the country, my first computer was an Acorn Electron. No 'Mony On The Run' or 'Horace Goes Skiing' for me - my favourites were 'Chuckie Egg' and 'Snapper'. So I've gone positively cock-a-hoop over The Stairway To Hell, the site of an Electron emulator. There isn't anything better than watching my Pentium dissolve into the familiar black screen with Acorn sign. As well as images of every game imaginable, there is the option of plugging a tape deck into your sound card and loading games straight from cassette....not that Sphinx Adventure was ever worth that wait...
* Sigh. I had planned to keep comments to a minimum, but it's important to note I was not stalking this woman.
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