Begin Again // Film Review

I recently went to see Begin Again at the cinema with my family so I thought I'd give it a little review here on my blog!

Written and directed by John Carney, the film stars Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo alongside James Corden, and Adam Levine from Maroon 5 (swoon).

The storyline follows Gretta (Knightley) - a singer-songwriter from England who's come to Manhattan with her then-boyfriend, Dave (played by the ever-hunky Adam Levine), who's songs were made famous in a film. Typically he turns out to be a knob and they go their separate ways. Meanwhile, Mark Ruffalo's character, Dan, gets fired from his job as a hot shot music - after having already split from his wife and turned to alcoholism.

So Gretta is sleeping on Steve's couch - a busker, played by James Corden, who Gretta met at university and so happens to be in the city at the same time - and Dan is living in a gross apartment, neglecting both his work and his teenage daughter. Amazingly the pair bump into each other at an open-mic night, and Dan sees something special in Gretta and her music.

After a strange series of events, Dan and Gretta become great friends and record an amazing outdoor album - using random musicians and the acoustics of random places across the city. Everything turns out well in the end: Coming Up Roses is one of the songs on Gretta's album, and that's definitely what happens.

So that's the plot, ish, without spoilers I hope. The film is a unique and beautiful story - yes it features some clichés but they're worked so well into the plot that to me it didn't matter. The characters complement each other wonderfully and the film is just so full of joy.

What really made is special for me, though, was the soundtrack. It's full of original songs sung by Gretta and some by ex-boyf Dave; and honestly they're beautiful. I've downloaded them all.

Begin Again is well worth a trip to the cinema: beautiful people and beautiful songs working within a beautiful story line. JUST BEAUTIFUL OKAY.

"A man should never hit a woman" / Gender Inequality

One phrase that always gets on my nerves is that a man should never hit a woman; and no, a man shouldn't hit a woman, nor should they hit a man, nor should a woman hit a man or a woman hit another woman. Why is a man hitting a woman seen as SO MUCH WORSE than any other type of violence?

BBC3s recent drama, Murdered By My Boyfriend, has sparked another wave of people tweeting/writing/blogging about their horror at the violence some women suffer at the hands of some men - and while any case of domestic violence is truly horrible, I'm not denying that, it's not just women that suffer. Yet you never hear anyone say "a woman should never hit a man" - because stereotypes tell us that women are the weaker sex, and that women don't hit men anyway. But that simply isn't true, and I can't understand why it's so difficult for people to see.

In May of this year, UK charity ManKind released a video showing a public experiment they had carried out; the first half shows how members of the public react to a man shouting at/roughly grabbing a woman - and the second half of the video shows how the public reacted to a woman doing the same (and at some points, in my opinion, even worse things) to a man.

It baffles me so much that peoples' reactions are so wildly different - abuse is abuse, and if women want equality then why don't we treat men as our equals, rather than acting like we deserve more than they do? Just because men don't speak out as much as women do, that doesn't mean they aren't being abused. Just because men have always been seen as the stronger sex, that doesn't mean women aren't violent. And just because a man should never hit a woman, that doesn't mean it's okay for a woman to hit a man.