Buzz
Demetrios Matheou
The 65th edition of the Festival de Cannes opens today, with Wes Anderson’s latest slice of leftfield whimsy, Moonrise Kingdom, and continues for almost two weeks of frantic film-going, star-spotting, wheeler-dealing and beach partying. For these days in May a usually somnolent seaside town becomes the cinema city that never sleeps.Cannes is still the world’s leading film festival, for good reason: the best directors in the world want their films to premiere here; everyone else has to wait in line. Of course, the festival doesn’t always deliver – one can never know. But this year’s selection Read more ...
Jasper Rees
One day soon Beatles scholars and Professors of Fabology will emerge from their caverns and their ashrams to inform us that it was 50 years ago today. On 5 October 1962 “Love Me Do” was released and, to recycle a phrase often appended to lesser earthquakes, the world would never be the same again. There will be celebrations, doubtless, across the universe. Tribute bands will perform bootleg gigs in the likes of, probably, Indonesia and the Baltic, all booted and suited and moptopped up and harmonising like the Everlys etc etc. American Fab Fourists will, in the slightly imperialistic way that Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's hard to process the news that Adam "MCA" Yauch of the Beastie Boys has died - even though he had been fighting cancer since 2009. The Beastie Boys seemed to mirror my youth: exploding into the public eye just as I hit adolescence, they were the epitome of bratty rebellion for my generation, but also led us to their Def Jam labelmates Run DMC and LL Cool J, and thus into hip-hop culture as a whole.Their second album - and perhaps their masterpiece - Paul's Boutique was one of the defining records of leftfield hip-hop sample-collage, and through the Nineties they became fixtures Read more ...
theartsdesk
Matthew Bourne, creator of the famous male swans of his modern reinvention of Swan Lake, is to launch the nationwide screening of a spectacular new 3D film of his creation, along with a live Q&A - and we have free tickets to be won for this exclusive event. UPDATE: Competition now expired.Swan Lake will be given its premiere 3D screening on Monday 14 May, followed by the Q&A session with Bourne, the film's director Ross McGibbon and the producer Fiona Morris. The session, held at the Curzon Soho, 99 Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1D 5DY, will be chaired by theartsdesk's Ismene Brown.The Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Things didn’t go well for Eva Perons past and present at this morning’s announcement from New York of the nominations for Broadway’s 2012 Tony Awards, honouring the best of the 2011/12 theatre season, and Richard Bean will surely be wondering how it is that critics’ darling One Man, Two Guvnors failed to get a Best Play nod while nonetheless scooping up seven mentions in other categories – among the highest for a non-musical. But there will be general rejoicing in the onward Broadway march of both James Corden and his wild-eyed colleague Tom Edden, who have been nominated for virtually Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Goods, the second album by Sweden’s Edda Maganson was one of last year’s highlights. With a playful jazz sensibility which intertwined with a quirky pop, Magnason’s approach was unusual and refreshing. Coinciding with the release of her new EP, theartsdesk premieres the video for its lead track “Jona”.Magnason’s time is currently filled playing the lead in a biopic about the legendary Swedish jazz singer Monica Zetterlund. Being shot in Sweden and New York, it’s directed by Denmark’s Per Fly (the director of 2010’s The Woman Who Dreamed of a Man, made for Lars von Trier's company Zentropa).“ Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A new publicly funded UK web channel for performing arts opens tomorrow morning, preparing for a major launch this weekend streaming top international streetdancers to the web audience and publishing John Peel's notes on his record collection. The channel, called The Space, is funded by the Arts Council England in partnership with the BBC, and will run for six months over and through the Olympics period as an on-demand channel to put performance out via smartphones, tablets and computers.Described as an experimental digital arts channel and "communal playground", The Space clearly hopes to Read more ...
ash.smyth
There’s something in the water at the commissioning editors’ local, I think, resulting, of late, in a rash of rather good arts-n-culture biopics. This week, it was the turn of Roald Dahl, the Big Friendly Giant who made an absolute shit-load of cash telling really not-very-bedtime stories to young children.Our host for the evening – the channelling medium, more accurately – was David Walliams, comedian, campo supremo, and sometime quaffer of the Thames (oh, and he may have mentioned something about writing children’s books of his own). Walliams is not a world-beating comic talent, and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The full programme is announced today for the London 2012 Festival, from 21 June-9 September, celebrating the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics.Among more than 25,000 artists from all 204 participating nations, star names include theatre stars Cate Blanchett, Alan Ayckbourn, Mike Leigh and Julie Walters, musicians Damon Albarn, Daniel Barenboim, Gustavo Dudamel, Gilberto Gil, Zakir Hussain, Yoko Ono, Simon Rattle, Rihanna and Scissor Sisters, visual artists Ai Wei Wei, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor, and TV characters Stephen Fry, Wallace and Gromit and Dr Who.More than 10 Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Ballerina Tamara Rojo, director-designate of English National Ballet, is making waves even before she takes up her position in September. Next Monday she is a keynote speaker at a day of events at the Royal Society of Medicine launching the first-ever NHS treatment centre for injured dancers and rejecting the pressure for extreme thinness in performers.The all-day event will field a large number of speakers from both the performance and treatment sides. Rojo last week declared after the announcement of her appointment, "I have never been thin and I want for myself and for others to have long Read more ...
Jasper Rees
"Shakespeare’s Coming Home," boasts the strapline of a highly ambitious strand of London 2012’s Cultural Olympiad. Between now and 9 June, 37 productions of the complete canon by Shakespeare (with apologies to Two Noble Kinsmen fans) will be seen at Shakespeare’s Globe by 37 different theatre companies from all over the world. Hence the catchy title, Globe to Globe, which forms only a part of a World Shakespeare Festival continuing until September and taking place all over England and Wales, from Stratford-upon-Avon to the National Eisteddfod.But the whole thing is starting this weekend at Read more ...