San Francisco
Jenny Gilbert
Khaled Hosseini's 2003 bestseller ticks all the boxes as an A-level text. A personal story with epic sweep, it interweaves the bloody recent history of Afghanistan with a gripping family saga. Its treatment of racism and radicalism is timely. Other themes too might have been hand-picked for classroom discussion: bullying, betrayal, bad parenting, family secrets. Its first-person narrative makes it feel real.The trouble with this stage adaptation newly arrived in the West End is that only a small portion of the audience is using it for exam revision. Those merely hoping for a theatre Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Music is no exception to the rule that history is littered with winners and losers. In commercial terms, however they are looked at, San Francisco’s Charlatans were losers. They issued just one single in 1966 and a belated album in 1969. While the world hummed along with Scott McKenzie’s "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" in 1967, these pioneers of the city’s scene were without a label and left adrift in the rush to sign Bay Area bands. Big Brother & the Holding Company, The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape and Quicksilver Messenger Service saw their stock Read more ...
Jasper Rees
About a dozen years ago the publishing industry cottoned on to the sex lives of women. Memoirs in which women wrote with complete candour about their sex lives appeared in sudden profusion, from Belle de Jour's blog-turned-book and The Sex Life of Catherine M to Jane Juska’s account about what happened when she advertised in the NYRB, aged 67, for sexual partners. At the younger end of the market there was One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed by a Sicilian teenager known only (at her parents’ insistence) as Melissa P. Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl feels like a late Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
How many live versions of “Heroin” are necessary? The new four CD set The Complete Matrix Tapes includes, yes, four. One per disc. If that seems excessive, consider this: one version previously appeared, in the same mix, on last year’s reissue of the third Velvet Underground album; a second and third were included, in different mixes, on differing configurations of the 1969: The Velvet Underground Live album; an audience recording of a fourth was issued on 2001's The Velvet Underground Bootleg Series Volume 1: The Quine Tapes. All four versions are previously released.Overall, of The Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Multiple stars are born in The Diary of a Teenage Girl, the conventionally titled film premiered earlier this year at Sundance that turns out to be unconventional in every way that matters. Adapted from Phoebe Gloeckner's novel about a 15-year-old's coming of age in the swinging, drugs-soaked San Francisco of the 1970s, first-time director Marielle Heller has made one of the most probing films yet about that painful journey we all make through what Henry James so succinctly titled "the awkward age".Along the way, Heller has given 23-year-old Bel Powley the breakout role of anyone's dreams, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Powder: Ka-Pow! An Explosive Collection 1967–68It’s an instantly familiar sound. Crescendo follows crescendo, and power chord follows power chord. For The Who, “I Can see for Miles” was the apex of this style. But this is not The Who. Instead, it is a band from California called Powder whose shelved album from 1968 was crammed with thrilling, British-influenced gems. Like Todd Rundgren's contemporaneous band The Nazz, Powder filtered a British sensibility through an American outlook.Ka-Pow! collects the surviving recordings by Powder and the band they seamlessly evolved from, The Art Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The worlds of marital abuse and artistic fraud collide to eye-opening if also frustrating effect in Big Eyes, Tim Burton's film about the unmasking of an elaborate deception that ruptures a family along the way. The film has would-be Oscar contender written all over it, not least in pairing five-time nominee Amy Adams alongside two-time winner Christoph Waltz, but for all that fascinates about the real-life story on view, its walk to the podium is likely to remain as much a fantasy as the claims of the central character, Walter Keane, to having been a great artist. In fact, the Nebraska Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The original Planet of the Apes series was Hollywood’s most ingeniously extended franchise, surviving the obliteration of Earth in its first sequel to loop back on itself and spin out a further three. This second film of the successful reboot and its already planned follow-up are both basically remakes of the clapped-out 1973 finale Battle for the Planet of the Apes, a conceptual handicap evident when it climaxes with two chimps in a punch-up.The care put into the world of Matt Reeves’ film still mostly carries the day. Set 10 years after Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Caesar (Andy Serkis, Read more ...
Simon Munk
It's Call of Duty, in the future, with Kevin Spacey. For many, the biggest and most important game of the year is here. But for the most part, Advanced Warfare is as conservative and reactionary in terms of innovation as it is in terms of the pro-military, ends-justifies-the-means politics it peddles.For those less than familiar with the Call of Duty franchise, a brief recap – the series specialises in epicly over-the-top first-person shooter action. These games are the Jerry Bruckheimer, the Arnie, of action games. They started out in WWII, but rapidly moved focus to cover Modern Warfare in Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It is no mean feat to turn an audience against idealistic, painfully young marines heading for the nightmarish hell of Vietnam, but Dogfight comes perilously close to achieving that undesirable goal in the manner of their introduction. The band of brothers have just one night of freedom in San Francisco before deployment, and how do they wish to spend it? Competing to see which of them can recruit the least attractive date in a so-called "dogfight", with the winner – if there can really be a winner in such a contest – pocketing a wad of cash. On the Town it is not.In fairness to Peter Duchan Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“If I didn’t want to have a life, I’d move to LA,” was one of the (many) funny lines in the new HBO series Looking, and brought home that, along with the show’s three appealing gay male leads (main picture), it’s the city of San Francisco itself that plays a central role here.Looking has drawn comparisons variously with the likes of Queer as Folk, Sex in the City, and fellow HBO show Girls, but there’s surely another spectre looming over it, in the very best possible sense: Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. The adaptation of the first of Maupin’s books reached television two decades ago, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Love, Poetry and RevolutionThe subtitle “A Journey Through the British Psychedelic and Underground Scenes” – with “A” as the operative word – suggests this box set isn’t going to tell a familiar story. Most of the bands were and still are barely heard of. Twenty-four of the 65 tracks compiled were not originally issued.The opening shot is “Pretty Colours”, by obscure West Midlands band Deep Feeling which included future Traffic member Jim Capaldi. Although unreleased at the time of its October 1966 recording, The Animals’ Eric Burdon cocked an ear and declared it “ Read more ...