America
Graham Fuller
“A dirty fairy tale” was one of the encomiums lobbed at The Apartment in June 1960, nine months before it won Billy Wilder and I A L Diamond the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and Wilder the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. Although The Saturday Review’s influential Hollis Alpert was critically off the mark when he disparaged Wilder’s serious adult comedy, he was right to describe it as a fairy tale. A prince does rescue a princess after an ogre’s cruel treatment of her has caused her to fall into a fatal sleep.The “dirty” part is more complex. The premise is undeniably Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sing Your Song isn’t a showbiz biopic of the actor and singer, it’s a history lesson that revolves around Harry Belafonte and his tireless, long-term espousal of civil rights and socio-political causes. Belafonte is an incredibly important figure, a man whose place in history is assured. What’s less certain is who he actually is. “He took all our struggles and made them his own,” says Miriam Makeba. Sing Your Song suggests that the price Belafonte paid for making that choice is to be defined by the issues he pursues. There is no man any more, just the causes.With his daughter Gina Belafonte Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Opened in 2007, the Prudential Center in Newark, 16 miles from Manhattan, is a cavernous indoors sports arena, the home of ice hockey’s New Jersey Devils and basketball’s Seton Hall Pirates and, temporarily, the New York Liberty. The arena’s capacity for concerts is 19,500 – perhaps 2,000 can stand on the floor in front of the stage, the remainder must take their seats in the tiers that rise and rise to a stratosphere that removes them, emotionally and spiritually, from the show below.If you’re up so high and also at the opposite end from the stage or stuck in a far corner you might think you Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Just when it seemed that thrillers on British television were supplied solely by Scandinavia's finest, along comes a new US series to remind us that when it comes to densely plotted ensemble pieces the Americans have form too. Revenge, the pilot episode of which aired last week and which started a 21-week run last night, has some promising names attached. It was created by Mike Kelley, a writer on One Tree Hill and The O.C., and it stars Madeleine Stowe.She plays Victoria Grayson, who spends her summers in the Hamptons, the East Coast summer playground of the über-rich and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Ever since their original collaboration on 1969's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Neil Young and Crazy Horse have made music that sounded as old as the hills. Primitive and funky, they reduce rock to its raw materials, without flash or frills or any chords more complicated than a G7. For this new project (their first together since Greendale in 2003), Young has assembled a batch of elderly folk songs and traditional ballads and processed their simple chord structures through the Crazy Horse blender.Folk music connoisseurs will recognise several of these, even if Young has given himself Read more ...
theartsdesk
Everything But The Girl: Eden, Love Not Money, Baby, The Stars Shine Bright, IdlewildJasper ReesCan it really be nearly three decades since the release of Eden defined the quintessential bedsit sound? Everything But The Girl are somehow ageless, a reality underwritten by this bloody wonderful set of reissues which tells the story of their quietly immense contribution to intelligent Eighties pop. There is also a clear narrative of their early progress from the undergraduate balladeering of Eden (1984), embellished and politicised in Love Not Money (1985), thrown entirely over for Ben Watt’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“You're a wasted face, you're a sad-eyed lie, you're a holocaust.” The devastation of Big Star’s “Holocaust” manifested the mood of the album it was recorded for, which was supposed to be the Memphis band’s third. Last night celebrated this classic musical evocation of fragmentation. Capturing that on stage was a tall order. Playing the songs along with a string section reading from sheet music could never be as spontaneous as the chaotic, booze-fuelled sessions that birthed what became Third.Even so, this extraordinary album was brought to life, a life it never had back in 1974 when it was Read more ...
Andrew Perry
When these blazin’ psychedelic jazzers first landed here from Austin in 2007, there’d already been four or five years’ worth of herky-jerky cod-post-punk-reviving going on, way past the point of overdose, but White Denim were different, and obviously worth making an exception for. Initially a trio, comprising James Petralli (guitar/vocals), Josh Block (drums) and Steve Terembecki (bass), their early gigs here were explosive, crystallizing the genre-transcendent ideal of the original post-punk era, blasting through everything – 1960s beat, funk, Tropicalia, Krautrock, folk – with Texas-fried Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With its precocious youngsters, enchanting title, wonderful wit and delight in hand-crafted detail, Moonrise Kingdom is every inch a Wes Anderson film. This year’s Cannes opener is steeped in The Royal Tenenbaums’ director’s faux-naïf, frivolous worldview, with nearly every one of its magical frames carrying his signature. He has always presented adult strife as if seen through a child’s fertile eyes - spinning the prosaic, dark or melancholy into something altogether more quixotic. Anderson’s films are poised and peculiar, with their thrift-store chic and deadpan protagonists. Grim reality Read more ...
David Benedict
There comes a point in almost every great soprano’s career when she tells the world that Tosca, the Marschallin or Isolde be damned: what she wanted to sing all along was The Great American Songbook. This announcement tends to be made - how shall I put this? - later rather than sooner. In Jessye Norman’s defence, in 1987, just five years after her landmark, ultra-luscious recording of Strauss’s Four Last Songs, she recorded a disc of Gershwin, Richard Rodgers et al. Yet since that recording included her terrifying, never-to-be-forgotten cover of Billy Joel’s “Just The Way You Are” ( Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The death of Robin Gibb was announced last night. He had been diagnosed with cancer following surgery for a blocked intestine in 2010, when it was discovered that he had cancer of the colon. This April, it was announced he had contracted pneumonia. His death leaves brother Barry as the only surviving Bee Gee.Although influenced by The Beatles, The Bee Gees did, in time, become as big. From the beginning, Robin’s distinctive, soulful and emotional voice was always crucial to their edge. Scissor Sisters' Jake Shears said of Robin, “You are and forever will be a massive influence and inspiration Read more ...
David Benedict
The competition for best dramatic use of a coffee table is won hands down by the wagon-wheel one that prompts a major argument in When Harry Met Sally. Runner-up is the one that appears in Detroit. So deliciously hideous that it gets its own laugh, the symbolic table from Ben and Mary’s nice suburban home is given to new neighbours Sharon and Kenny whose total lack of furniture stems from the fact that they only recently met during a spell in major substance-abuse rehab. Their back yards may abut one another but you don’t have to be Robert Frost to realise that since good fences make good Read more ...