California
stephen.walsh
Though composed after and based on a play by the same author, Puccini’s spaghetti western is in no way a sequel to Madama Butterfly, his whisky-sour eastern. Fanciulla is Butterfly’s opposite in almost every respect, and to tell the truth it isn’t much at home in a small theatre like the one at Grange Park. Where Butterfly is delicate and light-handed, its successor is loud and punch-drunk. Its heroine is no frail Puccini victim but a tough mother figure surprised by true love. Simpering geishas are replaced by rough gold-diggers, and mawkish tragedy by the Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Alexander Payne’s adored 2004 film adaptation of Rex Pickett’s semi-autobiographical novel didn’t just pick up an Academy Award – it led to a plummeting in sales of Merlot, and Pinot Noir becoming the drink of choice. What might Pickett’s theatrical version accomplish?The good news is this midlife-crisis comedy will certainly encourage visits to the bar, if not to California’s Santa Ynez Valley. (Canny ads and paired wine tastings stoke the flames of the latter.) Both parody of and love letter to the oenophile, it savours the rituals and jargon, as Pinot fanatic Miles (Daniel Weyman) takes Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was in August 1968 that Graham Nash, then still a member of The Hollies, took a cab from LAX airport in Los Angeles to Joni Mitchell's house in Laurel Canyon. He was just embarking on a love affair with Joni, but also about to blast off on a different kind of adventure with the two musicians who greeted him at her house, David Crosby and Stephen Stills.When Nash added his high vocal harmony to the other two voices as they sang a new Stills song, "You Don't Have to Cry", it was the first spark of a California soft-rock revolution. Crosby Stills and Nash, later joined by Neil Young, would Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
While Harpers Bizarre’s US Top 20 version of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)” will always be their single turned to by American oldies radio, its follow-up “Come to the Sunshine” defines their sound and musical attitude. Written and previously recorded by Van Dyke Parks, it captures an irresistibly effervescent Californian harmony pop which painted a sonic picture of the West Coast in 1967 as balmy, beautiful and seductive. In the same way as The Beach Boys’ early surfing songs, it was as much invitation as postcard, one which said: bring yourself into an Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Although terms like "collateralised debt obligations" and "credit default swaps" were much bandied-about after the banking crash of 2008, they still make sense to almost nobody except bond traders and arbitragers. However, director Adam McKay has come as close as is humanly possible to getting the baffled layman inside the belly of the financial beast in this complex but absorbing movie, and he's done it with wit and flair.The Big Short is based on Michael Lewis's book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, a true story of how a handful of maverick investors discerned that the financial Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Most three-act movies include a scene in which the protagonist and his or her intimates are at their happiest – a state of affairs that can’t last. Oren Moverman and Michael A Lerner, the writers of the Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy, lit upon an organic – in fact, magical – way of encapsulating the effect of Wilson’s genius on the other Beach Boys.It comes when the 24-year-old Wilson (Paul Dano) steers his bandmates into finding the exact blend of harmonies needed for “Good Vibrations” one day in 1966. Even the song’s lyricist Mike Love (Jake Abel), a surf pop conservative who’d Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Chairs, chairs, chairs, as far as the eye can see. Plywood or plastic shells, some decorated with hilarious drawings of jolly nudes by Saul Steinberg (main picture), others in all the colours you can imagine – stacks, in rows, alluring and all so familiar. As it is an exhibition, there is an air of reverence – heaven forbid that you actually have a chair to sit on! - but these chairs have been design icons for well over half a century. Here they are the stars of “The World of Charles and Ray Eames”, an anthology of projects and successes, shown not only in actual produced objects but drawings Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It trashed Olivia Newton-John’s film career, halted the movie-musical revival, and was so critically reviled it led to the creation of the Razzies. How, then, could the stage version of hubristic 1980 flop Xanadu become a 2007 Broadway hit? The answer, as illustrated by Paul Warwick Griffin’s sublimely silly Southwark Playhouse production, is to laugh at itself first.Adaptor Douglas Carter Beane retains the best of the original – John Farrar and ELO leader Jeff Lynne’s infectious pop/rock score – and lovingly spoofs the rest. The book’s absurd Ancient Greece/contemporary California mash-up Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"This ain't the Summer of Love," sang Blue Oyster Cult in 1975. Judging by this intriguing new drama, it might not really have been the Summer of Love in 1967 either, as David Duchovny's Detective Sam Hodiak picks his way through the dope and the kaftans and finds himself on the trail of a menacing little scumbag called Charlie Manson.Looking older and chunkier, but also sleek and a trifle sleazy, Duchovny slips into the role of an LAPD veteran with a knowing shrug. Though the young undercover narcotics cop he ends up working with, Brian Shafe (Grey Damon, pictured below right), starts off Read more ...
ellin.stein
The pop-genius-as-self-destructive-lost-soul biopic is this year’s genre du jour. We’ve already had documentaries on Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain, while coming down the pike are dramatised bios of NWA, Hank Williams, Elton John, and, again, Cobain. Now Love & Mercy, a fictionalised life of Brian (Wilson), presents the Beach Boys’ resident composer of gorgeous pop classics like "God Only Knows" as a sort of Californian Amadeus, an otherworldly savant through whom sublime music pours while he tries to escape from the domination of a stern father. As with all such biopics of artists, it Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The first thing that hits you is the voice. Simultaneously full and fragile; assured, but with a distinctive, backnote graze that runs along it like barbs on a feather shaft, it sounds, at times, as if it’s ghosting itself. As well as lending textural gravitas to pretty much anything Meg Baird chooses to sing, it’s the perfect instrument for this collection of self-penned songs that appear, on first listen, to be haunted by the past.Indeed, as we begin, you could be forgiven for thinking that “Counterfeiters” and “I Don’t Mind” were in fact the opening of a new album by Baird's former band, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time gets called on California in San Andreas, a bone-headed disaster movie that sends huge swathes of the West Coast toppling to its doom even as one particular family not only makes it through intact but is even enriched in the process. Who'd have thought that the demise of several cities full of unnamed people would act as a perverse sort of marriage counselling for a couple in nuptial distress? The real fault here isn't the tectonic one that gives Brad Peyton's putative summer blockbuster its title but the perverse logic of a creative team clearly indifferent to mass suffering but willing Read more ...