love
Jasper Rees
The door to a pristine apartment is opened by a rivetingly beautiful young woman. “You're early," she says matter-of-factly. "I was just masturbating.” Has a date, and indeed a romantic comedy, ever started so winningly? Not that it goes so well for short, fat, snub-nosed Mark Bellison. At the restaurant she informs him that she’s way out of his league and the evening will not conclude in sex or even a kiss. And the waiter hits on her, unsuccessfully. Mark takes all this on the chin because he’s used to it. Everyone is. In the brilliant conceit of Ricky Gervais’s The Invention of Lying, this Read more ...
graham.rickson
The film critic Mark Kermode maintains that if a film is advertised on the side of a bus, it will inevitably be rubbish. Opera North are advertising this revival of Tim Albery’s 2004 Così fan tutte extensively on the sides of buses here in Leeds. Kermode’s theorem evidently doesn’t hold for opera.This production is an invigorating, life-enhancing evening which showcases all that Opera North excel at: it is visually imaginative, crisply sung and underpinned by marvellous orchestral playing. The witty English-language version (in an uncredited translation) is always audible. Conducting is by Read more ...
ryan.gilbey
Superbad was a modern-day coming-of-age comedy with inexplicable 1970s trimmings (the title, groovy credits sequence, Richard Pryor references and so on). Now its director, Greg Mottola, has made a period piece proper in the form of Adventureland, set in the mid-1980s in a cheesy, dilapidated Pittsburgh theme park where the rides make you throw up, and the stalls are rigged against any customer hoping to win more than a dying goldfish.The movie is breezy and well-observed, but also deeply conventional. It may poke fun at a tacky nightclub called Razzmatazz, which bills itself as “A Read more ...