New York
Kieron Tyler
The expected curveball came an hour in with a completely unfamiliar 14-minute song. Based around a pulsing bass riff, it was a deconstructed merger of The Rolling Stones’s “Paint it Black” and the Spanish side of Love’s Da Capo. A large contingent of the audience used it as handy toilet break.Television were never going to play what amounted to the equivalent of a straight greatest hits set, although they came pretty close last night at the Roundhouse. There was no “Foxhole”, but “Elevation”, “Guiding Light, “Little Johnny Jewel”, “Prove it”, “Torn Curtain” and “See no Evil” were aired. The Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Showbiz is a cruel and mysterious cosmic code that can grind the artist down, before he comes close to cracking it. That’s the message behind the Coen brothers’ elegy to the Greenwich Village folk scene of 1961. Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) stands bruised and baffled at its heart.Speculation mounted in the wait for the Coens’ sixteenth that Davis’s resemblance in early footage to Dylan on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’s sleeve meant he’d be a satire on the singer. Actually, he’s Dylan’s shadow: the folkie scuffling round New York who then doesn’t get the breaks, and whose American dreams aren’t Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The new puritanism of the American cinema continues apace with Thanks For Sharing, which follows on from the more elegantly made but comparably dispiriting Shame in positing Manhattan as the most sexually dysfunctional place on earth. What did New York do (besides elect Michael Bloomberg as mayor three times over) to deserve all this carnal angst and obsessiveness and shame? Lord knows, but even the wonderful Mark Ruffalo can't lift the spirits of a film that wallows in its therapy-speak environs. One doubts audiences will be sharing this one once word of mouth kicks in.Ruffalo plays Adam, a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
That slice of Broadway-upon-Southwark that is the Menier Chocolate Factory has a toxic treat in The Lyons, Nicky Silver's pitch-black and quintessentially New York comedy about a family so in love with truth-telling that they've all but forgotten how to live. Small wonder the cancer-ridden Lyons père (Nicholas Day, in blistering form) swears up a storm throughout the first act as he lies in hospital preparing to die. Why go gently into the good night, the play's characters all in their own way ask, when you can exit in rampaging style, dragging everyone through the rancorous muck with Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An immensely likeable cast gets pushed to breaking point and beyond in Girl Most Likely, a Kristen Wiig quasi-romcom that is preposterous and obnoxious in turn. The tale of a playwright called Imogene (Wiig) who starts over by returning to her New Jersey home and to Zelda, her former go-go dancer of a mum (an unplayable role here foisted upon the great Annette Bening, if you please), the film wants to be distinctively quirky and merely ends by shutting the audience out.Nor would detail seem to be its strong suit if the dénouement is to be believed. By film's end, Imogene is shown savouring Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s one of the delightful incongruities of pop that Moby continues to be a presence. This 5’7”, bespectacled, bald, 48-year-old New York intellectual hardly seems frontline material in a world where One Direction and Jessie J rule the roost. Even his home country’s clubland, the turf which nurtured him, has been taken over by younger contenders whose over-production is rife with keg-party obviousness. And yet, despite a slow downwards sales curve since his 1999 behemoth Play – understandable, given it shifted over 12 million copies – Moby’s music and concerts continue to do the business.In Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I see a lot of things up there, I get chills, see shadows. I don’t know if you call them ghosts or whatever, but you feel stuff. They’re trying to tell you something.” This is bolt boss Mohawk Joe “Flo” McComber, one of the many Mohawk iron workers rebuilding the World Trade Center. A tough guy, he’s not alone in sensing the spirits of the dead. “The site is being take care of in a different way. You feel it,” says Mike O’Reilly, another ironworker.Belfast-born artist and film-maker Marcus Robinson has been on site since 2006, recording the rise of 1 WTC from bedrock upwards with time-lapse Read more ...
Tim Cumming
No songwriter casts a deeper shadow than Bob Dylan does, and since the first three volumes of the Bootleg Series came in 1991, his shadow career – now reaching Volume Ten with Another Self Portrait – continues to prove as compelling as the official releases. While the latter are set in stone, the Bootleg Series is more like a basement excavation, digging into the softer darker clays of epochal concerts, wildly alternate versions, and almost willfully lost treasures.With Another Self Portrait, Dylan’s archivists have remoulded clay, looking for a hidden masterpiece. Folks, it’s just not there Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You might wonder if anybody really deserves three and a half hours of TV biography, but after the first half of Robert Weide's immense survey of Woody Allen, the nebbish messiah, I was pawing the carpet in anticipation of part two. Documentaries don't, as a rule, leave you in seizures of mirth, but the judicious selections from Allen's bottomless catalogue carried a sealed-in guarantee of hilarity despite being snatched from their original context.But it isn't just comedy, or perhaps it's comedy as the visible tip of a fully-rounded philosophical iceberg. Even Allen's shortest one-liners may Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Woody Allen once joked that he would prefer to achieve immortality not through his work but through not dying. He is now 77 and the inevitable is a lot nearer than it was when he first realised, aged five, that this doesn’t go on forever. Fear of death has powered the furious productivity that in the early days yielded jokes by the yard, then the films appearing year upon year. In the interim the public image has calcified: the master comedian who would prefer to be a tragedian, the world-class worrier, the clarinet-tooting workaholic. But is that the real Woody Allen? This week a two-part Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Samantha Urbani is one of the sassiest frontwomen in all pop, a sexy, feline creature whose polyamorous lifestyle fuels her lyrics and adds to her projected sensuality. She sits outside Brighton seafront venue Coalition, watching water-skiers ride the mill pond sea in balmy summer heat, but one whisper from a bandmate in her ear and she's onstage within a minute, attacking opening song "Shattered". She wears a faded denim jacket with a yin-yang logo on the back, a white New York baseball cap, hot pant shorts with bulbous gold trim and a necklace of giant ersatz pearls. Behind her a large LED Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Sophisticated Boom Boom!! – The Shadow Morton StoryWithout Shadow Morton, Amy Winehouse could not have made Back to Black. The songs the enigmatic sonic wizard wrote and produced for The Shangri-Las in the mid Sixties were integral to what made Back to Black tick. Amazingly, Sophisticated Boom Boom!! – The Shadow Morton Story is the first career-spanning collection of Morton’s work. For that alone, it would be, at the least, exciting. But with its massive, well-illustrated booklet, the involvement of and interviews with Morton – who died in February this year, before he Read more ...