sex
Kieron Tyler
Although 2010 was undeniably a bad year for Greece, the arrival of Attenberg was a timely reminder that despite the country’s financial bankruptcy, it wasn’t culturally bankrupt. Suffused in melancholy, Attenberg nonetheless recognises that courage and facing change head on are core to the human spirit.theartsdesk has already remarked on Attenberg’s “peculiarity and pathos”. Two other things are central to Attenberg. At one point, Marina’s architect father remarks that the project he’s part of “might as well be constructing ruins”. That, and his and Marina’s strategy to cope with and organise Read more ...
graeme.thomson
My, but it’s been a bumper few months for the Baker Street Boy. There’s been Anthony Horowitz’s superior new Holmes novel, The House of Silk, Guy Ritchie’s second instalment of his steampunk take on Sherlock as karate-kicking action hero, and now the return of the BBC’s stylish reboot of Holmes as a new millennium net 'tec. And what a lot of fun it was. There may be helicopters, webcams and Wi-Fi, and Dr Watson may be blogging rather than scratching away at the old pen and ink, but still the essence of what makes Holmes such an enduringly compelling fictional figure was evident in spades.The Read more ...
graeme.thomson
This was the year I finally fell in love with Laura Marling’s music. I liked her first two albums well enough, but I couldn't quite shake the feeling that the endless chorus of critical hosannas was more about what people wanted her to be than what she actually was. Well, A Creature I Don’t Know certainly changed all that.Perhaps it was the newfound sense of playfulness I fell for. Produced by Ethan Johns and recorded in a week, Marling’s third album feels like a more wayward, somewhat wanton older sister to her first two records. It pulls at the hems of her music, musses its hair, smudges Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It could have been Fleet Foxes’s Helplessness Blues, or maybe The War on Drugs’s Slave Ambient, but this is the one that keeps being returned to. Lykke Li’s Wounded Rhymes kept forcing its way to the top of the pile, insisting it had to be heard. The music was forceful, the melodies instantly unforgettable but it was also impossible not to be distracted by the lyrics of “Get Some”: “Don’t pull your pants before I go down… Like the shotgun, I need an outcome, I'm your prostitute, you gonna get some”.She told me earlier this year that “Get Some” was “not sexual. It’s not really submission Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Two French films, both exploring the nature of the erotic charge and its impact on characters whose well-being is off balance. One leaves things mostly unsaid, with its leads barely expressing what’s hanging in the air. The other leaves nothing hanging in the air.In Q, Cécile (Déborah Révy) gets on with it. Fetching up in nowhere-ville, France, after the death of her father, she’s looking to fill an empty space and create sexual havoc in her wake. Cécile needs conformation that the men she comes across are affected by her. She also needs to make the younger Alice (Hélène Zimmer) aware it’s Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Loneliness is hard to put on stage. There is something about the feeling of unwanted urban solitude which is so repetitive and, let’s face it, boring, that writing a play about it risks sending the audience into the night before the story is properly over. So the first thing to say about Lucinda Coxon’s play, which was first staged in Bath a year ago and now makes a welcome appearance in London, is that it is compelling and never boring. In fact, it has that strange kind of intensity that leaves you feeling completely shell-shocked at the end of the evening.Set in a single room somewhere in Read more ...
Graham Fuller
My Week With Marilyn depicts the supposedly sweet dalliance between Marilyn Monroe – an actress in over her head played by an actress, Michelle Williams, reaching her peak – and eager-beaver gofer Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) during the fraught Pinewood production of Laurence Olivier’s The Prince and the Showgirl in 1956. The liaison, romantic on the boy’s part, needy on the star’s, was such a pivotal episode in the life of television arts film-maker Clark (son of Sir Kenneth, brother of Tory MP Alan) that he wrote two memoirs about it, the sources of Simon Curtis’s likeable but slender and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Dateline July 14th, 2357, New Oxford Excavation, UK Sector 71. Uncovered a remarkable haul of artefacts from the early 21st century. Most pristine among these is a sonic data disc, theoretically a devotional item related to the contemporaneous female fertility symbol known as Rihanna. The disc was discovered intact in a transparent plastic case accompanied by a 120 x 120mm stapled booklet. It appears the disc’s primary purpose was related to sexual arousal. Photographic images within the booklet, both black-and-white and colour, offer up Rihanna in a multiplicity of sexual availability – Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Until recently, on YouTube, you could watch Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley’s Heidi (1992), one of the funniest and most transgressive videos ever made. In a Swiss chalet, the children Heidi and Peter are being “educated” by their abusive grandfather, who freely indulges his propensity for bestiality, incest, onanism and scopophilia. Played out with the help of masks, inflatable dolls and numerous props, life in this dysfunctional family reveals both childhood innocence and parental responsibility to be a myth. Recently, though, even a cleaned-up version of this black comedy has been deemed too Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Those of a certain vintage will know Richard Herring's irreverent comedy best from his BBC television work with erstwhile partner Stewart Lee - including Fist of Fun (1995-96) and This Morning with Richard Not Judy (1998-99) - while newer fans will be familiar with his radio work and podcasts. Over the years, though, while Lee has grown into the most astute and cutting political comic of his age, it's probably fair to say that Herring has taken a more meandering route to finding his métier.Herring is not afraid to take on big subjects – religion in Christ on a Bike!, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
So Fresh Meat approaches the conclusion of season one and, against my expectations, I’ve become a devoted fan. When it was announced that Peep Show creators Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain were launching a new sitcom, based around a Manchester student household, it sounded promising; perhaps a postmodern update on The Young Ones was in the offing. Peep Show fans were expecting a riot of sordid humour and cruel jokes of embarrassment. We had those in spades. What we weren’t expecting were such wonderfully written and acted character studies.You grew to really care about perky try-too-hard Welsh Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In an age when comics are doing shows with theatrical content or presented with a degree of technological sophistication, and they appear on stage expensively coiffed and suited, it's refreshing to spend an evening in Sarah Millican's company, whose show at times feels like we're having a chat over the garden wall. It's also pleasing that someone who just a few years ago was a jobbing club comic is now enjoying the sort of success her talent so richly deserves. I saw her latest show, Thoroughly Modern Millican, at the huge Hammersmith Apollo but I suspect that arena gigs can't be far behind, Read more ...