Features
Demetrios Matheou
Earlier this year Clotilde Hesme won the César, France’s equivalent to the Oscars, for “most promising actress” in the excellent, atypical love story Angel & Tony. One wonders if the voters have some kind of collective myopia, or simply don’t see enough good movies, because Hesme stopped being "promising" a long time ago.That’s not to take away from a much-deserved award, for one of France’s unsung actresses. Ever since she came seemingly out of nowhere in 2005 to match (and even out-pout) the smouldering Louis Garrel, in his dad Philippe’s epic love story Regular Lovers, Hesme has been a Read more ...
fisun.guner
Where’s Marcus Coates? The gangly shaman-artist was last seen communing with the dark spirit of the soon-to-be demolished Heygate Estate in the Elephant and Castle, but, hell, he’s nowhere on the Turner Prize 2012 shortlist.Coates is an artist whose profile has been steadily growing over the last decade. Last year he showed a moving work at the Serpentine Gallery in which he carried out the last wishes of patients in a hospice (one elderly gentleman said he’d always wanted to go to the Amazon, and so Coates undertook the trip on his behalf). But after seeing his latest film, Vision Quest Read more ...
ellin.stein
This weekend Robert Redford and his Sundance Institute are bringing a sort of taster version of the world’s leading showcase for independent (non-studio) English-language films to London. No one’s going to mistake Greenwich’s O2 Centre for an upscale skiing resort in the Rockies, home of the famed Sundance Film Festival which is held in January, but if Sundance London lacks the funky screening venues and bars of Park City, Utah, it also doesn’t require standing in line in the snow and freezing cold.The other thing that’s hard to replicate is the possibility that you might find yourself in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Who knew back in 1999 that a comedy about a bunch of teenage boys desperate to lose their virginity before they graduated from high school would be so popular? Adam Herz's script for American Pie, filmed by debutant directors Chris and Paul Weitz, was a huge box-office hit, and spawned two sequels; American Pie 2 (2001), American Wedding (2003), and now a third - American Pie: Reunion. There were also four spin-off straight-to-DVD films. Perhaps most notably, it presaged the perils of sex and the internet and brought the term “milf” to worldwide attention.The title famously refers to a scene Read more ...
ellin.stein
Unlike the New Seekers, Whit Stillman does not want to teach the world to sing. He does, however, want to teach it to dance, specifically to dance the Sambola (or, to give it its full name, Sambola! The New International Dance Craze). Instructions and a demonstration accompany the final credits of his new film, Damsels in Distress.Social dancing plays a large role in all of Stillman’s work. His breakthrough, Metropolitan (1990) - which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay and became a Withnail and I-level cult success with fans still quoting favourite lines years later - is set Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
There is something surreal about emerging from an underground station in Liverpool and being confronted by an enormous giant lumbering its way up the street. Even coming up the escalator it is possible to hear the band accompanying this gigantic being merging with the roar of delight from the crowd. And crowds there have been. Over the three days of the Sea Odyssey it is estimated that 600,000 people have seen the latest street theatre creation from Nantes-based Royal De Luxe.The cost of the epic - £1.5m of legacy funding from Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2008 – is Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Levon Helm, who died yesterday from cancer at the age of 71, was not only the drummer in The Band, one of the load-bearing beams of American roots rock. He was also an astonishingly soulful singer, whether as lead or harmony, with a voice that seemed to imbue everything he sang with an unfussy yet absolute truth, as inescapable and essential as the earth.Helm’s distinctive crook-backed playing style and immersed singing, reaching up from his drum stool toward the microphone like a wolf howling at the moon, were marks of a true one-off.Born in Elaine, Arkansas, in 1940, Helm brought the sounds Read more ...
Dylan Moore
The Laugharne Weekend has become a fixture in the crowded calendar of festivals that now punctuates not just high days and holidays but the whole six months that make up British Summer Time. Carving a niche for itself as a halfway house between literature and music, Laugharne’s success is built on two key factors.First, its remarkable natural location in a remote corner of Carmarthenshire, southwest Wales and the village’s associations with Dylan Thomas, whose Boathouse, writing shed and the string of local pubs with legendary stories of the poet’s drunken antics make up Laugharne’s year- Read more ...
Gwyneth Lewis
Like many students, I read the Oresteia by Aeschylus as an undergraduate as part of a compulsory Tragedy paper. A while ago I was asked would I do a new version of the Oresteia. I’m not a Greek scholar so I feel I have no authority to offer a "translation". However, I was up for writing a completely new play.Aeschylus’s Oresteia tells of Agamemnon returning from the Trojan war and being murdered by his wife Clytmnestra because he sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia as part of the campaign. In Aeschylus, Clytemnestra is a wicked man-woman who upstages her husband, takes a lover and is later Read more ...
Thembi Mutch
The 18th-century Omani fort in Zanzibar is silhouetted against a clear African night. Nneka, a bird-like Nigerian female artist in shabby leggings, is hammering out “Vagabonds in Power” on an open-air stage inside the fort, just metres from a sea of entranced faces. The song is a poke at Africa’s leaders, specifically their part in the Niger Delta mismanagement and related death and corruption scandals. With a voice reminiscent of Nina Simone, and the emotional clout of Billie Holiday, Nneka delights the predominantly African crowd attending the Busara festival. They punch the air, and raise Read more ...
ronald.bergan
News that Nicole Kidman is to play Grace Kelly in a movie called Grace of Monaco convinces me that it is foredoomed. This time Kidman won’t have any prosthetics to help her resemble Grace Kelly, such as the long nose she wore as Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002). Nor would it be possible, as attractive and talented as Kidman is, to replicate Kelly’s ineffable quality and patrician beauty.Unlike other biopics, those with film stars playing film stars fail because the originals exist to be compared with and appreciated in the same medium. In fact, they are attempting to simulate someone whose Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
You may be feeling Titanic fatigue by now, the last straw being the so-so Julian Fellowes TV romp which heads, as Adam Sweeting points out elsewhere, “an epidemic of TV programmes” this week. Rather than seeing any of them, or the Cameron film epic, or even Roy Wood Baker’s 1958 melodrama A Night to Remember, can I quietly recommend the evocative and moving The Sinking of the Titanic by Gavin Bryars, which will be performed at Birmingham Town Hall on (pause for doom-laden chord) Friday the 13th and at the Barbican on the 15th, the exact centenary date.Quietly recommending seems to be the Read more ...