drugs
Thomas H. Green
With The Jesus & Mary Chain reformed and currently touring their epochal debut album, Psychocandy, theartsdesk reaches into its archives to offer up a rare and very extensive interview with lead singer Jim Reid from 2010.Jim Reid (b 1961) is lead singer and, with older brother William, the creative driving force behind The Jesus and Mary Chain. Together they created a furore in the mid-Eighties, bursting onto the scene with punk churlishness, a uniquely noisy sound and riots that exploded at their every gig. It seemed for a moment as if a new Sex Pistols had arrived.Instead of burning out Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With this year's Cannes Film Festival in full swing, the winner of last year's Best Director prize gets a belated UK release. Heli is the third feature from the Spanish-born, Mexican-raised Amat Escalante, following Sangre (2005) and Los Bastardos (2008). Set in a ravaged town in rural Mexico, Escalante's film shows a country enslaved by the drugs trade, its authorities corrupted and its people living in poverty and fear. By combining compositional magnificence and hard-to-watch content Heli gives us beauty intermingled with beastliness.Heli finds children growing up far too fast, while the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Crystal Fairy (or to give it its full, original name Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus and 2012) is an endearing curio from odd-couple director and star Sebastián Silva and Michael Cera, who have teamed up for a double-bill of projects: the other one is the psychological thriller Magic Magic, currently scheduled for an April release. Silva describes Crystal Fairy as being about "the birth of compassion in someone's life"; it's a comedic drama, improvised by its cast and buoyed by character-sensitive direction and a pair of perfectly pitched, often squirm-inducing, performances.Silva is Read more ...
joe.muggs
The hip hop music of California has always been deeply stoned, and the wave of instrumental beats that have emerged from LA in recent years have taken this to quite some extreme. The scene around the Brainfeeder collective and Low End Theory club have, in fact, produced some of the most deeply psychedelic music of the 21st century, and Sam Baker aka Samiyam is one of the key figures within that.Baker's profile is relatively low outside the scene but he is a foundational figure within it, and his influence is subtly felt more widely: key UK label Hyperdub released an EP in 2008, and electronic Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Not long ago James McAvoy finished a brutal run as Macbeth, and he’s back in Filth as another manic Scotsman hurtling towards self-destruction. The setting is Nineties Edinburgh, and his character, dodgy policeman Bruce Robertson, has a Machiavellian genius for getting one over on his copper colleagues, until his addiction-fuelled luck runs out, and he comes crashing down. He’s the first-person narrator for most of the story, and though repulsively believable, his grip on the narrative starts separating from reality.It’s a compelling performance that pulls out all the stops, and then some, Read more ...
joe.muggs
When drum'n'bass emerged from hardcore rave's interactions with London's pirate radio culture, 20-odd years ago, it created some of the most radical grassroots music ever to come out of the British Isles. It came in such a white heat explosion of underground, transforming repeatedly and rapidly through different iterations its first few years, that nobody could have predicted that it would reach a commercial high-point two decades on. Yet here we are with the likes of DJ Fresh creating chart toppers, d'n'b's top rank of DJs still touring the world to arena crowds, and a whole range of new Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Ronan Bennett doesn’t do protracted. The writer of Top Boy has whipped us through another series, in the course of which an awful lot of water has flowed under the proverbial bridge. Except that it’s blood rather than water that tends to flow in Summerhouse, and the first we saw of a bridge in that neck of East London was in the last seconds of episode four, with Dushane hiding underneath one. He looked more than a bit cornered – not how we’re used to seeing him.Ashley Walters has grown Dushane (main picture) into a character whose confidence knows few bounds. He’s even arbitrated a feud Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Roky Erickson & the Aliens: The Evil One Roky Erickson: Don’t Slander Me, Gremlins Have PicturesRoky Erickson is usually depicted as America’s Syd Barrett: the leader of a pioneering psychedelic-era band who took too many drugs, had mental health issues and then dropped off the face of the earth. But unlike Barrett, or even his American contemporary Skip Spence, Erickson returned from the abyss.In 1980 he pulled off the remarkable coup of releasing an album on the British major label CBS. That first solo album – untitled in the UK (but usually referred to as Five Symbols due to Read more ...
Russ Coffey
There are few duller subjects in popular music than the relationship between Pete Doherty and drugs. I’d like therefore to be able to tell you that I have avoided all such references in this review. The truth is, however, I can’t: from the first slur to the last jangled guitar this still sounds like the work of a man who prefers his consciousness chemically altered. Yet, if Doherty's experimentation is unlikely to ever unlock the doors of perception, on this occasion his mindset is, thankfully, more lightly melancholy than those previous occasions when it was simply depressing and incoherent. Read more ...
emma.simmonds
We're the Millers is a road movie which sees a group of outsiders learn how to fill traditional roles and find happiness. It's a film that flirts with rebellion but ultimately reveals itself to be boringly conformist. Director Rawson Marshall Thurber had a memorable hit with his debut Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story but, in the manner of one of that film's KOs, he falls flat on his back here.Jason Sudeikis plays David Clark, a small-time weed dealer who's never really grown up. When he's robbed of his drug stash and money after playing the good Samaritan he finds himself in debt to mwa-ha-ha Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
After the almost complete absence of the police from the first series of Top Boy, the sirens are blazing as the follow-on to Ronan Bennett’s tough drug-dealing drama kicks in. Specifically, they’re exhuming the corpse of Kamale, who fell victim to Dushane’s ascendance to the position of Top Boy in the East London estate of Summerhouse. What’s left of Kamale a year on is no pretty sight, even though the scene’s got some spectacular background illumination from the O2 stadium.The main change in the ‘hood is that Dushane (Ashley Walters) has parted company with his former best mate Sully (Kane Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Clocking in at a comparatively lean 102 minutes, 2 Guns is a speedy and rumbustious buddy movie in which Bobby Trench (Denzel Washington) and Stig Stigman (Mark Wahlberg) form a wisecracking, fast-shooting duo forced to abandon their mutual suspicion and pool their wits to battle swarms of double-crossing bad guys. The two leads don't quite fizz like Butch and Sundance - Wahlberg as light comedian is like inviting Vladimir Putin to host Celebrity Masterchef - but there are several perfectly serviceable gags, while these days you can put ol' Denzel anywhere and he looks as comfortable as a cat Read more ...