Reviews
howard.male
Dinosaurs. Even just seeing that word takes me back to a letter my seven-year-old self wrote to Blue Peter humbly begging them for “More dinosaws pleez”. Back then, a sighting of these lumbering beasts on TV or at the movies was a rare and thrilling thing. But ever since Jurassic Park (and the fact they can be conjured up with relative CGI ease) we’ve been overrun by the things. The BBC alone have recently given us a Horizon special, a guide to their mythology, and even a programme on how to assemble one yourself should you stumble upon its bones in your back garden.Out of all this new dino Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The final night of the Barbican’s adventurous if slightly awkwardly named Transcender season was a Sufi safari, with a tapas selection of four very different artists from assorted Islamic countries giving a taste of their music.First up, making their UK debut, although they had impressed at this year’s Fes Festival, were the Ensemble Syubbanul Akhyar. The band, whose name translates as “youthful praise”, are from Java, Indonesia, where they added sweet violin, painted a hallucinogenic turquoise, and wonderfully melodic flute to the traditional voice, oud, drums and tambourines. Their music Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It takes an ultra-liberal Catholic like Kevin Smith to tear into Christian fundamentalism with Red State’s ferocious accuracy. The writer-director’s 10th is being sold as a horror film, but the only demons to be seen are those of church and state.When his debut Clerks became a micro-budget paragon of independent cinema in 1994, Smith gently dismissed himself as “a 24-year-old with a talent for dick jokes”. In some subsequent films – Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), for instance - he’s seemed happy to live down to that, and massage his own cult. Red State is a radical change. An early Read more ...
Sarah Kent
"The sheer adventure and life of the touch is the only relevancy," wrote Barry Flanagan in his graduation thesis for St Martin’s School of Art in 1966. "I must allow my hand to touch and feel, my eyes to look and see, my tongue to lick and taste, my nose to sniff and smell, my ears to listen and hear."Clearly a sensualist, his approach to art-making was exploratory; a fascination with materials and processes led to objects whose forms were arrived at through simple actions that are clearly visible in the end product. The first sculptures in this exhibition at Tate Britain are made from sand. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, all women were dressed by Frederick's of Hollywood and all men were a cross between David Lee Roth and Jon Bon Jovi. The Eighties-set Rock of Ages is so outlandish, it might as well be set on another planet. Instead, the all-singing, all-dancing action centres on a bar along LA’s Sunset Boulevard.There’s no doubt that Rock of Ages is absurd, but that hasn’t stopped it being reconfigured for a film that’s in production now. The high-octane cast includes Alec Baldwin, Mary J Blige, Tom Cruise, Paul Giamatti and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Its Broadway run Read more ...
fisun.guner
A 50th birthday is a landmark occasion. One has plenty to look back on, whilst still having much to look forward to. Plus there’s all that life experience to draw on. What’s not to feel positive about? In the case of a gallery that’s built up a remarkable reputation as an innovative space for contemporary art outside London, sheer staying power is surely to be cheered and celebrated – "hear hear" for the next 50 years, and so forth.But it’s also worth asking whether middle age hasn’t precipitated some kind of quiet crisis for Bristol's Arnolfini gallery. It’s not fair, of course, to judge on Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's difficult for modern theatregoers – in or beyond Ireland – to understand the extraordinary furore The Playboy of the Western World caused when it was first performed in 1907 at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Protesters, who believed the play was a slur on the Irish people, gathered at the theatre and drowned out performances with their shouting, and there were even cries of “Kill the author”.JM Synge had committed the cardinal sin of holding up a mirror – albeit a mirror that distorts for comedic effect - to his native land. In a country that was gaining confidence in all things Gaelic ( Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Four years ago a film called Persepolis told the story of a young woman’s experience of revolution in Iran. There has been a modest abundance of Iranian films making their way west over the years, but this distinguished itself from the others by being a frank and unflinching account of recent historical events, told in the form of animation. So the concept of The Green Wave should not take anyone by surprise.In 80 compact minutes, it gives an account of a very different revolution in Iran: the street protests of 2009 before and after the rigged election. It is much less reliant on animation, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 1973 series An American Family is often referred to as television's first reality show, though comparing it to Big Brother or the Kardashians would be like slotting Ingmar Bergman alongside the CBeebies. Its 12 episodes were boiled down from 300-odd hours of observational footage of the Loud family, of Santa Barbara, California, at work, rest and play. But whatever the original intentions of the show's producer, Craig Gilbert, An American Family ended up being far from a fly-on-the-wall portrait of humdrum domestic routine, or "five hours of pass-the-salt", as one TV network Read more ...
ash.smyth
There can't be many excuses for a back-up band at a triple bill, but back it up they did at last night's The Good The Bad album launch at Madame Jojo's. Way up.Hot Fiction deserve a mention for their efforts. A two-man White Stripes (drums and bass) with - both literally and metaphorically - an extra set of balls, they play an old-school, sludged-up tangent somewhere between The Stripes and The Killers, with a few Hendrix-lix and hints of the Bayou thrown in. It's like something you might have seen on black-and-white Top of the Pops, only with better amps, tailor-made for a Guy Ritchie " Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Clowning, despite its association with great funnymen such as Joseph Grimaldi and Charlie Chaplin, has always had a dark underside of melancholy or even menace. More latterly it has been thought of in terms of “low” arts such as circus and street theatre, and so it perhaps shouldn't come as a surprise that fear of clowns, coulrophobia, is in the Top 10 list of phobias, up there with spiders, enclosed spaces and vomiting.Understandably, then, clowning – even the physical-theatre style developed by Jacques Lecoq – is an acquired taste, perhaps more so in modern comedy where wordsmithery is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Excepting the cows, Guernsey’s most famous resident was probably Oliver Reed, who lived there as a tax exile. The barmy This is Jinsy, the creation of Guernsey natives Chris Bran and Justin Chubb, probably isn’t a faithful depiction of the island’s life, but it’s got to be its most notable cultural export. If not that, then its most curious.Jinsy is an island. Its population is 791. Dotted about the place – in homes, too – are 1067 tessalators, surveillance devices that look like old-fashioned parking meters. The tessalators issue edicts and show TV. Living in numbered chalets, the lives of Read more ...