America
Veronica Lee
John Barrowman's Dallas was a shameless ad for Channel 5's upcoming new series, an updated retread of the American soap opera, but an enjoyable pointer nonetheless to what pleasures await us - the amuse-bouche, if you will, to the meaty main course starting next week.For those old enough to remember the original, the prospect of Ewing family shenanigans starting over is a treat indeed. For those too young to have experienced the Emmy-winning show, which was broadcast on BBC One between 1978 and 1991, let me fill you in. Dallas, with its bombastic theme tune and much copied split-screen Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An erstwhile Broadway flop provides late-summer theatrical fascination in the form of Vieux Carré, the self-evidently flawed Tennessee Williams play from 1977 that nonetheless is worth seeing for anyone attuned to this playwright's singular articulation of abandonment and loss. Robert Chevara's production may be as variable in its casting as is Williams's play in both focus and tone, but when its characters give voice, collectively or otherwise, to the abrasions of life, one is drawn anew into the vortex of an artist acquainted at every turn with psychic pain.Williams scholars will Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
America comes with an artist statement where Deacon says “I never felt American until I left the United States”. His third album digs into his “frustration, fear and anger towards the county and world I live in and am a part of”.The album ends with the 21-minute suite “USA”, where, over four sections titled “Is a Monster”, “The Great American Desert”, “Rail” and “Manifest”, Deacon explores the nature of his country.Baltimore’s Deacon is classically trained and has a Masters degree in electro-acoustic composition. His first album, 2007’s Spiderman Of The Rings, cast him as an electronic Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
MoMa and the Met, the Whitney and the Guggenheim – all very fine, but if you crave something different when in NYC, it’s worth braving Penn Station’s circles of hell to get a train to Philadelphia (takes just over an hour) to visit the mind-boggling Barnes Foundation. This private art collection, worth around $30 billion, is in a league of its own. Dr Albert Barnes owned the largest number of Renoirs in the world - 181, acquired between 1912 and 1942; 69 Cézannes - more than the Louvre - 59 Matisses, 46 Picassos, many works by Monet, Degas, Van Gogh, Rousseau, Modigliani, Seurat, Pissarro, Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Stumbling across the perfect pop hit must be its own kind of curse. It’s been two and a half years since Owl City’s “Fireflies” shot its way into the charts, seemingly from nowhere. With its lush, quirky melodies and wistful, lovelorn lyrics, Adam Young’s quirky electronic project seemed almost to have been custom-built by a crack team of pop scientists to appeal to dreamy girls like me. “Fireflies” used to play on a loop at the store where I was working at the time; Young’s vocals and programming a dead ringer for Ben Gibbard’s work with The Postal Service - a band whose one album I loved to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ry Cooder is an unpredictable quantity. He’s a prickly, opinionated old coot who doesn’t seem the type to pass a night in the pub with. He’d probably not get your jokes and moan about the Rolling Stones nicking his songs. His musical output is equally tricksy. For every fab film soundtrack (Paris, Texas, Southern Comfort, The Long Riders) or Buena Vista Social Club, there’s some less loveable tangential whim, such as his Buddy concept album, about a cat and a toad.However, there’s little doubt Keith Richards did find a golden seam of new songwriting via Cooder in the early Seventies, or that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
American critics haven't been too kind to Aaron Sorkin's new HBO series about a cable TV news programme, for a variety of reasons. At least they had the advantage of understanding the intricate partisan infighting of American politics which forms the show's backdrop, and which will be baffling to many British viewers. On the other hand, nobody is likely to have much trouble recognising the A Few Good Men view of history familiar from previous Sorkin milestones such as The West Wing and, uh, A Few Good Men.This time around, Sorkin's hero is Will McAvoy, a former lawyer turned veteran TV anchor Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Those familiar with Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s elegant political feature Il Divo (2008), or perhaps the beautiful, cynical The Consequences of Love (2004) may find themselves struck (pleasantly) dumb by the direction of his latest. Inspired by Lynch’s The Straight Story, This Must Be the Place takes its name from the Talking Heads track (with David Byrne providing original songs and popping up for a cameo). This curio sees Sean Penn’s mischievous goth rocker turn Nazi hunter, taking up his dead father’s mantle of revenge.Penn plays retired rock star Cheyenne, the sartorial twin of Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In Vertigo Kim Novak plays two women who are really just one. First Madeleine, a supernatural siren, a woman apparently possessed by her tragedienne great-grandmother Carlotta Valdes. However, it’s a performance within a performance and she’s merely a facsimile, a devastating creation played by an agent in a murderous plot. The imposter manipulates Scottie (James Stewart) into loving her only so that he may witness her apparent death. Then there’s Judy, the real woman behind the performance who is persuaded back into the part when Scottie can’t let go of Madeleine’s ghost.The dual role Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A friend of mine has an Eames lounge chair that he treats with enormous reverence and claims is the comfiest seat ever made. I simply don’t get it; with its bent plywood shell and black leather upholstery, this 1956 American design classic looks to me dark, clumsy and uninviting – especially when compared with Eileen Gray’s Bibendum chair of some 50 years earlier or the delicate designs produced in the 1920s for the Bauhaus by Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe.Since the Eames phenomenon didn’t readily cross the Atlantic and we are not overly familiar with their achievements, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Seth MacFarlane is the equal opportunity offender responsible for a trio of animated sitcoms: Family Guy, American Dad! and The Cleveland Show. The hardest-working man in TV comedy is known for his colourfully un-PC style and agreeably obnoxious humour, marrying American brassiness with sharp satire, and for turning a baby into a maniacal genius. Ted, his largely enjoyable film debut, focuses on a man held in a state of arrested development by his bad-influence buddy, the twist being that said buddy is a teddy bear. Teddy Ruxpin he most certainly isn't.In last year’s child-friendly Hop the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Movies often come unwittingly in pairs, whether you're talking Capote and Infamous (both about Truman Capote) or Valmont and Dangerous Liaisons (both adapted from the epistolary novel by Laclos). And so it was that the late 1990s saw the release in successive years of Prefontaine (1997) and Without Limits (1998), both telling of the same American track star who died in 1975, age 24.Here's something else that the twin biographies of Steve Prefontaine, the Oregonian Olympic hopeful, had in common: they were both flops. Quite why, precisely, is hard to fathom, and not only because a British Read more ...