America
alexandra.coghlan
And so John Adams’s residency with the London Symphony Orchestra reaches its finale – a brisk allegro of a concert with a cheeky coda in the form of the composer’s latest orchestral work, Absolute Jest. One of contemporary music’s most articulate advocates, Adams here swapped pen for baton in a beautifully programmed concert that took a postmodern road-trip across 20th century musical America, guiding listeners along the highways of Copland’s Appalachian Spring and Ives’s Country Band March and off-road for Elliott Carter’s Variations for Orchestra.Ives’s Country Band March is Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
A rum aspect of the Oscar nominations has been the inclusion of two films that concern American slavery, and which could not be more different: in Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino gives the American slave exactly the sort of empowerment he offered the Jews in Inglourious Basterds – blood-splatter violent and fantastical; in Lincoln, Steven Spielberg is happy to lean on the history books, for a respectful biopic. Lincoln might not be as inventive, or as much fun as Django, but its seriousness and maturity are a welcome alternative to Tarantino’s excess.Spielberg is no stranger to the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Zero Dark Thirty could have easily gone by the name of the Danish thriller from last year, The Hunt, it’s so furiously single-minded. As it is, the film's striking title is a military term for half-past midnight - the timing of the Navy SEAL raid which shot dead Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on 2 May 2011. The shadowy, nail-biting recreation of that infamous operation forms the film’s finale and is its pièce de résistance. But Zero Dark Thirty also gives us the undisclosed story of the 10-year search for bin Laden: the moments of discovery and revelation, as well as the frustrations and deadly Read more ...
David Nice
“It looks like the Coconut Lounge,” remarked John Adams as he stepped up jauntily to introduce the first of two big string pieces composed 30 years apart. The folk with their drinks at the candlelit tables, though, were never allowed to sit back and let it all wash over them.The seminal Shaker Loops of 1978, heard here in its string-orchestra incarnation of five years later, buffets and charges you as it flies or coasts through space, the polar opposite of the more placid minimalism which inspired it. That was nothing, though, compared to the strange adventure of Adams’ recent String Quartet Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's not an easy trick for an outsized action hero to grow older gracefully or credibly, but Arnold Schwarzenegger has made a shrewd choice of vehicle with which to launch his post-political film career. The way he tells it, being Governor of California was only ever intended to be a temporary time-out from Hollywood. Back in his first leading role since 2003's Terminator 3, he has little difficulty in seizing control of the screen.However, he has carefully scaled down his ambitions. Playing Ray Owens, sheriff of the small town of Sommerton, Arizona, Arnie has adopted a laboured senior Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As promised, he's back. Arnold Schwarzenegger's last major movie appearance was in 2003's Teminator 3: Rise of the Machines, probably the worst of the Terminators but a lucrative one nonetheless. Since then he has popped up in a few cameo roles including an appearance as Prince Hapi in the Jackie Chan/Steve Coogan remake of Around the World in 80 Days, but from 2003-2011, he was mostly preoccupied with being governor of California. And handling a few personal issues of course, which led to him separating from his wife Maria Shriver in 2011.Anyway, this week the 65-year-old Arnold gets top Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As proof that the American cinema for the most part exists to waste its actresses, along comes Won't Back Down. A peculiarly reactionary piece of tosh, it masquerades as a crusading film in the spirit of Norma Rae, the Sally Field Oscar-winner from decades ago that in fact is snarkily referenced in passing. The story of two determined mums who take on the Pittsburgh school system and (guess what?) win, Daniel Barnz's film exudes the breathless if misplaced confidence of a pre-schooler who hasn't yet learned anything of the realities of life and thinks that all experience can be reduced to a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although there was no shortage of interview clips with Glen Campbell [who has died at the age of 81] in this fine overview of his career, the tragedy was that archives were so heavily drawn on. Tragic because pop-country stylist Campbell has Alzheimer’s and is limited in what he can contribute. Less tragic, but equally noteworthy, was that British TV has taken so long to get around to seriously appraising the singer of classics like “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”, “Wichita Lineman”, “Galveston” and “Rhinestone Cowboy”.Campbell was a British chart and television fixture from the late Sixties Read more ...
mark.kidel
Aaron Neville’s ache-soaked voice was nourished by the romance of doo-wop tearjerkers and late 1950s black rock’n’roll: the Drifters, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters and other silken-toned purveyors of proto-soul. It’s hardly surprising that he should record an album that recreates the glory of repertoire classics such as “Money Honey”, “Under the Boardwalk", “Bye Bye Baby” and other much-covered hits of an era whose innocence we have definitively left behind.Neville’s signature success, “Tell it Like it Is”, demonstrated how much mid-'60s soul owed to an Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Even though this much-anticipated encounter was shown on the Discovery channel in the middle of the night, it was still generously packed with ad breaks, which may be some testament to the global selling power of Oprah Winfrey. But in fact the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), which made the programme, has been struggling for ratings in its two-year existence while managing to burn a $300m hole in Oprah's pocket.Could disgraced super-cyclist Lance Armstrong, seven-times Tour de France winner but now expunged from the record books following revelations about the epic extent of his use of banned Read more ...
David Nice
Want to learn more about 20th century music in action? Starting tomorrow, you could lose yourself in the labyrinth of the Southbank’s year-long The Rest is Noise festival, and plough your way through Alex Ross’s monumental but partisan study of that name. Or you could learn a lot in a short space of time from John Adams’s mini-residency with the LSO at the Barbican. There’s an even more essential book to read alongside it, the composer’s Hallelujah Junction, following an insider’s path to finding his own voice after encounters with the rigours of the 12-tone system, Cage-style anything-goes Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With its exuberant blood-spray, rambunctious dialogue and generous running time, Django Unchained is writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s first full foray into Westerns. Although it’s not a remake, it pays tribute to Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 Spaghetti Western Django, not only in name but in its use of the title song - which opens this movie as it opened that one - and in the fleeting appearance of the original's game star, Franco Nero (pictured below right).The year is 1858, two years before the American Civil War, and the setting "somewhere in Texas". We watch as a pair of slave trading brutes Read more ...