America
Kieron Tyler
“Suddenly, all America wants to be a redneck”. That might be slightly overstating the impact of southern rock on American culture. Californian ex-actor Ronald Reagan becoming president in the footsteps of Georgia’s Jimmy Carter suggests it’s an unsound declaration, despite the prime-time scheduling of The Dukes of Hazzard during Carter’s tenure. Sweet Home Alabama made the case for the rock music of the south, but failed to convince that it inspired a cultural shift.Instead, this was essentially the story of two bands: The Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd. The path traced began with Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Like an adrenalin injection straight to the heart of a flagging horror genre, The Cabin in the Woods is fresh, funny and teeming with deliciously nasty surprises which - have no fear - will not be revealed to you here. Although it’s helmed by first-time director Drew Goddard (the Cloverfield scribe and co-producer of Lost and Alias), for many the key name attached to The Cabin in the Woods will be Joss Whedon, the film’s co-writer and producer. Whedon is the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (on which Goddard also worked as a writer), Firefly and the lesser but still impressively ambitious Read more ...
ash.smyth
“If James Bond actually worked in MI6 today,” said “Anna”, “he’d spend a large amount of time behind a desk.” Fair enough, since he’d also be about 110. And besides, the days of the Oxbridge “tap” having gone the way of Bernard Lee, most of 007’s work has long been outsourced to Johnny Foreigner.In the age of Homeland, Spooks, Rubicon, Tinker Tailor... (again), and Ben Macintyre, it seemed unlikely that much more needed to be said about the role (and/or importance) of spies in our world. But Peter Taylor’s Modern Spies (BBC Two) deserves credit for being made at all – a first, apparently: Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It's about as close to a spiritual awakening as I’ve had in my entire life,” said Lionel Richie. He was standing close to the unmarked grave of his great-grandfather, in the pauper’s section of an overgrown Chattanooga cemetery. Richie began the search for the man he’d discovered was called John Louis Brown thinking he was on the trail of a scoundrel. He ended it discovering Brown was a former slave who had become a pioneer of the American civil rights movement. Throughout the programme, Richie wasn’t given to emotional displays and wasn’t verbose. His usual comment as each discovery was Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Perfectly peculiar and as cute as can be, Tiny Furniture is the second film from writer/director Lena Dunham. Her first, Creative Nonfiction (2009), was based on her own romantic woes, shot whilst she was attending college and featured a cast of non-professionals - mostly her friends. Its adorably titled, professionally produced successor sees Dunham still working very much with what she knows: she features in the starring role, alongside her mother, sister, (some) friends and it’s part set in her family home. In Tiny Furniture the colourfully calamitous, low-key adventures of Dunham’s alter Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Into the Abyss sees celebrated German filmmaker Werner Herzog take a sharp turn away from those marvels of early man he so magnificently captured in the stereoscopic Cave of Forgotten Dreams to the shocking violence of which humanity is also capable, here both greed-fuelled and state-sanctioned. It’s a documentary which takes as its focus a multiple homicide and is both an anatomy of a (triple) murder and a passionate, if frequently askew, petition against the death penalty.Wearing his anti-capital punishment stance proudly from the outset, Herzog delves into the 2001 murder of Sandra Stotler Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
If you’ve ever had that cold, clammy feeling following the realisation that an email, in which you have been less than flattering about a colleague, has accidentally landed in said colleague’s inbox, then you will have experienced roughly a millionth of the pain felt by assorted US government officials in the wake of the WikiLeaks scandal.In late 2010, the website WikiLeaks posted around 250,000 secret communications between Washington and the scores of US diplomats stationed across the world, which were subsequently published in newspapers. Suddenly America’s private anxieties and political Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Civil Wars are one of those bands rendered suddenly white hot in the UK by a classy performance on Later with Jools Holland. They’re a photogenic country-ish acoustic singer-songwriter pairing whose style is just un-country enough to fit neatly alongside James Morrison on Home Counties i-players, but whose very, very faint tint of Deep South gothic also has the hipsters intrigued. They have sold out the Shepherds Bush Empire tonight and arrive on stage to enthused applause and yells of appreciation. The crowd are in their early thirties and upwards, straight-looking, and they love this Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It’s two songs into Port of Morrow, the Shins’ first album since 2007’s Wincing the Night Away (and the band’s first to be distributed by a major label, Columbia) and it hits me that what I’m hearing isn’t something I’ve heard before. Sure, the track - “Simple Song” - started streaming on the band’s website back in January with accompanying fanfare, but that isn’t exactly what I mean. It’s more that those first two songs sound like a continuation, and a surprising one at that.When you’ve had any level of investment in a band at all, news of a full-on line-up change never goes over well. While Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Those of a certain age will remember the television series 21 Jump Street, a huge hit for the then fledgling Fox network in America. It ran from 1987 to 1991 and starred Johnny Depp. The titular address was where he worked as an undercover cop, one of a team of youthful officers investigating crimes in high schools and colleges. Jonah Hill, who at 28 is far too young to have watched the original but no doubt caught one of its many reruns, is a fan and has now co-written, co-produced and stars in the film version.It may seem like a vanity project but it's actually an amusing venture: part Read more ...
bella.todd
He has terrible tusks, and terrible claws, and terrible teeth in his terrible jaws… Ah wait now, that’s The Gruffalo. Mark Lanegan doesn’t have any of the above (although he does have tattooed fists and a considerable jaw, and past heroin addiction probably hasn’t played too well with the old teeth). But the grunge survivor turned celebrated American gothic bluesman is the gruffest man in rock, with a voice that makes Nick Cave seem like a bit of a pussy and Johnny Cash sound positively moisturised, and a complimentary reputation for hard living and hard dealing that warns baby music Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
There have been many Earths. Dylan Carlson has been the only constant, using the shifting line-ups as the vehicle for his vision of a music that is all about space, slowness, and repetition. As last night's concert made clear, he no longer needs a heavy metal framework to achieve his goal. Nowadays, understatement achieves heaviness. You could call it maturing.Earth are currently Carlson on guitar, bassist Karl Blau, percussionist Adrienne Davies and cellist Lori Goldston. Goldston is best known for playing with Nirvana on MTV’s Unplugged. Carlson was once Kurt Cobain’s roommate and they were Read more ...