America
Matt Wolf
Just in time to capitalise - is that how that word is spelled? - on awards season, along comes the latest Broadway-to-Britain transplant, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, a musical all about a culture that likes to win, win, WIN! Does William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin's surprise 2005 New York hit go to the top of the London class? Intermittently, yes. Charming and cheeky at its best, repetitive and sentimental elsewhere, the piece may simply be too echt-American to repeat its success here, though it certainly marks a change at the Donmar from the daunting fare this playhouse has Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When Treme debuted on HBO in the States, some excitable critics watched the pilot episode and instantly proclaimed it a masterpiece superior even to The Wire. David Simon, who created both shows, may have been delighted. Or on the other hand, he might have wondered how anybody could assess a complex, long-term portrayal of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina so categorically on so brief an acquaintance.Now Treme is here, though at the moment sadly confined to the elite mini-monde of Sky Atlantic. Having watched the pilot, I felt ill equipped to deliver a definitive judgment of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Look past the cum buckets, the trucker pussy, the fuck you-ing and cunt-hungry beasting (librettist Richard Thomas's words, not mine), the mountainous titties and cheap promotional candy that had been confected for the legions of rubbishy celebrity opera virgins scattered in the Royal Opera House audience at last night's world premiere and you will find a profoundly conservative, and mostly not unattractive, new opera in Anna Nicole.Most conservative was the story. Put-upon female has life destroyed for evening's entertainment - ie, classic operatic fallen-woman porn. Ask Violetta, Lulu Read more ...
josh.spero
Inside Inside Job is an interesting film struggling to get out. Sadly, one has to sit through two hours of Financial Meltdown 101 to see it. Narrated by Matt Damon in his serious voice (and if you're anything like me, you'll always be thinking of his Team America caricature), the film starts with the perfect glaciers of Iceland being ravaged as the free market takes its toll. The financial engineering that brought its banks down is exposed, and it's cut to a rock song overlaying swooning shots of New York that would not be out of place in Sex and the City.These first five minutes tell us Read more ...
Russ Coffey
To mark the release of their new single "Dilly" theartsdesk has limited-edition box sets of Band of Horses album Infinite Arms to give away. The box sets have a CD version, a vinyl version and artwork unique to the set. All potential winners have to do is to answer the four questions below, and just to make it easy the answers will be found by following the embedded links.
Band of Horses' latest album is called Infinite Arms, but what is the first song on the album?
Band of Horses' lead singer Ben Bridwell is sometimes compared to Neil Young. What was the title of the last Neil Young album? Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Detroit electro-techno duo of James Stinson and Gerald Donald aka Drexciya never gave away their secrets easily. Almost completely anonymous and never photographed during their 10-year existence – which ended with Stinson's 2002 death after a long illness – they surrounded their music with a complex mythos and mischievous wit comprehensible only to a small, obsessive cult audience. Only now are they getting wider appreciation, with a new generation of electronic musicians like Rustie hugely influenced by their sparse electronic funk, and the art world being introduced to their Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Who needs America for the American theatre? Barely six weeks into this year, and already we've had the bracing and bilious Becky Shaw, the West End transfer of Bruce Norris's perpetually award-scooping Clybourne Park and Woody Guthrie taking up residence at the Arts Theatre courtesy of Woody Sez. What's been lacking has been the sort of defining revival on the order of last season's All My Sons that shakes down an extant text, inducing in sometimes unruly West End audiences a wondrous hush. Well, the wait is over: The Children's Hour has reached town anew in a production so powerful that Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A whiff of excrement hangs around DBC Pierre’s Booker Prize-winning Vernon God Little. It’s a novel that likes to get right up into the crevices of society and then inhale deeply. Written in an anarchic, freewheeling American patois, it’s the inner voice of Vernon himself (and Pierre’s brutal way with a simile) that plays shock and awe with the reader, delighting many and appalling more. The loss of narrative voice would seem enough to deter any would-be theatrical adaptor, but in 2007 Tanya Ronder and the Young Vic took up the challenge. The result (newly revised) now makes a return – Read more ...
josh.spero
Aptly for a programme whose title invokes a show which is all style, no substance, the subject of Ronald Reagan: American Idol is image. What was Reagan really like? How much of his career as a Hollywood star did he carry into office? And why have certain images of Reagan endured? The first question, alas, is the one neither the film nor his biographers nor his family and friends have come close to answering.The film, directed by Eugene Jarecki and shown to coincide with Reagan's centenary, opens with an ancient clip of Reagan talking about the fictionality of what follows. This tactic Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The timely arrival on DVD of Winter’s Bone as it heads for the Oscars ceremony gives a fresh chance to dwell on the film’s unshowy riches. Jennifer Lawrence plays 17-year-old Ree whose father has disappeared, leaving her to care for an invalid mother and a much younger brother and sister. If she can’t find him, a bail bondsman will repossess the family house in the Missouri backwoods.Her search takes her fearlessly into terrain patrolled by vengeful crystal meth dealers who trade in natural justice. Lawrence deserves every plaudit for a performance which mixes heartstopping vulnerability Read more ...
joe.muggs
Carl Craig is extraordinarily easygoing. Most dance producers of his seniority and level of achievement would come with at least a publicist in tow, but when we meet him in his London hotel, his only entourage is his nine-year-old son, playing happily with an iPad or chatting to the photographer as we talk, and Craig is very easy and engaging company. One might expect someone more driven-seeming, given that, in the notoriously fickle world of club music, he has managed to keep both fiercely snobbish techno fans and mainstream club audiences on side for over two decades, branching out Read more ...
josh.spero
Probably the only person who would try and tackle cancer in a "humorous" way in Britain would be Frankie Boyle, and God knows he's not funny. No doubt we'd be treated to jokes about how unattractive women without hair are, or something equally enlightening. But while the British would come at this from an unpleasant angle, it is normally squeamish American TV which is in the true avant-garde. Hence, The Big C on More4.Laura Linney, saddled with infantile Oliver Platt as a husband and a son who seems on the cusp of rebellion, gets X-ray results with those ominous black spots, and it's terminal Read more ...