America
Sarah Kent
Last week I watched a tiny tot being photographed by her father, on a beach in southern Turkey. There was no girlish giggling or splashing about in the sea; rather than a show of carefree happiness, she delivered a studied pose. She assumed an expression of supreme indifference and, with hand on hip and weight on one leg, twisted her body into a seductive coil. The four-year-old was imitating a supermodel! I didn’t see the pictures, of course, but I would still classify this kind of premature sexualisation as child pornography.The American photographer, Sally Mann was accused of kiddy porn in Read more ...
neil.smith
Creative rebirth or belated midlife crisis? That is the question that hovers over Francis Ford Coppola’s decision to turn his back on lucrative studio fare in favour of personal pet projects with an arthouse bent. The director of The Godfather trilogy has been here of course, his 1982 flop One From the Heart leading him to declare bankruptcy and spend a decade or more doing derivative hack work to pay off his debts. This time around, though, he has taken a self-sufficient route, using profits from his Californian vineyard and other businesses to finance modestly budgeted indies that enable Read more ...
fisun.guner
The gallery has been turned into a little girl’s dressing-up closet. The walls are painted midnight blue and dusted with glitter. Ballet shoes, made for small feet, and a discarded tutu are to be found in a decorous pile on the floor. There are shiny trinkets and princessy things and pictures of ballerinas in bright, pastel shades. And miniature cabinets, almost empty but for one or two small objects – old, discardable things that might be hoarded away as treasures by a child wrapped up in its own imaginary world.I’m not quite sure what Joseph Cornell would have made of all this – his Read more ...
david.cheal
Our story begins in the early 1970s, when a young fiddler from Louisiana named Michael Doucet was making rock music. Then one day he heard a song by Fairport Convention: “Cajun Woman” (from the band’s Unhalfbricking album). He was shocked and delighted that an English group should be taking an interest in a strand of music that seemed to be fading into obscurity. In a sort of Proustian moment, he inhaled the fragrance of “Cajun Woman”, his interest in the music of his native region was awakened, and Doucet began to immerse himself in the folk music of France and of his home state, where Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Hans van Manen does basic instincts in ballet better than anyone alive. The Dutch choreographer, nearly 78 and far too little exposed in Britain, is a near-contemporary of Kenneth MacMillan, another specialist in sexual relations, but where MacMillan is fascinatingly drenched in guilt, Van Manen takes a bold, guilt-free stand. Grosse Fuge, which Birmingham Royal Ballet revived in the Hippodrome last night in a smart triple bill to entertain all tastes, is all about mating display - four men in black oriental skirts and big-buckled belts, four women in beige Playtex-type corsets that give Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As cinematic landmarks go, Kutcher Speaks French may not quite be up there with Garbo Talks. But there's a certain pleasure to be had in the opening sequences of the otherwise dismal Killers to find that so quintessential a movie dude can actually manage the word "bonjour". Small wonder that a vacationing, newly single Katherine Heigl falls for this clearly keen linguist in a lift in Nice. His bared torso has nothing to do with it - surely, not! After all, a fella's skills with the bench press look even better accompanied by a self-evident immersion in the back catalogue of Berlitz.If only Read more ...
anne.billson
Hollywood westerns and Japanese samurai movies have long been generic companions. Akira Kurosawa borrowed from the films of John Ford for his chambara (a term referring to period drama with swordfighting), while Hollywood borrowed back again by remaking The Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven, and Sergio Leone launched the spaghetti western subgenre by remaking Yojimbo as A Fistful of Dollars.Toshiro Mifune, star of both The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, was the only Japanese actor of his era who might have been reasonably described as world-famous; he had already appeared in Grand Read more ...
howard.male
My excuse is that I was comfortably settled on the sofa next to my wife when the first episode of Glee aired, and I just got drawn in. I know, it’s not much of an excuse - and it hardly explains the fact that I then went on to watch the next 20 episodes - but there we are. And as a heterosexual middle-aged ex-punk rocker, I’m certainly not the obvious target demographic for this latest American television phenomenon, so perhaps I should explain further.Glee is probably the most aptly named TV show ever devised, in that the dictionary defines “glee” as “open delight or pleasure; exultant joy; Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Usually a seasonal home for the pastel-coloured delights of drawing-room farce, musical comedy and the odd Shakespeare pastoral, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre is this year offering a programme of rather darker hue. With Macbeth to follow later in the season (not to mention Stephen Sondheim’s deliciously off-white fairytale musical Into the Woods) it was with a new production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible that things kicked off last night. The post-interval nightfall – so perfectly timed for the Act Two tribulations of a comedy – became the stifling moral blackness of a benighted Salem Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
We’ll never feel the real impact - an all too apposite word - of the violence in Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me, given that it has dominated pre-release publicity for the film. The suspense of waiting for it will surely distract viewers from any suspense that the director was trying to create naturally through the formal build-up of unease within the plot and environment he’s taken on from Jim Thompson’s noir novel.If that leaves Winterbottom somewhat hoisted by his own petard, the director more than makes up for it with his immaculate control of a movie dominated by the ( Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A young Arthur Miller wrote this highly moralistic, redemption-seeking play soon after the Second World War, a parable about an older generation’s dubious pragmatic principles versus the bewildered idealism of their children who were Miller’s generation, the soldiers’ generation. The deathlessness of its message about faulty army equipment, young military casualties and the no-blame culture may be quite as much a reason for this new revival of Howard Davies's 2000 National Theatre production, now with David Suchet and Zoë Wanamaker.If I find Miller's effects over-calculated, they were not so Read more ...
judith.flanders
Nigel Simeone’s engaging study of Bernstein’s score of West Side Story could almost be entitled “Collaboration: The Manual”, so deftly does it interweave Bernstein’s originality with the contributions of his stellar team-mates. Jerome Robbins conceived, choreographed and directed the Broadway show; Arthur Laurents wrote the book; Stephen Sondheim, in his first Broadway outing, wrote the lyrics; Hal Prince came in at a late stage when the original producer quit. (“It’s about a bunch of teenagers in blue jeans...a cast of total unknowns, and it ends tragically.”)Certainly the gestation was not Read more ...