politics
graham.rickson
And so, after 30 years, Chumbawamba are no more. Leeds’s finest issued an eloquent statement on their website back in July, confessing that “the rest of our lives got in the way and we couldn’t commit the time and enthusiasm that the band demanded… being already involved in the stuff of life that wasn’t the band.” Many musicians keep going to embarrassing effect long past their sell-by dates, but this lot are still brilliantly accomplished performers – witty, energetic, engaging and sublimely musical, with a capella harmonies which make the hairs on your neck tingle.Near the end of this final Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It has never been easier to get sucked into a warm, simplistic sensibility which portrays every rich capitalist businessman as corrupt and amoral, but you spend 90 minutes watching Donald Trump in action and you start to wonder. If Trump didn't exist you suspect Martin Amis would invent him. He would probably call his caricature of a dastardly US business tycoon Donald Shit.Anthony Baxter’s powerful, unashamedly partisan film pitches a number of principled Davids against this gammon-faced, lizard-eyed, overcombed Goliath. The story begins in 2006, when Trump first set his sights on the Menie Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Over the past few years, the 1970s have made a cultural comeback. On television, there’s been Life on Mars and White Heat, in the bookshops tomes by Dominic Sandbrook, in the theatre revivals of plays such as Abigail’s Party, all to the soundtrack of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The decade that time forgot has become the decade you can’t escape. But can a documentary about the Westminster politics of 1974-79 really make gripping drama?At first the signs seemed almost positive. After all, the cast includes Philip Glenister - Mr Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes - and the live soundtrack Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Mostly thanks to Armando Iannucci, we are currently spoilt for political satire. Between the two of them Veep and The Thick of It have Westminster and Washington running for cover: to use that gratingly pious phrase, they speak truth to power. One behemoth that Iannucci has yet to bring down is the befuddling, clusterfucked idiocy of the American electoral machine. Its cynicism has lately been exposed in George Clooney’s The Ides of March, but that was about a candidate for the Democrat presidential nomination who was too good to be true. What of Republicans lower down the pecking order?Step Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction saw Harvey Keitel play Winston "The Wolf" Wolfe, a snappily attired, coolly menacing clean-up guy, brought in to mop up blood and brains and save Jules and Vincent’s bacon. In Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly Brad Pitt play a more obviously lethal kind of fixer - an enforcer brought in to realign a criminal faction in disarray. The film takes its name from a piece of dialogue uttered by Pitt: “I like to kill them softly - from a distance.” Dominik turns the machinations of the criminal element into a blackly comic microcosm of American society – a Read more ...
graeme.thomson
What tremendous sacrifice did Armando Iannucci lay before the comedy Gods in order to be offered the gift of the coalition? Labour post-Blair singularly failed to provide rich pickings for political satire; Gordon Brown and his hangdog posse were too obviously doomed for anyone to bother really sinking their teeth into. In the three years since the last series, however, democracy has served up the omnishambles to end all omnishambles. The question is what will The Thick of It choose to do with it?On the evidence of the opening episode the answer is far from conclusive. Though it has always Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It’s remarkable how many of the 20th century's most culturally significant popular musicians – from Louis Armstrong to John Lennon – emerged from a childhood defined by lack or absence. As Kevin MacDonald’s epic and enlightening documentary about the life of Robert Nesta Marley illustrates, much of his righteous anger, steely determination and elusive nature stemmed from the dubious legacy of a shady, philandering English father who was white, feckless and an almost entirely ghost-like figure in his son's life.This is a vivid and balanced portrait, neither hagiography nor hatchet job, which Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
It is a Hollywood truism that any film that begins with amateur footage of happy, smiling people ends in tears. Our War was no exception: fit young men messed about in the sun and somersaulted into the Med. However, their R&R was soon over and our boys were back in Afghanistan. As one member of Arnhem Company, 2nd battalion Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, so articulately put it: “I wouldn’t come here on fucking holiday.”The company’s nickname is the Lions of England – which immediately brings to mind the First World War phrase “lions led by donkeys”. This turned out to be ominously true. Read more ...
graeme.thomson
In the debating chambers and committee rooms of the Conservative Associations of Oxford and Cambridge lurk the Children of Cameron. The current cabinet is to a large extent an Oxbridge Old Boys club and succeeding generations are already being fattened up for the fray. Young, Bright and on the Right - and what an aimless title that was - picked two candidates and sharpened the knives.The film followed them as they negotiated the sharp end of student politics. Twenty-one-year-old Joe Cooke looked like a cross between Chris Evans and John Selwyn-Gummer and possessed a kind of dry charm and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
You’d have to have a heart of coal not to be moved by Aki Kaurismäki’s celebration of tolerance, redemption and the goodness that people can do. Le Havre isn’t quite It a Wonderful Life, but it’s not far short. The sensitivity with which the Finnish – now resident in France – director brings together unlikely elements makes him more than a humanist and takes him further into the political than any of his previous films.Le Havre is the story of shoe-shine man Marcel Marx (an impressively ragged but still noble André Wilms). He scrapes a living in Le Havre, where the real focus of his life is Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Standing ovations. Spontaneous genuflections. A we-can-change-the-world lecture. This must be what's it like to live in a Communist state. Funnily enough, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, who we were saying goodbye to last night in the final concert of their four-day Southbank residency, already do. I'm not a supporter of El Sistema, the body which gave birth to this youth orchestra. I'm amazed anyone thinks that an educational organisation set up to impose the Western classical canon on street kids in Venezuela (and now Scotland) because it's somehow supposed to miraculously make Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Post-Dubya, post-Palin, (very) post-Yes We Can, the US sitcom appears finally to have arrived at the same point its more cynically inclined British equivalent reached decades ago. In a political age defined by dishonour and doublespeak, it seems the most effective means of responding to all that mendacious incompetence is to dropkick depressing reality into the realm of the absurd.Perhaps pertinently, perhaps not, a couple of Brits are helping bring political satire to America's small screens. Conceived, directed and co-written (with Simon Blackwell) by Armando Iannucci, Veep - which aired in Read more ...