politics
ash.smyth
Attention! Required viewing: Jon Shenk’s Maldivian climate-change documentary, The Island President, starring one Mohamed “Anni” Nasheed in the title role.What might be called a natural sequel - or codicil, anyway - to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, The Island President tells the story of Nasheed’s long struggle against the dictatorship of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, his imprisonment, his exile, and his eventual jubilant ascension to the presidency in 2008 - only to discover that his country was sinking into the sea.To lose one island may be considered a misfortune; to lose 2,000… So it’s the run Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Little more than a year since The King’s Speech hit pay dirt at the Oscars, David Seidler’s tale of a prince stuttering between duty and impediment takes to the stage. Rather than a speedy and cynical exploitation of the film’s success, the move actually reflects Seidler’s original ambition for his story; and while we might reasonably have feared déjà vu and a pale shadow of the film, what we discover is a thematically richer, yet equally delightful experience.For those who have been in a different realm these past 12 months, the king in question is George VI, who reluctantly replaced his Read more ...
Tim Cumming
He has been called “America’s sharpest musical storyteller” by Rolling Stone, and has enough talent to give Bob Dylan’s talking blues a run for their money. The East Nashville-based singer-songwriter, guitarist, yarn-spinner, troubadour and amiably agnostic stoner has 10 new stories on his 14th album, the title of which acts as a pretty accurate calling card for the Snider experience: Agnostic Hymns and Stoner Fables. He’s also got a raw new band behind him, at the same time as strapping on an electric guitar, blowing a mean, distorted harp through a handheld mic, and delivering some of the 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 ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
“I know what I was angry about when I wrote this,” Nanci Griffith told the crowd as she introduced “Hell No (I’m Not Alright)”, “but you can get your anger out about whatever you want.”It seemed a little odd that Griffith left the big hook (if the bold, sloganned t-shirts of the crowd are anything to be believed) from new album Intersection until after the house lights came back up for the first time, but back in her native America the song can lead to pandemonium. Delivered with gusto, complete with synchronised clapping from two burly roadies in matching sunglasses, its lyrics are not Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
Everything that’s best about the opening episode of Paula Milne’s White Heat, a decade-straddling saga of seven friends who begin as flatmates in 1960s London, is encapsulated in its Hartley-quoting title, The Past Is a Foreign Country. For estranged friends Charlotte (Juliet Stevenson) and Lily (Lindsay Duncan) it’s also a country fraught with unresolved tensions and deeply painful secrets, and one that they’re forced to revisit after a death brings the old group back together in the present day. So far, so The Big Chill. But the more commonly drawn comparison has been to the Beeb’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hats off to independent British writer/producer/director Hadi Hajaig, who has doggedly piloted his thriller Cleanskin to the screen and picked up distribution support from Warner Bros in the process. Hajaig was never going to be splashing around in a Bourne- or Bond-sized budget, but he has played up the flick's British roots with pungent use of some prime London locations. He's also bought himself some box office buzz by recruiting an especially grizzled-looking Sean Bean to play Ewan Keane, ex-British soldier turned terrorist-hunter, as well as luring James Fox and Charlotte Rampling aboard Read more ...
fisun.guner
The Lord count was perhaps surprisingly high in the first instalment of Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture. Among the talking heads I counted there was only one who wasn’t a life peer or a “proper” hereditary one, and there was only one who was neither Lord, Lady or Dame (though she did have a CBE). That hereditary baron Ferdinand Mount was not only squeezed into the minority corner but never actually uses his title was, I suppose, a telling comment in itself about contemporary Britain and our egalitarian self-image, but more so the fact that two of the lifers, Lord Bragg and Peter Hennessy, Read more ...
fisun.guner
As he readily acknowledges himself, Jeremy Deller can’t paint and he can’t draw, so he never went to art school. For many artists of his generation (he’s 46), this lack of traditionally based skills seems not to have presented a problem. But Deller clearly isn’t one for trying to be good at things he’s so self-evidently bad at, so instead of going to art school he studied art history, and then began to follow his interests. Luckily for him, and us, all the stuff that interests him falls within the periphery of what one might call art.Deller’s interests are diverse, but are primarily based on Read more ...
ash.smyth
When I opened my e-nvitation to write up last night’s The World Against Apartheid, I was not expecting it to come bedecked with GoogleAds for hen parties, roller discos, and custom-made birthday invitations (keyword: "part/y", one assumes). Only 20 years ago, any mail on this topic would’ve been stuffed with "End racism NOW!" leaflets, discount book offers by/about Basil D’Oliveira, and pop-up Peter Hains beseeching you to boycott your local fruiterers. Twenty years ago "The World Against Apartheid" would have been a call to arms.But now it is a history programme, and one a decade in the Read more ...
graham.rickson
You approach the theatre via a cobbled side street and you’re harangued by a Salvation Army officer, pleading with you not to go inside this house of ill-repute. The City Varieties is an under-appreciated jewel of a venue, a Victorian music hall recently reopened after an expensive refit. The carpets are no longer sticky underfoot and the seats are slightly comfier. Fortunately, not much else has changed. This is an extraordinary time capsule of a place.A two-minute walk from the garish delights of 21st-century Leeds, and it feels as if you’ve stepped back in time. Which is the point. Big Read more ...
Jasper Rees
People tend to know three things about J.Edgar Hoover: that he was in charge of America’s internal security for four decades; that he kept secret files on the political elite; and that the most powerful unelected man in the nation's history liked to throw on ladies’ attire. Although sadly only two of the above turn out to be true, the facts have not stopped Clint Eastwood and Leonardo DiCaprio from at least flirting with the elephant in the room. But we’ll cross that dress when we get to it.If this is a charmless and heavy-legged biopic, the genre itself has to take some of the rap. Fifty Read more ...