teenage
MargaretMonday, 05 December 2011
Idiotically buried by a release which sees it appearing on just one screen nationally, Kenneth Lonergan’s triumphant follow-up to his Oscar-nominated debut You Can Count on Me (2000) is, without a scintilla of a doubt, one of the finest films of... Read more... |
Hanson, IndigO2Wednesday, 30 November 2011
Can the Hanson brothers ever rid themselves of the shackles of “MMMBop” (the 1997 hit that brought them global renown)? More to the point, should they bother to try? These were the burning questions I armed myself with as I prepared to watch a band... Read more... |
Living With the Amish, Channel 4Friday, 25 November 2011
The life-swap doc comes in sundry guises. Emissaries of simpler cultures visit our broiling cities to gawp at streets swimming in fresh spew and rivers of piss every Saturday night. Alternatively our lot pop off to places where people shit in holes... Read more... |
Welcome to the RileysWednesday, 16 November 2011
As supremely silly as they are, the Twilight movies are made watchable by Kristen Stewart’s Bella Swan, whose combination of fidgetiness and aloofness puts me in mind of James Dean’s Cal Trask and Jim Stark. If not as virtuosic as Dean (... Read more... |
Beautiful Thing, Royal Exchange, ManchesterTuesday, 15 November 2011
Nearly 20 years have whizzed by since Jonathan Harvey, then a 24-year-old comprehensive school teacher, wrote a play in the school holidays – and caused a stir. That play was Beautiful Thing, dealing with the then (and now?) contentious issue of two... Read more... |
DVD: The OutsidersFriday, 04 November 2011
Based on the novel by SE Hinton, The Outsiders is a tender coming-of-age movie set against a tough backdrop of flick-knives, rumbles and gang warfare. In Francis Ford Coppola’s vision, it’s also a romantic cinematic homage to Gone with the Wind.... Read more... |
Jumpy, Royal Court TheatreThursday, 20 October 2011
“Why does anyone ever have kids?” By the time a character in April De Angelis’s new comedy utters this exasperated exclamation, there are many in the audience - whether parents or children, or both - who must have had the same thought. And more than... Read more... |
Emmy the Great, Pleasance, EdinburghSaturday, 24 September 2011
“Are there any freshers in the audience?" asked Emma-Lee Moss halfway through last night’s set. Two voices raised a muted cheer. Whatever else your average 18-year-old might have been doing, cut loose from the apron strings for the first time in the... Read more... |
Educating Essex, Channel 4Friday, 23 September 2011
Education, education, education. Have we ever worried so much about how, and what, and why, and where our children are being taught? We’re so desperate, it seems, for some guidance on the matter that we barely raise an eyebrow about turning their... Read more... |
Fright NightWednesday, 31 August 2011
After 10 minutes in the company of Fright Night’s vacuous US teens I was thinking, like Colonel Kurtz, “Kill them all!” One of the several virtues of this remake of the 1985 vampire horror-comedy is that its writer, Marti Noxon, feels the same way.... Read more... |
BBC Proms: National Youth Orchestra, Jurowski/ Nigel KennedySunday, 07 August 2011
Youth was everywhere to be seen at the Proms last night. Whether in the massed ranks of Britain’s National Youth Orchestra, soloist Ben Grosvenor (even younger than the precocious Benjamin Britten when he debuted his own Piano Concerto in 1938),... Read more... |
KaboomFriday, 10 June 2011
The playfully titled, deliriously deadpan Kaboom doesn’t so much explode onto the screen as briefly sparkle then fail to ignite. Superficially it’s an intriguing confusion of murder mystery, Generation Sex romp and slacker comedy, and is... Read more... |
