Features
Veronica Lee
Who knew back in 1999 that a comedy about a bunch of teenage boys desperate to lose their virginity before they graduated from high school would be so popular? Adam Herz's script for American Pie, filmed by debutant directors Chris and Paul Weitz, was a huge box-office hit, and spawned two sequels; American Pie 2 (2001), American Wedding (2003), and now a third - American Pie: Reunion. There were also four spin-off straight-to-DVD films. Perhaps most notably, it presaged the perils of sex and the internet and brought the term “milf” to worldwide attention.The title famously refers to a scene Read more ...
ellin.stein
Unlike the New Seekers, Whit Stillman does not want to teach the world to sing. He does, however, want to teach it to dance, specifically to dance the Sambola (or, to give it its full name, Sambola! The New International Dance Craze). Instructions and a demonstration accompany the final credits of his new film, Damsels in Distress.Social dancing plays a large role in all of Stillman’s work. His breakthrough, Metropolitan (1990) - which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay and became a Withnail and I-level cult success with fans still quoting favourite lines years later - is set Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
There is something surreal about emerging from an underground station in Liverpool and being confronted by an enormous giant lumbering its way up the street. Even coming up the escalator it is possible to hear the band accompanying this gigantic being merging with the roar of delight from the crowd. And crowds there have been. Over the three days of the Sea Odyssey it is estimated that 600,000 people have seen the latest street theatre creation from Nantes-based Royal De Luxe.The cost of the epic - £1.5m of legacy funding from Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2008 – is Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Levon Helm, who died yesterday from cancer at the age of 71, was not only the drummer in The Band, one of the load-bearing beams of American roots rock. He was also an astonishingly soulful singer, whether as lead or harmony, with a voice that seemed to imbue everything he sang with an unfussy yet absolute truth, as inescapable and essential as the earth.Helm’s distinctive crook-backed playing style and immersed singing, reaching up from his drum stool toward the microphone like a wolf howling at the moon, were marks of a true one-off.Born in Elaine, Arkansas, in 1940, Helm brought the sounds Read more ...
Dylan Moore
The Laugharne Weekend has become a fixture in the crowded calendar of festivals that now punctuates not just high days and holidays but the whole six months that make up British Summer Time. Carving a niche for itself as a halfway house between literature and music, Laugharne’s success is built on two key factors.First, its remarkable natural location in a remote corner of Carmarthenshire, southwest Wales and the village’s associations with Dylan Thomas, whose Boathouse, writing shed and the string of local pubs with legendary stories of the poet’s drunken antics make up Laugharne’s year- Read more ...
Gwyneth Lewis
Like many students, I read the Oresteia by Aeschylus as an undergraduate as part of a compulsory Tragedy paper. A while ago I was asked would I do a new version of the Oresteia. I’m not a Greek scholar so I feel I have no authority to offer a "translation". However, I was up for writing a completely new play.Aeschylus’s Oresteia tells of Agamemnon returning from the Trojan war and being murdered by his wife Clytmnestra because he sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia as part of the campaign. In Aeschylus, Clytemnestra is a wicked man-woman who upstages her husband, takes a lover and is later Read more ...
Thembi Mutch
The 18th-century Omani fort in Zanzibar is silhouetted against a clear African night. Nneka, a bird-like Nigerian female artist in shabby leggings, is hammering out “Vagabonds in Power” on an open-air stage inside the fort, just metres from a sea of entranced faces. The song is a poke at Africa’s leaders, specifically their part in the Niger Delta mismanagement and related death and corruption scandals. With a voice reminiscent of Nina Simone, and the emotional clout of Billie Holiday, Nneka delights the predominantly African crowd attending the Busara festival. They punch the air, and raise Read more ...
ronald.bergan
News that Nicole Kidman is to play Grace Kelly in a movie called Grace of Monaco convinces me that it is foredoomed. This time Kidman won’t have any prosthetics to help her resemble Grace Kelly, such as the long nose she wore as Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002). Nor would it be possible, as attractive and talented as Kidman is, to replicate Kelly’s ineffable quality and patrician beauty.Unlike other biopics, those with film stars playing film stars fail because the originals exist to be compared with and appreciated in the same medium. In fact, they are attempting to simulate someone whose Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
You may be feeling Titanic fatigue by now, the last straw being the so-so Julian Fellowes TV romp which heads, as Adam Sweeting points out elsewhere, “an epidemic of TV programmes” this week. Rather than seeing any of them, or the Cameron film epic, or even Roy Wood Baker’s 1958 melodrama A Night to Remember, can I quietly recommend the evocative and moving The Sinking of the Titanic by Gavin Bryars, which will be performed at Birmingham Town Hall on (pause for doom-laden chord) Friday the 13th and at the Barbican on the 15th, the exact centenary date.Quietly recommending seems to be the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The workers at the smart Borusan Holdings head office are expected to be tidy, especially on a Friday. That’s because their office doubles up as an art gallery, the Borusan Contemporary, at weekends. There are some paintings, like the attractive wall paintings of Jenny Zenuik, although the main thrust of the collection is up-to-the-minute electronic art. Some seem a little gimmicky, like superior executive toys, such as one where you place your finger in a hole and the frame turns into images of your fingerprint, but it’s an excellent way to pass an hour or two.There’s a separate space for an Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It began with a warning. Opening the fourth Tallinn Music Week, Estonia’s President Toomas Hendrik Ilves cautioned, “In a free society, it’s risk-free. In an un-free society, it’s not risk-free. It’s not all fun.” From behind a hotel conference room lectern, he then began rolling a video of Russia’s Pussy Riot being arrested in Moscow a few days earlier. Not everyone can make their point, make their music, choose how they want to get it across.The contrast between Pussy Riot’s fate and a festival that celebrates new music in all its forms, held in a country bordering Russia, was marked by Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
In the past few decades we've all learnt to pay at least lip service to ecological matters, and millions of people in this country are members of environmental organisations. But perhaps we should also focus our attention on an issue that could be one of the big causes of the 21st century - the disappearance of languages.While estimates suggest that in the next 100 years perhaps five per cent of species will be wiped out, languages are under as much or more threat. The consensus (Mark Abley's book Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, for example) seems to be that on current trends Read more ...