Reviews
josh.spero
The first room of Andy Warhol: The Portfolios at Dulwich Picture Gallery made me regret coming. The second room made me never want to leave. The first has 10 of the Flowers and 10 of the Campbell's Soup Cans, four weedy sunsets and one Marilyn in pink, purple and brown - hardly any nourishment, certainly nothing fresh. I'm a Warhol fan - 10 glowing Marilyns in a darkened room at the National Portrait Gallery is the closest I've come to a religious experience - but is there anything new to say about these overly familiar works?Luckily, there was also Birmingham Race Riot (1964) (pictured below Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Can your BFF also be the father (or mother) of your child, not to mention the lover with whom you share both body and bed once all platonic constraints have been cast aside? It's in the DNA of the Hollywood romcom to contrive suspense out of so many foregone conclusions, and I doubt anyone watching Friends with Kids will be in any way surprised at the outcome. What filmgoers should respond to are the wisdom and wit that writer/director/star Jennifer Westfeldt gently imparts along the way to a finish that may make even the most child-phobic start to choke up. As unpredictable in its details as Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“America treats its musical titans as disposable, and I’m not disposable.” Coming from anyone else, Van Dykes Parks’ declaration last night might have been self-aggrandising. Parks is 69, but he could have said this during any of the last four decades with no problem. He is a titan, and he is not disposable. Coinciding with the reissue of his first three albums, this concert reached back to 1968 and stopped off at all points from then on. And before too.Parks has opinions and isn't shy of expressing them. He wants you to think. Like his music, he arranges words baroquely and meanings are Read more ...
Natalie Shaw
The rise of Korean pop (or K-pop, for short) in Europe has been steady; conceivably, all that’s needed for the common or garden music fan to become enraptured is one crossover artist. Countless new acts sprung up following the first wave of K-idols - G.O.D., SES, H.O.T., Shinhwa - and a new one continues to appear almost every week, unveiled after years of training. They often live in boarding schools with strict diets and no guarantee of success, a regime for which the Korean culture industry is estimated to have generated some $3 billion. K-pop has started influencing western Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Make it Your Sound, Make it Your Scene – Vanguard Records & the 1960s Musical RevolutionKieron TylerSeymour and Maynard Solomon’s Vanguard Records hasn’t been given the same amount of recognition as Jac Holzman’s Elektra, despite both labels being equally important and having trodden – at least up to the late Sixties – very similar paths. This neat four-CD box set should ensure that Vanguard gets more recognition.Like Elektra, Vanguard cast its net into New York. Also like Elektra, its earliest releases didn’t suggest a coherent strategy. Viennese waltzs, Elizabethan Read more ...
howard.male
Given that Ziggy Stardust was a figment of David Bowie’s imagination it seems fitting that, for all intents and purposes, Bowie himself now appears to be a figment of our imagination. What’s he up to these days? Is he still living in New York with his beautiful Earthling wife and daughter? Or did he finally manage to accumulate enough wealth from his record sales to finance a return to his own home planet? These questions and many more are not even touched upon in this hour-long documentary.However, fanciful whimsy aside, with no Thin White Duke available for comment, the programme-makers Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Premiered in 2007, Bamboo Blues was generated by a visit to Kolkata; and with the simplest of means, designer Peter Pabst conjures the vast landscapes of India. The first half unfolds against a backdrop of white muslin curtains rippling in the wind; the long hair and flowing dresses of the dancers are similarly activated by this elemental force, whose energy creates an ongoing sense of excitement and expectation (even though we know the air currents are generated by a wind machine).Later the curtains become a screen for footage of palm trees and dense forest; for scenes from the Read more ...
william.ward
With every new series, as he edges closer and closer to Dimbleby-ian National Treasure status, Simon Schama’s archly mannered drawl becomes more and more pronounced, his camp asides more central to his on screen persona. He is getting awful grand. And he now apparently “owns” our greatest dramaturge. Way to go.In the first of this two part series Schama engaged with that well trodden theory, of Shakespeare as the very definition of Englishness, of our language, our history and of our way of looking at ourselves. Tick, tick, tick. Falstaff as the archetypal Englishman, humourous, canny, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There are of course no superlatives left when it comes to these Venezuelans. And yet last night called on those witnessing the al fresco performance of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra to root around in the store cupboard for a couple more. Coldest midsummer night ever experienced by a South American? No that won’t be it. Wettest? Neither. Most tumultuous celebration of the centrality of music in all our lives to take place in a Scottish field? Certainly.This opening night of the London 2012 Festival – the event was marked elsewhere all over the country, but this was the one on BBC Read more ...
Andrew Perry
The suspicion that Jack White is a humourless plank-spanker, harboured by certain members of the media at least, has been thrown into deeper conjecture this past month, with the news that he’s entered into a war of words with the compilers of The Guinness Book Of Records.With his first band, The White Stripes, he’d secured an entry in the trusty annual’s 2009 edition for performing the shortest-ever concert – a one-note affair in Newfoundland, Canada in 2007, which may or may not have been a spontaneous gag for the benefit of a rockumentary being shot at the time. Since then, numerous rival Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Claude François doesn’t have the hipster cachet of Serge Gainsbourg, but he did lead an extraordinary life and died young. He also wrote “Comme d’habitude” which was Anglicised to become “My Way”. His live shows were spectacular, the women he married, dated and flirted with were striking, he had tax debts, a father who rejected him and his chosen career, and a mother addicted to gambling. It’s more than enough to fuel this two-and-a-half hour biopic.But Cloclo isn’t going to lead to an Anglophone embracing of François – universally known by the nickname Cloclo. However strong the image, his Read more ...
sheila.johnston
You might not think that a drama about German parliamentary politics in the 1970s would be of great urgency today. But when Democracy, Michael Frayn's play about Willy Brandt and the Günter Guillaume spy scandal, first opened in 2003, Brits swiftly discerned links with another charismatic politician, the first left-wing leader in decades, while across the Atlantic the womanising German Chancellor looked very much like Bill Clinton. Today a new spin appears and Democracy is described as "exploring the Machiavellian nature of coalition government."Brandt ended his first speech after being Read more ...