Reviews
David Nice
Let me confess immediately: Debbie Reynolds didn't mean a great deal to me beyond Singin' in the Rain, warbling "Tammy" and Being Princess Leia's Mother (and believe me, she gets plenty of comic mileage out of the Carrie Fisher connection). But I knew she had a fabulous Hollywood history, and having been smitten by old troupers Elaine Stritch and Barbara Cook in London, I wondered if she could match them. Half-sashaying, half-tittupping on to deliver her own abbreviated, adapted version of Sondheim's "I'm Still Here", she immediately provoked the comparison. Did she compare? Nowhere Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Let's get straight to the fellatio, shall we. The blow job - and its Polaroid rendition - that led to the 1960s divorce trial of the dissolute Duchess of Argyll forms the centrepiece aria (an aria that "begins with words and ends with humming") in Thomas Adès's opera Powder Her Face. And how good we were: as silent as a row of Trappists. There was none of the outrage, laughter, consternation that this staged blowy could once summon up and that once led Classic FM to ban the work. Sex, when dealt with correctly - as in Carlos Wagner's revival production - is never really scandalous. It's Read more ...
David Nice
For many of us, this was bound to be an emotional evening. Noëlle Mann, doyenne of all things Prokofievian on the editorial, archival, teaching and performing fronts, died peacefully at home last Friday, and it was to her that Vladimir Jurowski dedicated a typically bold programme of Prokofiev's late epic for cello and orchestra, the Symphony-Concerto, and a big but rather less focused symphony by his closest composer-friend Nikolay Myaskovsky. Perhaps it's presumptuous to speak for the departed; but I could hear Noëlle responding vitally to her master's voice, applauding Jurowski for Read more ...
fisun.guner
Last year, visitors to Tate Modern’s Artists’ Rooms could see a room dedicated to Jannis Kounellis. It was filled with some of his most resonant work: a door filled up with drystone walling; burlap sacks of grain, rice, pulses; metal bells. For a founder-member of the Arte Povera movement, it was surprisingly bucolic.Now, in the bowels of the University of Westminster, past a car park and in what was probably once a series of machine rooms, the other side of Kounellis is on view. As always, he is working with everyday materials, but these are now industrialised – coal, metal, steel, and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In a stone-faced analysis of the political and historiographical connotations of action hero films, the Guardian’s Film Blog found Iron Man 2 to be “a throwback to a Cold War sensibility,” as well as “the first post-Bush superhero movie.” However, a reader known as Corrective suggested that, au contraire, “perhaps it’s just something dumb to look at while you munch your popcorn.”As I munched my popcorn, I saw Iron Man 2 becoming dumb and dumber before my eyes. It presents the grim symptoms of Sequel Bloat, where a successful first outing of a potential franchise is hosed down with even more Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The Peruvian Claudia Llosa's debut, Madeinusa, took place in a remote Andean village, whose religiously fervent inhabitants had an unusual spin on the festivities: during their tiempo santo, God was deemed dead, and all could sin with impunity before Easter Sunday. Unhappily, one girl's loathsome father intended to use this "free pass" to take her virginity. A village girl tormented by superstition is also at the heart of Llosa's sophomore film, The Milk of Sorrow, but this time she's struggling in the capital, Lima. Thus the writer-director broadens her gaze, while demonstrating that Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Do look away now if you’re squeamish. Why? Because before the star turn has even made his entrance, a film is shown on the screen suspended above the stage. An earnest American advises that there is a global shortage. Jumbo jets have been spraying deliveries from the skies. Donations are coming in, but billions of gallons are simply not enough. He is drinking more than the world can supply. But what can this precious nectar possibly be?Cut to a shot of a famous face vomiting milky white gloop into a toilet bowl, then wiping a few sticky deposits off his goatee. Ricky Gervais, ladies and Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
David McVicar's new Aida production had an opening mise en scène of such unashamed ugliness, a revolving main feature (a wall of scaffolding) of such audacious featurelessness, a wardrobe of such brazen tastelessness (think Dungeons and Dragons), that my critical faculties sort of went into a coma. I looked on, my mouth so wide open I was virtually dribbling, wondering what had happened to the great McVicar, praying for the return of a refreshed and fragrant reality, imagining that something - a fire, a flood - might intervene on my behalf between now and the end of the opera to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Gnosis means spiritual knowledge, or recognition. Surely Akram Khan has some unusual intuition about what it means to die, since his latest creation is truly a dance of death and the gods certainly seem to have been bent on preventing it.It was intended to be unveiled last November, but Khan hurt his shoulder. It was then intended to be premiered in Abu Dhabi - but the sheikh died on the day of the premiere. It was then supposed to be premiered in Oman - but it was cancelled two days before. It was then at last premiered in Istanbul last week - while the Icelandic volcano ash billowed over Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
One can only speculate about why More4 would want to broadcast a documentary about bare-faced electoral fraud in the week before the climax of our own unimpeachably democratic process. However, this rather long film about 2009's Afghan presidential election gradually marshalled its arguments into a pointed critique of how the “democracy” which the West has unloaded over Afghanistan like a badly aimed air strike is anything but. Of course, this may not strike many people as front page news.Interestingly, even such complete novices at the free elections game as the Afghans had beaten the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The recent fuss about British culture being anti-Catholic just because some civil servant wrote a spoof memo satirising the Pope’s upcoming visit may have been overblown, but it is certainly true that, in the past, Italy was a byword for rank corruption. To doughty English Protestants, Rome was a stew of sin and Italians were Machiavellian plotters and idolators. Little wonder that Thomas Middleton’s 1621 tragedy, a large-stage revival of which opened yesterday, is brimful of illicit sex, cunning intrigues and vicious revenge - and set in Renaissance Italy.We are at the Medici court ruled by Read more ...
graeme.thomson
“Marc Wootton is playing characters in real situations with real people” read the message that followed the opening credits of La La Land, as though Wootton were a comedic Archimedes unveiling his Eureka moment, rather than simply the latest “provocative” British wit to go panning for comedy gold in the murky waters of American embarrassment. La La Land premiered in January on US channel Showtime to fair-to-middling reviews and a thumbs-up from Larry David, and has now been given an Anglicised voiceover by Mighty Boosh star Julian Barratt and sent out to battle on BBC Three.The six-parter Read more ...