Los Angeles
Kieron Tyler
In a 1967 headline, The Washington Post pegged Lynn Castle as a “Shapely Blonde in Blue Jeans, Popular Barber in Hollywood”. She had attracted attention as the hairdresser of choice for The Byrds, The Monkees, Del Shannon, Sonny & Cher and Stephen Stills. Known as “The Lady Barber”, she also cut the hair of music business movers and shakers Lee Hazlewood and Monkees’ songwriters Boyce and Hart.The Washington Post had no interest in her other life as a songwriter. Her song “Teeny Tiny Gnome” (originally titled “Kicking Stones”) was recorded by The Monkees but wasn’t issued until 1987. In Read more ...
Matthew Wright
From a residency at a low-key Hollywood piano bar, jazz fusion collective The West Coast Get Down has seemingly launched a global takeover of jazz. First, saxophonist Kamasi Washington went stellar; currently four other members of the group are releasing their own albums. Of these, upright bassist Miles Mosley is possibly the slowest burn, but after collaborations with the likes of Joni Mitchell, Kendrick Lamar, and Chris Cornell, he, like Kamasi Washington before him, is in danger of being handed the saviour-of-jazz mantle. It’s passed around many a young(ish) cat with broad shoulders and an Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We’ve had the pre-release hoopla. We’ve had the gruellingly inevitable backlash. We’ve had, as an additional sideshow, the brief interlude when it was this year’s best picture at the Academy Awards, until it wasn’t. The time has now come for La La Land to embark on a long and doubtless fruitful afterlife as a home entertainment, and the arguments about the stars' abilities as musical performers can continue on the world’s sofas.You’ve seen it in the cinema. What do you get when you take the film home? On the DVD the extras include a mini-doc on Los Angeles and the homage the film pays to it, Read more ...
Alison Cole
As the UK prepares for a particularly severe cold snap, the opening of David Hockney’s major retrospective at Tate Britain brings a welcome burst of Los Angeles light and colour and Yorkshire wit and warmth. The exhibition, which opens in the lead-up to Hockney’s 80th birthday, will be deservedly popular – for many people, Hockney’s work is simply bright and beautiful. But the show also seeks to reveal the serious and consistent nature of Hockney’s interrogation of the meaning of picture-making, and his preoccupation with the joyous and rather subversive business of “looking”.The curators Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Charles Burnett is one of the neglected pioneers of African-American film-making. He first won attention back in 1978 with his poetic, powerful debut film, Killer of Sheep. Acclaimed by critics and respected by his fellow directors, Burnett has always struggled to get his scripts on screen, focusing as they do on the reality of black American lives.The Glass Shield, made in 1994, was his best-funded movie and doubtless the film’s producers thought their investment would pay off if they highlighted rapper Ice Cube’s name (he’s a minor character) and sold it as a racy cop drama off the back of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
La La Land needs no further introduction. A homage to the golden age of the movie musical, to Michel Legrand and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, it contains perhaps the catchiest score to come out of Hollywood in many years. Unless you have a heart of reinforced teak, its silk-and-honey songbook will seep into your consciousness and stay there, from the rapturous overture “Another Day of Sun” via Mia’s beautiful song “Audition” and the perky love duet “Lovely Night” all the way through to Mia and Sebastian’s bitter-sweet theme tune.The film is the college dream of director Damien Chazelle and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
An action film with an intensity that sets it apart, Assault on Precinct 13 still shocks. Although expected, its first killing is a “they wouldn’t do that, would they?” moment. No wonder the 2005 remake failed to overshadow the original. John Carpenter’s hard-boiled second feature, a follow-up to Dark Star, was filmed on a budget of $100,000 in less than three weeks in late 1975 and released the following year. He wrote, shot and edited it as well as composing and playing its brilliant soundtrack music (the early Human League took a lot from it). With a cast of unknowns, the noir-toned Los Read more ...
Saskia Baron
William Friedkin’s super-stylish bad cop/bad villain thriller was his return to form after the disasters of Cruising and Sorcerer. To Live and Die in LA didn’t achieve the instant classic status of The French Connection when it was released in 1985, but it's enjoyed a cult following ever since, and this new edition in a restored print is a treat. It’s a familiar story of amorality and betrayal – the most effective cops are those who think like criminals themselves and are willing to cross the line to nail their target – but told with such slick energy that all clichés are forgiven.Based on Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
New York-born actor Robert Vaughn, who has died at the age of 83, achieved massive popular success when he starred as the sleek secret agent Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which ran for four seasons from 1964 to 1968 and exploited the then-new James Bond mania to ratings-busting effect. Prior to that, Vaughn, both of whose parents were actors, had racked up a long string of minor credits in American TV and movies, the most prestigious of which was an appearance in John Sturges's 1960 cowboy classic, The Magnificent Seven. The latter also starred Steve McQueen, with whom Vaughn Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Only a film which is very sure of itself would set one of its climactic scenes against a backdrop of wallpaper dominated by swastikas. Such audaciousness is typical of Nicolas Winding Refn who, with the startling Neon Demon, confirms he is now mainstream cinema’s most adroit director of films rooted in shock traditions stretching back to the Sixties. There are no laboured, knowing winks or clunky, long-winded exercises in genre recreation. Instead, Winding Refn hurtles pell-mell into his tale with nary a look back over his shoulder.The Neon Demon is as fantastic as its predecessor Only God Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's a lot of neurosis these days about retro-ism and lack of innovation in music, as if the shock of the new is all that gives things value. Of course, this is something worth keeping in mind: we certainly don't want to end up in a Keep Calm And Carry On world of faux nostalgia for golden ages that never existed, ingested as an analgesic as the present crumbles around us. But taken as dogma, it becomes a very one-dimensional way of looking at things, and can stop us appreciating how much newness there is in our ever-complexifying relationships to the past.Many musicians mining the past – Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A couple of months ago the release of “Smile More”, the first song from Deap Vally’s new album, made it clear the female Los Angeles duo hadn’t mellowed. Almost all women hate it when blokes – especially blokes they don’t know – say, “Smile, love, it might never happen.” The song is a snarling response to such inanity. “I don’t want to be your reflection,” runs the chorus, “I don’t need your direction”. And if those clunky chancers didn’t get the point: “Everybody trying to tell me what to do/It makes me want to break some shit and sniff some glue.” The song boded well.Deap Vally’s debut, Read more ...