Los Angeles
Tom Birchenough
American director Sean Baker is an adept at exploring different Los Angeles worlds that we don’t often see portrayed in standard Hollywood fare. His much-acclaimed Starlet, from 2012, took us into the city’s porn industry (in an entirely non-judgmental way), ticking most of the boxes usually associated with “independent” cinema.Tangerine goes further out on a limb, and proves an energy-driven piece that seems to breathe the life of the seedy streets of the less salubrious end of Santa Monica Boulevard around which it’s set. Baker developed his story of two transgender prostitutes by working Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The City: Now That Everything’s Been SaidWith early 1971's Tapestry, Carole King released a worldwide best seller which belatedly recognised that as an interpreter of her own songs, she had no peers. King had made the jump from the writer of songs for others to successful singer-songwriter. Harry Nilsson had done it. So had Randy Newman. Jimmy Webb would too. All three were based in Los Angeles.She had moved there from New York in 1968. The new home of America’s music business had supplanted the city where she had written “The Loco-Motion”, “Pleasant Valley Sunday, "Will You Love Me Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last year's debut series of True Detective starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in a fascinating slice of metaphysical Southern Gothic. That's all gone now though, because this time, writer Nic Pizzolatto has shunted the action out to the West Coast, to a small fictional city in the shadow of Los Angeles called Vinci. Apparently Pizzolatto based it on real-life Vernon, California, a city infamous for its history of endemic corruption.The show's new protagonists are Detective Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell), a Vinci cop with a long list of personal issues, and casino owner Frank Semyon Read more ...
ellin.stein
Some people are irritated by Entourage’s superficial depiction of Hollywood as a bro fantasy world, but this is like condemning a soufflé for not being a roast chicken. For those like myself who enjoyed Entourage the television series, Entourage the movie will be very much the kind of thing they like, since it is essentially a feature-length version of the long-running HBO/Sky Atlantic show; non-enthusiasts, however, may find it shallow, shambolic, sexist, and smug (if you feel this perfectly describes Top Gear, you probably fall into the latter category).Like the film iterations of Sex in Read more ...
Matthew Wright
No one can accuse Gardot of stinting on the shoe-leather. For her previous two albums she has trotted the globe, drawing together samba, tango, bossa nova and calypso into a rhythmical pot pourri. This time, for the fourth album in seven years, Gardot turns her attention to the streets of LA, which she pounds, discovering, according to the release, the “helpless, homeless and hungry”, whose stories she tells here. Amid some undoubtedly charismatic performances, it feels as if the work’s main discovery has been the particularly diverse instrumentation settings menu in the production suite. Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Hollywood has never met a cliché it didn’t love; unfortunately, neither has Dylan Costello. His peek behind the curtain of Tinseltown’s Golden Age employs every stock type imaginable, from the boorish, chain-smoking manager to a pill-popping Marilyn-lite. It’s a play with admirable aims, but desperately in need of a good script doctor.Playing the part of fresh-off-the-bus ingénue is British thesp Patrick Glass (David R. Butler), getting his big break in 1949 when – you guessed it – the movie’s lead actor is forced to withdraw. Not the victim of All About Eve scheming or a good shove down the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
David Kauffman and Eric Caboor: Songs From Suicide BridgeThe tale of David Kauffman and Eric Caboor is not unusual. Two singer-songwriters form a duo, play some live shows to zero interest, record an album which goes nowhere after it’s privately pressed and then – nothing. Kauffman and Caboor though recorded a gem which, in terms of its haunting mood and quality of songwriting, belies its obscurity. Songs From Suicide Bridge, which was barely released in 1984, is as good as James Taylor at his most naked, and as evocative as Elliott Smith. The album sounds as if it could have been Read more ...
joe.muggs
I work in an office where music is generally played in the background. Picking the soundtrack for a Friday afternoon can be a particularly fraught moment: one person's idea of a wind-down from work and a promise of leisure to come can be too cheesy, or too laid-back, or too pounding. It's been a minefield. But no more: thanks to this album.Tuxedo is a kind of supergroup. Los Angeleno Mayer Hawthorne has recorded for the ever-sophisticated Stones Throw label, delivering a particularly sophisticated, 1970s-scented retro soul. His records have always oozed class, but have often struggled to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Jennifer Aniston changes pace without changing any fundamental perception of her skills in Cake, the austerely self-admiring new film that finds the onetime Friends star playing a none-too-friendly sufferer from chronic pain. Adopting a halting walk and clenched demeanour and delivering the majority of her lines with a gallows-humour mordancy that quickly palls, Aniston tackles the part head-on in a putative bid for the kind of career about-face Oscar glory that led Charlize Theron to the podium some years back in Monster. No such luck on this occasion: Aniston wasn't even nominated. But Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
There is indeed something of Frankenstein’s monster about the handsome young gardener, with his flat-top haircut and gym-bulked torso, who has come to mow James Whale’s lawn. The retired Hollywood director, now plagued by a series of strokes, is pathologically alert to remembrances of his earlier life, and it’s Whale’s state of mind, rather than the game-changing films he made in 1930s Hollywood (Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Man in the Iron Mask), that forms the locus of Russell Labey’s new play.The material comes from a speculative novel by Christopher Bram, which in turn Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Thomas Pynchon and PT Anderson: too good to be true? News that the director of There Will Be Blood and The Master was adapting America’s greatest and most hiply profound living novelist certainly sounded like a heavenly equation. Better yet, Anderson had chosen Pynchon’s most consistently funny and approachable novel, Inherent Vice, in which the author had effectively passed around a convivial and especially mind-blowing joint to his fans, as a reward for braving the heaving banquet of his preceding, testing masterpiece, Against the Day. With Anderson also coming off his own furthest-out film Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Drop-dead dames, a hard-bitten gumshoe, an ambitious writer and a sleazy movie mogul: this slick, sassy 1989 musical by Cy Coleman, David Zippel and Larry Gelbart serves up two parallel tales of Forties Tinseltown – and both of them are swell. Directing her first musical, Josie Rourke tackles this dazzling collision of noir thriller fantasy and garish Hollywood machinations with seductive brio. And her cast glide between the show’s twin dimensions with an elegance and wit worthy of stars of the classic silver screen.The set-up is ingenious. Stine (Hadley Fraser), a novelist, has been offered Read more ...