Los Angeles
Thomas H. Green
Pet Shop Boys eleventh album leaps sideways into smooth, opulent US FM radio production in a way that will initially give long term fans palpitations. The duo sound… different. They recorded Elysium in Los Angeles with Grammy-winning Kanye West producer Andrew Dawson and it sounds that way too.Here’s the thing, though, whether you like the results or not, Dawson pushes them somewhere new, albeit sometimes in directions that jar. A case in point would be the way the snappy “Ego Music”, which ruthlessly satirizes the portentous self-importance of certain rock stars, is wilfully followed by “ Read more ...
theartsdesk
Welcome to another show, in which Joe guides us around some of the weirder, smokier corners of the broad church of hip hop, and discussion returns to how far genre can stretch and where originality can reside in a multi-channel, everything-available-at-once world. We also take a listen to more and less authentic sounds of South America courtesy of a Brit-in-Colombia, a Colombian Brit, and a legend of British underground sounds turning Colombian sounds into house music. There's some neo-psychedelia and neo-folk thrown into the mix for good measure.The Colombian Brit is one José Hernando Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
There are a few things wrong with Episodes, the comedy series in which Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig play a British scriptwriting couple who take their hit sitcom across the pond, but there’s a lot more that’s right with it. Look beyond the horrible title sequence, in which a television script literally takes flight and flaps all the way from London to Los Angeles, and the ghastly parping music which transports you not to a sunny Californian TV studio but a low-rent BBC panel game complete with plywood set, and you’ll find a show worth cherishing.The second series finale provided a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Many people will be having their first taste of the late Pina Bausch’s dance-theatre in this copious London retrospective of 10 of her “World City” productions; others will have bought into several of the series, possibly by now wondering how many hours they can take of her barbed view of men and women. For all of us, reading programme notes is beside the point; the background you need is what’s inside you, your memories, your songs, your susceptibilities. Rome is a history as much as a city, which made Viktor (the first of the series, last week) dense with interest, a palimpsest of centuries Read more ...
theartsdesk
David Bowie: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars 40th Anniversary EditionHoward MaleLet’s start with the bombshell. Yes, Ziggy is a landmark Seventies album but it’s not the masterpiece it should or even could have been, and no amount of remastering or repackaging can change that. For one thing, it simply doesn’t hold together as a concept album or rock opera. For another, the apocalyptic theme set up by the opening number “Five Years” is never followed through (and anyway, Bowie covered this whole area so much better on Diamond Dogs). Then there’s the sore thumb of Read more ...
joe.muggs
Tonight on Channel 4, a new music series begins with a fantastic premise. A group of music obsessives drive around the USA in a London black cab, finding interesting musicians and recording them performing and talking in the back of the cab. Sounds a little bit like the 2008 Stephen Fry in America series, doesn't it? Well maybe, except Black Cab Sessions has been broadcast online since 2007.Watch the Black Cab Sessions trailer:And there's the rub. BCS has now featured hundreds of acts in various cabs, from complete unknowns to top ten-bothering popstars, from gangsta rappers to Brian Read more ...
theartsdesk
Every year before the Academy Awards speeches are tacitly composed, flowing gowns and priceless necklaces booked and no doubt small blameless animals slaughtered in the Roman style for good luck. Before the gladiators enter the ring, we at theartsdesk continue our novel take on the 2012 Oscars by allotting a category each and asked our film writers to sift through the nominations, tell you who they think will win, who they really would like to win, and who has been most egregiously overlooked by Oscar's overwhelmingly ageing white male judiciary. Will Meryl actually go home with her third Read more ...
emma.simmonds
A bent cop movie with style, swagger and a sometimes questionable approach to characterisation, Oren Moverman’s latest at least gifts Woody Harrelson one of his best roles in years. Set against a backdrop of the Rampart police scandals of the late Nineties, it takes as its target one (fictional) Los Angeles law enforcer and his towering demons. Harrelson’s Dave Brown is an intelligent but difficult man, buckled into the straight-jacket of thuggery. From the pen of pulp writer James Ellroy (who co-wrote the script with Moverman), Rampart veers fascinatingly between cinéma vérité authenticity Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Those of a certain vintage will recall with fondness their childhood years (or those as parents of small children) gathered in front of the television on Sunday evenings between 1976-1981 to watch The Muppet Show. But The Muppets movie, their first big-screen outing in 12 years, is no lazy exercise in nostalgia; it's bracingly original and postmodern, with dollops of self-knowing humour and irony.It's also produced by Disney (which now owns the Muppets brand), making the accusation that, with its message of anti-corporate greed, the film is the work of pinko communists so much funnier. As Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director Nicolas Winding Refn says that his LA heist fable Drive was inspired by Grimm's Fairy Tales, but viewers unfamiliar with the perverse labyrinth of Refn's imagination are more likely to detect echoes of Bullitt, Walter Hill's The Driver and Clint Eastwood at his most taciturn. Ryan Gosling plays The Driver, auto-wrangling movie stuntman by day and getaway wheel-man by night. A pre-credits sequence follows him as he ferries two anonymous clients away from a robbery, mixing raw speed with calculating guile as he eludes police pursuit with icy efficiency.Despite being solitary and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Until recently, on YouTube, you could watch Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley’s Heidi (1992), one of the funniest and most transgressive videos ever made. In a Swiss chalet, the children Heidi and Peter are being “educated” by their abusive grandfather, who freely indulges his propensity for bestiality, incest, onanism and scopophilia. Played out with the help of masks, inflatable dolls and numerous props, life in this dysfunctional family reveals both childhood innocence and parental responsibility to be a myth. Recently, though, even a cleaned-up version of this black comedy has been deemed too Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
At Murry Bergtraum high school in Queens, New York, John Leguizamo was voted the "Most Talkative" student by his classmates. Not much has changed. As this one-man show demonstrates, Leguizamo talks like a Gatling gun on speed, switching almost unconsciously between English and Spanish, and likes to rattle through a gallery of impersonations with scurrilous, hyped-up intensity.The Bogota-born performer is hardly a household name in Britain, but as Ghetto Klown jitters edgily down its autobiographical path, Leguizamo's accomplishments begin to assume reasonably impressive proportions. From a Read more ...