America
Jasper Rees
Apparently it’s the taking part that counts, which would explain why recent weeks have brought unseemly howls of protest and threats of litigation from British athletes who have failed to make it into the Olympic squad. You’d like to sit these people with their adamantine sense of entitlement in front of a couple of this week’s releases. One we know all about. Chariots of Fire has jogged back along the beach and onto cinema screens in time to remind us about all our amateur yesteryears. The ageless story of two British sprinters who defied the Establishment, it finds a remarkably good Read more ...
Nick Levine
Compared to previous Dirty Projectors records, Swing Lo Magellan is a walk in the park with a piece of cake to follow. Then again, previous Dirty Projectors records include a so-called "glitch opera" about Don Henley, a "re-imagining" of a punk album that Dave Longstreth hadn't heard in 15 years, and an EP featuring a 10-piece chamber music collective that Longstreth put together and then named "First Orchestral Society for the Preservation of the Orchestra."Their last album, 2009's Bitte Orca, found the singer-songwriter-producer and his willing minstrels edging towards the straightforward. Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Regina’s Spektor’s kooky New York piano gal shtick sure divides audiences. For every person who finds her a perfect antidote (I refuse to say adorkable) to all that’s mainstream and soulless, there is someone else who wants to punch her on the nose for singing “on the Braa-dio-uh-oh” instead of “on the radio.”Mind you, it’s not all icing sugar. She might have started her career sounding like an ad man's idea of a pixie dream girl, but time has proved she really means it. Still, it can get a bit syrupy, no? Well, last night it didn’t. Thumping out power chords and belting out slogans like “ Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Tracing a career arc which has taken him from stand-up comic to actor, writer and film director, it's not too fanciful to describe Bobcat Goldthwait as an anarchic, indie, low budget version of Woody Allen. The 50-year-old New Yorker started out in the clubs of Boston before heading west to Hollywood in the 1980s, where he cultivated a shrill-voiced, nervy, confrontational comic persona to considerable success. Increasingly, he became infamous for the somewhat contrived controversies he unleashed on the US chat show circuit; in 1994 he set fire to a chair on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Some movies are defined by sounds and Killer Joe is most certainly one of them. The squeak of a stripper’s heel on a clear plastic floor, the crack of thunder, the thrum of a motorcycle engine and the thump of a bouquet of flowers landing on a coffin – which unquestionably spell sex, trouble and death. From director William Friedkin - still best known for The Exorcist and The French Connection, films he made some 40 years ago – Killer Joe is pure juicy pulp. It’s hard not to get swept along as it delights in immorality and double-crosses, that is until Friedkin punches you square in the gut Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Twenty years ago Mary Chapin Carpenter used to sing about loving and losing, but also about lusting. Even her ballads went at a bullish lick. The essence of what she had to say was distilled in “He Thinks He'll Keep Her”, which captured the emotions of a 35-year-old woman at the moment she realises her marriage is a dead duck. Here was a Nashville grandee who, rather than standing by her man, stood up for herself. Her feminist folk preeminence has helped Carpenter to sales of 12 million albums.Ruined romance is still on the agenda in Ashes and Roses, but this time Carpenter is nowhere near Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It was the right venue. Frankie Valli is New Jersey royalty. He might not have been crowned, but appearing in The Sopranos is as good as any coronation. As he leaned into the audience, shaking hands, he spread his magic. Even Jimmy Page had come along for this rare London show by one of pop’s greatest, most distinctive voices.The real shock was that live, Valli sounds exactly like Frankie Valli. Exactly. To hear for real the sharp falsetto was a thrill. Opening with a forceful “Grease” couldn't disguise the fact that, despite the billing, it was instantly obvious this was not Frankie Valli Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Post-Dubya, post-Palin, (very) post-Yes We Can, the US sitcom appears finally to have arrived at the same point its more cynically inclined British equivalent reached decades ago. In a political age defined by dishonour and doublespeak, it seems the most effective means of responding to all that mendacious incompetence is to dropkick depressing reality into the realm of the absurd.Perhaps pertinently, perhaps not, a couple of Brits are helping bring political satire to America's small screens. Conceived, directed and co-written (with Simon Blackwell) by Armando Iannucci, Veep - which aired in 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 ...
Ismene Brown
Young Adult is the category of fiction that teenagers read, and it’s where Charlize Theron’s extremely damaged character in this odd film has made her well-rewarded living (albeit as the ghost behind the name on a popular series of “young adult” fiction). In that literary genre teenagers’ love of contorted, messy living and big questions whose answer is likely to be “whatever” makes for frequent critical debates about what’s right, or what matters, and Jason Reitman’s film homes in a prime example of a not-that-young adult who’s never grown up and can't answer any of that.Mavis Gary is Read more ...
theartsdesk
Can: The Lost TapesKieron TylerDespite being compiled from previously unreleased material, the extraordinary The Lost Tapes is as wonderful as last year's 40th Anniversary edition of Tago Mago. This archive trawl outpaces previous exhumations like Limited Edition, Unlimited Edition, Delay ‘68 and Prehistoric Future by a very long distance. Not because it’s a three-CD set, but due to the sheer quality of what’s heard. Can still had material on the shelf equalling what they issued. Little is from the post-Damo Suzuki configuration of the band (it’s roughly half-and-half between the Suzuki and Read more ...
bella.todd
You wouldn’t be surprised, in the programme for Elevator Repair Service’s adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz age masterpiece The Great Gatsby, to find instructions for gentle exercises to stave off deep-vein thrombosis. With a run-time of eight hours, during which every single word of the novel is spoken on stage, in one sense Gatz is no adaptation at all. It’s a marathon of textual faithfulness, a triumph of great literature over the much fabled waning modern attention span, and something of an endurance test during which "tender is the tailbone" starts to seem like a good subtitle.But Read more ...