Los Angeles
Veronica Lee
Halfway through its 10-week run, The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story appears to be running in real time as it slowly, painstakingly tells the story of how one of the US's biggest sports stars was accused of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman in 1994. But moving at what is – by modern television drama standards, at least – a glacial pace allows the creators to burrow deep into the American psyche and, more pertinently, examine the deep-rooted racism lurking in parts of US society.Writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski have set out their stall Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The causes kept coming – diversity, of course, but also climate change, sexual abuse, LGBT rights and more – at the 88th annual Academy Awards, which surely ranked as the most politically charged Oscars in years. And that’s not only because one of the warmest welcomes of the night went to the American vice president, Joseph Biden, in an evening during which Donald Trump’s name – surprisingly or mercifully, or maybe both – was heard only once.As expected, and ever since this year’s nominations were first announced, the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag promised a provocative evening, and host Chris Rock Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Paris Sisters were a look and a sound. Slightly different but still peas in a pod, Albeth, Priscilla and Sherrell Paris united to make often moodily minor-key music always suggestive of angels stamping their feet. Otherwordly. Yet hard-edged. The defining vocalist was Priscilla, whose slightly husky, ever-intimate mid-tone evoked the wind whispering its secrets. No one had sounded like her before and, at her best, only Saint Etienne’s Sarah Cracknell has come close to Priscilla’s vivid union of the languorous and yearning.Albeth (1935-2014), Priscilla (1945-2004) and Sherrell had been Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For its 6 April 1985 issue, the NME chose The Long Ryders as its cover stars. The colour picture of the band was emblazoned “A Shotgun Wedding of Country and Punk.” The Los Angeles outfit attracted attention as part of a wave of California bands overtly drawing from the past. Local peers included The Bangles, The Dream Syndicate and The Three O’Clock.Competition was tough. Bands from elsewhere in the States were also voguish during the pivotal years of 1983 to 1986: Green on Red, Let’s Active, R E.M. and The Replacements amongst them. The directly punk-rooted Black Flag and Hüsker Dü were on Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Trumbo depicts the 13-year struggle by the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) to break the blacklist imposed on him and the other members of the Hollywood Ten in 1947. By continuing to get his scripts produced throughout the Fifties, Trumbo made a heroic, if morally complex stand against rabid Red Scare-mongers like the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren) and John Wayne (David James Elliott). It’s disappointing that his courage and brinkmanship should grace a movie with no attitude of its own – that has the narrow sensibility of a 1980s or 1990s telefilm.Cranston nails the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Motörhead played loud rock ’n’ roll. Now, like The Ramones, they are gone. They burned with unbelievable vigour from the mid-Seventies until earlier this year, when the wheels started to fall off Lemmy’s wagon. His health suddenly gave way – as was clear at this year’s Glastonbury Festival – and now, as one of his greatest songs roared with rabid conviction and a cheeky wink, he has finally been killed by death.Whatever their line-up, from the mid-Seventies until his death on December 28 this year, Motörhead were Lemmy Kilmister’s conception. He was a confident, down-to-earth, post-hippy Read more ...
Joe Muggs
For some musicians operating on the leftfield, achieving accessibility or commercial success means compromising their unique vision. Not so with Los Angeles singer-songwriter-producer Julia Holter. Her first three albums – four, if you include 2009's home-burned CDR Celebration – were intriguing, if blurry, windows into a complicated inner world, within which intensely felt dreams and extraordinary erudition tangled up into constantly moving patterns, but the haze rarely revealed any distinct shapes.Have You in My Wilderness, however, marks a dramatic coming out into the world: not only does Read more ...
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 ...