Los Angeles
Graham Rickson
Comparing Harold Lloyd with Keaton and Chaplin is difficult. Though the input he brought to his films was crucial, Lloyd didn’t write or direct, and there’s much discussion as to whether he was a genuine comedian or a straight actor playing the part of one, his matinee idol appearance befitting a conventional leading man. Lloyd’s trademark horn-rimmed spectacles were suggested by producer Hal Roach, concerned that his star property was too handsome to be funny. The glasses are a superb prop, Lloyd’s normality making his physical comedy all the more effective.Directed by Fred C. Newmeyer and Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Watching the semi-satirical psychological horror film She’ll Die Tomorrow conjures the last lines of TS Eliot’s "The Hollow Men": “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.” Writer-director Amy Seimetz’s second feature doesn’t depict a widescreen apocalypse – it’s a low-budget indie, after all – but offers a collective whimper from a not very likeable group of people living in relative comfort.If no atoms are split above Seimetz’s’s bourgie LA, there’s still a chain reaction. The protagonist – another Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil, pictured below) – is a thirtysomething lapsed Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Katy Perry occupies an odd position. By some measure the biggest pop star in the world over the last decade, with streams in the billions, she’s always been an awkward mix of old-school razzle-dazzle showbiz hucksterism, knowing sass and awkward vulnerability.And while she often appears likeable and self-aware, there’s a piercing desperation – lyrically and sonically – to so much of her work that clearly assists it in cutting through the noise and babble of information overload culture, but all too often makes it not actually that pleasant to listen to. Her songs tend to embody the sad cycle Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Allergic to that word “influencer”? Afraid that social media is the death of civilisation as we’ve known it? Then this movie may be for you.Despite its overt absurdity and compulsive over-the-topness, director Eugene Wobble Palace Kotlyarenko has delivered a cortex-frazzling alarm about the hazards of living a life wholly defined by touchscreens, emojis, tweets, selfies and narcissistic self-obsession. Goofy, floppy-haired Kurt Kunkle (Stranger Things’ Joe Keery) drives a cab for the Uber-like service Spree, and meanwhile has been failing miserably to build himself an online following as @ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was Alison Ellwood who directed 2013’s History of the Eagles, and now she’s at the helm of this new two-parter on Sky Documentaries, telling the story of the Los Angeles music scene from the mid-Sixties to the early Seventies. The musicians’ community in the streets and meandering side roads off Laurel Canyon Boulevard was a hive of artistic activity encompassing among others The Byrds, The Monkees and The Turtles, Love and The Doors, Crosby Stills & Nash, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, the Mamas & the Papas, Jackson Browne and the Eagles. Frank Zappa lived here too, and even the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Apparently a freaky, brilliant novelty in 1974, Sparks have proved eternally invincible: the synthpop duo template, glam and disco avatars, chasing the pop grail across the globe as their latest mode hit the local chart mark. Lightly worn resilience and diligent application underpin their endurance (Russell Mael told me 20 years ago that he felt a professional responsibility to remain a good-looking singer). This 24th album follows the Top 10 UK success of Hippopotamus, and precedes a French film musical of Sparks songs sung by Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard. Though Ron Mael’s lyrics Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rather like David Suchet’s Poirot, the world will always think of Raymond Burr as the doughty defence lawyer Perry Mason, whom he played in nine TV series and 26 TV movies between 1957 and 1993. But Burr’s Mason existed before the age of the prequel, which now brings us HBO’s impressively-mounted back story of the battling attorney (showing on Sky Atlantic).The original Perry Mason novels by Erle Stanley Gardner told readers next to nothing about Mason’s history and background, so creators Ron Fitzgerald and Rolin Jones had a huge canvas to splash about on when they devised their new show. Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Echo in the Canyon is a lamentably thin documentary about the vibrant folk-rock music scene that flourished in the bohemian Los Angeles neighbourhood of Laurel Canyon from 1965 to 1967. Though it features priceless vintage footage of the Beach Boys, the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and the Mamas and the Papas and interviews with some surviving members, it weirdly comes across as a vehicle for Jakob Dylan.The singer-songwriter was born in 1969, the year in which Jacques Demy’s only American film Model Shop was released. Inspired by the mood of Demy’s semi-documentary love-letter to Los Angeles Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Is friendship mightier and more durable than sex? That's the proposition put forward by the engaging if ultimately cautious Banana Split, the Los Angeles-set romcom in which two teenagers become friends unbeknownst to the long-haired himbo boyfriend whom they have shared. Co-written by Hannah Marks, who stars as the wounded (but maybe not) April, this feature film directing debut from cinematographer Benjamin Kasulke is sufficiently lively that one feels the timidity of its closing sequence that much more fully.Up until then, there's a lot that both surprises and satisfies about a movie that Read more ...
Joe Muggs
A singer-songwriter of somewhat mystical bent, originally from a forested island in the US Pacific Northwest, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith really came into her own when she discovered vintage synthesizers. In particular, her masterpiece, 2016's EARS, saw her vocals merging into the rich flows of bubbling tones, melodies channelling folk traditions from various corners of the world, creating an unmistakably utopian sound. It felt neither futurist nor retro – rather, of a part with Craig Leon's Interplanetary Folk Music or Ursula K. Le Guin & Todd Barton Music and Poetry of the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Fiona Apple simmered in the LA sun for eight years to make this record, mostly holed up at home since her beloved dog died and she stopped drinking. Rather than polish the result to a sleek gleam, this is an album of trailing threads and percussive clatter, layered like unwiped tape. The brightly shining teenage angst queen of the Nineties continues to rub herself raw, rejecting major label norms, and left alone as Neil Young and Kate Bush are. The title is Gillian Anderson’s sex-crime cop’s demand in The Fall, when a room where a girl has been tortured needs breaking open. Cutters fetched, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Alongside the man he calls “the other half of my brain”, Flying Lotus, Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner sits near the heart of Los Angeles’ fertile, genre-busting scene, helping to link Kendrick Lamar’s righteous rebel rap, Kamasi Washington’s spiritual jazz, and the faux-nerd white one-man bands of Louis Cole and Sam Gendel. Breaking through himself with Drunk (2017), It Is What It Is confirms Thundercat’s own complex character, being both slyly funny and obscurely moving, as if attending a party that’s almost over.“Black Qualls” features another in the current generation of prodigious, Read more ...