Arts Reviews

Of the three creative pursuits that give Charli xcx’s eighth album its title, the English pop star seems least interested in the first. She admits as much on “Camera,” the best song on Music, Fashion, Film, which makes clear her obsession with acting and a desire to pursue it more fully. “Do I want to make music?” she asks herself. “Am I being fucking stupid if I try to be a girl on the screen and I’m turning 34?” Even without this clue – which, like much of the album, is presented via the singer throwing out rhetorical spiel more or less unexpurgated – it is no great stretch to surmise that the pursuit of making music is struggling to fully hold her attention.

The recent death of the actor Sam Neill, at the age of 78, was greeted with a mixture of surprise, sorrow and, in many quarters, unexpected grief. It is likely that Neill would have regarded the lavish tributes paid to him by actors, filmmakers and politicians with a mixture of embarrassment and quiet pride, because although he was a brilliantly versatile actor who managed to make a deep impression in virtually every role that he undertook over his five-decade-long career, he was also someone instinctively uncomfortable with the limelight.

As we ponder the ups and downs of the UK’s sporting record this summer, it might be worth noting their unquestioned prowess when it comes to the demands of classically based dancing. The Royal Ballet is consistently more than a match for any comparable company in the world, and its chief feeder, the Royal Ballet School, currently celebrating its centenary, is similarly and solidly rated as one of the two or three best of its kind anywhere. Both these institutions are deeply beholden to tradition, and the RBS might well be the most unabashedly elitist educational establishment in the country. It receives globally more than 2,500 applications a year. All these will lead to an audition, the number finally whittled down to 30-odd offers of a full-time place.

There comes a point in the career of any established artist when looking backward seems to be the only possible way to move forward. Madonna was a great pop star until she wasn’t. Confessions on a Dance Floor, released in 2005, was her last really successful record; “Hung Up,” from that album, her last truly unforgettable single. Ever since she has been chasing musical trends with increasingly diminishing returns, the heavy-handed concepts and contrived personae – Madame X, anyone? – no longer supported by anything approaching a properly decent song. Ms Ciccone seems to have belatedly remembered that Madonna is, and always has been, the concept So Confessions II is an act of both commercial and creative necessity. Its reclamation of the past is twofold.

The Odyssey is Christopher Nolan’s relentless, deafening three-hour take on Homer’s epic poem, and while it is technically impressive filmmaking – IMAX cameras; massive mechanical puppets, minimally pimped up by CGI; thousands of extras – it is set piece after set piece which becomes rather tiring. Even if weariness is part of the point of the Odyssey, it’s no excuse for the film being tiring. Even if weariness is part of the point of the Odyssey, it’s no excuse for the film being tiring What we get is an action blockbuster, without significant depth, although there is some heft to the final act – everybody’s favorite act, surely. Who doesn’t love it when Odysseus finally makes it back to Ithaca disguised as a beggar and no one recognizes him?

You can tell things have started to get really bad by the fact that they’re bringing back Little House on the Prairie. When a society is in serious crisis – or so I’ve read – it no longer needs edgy, transgressive, exciting art to push boundaries and challenge assumptions. Rather, it needs to be soothed and cosseted with bland, undemanding and familiar comfort food. Nothing, not even The Waltons, does that quite like Prairie. People griping about the remake have clearly forgotten how dire the original was I may well have gawped uncritically at quite a few of the original series’ 200-odd episodes, the first of which aired in 1974.

You know you’re getting old when you see Geena Davis from Thelma & Louise cast as a granny sex symbol and Alfred Molina as a character so elderly you’re supposed to believe that he could drop at any time. This is one of the running gags of The Boroughs, a sci-fi/monster series set in an upmarket, Stepford Wives-esque desert retirement village, and clearly aimed at aging farts like I very nearly am who imagine themselves to be much younger and groovier than they now are. “Don’t worry, wrinkly kids,” the series reassures us. “By the time you hit your seventies you’ll be taking more drugs and having more sex – even crazy, orgy sex [note to squeamish viewers: this scene takes place off camera] – than ever before.