Arts Reviews

The complaints about the Marvel Cinematic Universe are by now widely known. Their films follow predictable formulas and story beats. Characters become increasingly indistinguishable quip machines. The stakes are never high. The streaming content is overwhelmingly forgettable. Other than the death of Tony Stark onscreen and the sad passing of Chadwick Boseman offscreen, emotional moments are few and far between, as it's hard to care about characters when everything can be reset with a bit of multiverse mumbo jumbo. And then there's the problem of, well, as the Critical Drinker refers to it, THE MESSAGE. Expect a lot of that in the already twice-postponed production of The Marvels, girlbossing into theaters this winter.

The newest entry in the Legend of Zelda series, Tears of the Kingdom, was recently released to rave reviews.   Much like in its predecessor, Breath of the Wild, gamers make their way through the vast and boundless ruins of the Kingdom of Hyrule, playing as the hero Link on his epic quest to save Princess Zelda and defeat the evil wizard Ganondorf.  The game is an instant classic and highlights the action and intensity the Zelda series is known for. Thankfully, that intensity seems to be limited to the game itself and hasn’t bled into the real world.

HBO's flagship drama Succession came to an end on Sunday night. The tale of the Roy saga was heavily based on the Murdoch family, to the point that Rupert Murdoch's divorce agreement from his fourth wife Jerry Hall stipulated that she would be barred from providing plot points to the show's writers. But how close is the fiction to reality? Spectator chairman Andrew Neil — who spent over a decade as editor of one of Murdoch's top newspapers — joins Freddy Gray on Spectator TV to discuss. "There was enough of an overlap to make it interesting, and enough of an overlap to say, 'yeah, that's happened in real life, that's the kind of thing that goes on,' but not enough to give the lawyers at HBO palpitations," Andrew says. He describes how Logan Roy "ran his company like a king.

The finale of Jesse Armstrong’s show Succession — and it very much is a show where the creator and lead writer is the auteur — has been one of the most anticipated for any series in years. But us aficionados of intelligent long-form television are always primed for disappointment. For every Breaking Bad, which concludes satisfyingly and inspiringly, there is a Game of Thrones, which lazily drops in fan-service tropes and fails to bring any kind of rewarding closure to the show, alienating its audience in the process. So which way did Succession fall? In truth, there were moments in the fourth and final series where I was beginning to feel that the show had jumped the shark.

Even rock and roll can have produced few stranger paths than the one that led a then physically unprepossessing, raspy-voiced African-American named Anna Mae Bullock from her early days as a devoutly Baptist sharecropper’s daughter in Depression-era Tennessee, to her final years as a practicing Buddhist living in a whitewashed mansion overlooking the dove-blue haze of Lake Geneva. That was the life trajectory of the artist known to the world as Tina Turner, who died Wednesday at the age of eighty-three.

Amanda Gorman, the young female poet who read at Joe Biden's inauguration lamented on Tuesday night that her poem had been banned by a Florida school library. “Just found out my inaugural poem 'The Hill We Climb' has been banned from an elementary school in Miami-Dade County because it causes "confusion and indoctrination,” America's first National Youth Poet Laureate tweeted.  The poem, however, was never banned. Instead, according to the Miami-Dade school district, “The Hill We Climb” was moved from the elementary section of the library to the middle-school section.  “It was determined at the school that ‘The Hill We Climb’ is better suited for middle-school students and, it was shelved in the middle-school section of the media center.

You know something dire is happening in the world if Dolly Parton’s feathers are ruffled. Dolly, an American sweetheart known for her blonde, bouffant hair, downhome, sweet and simple honesty (and a couple other big things), has released some songs from her upcoming rock album, Rockstar. And golly Dolly, are they ever feisty. The fact that Dolly is releasing a rock ’n’ roll album at all points to a serious cultural reckoning. Dolly, now seventy-seven years old, is more known for such innocent hits as “Love Is like a Butterfly” and “Coat of Many Colors” than for having a black-leather edge associated with sex and drugs. Yet such are the times we live in.    At the ACM Awards a couple weeks ago, Dolly debuted “World on Fire” from Rockstar.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge must be destroyed before it's too late. The short-bob comedienne fond of wall-breaking and lazy edits has, in very short order, emasculated and destroyed multiple franchises thanks to the overwrought praise for her adaptation of her one-woman show, a descriptor that should itself elicit a bit of vomit in the back of the throat. Not content to politicize Star Wars as an irritating droid in Solo or to chop off the balls of James Bond in Daniel Craig's swan song whose name no one remembers, Waller-Bridge has now set her sights on a firmly American man to take down: Indiana Jones, whose fifth edition box office she will eradicate in spite of all the goodwill of these United States. https://twitter.

The British comedian, actor and author Charlie Higson is famous internationally for being one of the writers that has carried on the mantle of Ian Fleming by writing novels and stories that continue James Bond’s adventures, most recently On His Majesty’s Secret Service, published to coincide with King Charles III’s coronation. Yet in a recent interview with the Sunday Times of London, Higson was openly dismissive of the recent Daniel Craig-starring 007 films. He said “I went to see No Time to Die with my oldest boy, Frank, who is thirty, and he said, ‘That felt like a Bond film made by people who are embarrassed to make a Bond film.’ You had to watch two films in advance to know who such-and-such is and you think, ‘Oh, fuck off with that.