Arts Reviews

The opening scene of Camelot is stark. White snow covers the floor, drifting past a gray sky; on stage, beneath curvaceous stone arches, stands a bench and a tree, shorn of leaves. It is a mood that is prescient of what is to come: an experience that is beautiful but empty.  Camelot first premiered in 1960, adapted from T. H White’s novel The Once and Future King. For this lavish revival, Aaron Sorkin has created a new book, departing from Alan Jay Lerner’s original, and teamed up with director Bartlett Sher. But, despite the retention of many of Frederick Loewe’s easy-to-the-ear songs, Camelot doesn’t know what it wants to be. Is it a frivolous comedy? A lovelorn tragedy? A study in good governance?

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.

Pop superstar Taylor Swift is in the middle of a PR crisis as her fans overwhelmingly disapprove of her new beau, Matty Healy, the lead singer of English rock band the 1975. Healy has been attending Swift's concerts and the pair have been spotted several times kissing and holding hands in public. Taylor Swift and Matty Healy seen leaving the Electric Lady studio in Manhattan on May 16, 2023 in New York City (Robert Kamau/GC Images) Cockburn's niece tells him that Swift's online fan forums are blowing up with debate over the Midnights singer's decision to date the irreverent rock star.

Like everyone else in the Acela corridor, Cockburn has been avidly watching the final season of Succession. Without giving too much away, there have been some moments this season that are up there with the best of prestige television: the real-time playing out of a medical emergency in the third episode, for example. Cockburn feels entitled, then, to speak up when the show is less than great — and Sunday night's election special was an absolute stinker. One of the best things about Succession is that it feels like it takes place in a realistic parallel universe, very similar to this one, except that Trump and Covid never happened. And the drama is at its weakest when it tries to play solemn about the Roys' political whims.

When I mentioned to friends that I was reviewing Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, the new film based on Judy Blume’s hit 1970 novel of the same name, I was hit by unabashed enthusiasm. This is a coming-of-age story about an eleven-year-old girl as she navigates school, puberty, religion and boys. My peers couldn’t wait to see it.  “‘We must, we must, we must increase our bust!’ was my mantra growing up,” gushed one new mom in her mid-thirties, referring to Margaret and her friend’s group chant as they try, unsuccessfully, to grow breasts.  I shouldn’t have been surprised. Are You There God?

When I saw on Twitter that Bluey was the latest victim of cancel culture, naturally my first thought was "who did she say the N-word in front of?" For those not in the know, Bluey is an Australian cartoon dog who stars in an eponymous kids' TV show that airs on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC and, in the US, Disney+. She and her family go on a series of adventures that guide viewers through a healthy mix of toilet humor and confronting difficult emotions, in a tenor suitable for the under-tens.

Long before he was helming multimillion-dollar franchises, director James Gunn made an indie movie called Super. Starring Rainn Wilson (of The Office fame), Super was a nasty little send-up of the superhero genre that deconstructed familiar motifs long before The Boys hit screens. It shoved audiences’ faces into the violence often underlying the genre’s tropes, with a depth of brutality not easily sanitized away. But times change, careers advance — and Gunn is now the power behind marquee events like The Suicide Squad and the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy. He was recently tapped to lead DC Comics’ cinematic efforts in a new direction. Yet despite it all, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 has far more in common with Super and The Suicide Squad than its two forerunners.

The title “America’s Radiohead” has been flung around a lot, either admiringly or despairingly, over the past quarter-century, but the Brooklyn-Cincinnati rock band The National have done more than most to merit the description. Like Radiohead, they specialize in doom-laden, portentous but oddly beautiful songs that seem entirely out of kilter in today’s homogenized musical landscape. As with their Oxford cousins, the band contains two brothers. One is an eminent classical musician, while the other has one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary rock. And they are unashamedly, even defiantly cerebral at a time where intellectualism has been surgically removed from the genre.