Arts Reviews

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.

A wave of recent films, from Crazy Rich Asians to Turning Red to Everything Everywhere All At Once, has received critical acclaim for their representation of Asian Americans. But too often such films are one-dimensional, depicting the angst of model-perfect characters damaged by generational trauma and helicopter parenting. That's why the arrival of Beef, a show streaming on Netflix that follows two strangers whose moment of road rage leads to the self-destruction of their lives, is so welcome. The series is complex and nuanced; it breaks more artistic barriers than it has any right to. Beef is never interested in emphasizing that its cast is predominantly Asian American. Instead it chooses to depict them as imperfect people, responsible for the bad choices they make along the way.

I suspected something was wrong when I first heard that HBO would be producing a TV series called White House Plumbers. The network initially said it would be coming in 2023, date unspecified. Then the show was scheduled for March, but as March approached, the network added no specificity regarding the release date. March came and went, a worrisome sign, as did April. The show finally appeared last night, May 1 — a Monday night, not the Sunday night HBO reserves for its best stuff. Upon watching the first of five scheduled episodes, I can see the reason for the delay. I told my wife I planned to watch the show, so she gave the trailer a go. “I could only watch half of it,” she reported back. “It was so bad.

It is possible that there are A-list Hollywood stars who enjoy fame less than Joaquin Phoenix, but it would be hard to find them. The impression the man formerly known as Leaf Bottom gives is that any kind of public appearance is a miserable chore. It's as if he would rather be swimming through sewage than presenting awards at the Oscars, glad-handing at film premieres, giving interviews — oh, how he seems to hate giving interviews! — or any of the hundred and one other obligations that any leading actor faces today. Yet he continues to make fascinatingly offbeat choices that have kept him firmly at the top of filmmakers’ wish lists for decades. Joaquin Phoenix is a rare figure in an increasingly homogenized industry. Imagine if Johnny Depp had never made Pirates of the Caribbean.