Arts Reviews

If, in the spring of 1923, you’d somehow found yourself in the tumbleweed junction of Spokane, Washington, you might have shaken the dust from your feet at the strange and magnificent Davenport Hotel. Still standing today, this vast folly, soaring up in the middle of town like a gaudily iced wedding cake, was evidently greeted by cries of disbelief upon its opening in 1914. In the rural west of the early twentieth century, the Davenport was the last word in luxury and refinement. The lobby was a work of art in itself, with lamps in alabaster shells mounted on a twisted bronze column in each corner, and an Italian marble fountain set under a chandelier that tilted at a slightly drunken angle, like one of those ghostly photographs taken onboard the wreck of the Titanic.

In 2022's Triangle of Sadness, the first English language film from Force Majeure director Ruben Östlund, Woody Harrelson plays an addled Marxist captain of the Cristina O — in real life, the former yacht of the Onassis family, in the movie a doomed cruise vessel for the ludicrously rich. Harrelson is a jaded observer and capitalist critic who despises his passengers, choosing to order a cheeseburger and fries when others dine on oysters and caviar. He reads passages from Noam Chomsky into the microphone as the wealthy devolve into a roiling pile of puke and shit: "There are very few that are gonna look in the mirror and say, ‘the person I see is a savage monster.’ Instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

For over a decade now, every new Marvel Cinematic Universe film has promised a visual extravaganza, and Quantumania is no exception. Alas, in a franchise that has produced some genuinely emotional moments, a grand spectacle may be all it is. Following the events of 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, our eponymous shrinking hero, played by Paul Rudd, has settled into comfortable domesticity with main squeeze Hope van Dyne and teenage daughter Cassie. With the world mostly safe, his biggest problem now is keeping the idealistic Cassie out of trouble. At least, so he thinks.

Roseanne Barr is back on the screen again. The once-beloved comedienne and namesake of the hit sitcom from the late Eighties and Nineties, Roseanne, has a new comedy special on Fox Nation, the subscription service from Fox News. Titled Cancel This, it hearkens back to the short-lived Roseanne reboot, which aired from 2017 to 2018 before being canceled after Barr tweeted a picture of Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett with the caption “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.” What should have happened next, Roseanne says, was for Jarrett to appear on the show to roast her, both the person and the character. It would have been a teachable moment. It would have gotten tens of millions of views. Instead, though, she was canceled.

Marvel is releasing its latest extravaganza, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, this weekend. Although early reviews have been largely negative and suggest the film is overwrought, it will inevitably make a huge amount of money and begin Marvel’s so-called "Phase 5" in high-profile fashion. Which is why it’s crucial for the publicity machine that its star Evangeline Lilly’s views on the anti-vaxxing debate do not overshadow the film’s more straightforward themes of good, evil and quantumania. Unfortunately, real-world issues are more complex than Marvel might like them to be. Lilly has enjoyed a successful career in films such as The Hobbit and in shows including Lost, and her appearances in the Ant-Man pictures were, until the advent of Covid, entirely uncontroversial.

Last May, a rapper who performs under the name Young Thug was arrested and named in a gang indictment in Atlanta. Right now, the trial relating to that arrest, the YSL RICO case, is underway. Fellow rapper Gunna and no less than twenty-six other young men associated with their Young Slime Life music collective, have been arrested and charged under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization, or RICO, statute for “alleged gang activity.” In the post-Black Lives Matter era, the case has become something of a cause célèbre, with prominent figures in the entertainment industry and beyond arguing that Young Thug and Gunna are essentially on trial because they are flashy young black men – who, in Thug’s case, may also be gay or bisexual.

Could it be that 2023’s most engaging film centers on two ninety-year-olds (give or take) from the publishing world who have engaged in a decades-long debate over the uses and abuses of the semicolon? Why, yes, it could. Director Lizzie Gottlieb’s Turn Every Page is a charming chronicle of the fifty-year collaboration between her father, the famed editor Robert Gottlieb, and our nation’s finest historian, Robert Caro. The two shy, bookish products of New York City have, for half a century now, collaborated on two of the most influential biographies of the past half century: The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York and the four-volume (and counting) The Years of Lyndon Johnson.

The author and lyricist Polly Samson did not mince her words earlier this month when she attacked the musician Roger Waters on Twitter. She described him as “anti-Semitic to your rotten core. Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac.” She ended with “Enough of your nonsense.” Not only did her husband, Pink Floyd singer and guitarist David Gilmour, retweet her attack on his former bandmate, he added, “Every word demonstrably true.” Waters’s response was to tweet, with appropriate pomposity, “Roger Waters is aware of the incendiary and wildly inaccurate comments made about him on Twitter by Polly Samson which he rejects utterly.

Before the beginning of February, American viewers may have been forgiven for not knowing who Philomena Cunk was. The actress who plays her, Diane Morgan, was familiar enough thanks to her appearances in Ricky Gervais’ After Life and brief cameos in the Charlie Brooker-scripted Death to 2020 and Death to 2021. The one, the only, Philomena Cunk, however, remained a British phenomenon, much like Marmite and poor dentistry. Yet Netflix, recognizing the universal brilliance of the Cunk character, stepped in to co-produce her new series, Cunk on Earth, with the BBC. It aired to an appreciative Britain last September — now the United States has the great privilege of seeing Cunk unleashed. For the uninitiated, the set-up is simple but endlessly effective.

More than 12 million people watched Sunday night as Sam Smith and Kim Petras performed their award-winning song "Unholy" on the Grammys stage. Smith, a male soul and pop singer who now identifies as nonbinary, fashioned himself as a bulbous Satan, prancing around in latex pants and heeled boots, a bedazzled cane, and a top hat with devil horns. Plenty has been said about Smith's cosplay — and the deterioration of his (their?) appearance since "coming out" — but many glossed over his sidekick, Kim Petras. Petras, thirty, sings the second verse of "Unholy" and spent the Grammys performance locked in a cage. She is signed with Republic Records and has released two albums and an EP called "Slut Pop". The German singer's tracks are rife with sexual imagery.

Like most of the world, I saw M. Night Shyamalan’s very fine ghost story The Sixth Sense when it came out in 1999. It’s a blessing that it was released in pre-social media days, because its central twist would have been spoiled in minutes. Yet even without the shock value occasioned by its splashy central revelation, the film is still a haunting (no pun intended) piece of work, a Kubrickian exercise in restraint where the horrors are genuinely terrifying on the few occasions that the movie moves out of its comfort zone of chilly reflection. The then-twenty-nine-year-old director clearly had a glittering career ahead of him. I looked forward to his next film eagerly. Two and a half decades on, I would happily cross the country to avoid seeing another film by Shyamalan.

When someone compiles the history of 21st-century Hollywood, the section devoted to Armie Hammer will be one of the most bizarre. “Handsome leading man, came to prominence playing twins in The Social Network, a film about a forgotten invention known as Facebook. Most of the films he was subsequently cast in flopped, despite often being quite good. Amidst allegations of sexual assault and worse, it was then revealed that he had a cannibalism fetish, and that was the end of his acting career.” Yet canceled Hollywood figures often refuse to stay canceled these days.

Say what you like about the Marvel Cinematic Universe (or the MCU, for short) — and I do, frequently — but you can’t deny that it has a grim efficiency. The MCU impressively herds tens of millions of unsuspecting moviegoers into theaters to watch the latest incomprehensible special effects behemoth, with a wildly overqualified and suitably embarrassed cast. As I write this, the latest installment to threaten audiences is Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Now I don’t know what Quantumania is, and I will be perfectly happy to never find out. But as the previous film, Ant-Man and the Wasp (the titles lack a certain finesse), made more than $600 million at the box office, I accept I might be in the minority.