Arts Reviews

It has been a less than stellar year for celebrities. Will Smith slapped the piss out of Chris Rock for comparing his wife to a beloved action hero. Johnny Depp and Amber Heard publicly relived every detail of a relationship so toxic that it made nuclear waste look like sparkling water. Still, no one has surpassed the exploits of Ezra Miller. A star of such films as The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Fantastic Beasts and the forthcoming The Flash, Miller shows every sign of transitioning to documentaries — and true crime in particular. Miller’s alleged criminal rampage has been one of the most bizarre subplots of 2022. An androgynous eccentric with the features of a bird of prey, Miller was filmed choking a female fan in 2020.

At the beginning of the forgettable comedy Austin Powers in Goldmember, there is a selection of starry cameos, including Tom Cruise as an idealized version of Powers and Kevin Spacey hamming it up to high heaven as an alternate Dr. Evil. The film was made two decades ago, when Cruise was probably the biggest star in Hollywood, and when Spacey, a double Oscar winner for his roles in The Usual Suspects and American Beauty, was the leading character actor of his generation, both onscreen and onstage. Today, Cruise is as successful as he has ever been, with his latest film, Top Gun: Maverick, attracting rave reviews and stellar box office earnings. It has been a far different story for Spacey.

Baz Luhrmann’s latest exercise in excess, a new biopic of Elvis Presley, called simply Elvis, opens across American theaters this weekend. As ever with Luhrmann, it’s a mixture of sensory-popping provocation, cartoonish performances (Tom Hanks’s Colonel Tom Parker is written and played as if he’s walked out of a Snidely Whiplash short), an eclectic soundtrack and, once the sturm und drang settles, a surprisingly conventional account of a decidedly unconventional man. Played with chutzpah and charisma by Austin Butler in what must be a star-making performance, Luhrmann’s Elvis is less the bloated, drug-addicted behemoth of latter days than a youthful, hip-swivellin’, groin-thrustin’ icon.

The third — and apparently final, if rumors are to be believed — Jurassic Park film arrived in American theaters last weekend. Entitled Jurassic World: Dominion, one of those meaningless names that looks good on a poster, it was released to critical scorn: “the last time dinosaurs were subjected to a disaster this bad, an asteroid was involved” was a typical comment. Although Dominion opened to a mighty $145 million at the box office, terrible word of mouth is likely to see the gross plummet before very long. This is very much not a Top Gun: Maverick situation, where the most unlikely people have found themselves raving about a brilliant film. This is a bad, generic summer blockbuster, and it will be forgotten in due course, like all bad, generic summer blockbusters.

The Kids in the Hall was the best sketch comedy group of the early 1990s. Sure, Saturday Night Live had Phil Hartman, Chris Farley, Norm Macdonald, and Janeane Garofalo — and sketches like Celebrity Jeopardy!, Phil Hartman’s Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer and Motivational Speaker Matt Foley. But there were plenty of duds, too, like The Rickmeister and the ESPYs. The Kids in the Hall was less loud and more intelligent than SNL. They took more risks with sketches like the prescient Politically Correct Art Class, and no one skewered corporate culture better than the Kids (see Not Working Out and Can I Keep Him?). There were absurd characters like the Chicken Lady and the Sizzler Sisters, but their best sketches were the ones they played straight, like Parenting and Salty Ham.

Recently, Kate Bush went to the top of the iTunes charts — yes, such a thing does still exist — with her 1985 single "Running Up That Hill." It’s an excellent song, one of her finest works, but the reason for its somewhat unexpected resurgence in popularity is because it was prominently featured in the fourth and penultimate season of Stranger Things. It's testament to the show’s continued popularity that its consistent, even ruthless channeling of Eighties nostalgia can lead to unexpected knock-on effects.

Streaming services have a school violence problem. For all the hand-wringing and anti-gun stances actors love to indulge on social media, their industry has no problem glorifying the very terror they claim to condemn. Two such cases came last week, right after the Uvalde school shooting that left twenty-one people dead, nineteen of which were schoolchildren. On Friday May 27, three days after Uvalde, the fourth season of Stranger Things premiered on Netflix with an opening scene of mass child death, apparently at the hands of the show’s protagonist, Eleven, in a flashback. Several kids' corpses lie on the floor with smears and pools of blood around them. The streaming service added a disclaimer at the beginning of the season specifically referencing the incident in Texas.

Quick Top Gun II: Maverick movie synopsis (and spoiler alert) by the Bad Guys: let's build a secret base using the Star Wars Death Star plans. We'll leave an air vent that looks like a giant bullseye where one bomb will take down the whole place. Good Guys movie synopsis: to make it a fair fight, instead of one Navy Seal throwing a grenade down that ventilation shaft, we'll come up with a near impossible plan involving multiple airplanes flown by irascible characters. Should kill the whole two hours. It seems like some sort of anti-union move to credit people with the screenwriting for this movie.