Arts Reviews

‘At least we’ll have good comedy,’ liberals and leftists sighed to themselves when Donald Trump was elected. If anything, the opposite has been the case. Topical comedy has spiraled into a drain of irrelevance: soggy, flimsy, colorless, disposable. Hannah Gadsby’s self-consciously serious Netflix special Nanette was embraced by progressives and denounced by conservatives for explicitly spurning jokes in favor of moralism. Frankly, I was grateful that Ms Gadsby was honest. Comedians have long been flattering their audiences into believing they are good, wise people with good, wise opinions and at least Gadsby did not pretend Nanette was funny. Others sprinkle jokes on a big pan of half-baked propaganda.

Nicole Kidman’s face is so familiar from the cover of People that we might forget that she can still play other people. In Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer, Kidman plays people like us. Her character, Erin Bell, is haggard, unfit, and alcoholic, and a failure at work, marriage and parenting. Kidman is at her best when playing characters we dislike — the psychopathically ambitious weather girl in To Die For and the implausible spouse of Tom Cruise. Destroyer is Kidman at her intense and evocative best, as well as a proof of life that reinvents that venerable genre, the LA detective movie. It’s Chinatown all over again.

Fox News viewers go to some length to show their dedication to their favorite cable personalities. They might have Twitter alerts set up for whenever their preferred pundit says something, or they might go in to bat in the comments of a Facebook post. But then, some people really like heads they see on Fox. It gets their creative juices flowing, and inspires them to put pencil to paper. Cockburn is pleased to welcome you to his private gallery, where he’s been collecting the finest Fox News fan art the internet has to offer. Naturally, the higher profile personalities are depicted in a number of ways.

‘Talk to your crows!’ This precept should inspire us all as we begin the big, unknown adventure that is 2019. It’s going to change my life, that’s for sure. My wife’s too. That’s because we’ve both sat, increasingly enthused, through the first episode of Netflix’s eight-part series Tidying Up, presented by adorable Japanese tidying up sensei Marie Kondo, whose charming if rudimentary English I have just cruelly satirized. ‘Talk to your clothes,’ is what she was trying to say. Coming from a Western presenter this would sound like so much New Age airy fairy drivel. Coming from a beautiful Japanese woman with the serene aura of a Shinto temple nun, on the other hand, it comes across, somehow, as deep, wise and true.

No one plays Clint Eastwood better than Clint, but many people could direct a Clint film better than Clint himself. The strengths of Eastwood as actor — a steely isolation and an unremitting eye for the right profile — became the weaknesses of Eastwood the director. The actor’s ability to slow time and stop the action so that everyone waits for his next squint, a trick exploited so cleverly by Sergio Leone, became the director’s solipsism and self-regard. As Leone recognized, Eastwood’s gnomic emotions and grunted speech were an asset to the spare machismo of the Western. The Westerns in which Eastwood auto-directed as lead actor remain excellent exercises in genre: High Plains Drifter (1973), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Pale Rider (1985), Unforgiven (1992).

I sat down on my futon the other night to enjoy a nourishing but humble bowl of organic vegan noodles with wakame seaweed and steamed honey-gilded pak choi. As I sat cross-legged at my chabudai and browsed the Wot’s Woke blogosphere on my iPad, the enjoyment of my simple peasant’s dish was severely marred as I came across a story about Louis C.K. The article contained the link to a clip of a ‘so-called’ ‘stand up’ ‘comedy’ ‘routine’ in which ‘Louis’ ‘C.K.’ stood in front of his ‘audience’ and ‘delivered’ what can only be described as a torrent of hatred, the like of which I have not experienced since Ricky Gervais refused to call Caitlyn Jenner stunning and brave.

Don’t believe the critics. Don’t believe the score on Rotten Tomatoes, which has risen to 7 percent as of today. And don’t believe the fake news about mass walk-outs either. Holmes & Watson is the funniest film I’ve seen in 2018, and if I saw it next week, it would probably be the funniest film of 2019. Will Ferrell is the best Sherlock Holmes since Jeremy Brett, whose high-camp Holmes was always halfway toward hilarity, and John C. Reilly, a rubber-faced release of repressed love and resentment, is the best Watson ever. 221b or not?

As a study in political power, Adam McKay’s Vice resembles a slow day in the Oval Office of Bill Clinton: close, but no cigar. The fault is in the stars. Not in Amy Adams and Christian Bale, both of whom are wonderful as the modern Macbeths, Dick and Lynne Cheney, but in the casting of Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld, and in the intrusions of McKay’s technical and political vanity. Every time Bale’s Cheney tiptoes gruntingly towards power like one of the ballerina pink elephants in Dumbo, either Carell shows his teeth and snickers like a hyena, or McKay winks through the fourth wall via Kurt, Jesse Plemons’s supremely smug and irritating narrator.

Young people are revolting. The word now is that Frank Loesser’s ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’, an irritating Christmas flirt-fest from a bygone age, is a date-rape narrative. The same goes for The Pogues’ ‘Fairytale Of New York’, a recitative by two dipsomaniacs in the drunk tank. The young people have a point when they insist that when two alcoholics argue, they shouldn’t use offensive language. But that’s an impossible expectation. I suggest an easier solution.Erase the infamy, as that music critic Voltaire said. Ban all Christmas songs. Bury them under an avalanche of fake snow in a grotto of styrofoam igloos. And not because I’m particularly against Christmas songs or Christmas itself. While we’re at it, ban everything.

Mr President, as you settle down for an extended seasonal vacation at the little seaside cottage you and your retainers call the ‘Winter White House’, may I, as your sommelier of visual entertainments, recommend a few seasonally suitable amusements for the Mar-a-Lago screening room? You being you, the sort of movie you might find admirable may not exactly square with popular feeling regarding the season of good-will to all men — and, as you recently said, ‘women too, to be politically correct’. If goodwill isn’t to your taste, perhaps the presidential palate will enjoy some ill will, with a side order of bile? Submitted for your approval, Jon Landis’s classic comedy Trading Places (1983).

Sexual intercourse, Philip Larkin wrote, was invented in 1963, ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.’ Cunnilingus, according to Josie Rourke’s Mary Queen of Scots, was brought to Scotland in 1565 by a silver-tongued seducer named Robert, Lord Darnley, who seems to have acquired a taste for it at the court of Elizabeth I. The invention of intercourse, Larkin wrote, came ‘rather late for me’. But in Rourke’s telling, cunnilingus arrives north of the border just in time for Mary. She marries Darnley and, despite the obstacle of his alcoholism and homosexuality, bears him a son. In 1603, when Elizabeth I dies without issue, Mary’s son, a feeble and tyrannical slobberer obsessed with witches, becomes James I of England.

‘Songs of joy and tears of laughter are all we need, to lift our hearts – Godfrey Elfwick’ I penned the above quote for an article in my university’s weekly student magazine ‘Wotz Woke?’ while trying to combat the negative effects of Trump and Brexit. Since then however, things have changed, and my outlook on ‘tears of laughter’ has altered drastically. When it comes to comedy these days, ‘tears of laughter’ has become merely tears. This week, a ‘stand up comedian’ by the name of Konstantin Kisin was handed a very reasonable contract by the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) in London, organized by university society Unicef on Campus.

Did Shakespeare win the war? He was certainly Churchill’s greatest literary ally in 1940 when he sent the English language into battle. In fact it comes as a surprise to realize — at a fascinating exhibition in Washington D.C.’s magnificent Folger library  — just how much Churchill saw England and its history through the eyes of Shakespeare. For a period in 1940 he became the lion-hearted Henry V — albeit Henry V with a cigar and dressed in a velvet onesie. Shakespeare and the theatre runs through Churchill’s life. He bought a Webb’s toy cut-out theatre as a little boy. He studied hard for (but twice just missed getting) the Shakespeare Prize at Harrow.

For those desperately awaiting the Trump presidency’s spectacular collapse, Robert Mueller has acquired an almost mythic status – forever looming in the background with astonishing ‘bombshells’ that could drop at any moment. Mueller himself never speaks, except through terse court filings, which lends his aura a mystical quality. His newfound fans have been known to light votive candles in his honor, wear apparel sporting his heroic visage, and spend day after day speculating on the internet about the time, date, and profundity of his next miraculous intervention. https://twitter.

It’s important to hate the right person, and not the left person. If the fate of the United States depends on hating an unscrupulous media manipulator and sexual predator, then it’s only right — or rather, only left — to hate Roger Ailes, creator of Fox News, over Harvey Weinstein, bundler of money for the Clintons. Like people still say, at least the socialists had good intentions when they killed all those people. Contemplate both Ailes and Weinstein simultaneously, and you feel your brain splitting into partisan halves. They seem to exist in separate worlds. It feels like only a Dante could have imagined them in the same space.

Anyone who has blinked in the last week may have missed the tenure of Kevin Hart as 2019 Academy Awards host. Mere hours after the diminutive comic was ruminating over the ‘opportunity of a lifetime’ on his Instagram, his waxen wings melted in the scorching heat of the Twittersphere and he crashed to earth. The source of the public’s ire? Some of Hart’s tweets from the earlier days of the website, surfaced by a BuzzFeed reporter. ‘Yo why does @DamienDW profile pic look like a gay bill board for AIDS..........Booom, I’m on fire tonight,’ one says.

There has never been a better time than this to be a dwarf in show business. For years, thespians of diminutive stature were obliged to eke out the 11 months between pantomime engagements with humiliating side gigs like working at ‘dwarf-throwing’ bars and performing at bachelor parties. Now, however, the public’s apparently infinite appetite for idiotic medieval fluff has made our low-wattage era a golden age for the height-impaired performer. Take a bow, Peter Dinklage for Game of Thrones, and Warwick Davis for the Harry Potter franchise. The nominations for the Golden Globes were announced today. There should have been more dwarves on screen this year, and perhaps as many as seven in one film. I speak, of course, of Bohemian Rhapsody, the Freddie Mercury biopic.