Arts Reviews

Some actors reach greatness via pure commitment – shedding pounds, adding them, living in character for months on end, all but transforming into the role they’ve decided to play. Marlon Brando, Christian Bale, Daniel Day-Lewis, and if I may hazard an addition (a somewhat non-traditional nominee), the United States of America.Can we nominate a whole country for an Oscar? A Tony? Can we do that? Can someone check on that? That’d be beautiful. You know what I mean? Beautiful. The best. Beautiful people, beautiful acting. Wow. For approximately the past two years, my country, or the better part of it, at least, has stared into the mirror, and feigned astonishment, as if candidate-cum-President Donald J.

If you were to revisit the house you grew up in, would you take a look at your old bedroom? The answer is yes, of course you would—unless, that is, you are Ronit, Rachel Weisz’s character in Sebastian Lelio’s Disobedience. If you are Ronit, you will instead ponder your late father the rabbi’s rich collection of Talmudic literature, then kiss Esti, the lost love of your teenage years, with tongues. There should a joke here about pastrami and tongue sandwiches, but Disobedience has no jokes. Adapted from Naomi Alderman’s novel, Disobedience is set in an Orthodox Jewish community in London. Jews are supposed to be smart and funny, but this lot are slow-witted and mirth-impaired, like black-clad, black-hatted Stepford Wives.

It is now fifty years since the événements of May 1968, when young Parisians lobbed onobble stones at the police, occupied the Sorbonne, and launched the Boomers’ long march through the institutions. That makes it fifty years since Jean-Luc Godard lost the plot—never a good idea if you are a film-maker. Godard has made plenty of films since 1968, but no one cares. You can see some of Godard’s post-1968 films on YouTube. They’re all terrible—didactic and boring. Perhaps Godard admitted as much when he called his split-screen analysis of middle-class family life Number Two. The split in the screen, like the one in Godard’s mind, was dialectical. Many people lost their minds in 1968 through psychedelic drugs.

A doozy of a correction from the New York Times. On Sunday the Gray Lady published a profile of Campbell Brown, the CNN anchor turned head of news partnerships at Facebook, by Times tech reporter Nellie Bowles. All was going well until Bowles got onto the social media site’s new video series platform: 'Ms. Brown wants to use Facebook’s existing Watch product — a service introduced in 2017 as a premium product with more curation that has nonetheless been flooded with far-right conspiracy programming like "Palestinians Pay $400 million Pensions For Terrorist Families" — to be a breaking news destination.' Wait, what?

Is Jon Hamm’s name really Jon Hamm? Or is it a stage name, meant to telegraph his acting style? When an actor is called Slim Pickens, you know he’ll never play the Dane. Hamm is the name at the top of the bill in Beirut, and preserved pork is what he delivers, thinly sliced in the style of a television actor stretching his talents to the full two-hours, and with a rancid aftertaste. Too bad, really, as Beirut has the elements and characters of a good thriller. That is because the elements and the characters are familiar from other thrillers. The scriptwriter, Tony Gilroy, has written four Bourne movies.

Has the British artist Steven Patrick Morrissey, often known simply by his last name Morrissey, embraced the alt-right? Or is he just living proof that not every celebrity Brit is a moral coward? This week, the former frontman for The Smiths has attracted media attention after he condemned Halal meat as "evil," called out attempts to sabotage Britain's exit from the European Union, and denounced British Prime Minister Theresa May, London Mayor Sadiq Khan, and Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbot. This isn’t the first time Morrissey has ignored his public relations team.  In 2017, following the Manchester terrorist attack, Morrissey criticised politicians for refusing to acknowledge the attacker's extreme Islamic ideology.

They called Ted Kennedy the Lion of the Senate. He spent most of his time stuffed, satiated and asleep, and the rest of it on the prowl for young flesh. He also had a hand in numerous pieces of legislation. But the only thing he will be remembered for is leaving Mary Jo Kopechne to die at Chappaquiddick in 1969. Judging from Jason Curran’s carefully constructed and brilliantly played Chappaquiddick, Ted Kennedy deserved nothing less—and a lot more than a two-month suspended sentence. The Kennedys were a mafia. Ted was their Fredo Corleone. The family bailed Ted out when he was caught cheating at Harvard, then slid him into JFK’s empty Senate seat when JFK moved to the White House. The killings of JFK and Bobby left Ted as the head of the family, and in the crosshairs.

The recent news of a Spice Girls reunion will, I suspect, be greeted by some former fans with nostalgic longing and others with an embarrassed cringe. But whether you’re a fan or foe, I think it’s worth remembering that golden decade of Girl Power — the 1990s — when it was bliss to be young and female. With our present preoccupation with the abuses of male power, we’ve forgotten about Girl Power. It was a fun-fuelled feminism for the mainstream; a materialistic and hedonistic celebration of female assertiveness, ambition and self-reliance. Girl Power was Thatcherism in sexy underwear. OK, so maybe Girl Power didn’t produce much in the way of great pop music or feminist polemics.

Seeking the behind-the-scenes story about Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony? Don’t bother. Congressional testimony is mostly about what is right in front of your eyes: what are people willing to say in public, and how much public support does that attract? As they say, it’s like “raising a flag to see who salutes.” In this case, the flag says: social media is losing its luster. Congress was willing to grill Zuckerberg for fifteen hours, he was willing to act mostly contrite and submissive, and mass media mostly supported the critical tone.

Martin Luther King is easily misrepresented in our era of heightened identity politics, and of scepticism towards grand unifying ideals. For him, the campaign for black civil rights was firmly rooted in a very grand moral and political vision. Today’s progressives have largely lost sight of this wider vision; indeed the thought of it embarrasses them. It seems naïve, unrealistic. Its grandeur is more likely to be mocked than honoured. To black activist writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates (whom I recently discussed here) it seems a mask for complacent racism. The remarkable thing about King is that he expressed the core ideals of America, and the West, with new intensity and fullness.

It seems the phenomenon of Milo Yiannopoulos – the brief, bright arc of his invention – is over. I do not want him to fall without being understood so I will tell you the strange tale of our encounters last year. Monsters should be understood, and pitied, for our own sakes. It is midsummer and he is staying at the W Hotel on Times Square, close to where a $35,000 billboard of his face will soon appear to publicise his book Dangerous. Milo’s real face can, therefore, check on his paper face simply by looking up at the sky. The W is a slick pseudo-celebrity hotel for tourists. Milo has checked in under the name Emmanuel Goldstein, after the character in 1984. Few British journalists recover from George Orwell.

Wonderstruck is a film by Todd Haynes and you will certainly be struck by wonder, often. You will wonder at its painful slowness. You will wonder at the way it strains credulity until it snaps. You will wonder if the violins will ever give it a rest. You will wonder if it will ever end. And you will wonder at the ending, when it does finally come, as it is so stupid. So it does not short-change on the wonder front. Whatever the price of your cinema ticket, you will be getting limitless wonder in return. Haynes is usually such an immaculate, thoughtful, winning filmmaker (Carol, Far From Heaven, Velvet Goldmine, that Karen Carpenter short told with Barbie dolls — Superstar) that you will also wonder: how could he have helmed such an unholy mess? ‘Is it for children?

After an essay in this month’s Prospect about literature and freedom of speech, it seems I was cited on Twitter as a ‘racist provocateur’. Now, I rather fancy being a ‘provocateur’. But as for the adjective. Someone can call you ‘stupid’, and that’s just one person’s opinion. It doesn’t seem true because a single childish naysayer has impugned your intellectual prowess. Yet hitherto, the tag ‘racist’ has tended to stick. And it’s self-verifying. Why ever would anyone call you a racist if you weren’t one? In our current climate of sensitivity about race (and everything else), finger-pointers wield enormous power.

At dinner the other night a friend wondered what came first, social climbing or name-dropping? It’s obviously a very silly question, and we all had a laugh about it. ‘As Achilles told me in his tent the other evening, Helen always fancied him and Menelaus didn’t like it a bit.’ Or, ‘I’m rather tired of listening to Claudius complaining that Agrippina doesn’t hold a candle to Messalina in the sack.’ We played that game for a while and then I dropped the name of Highgrove, and the first time the Queen was seen in public with Camilla. I began to describe the outdoor lunch and my guests started to drift off. No, it’s true, I was there, I told them.

Americans breathed a sigh of disappointment last week when the promised super-heavyweight bout between Joe Biden and Donald Trump stalled after the weigh-in trash talk. “They asked me, would I like to debate this gentleman, and I said no,” Biden said as he stripped to his trunks. “I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.’” “Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy,” Trump replied as he strapped his thumb. “He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way.” This pugilistic persiflage reflects everything that is wrong with American politics. There should be more of it.

My friend’s ten-year-old daughter has a new hobby. Like many of her school pals, she hopes to become a video blogger — a ‘vlogger’. She has started to record clips of herself for others to watch, share and ‘like’. She showed me a few, then gave me a list of famous vloggers to watch: JoJo Siwa, iJustine, Noodlerella, Zoella. Their names sounded so bizarre. But they are totally familiar to tweenage girls. Like an earnest marketing executive, my friend’s daughter then explained to me that it was all a matter of numbers. If her videos are viewed 40,000 times on YouTube, she can have adverts placed on them; 100,000, and companies would start sending her products to promote. One million and she’d be a bona fide YouTube star.

Grade: B+Another ex-Long Beach crip replanted in pleasant Orange County via the conduit of very large amounts of record company money and thus now able to draw on his time as a gangsta, while telling us all it was a very naughty thing to have done.The difference between Staples and much of the similarly uprooted West Coast hip-hop crew is twofold. First, off-stage the man is thoughtful, articulate and refuses to hunker down beneath the comfort blanket of black victimhood. Further, he eschews all drugs and alcohol and loathes the glorification of gang culture — something he calls coonery — and is a Christian. (Although it is hard to imagine Jesus Christ cheerfully singing along with this little number.) And second, he has words.