More from Arts

Wednesday

Deborah Ross

Spot the point

Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? 12A, Nationwide OK, we’re busy people, so straight to the point on this one, and yet I’m already struggling, because there isn’t any point to get straight to. This is a pointless film. It is sans point, has zilch point, scores nul points in the point department. This is a shame. There have been greater shames, but it is still a shame. It’s American director–impresario Morgan Spurlock’s follow-up to Supersize Me, that strangely riveting and entertaining documentary about getting sick and fat on McDonald’s food, but this is nothing like. ‘I need to try to understand what drives an Osama Bin Laden,’ he says at the outset.

Simon Hoggart

Homer’s wisdom

This week marked the start of the 15th year of The Simpsons (Channel 4, often). The other day I went to a talk by Tim Long, the executive producer of the show, who said that it was popular in almost every country in the world, with the exceptions of Germany and Japan. He thought that failure in Japan could be due to the fact that the Simpsons have only four fingers on each hand, which might imply they were gangsters — Japanese yakuza have a finger chopped off at initiation. ‘I like to believe that because it’s cool,’ he said. My guess is that these are two societies which exert strict control over their children and who might find Bart Simpson an alarming role model. This international popularity brought in vast sums to Fox television.

Kate Chisholm

Escape into silence

It was a daringly original thing to do. To write a play where the heroine stays silent for most of the time. And the drama’s creator, Anthony Minghella, cleverly conceals her reason for doing so until the very last sentence. I can remember listening to Cigarettes and Chocolate when it was first broadcast back in 1988. It sounded so different, so strange, and still does after almost 20 years. Radio Four repeated it on Saturday afternoon as part of a short season (shared with Radio Three) to celebrate the work of Minghella, who died in March aged just 54. The play (starring a very youthful-sounding Bill Nighy and Juliet Stevenson) begins with everyone leaving messages on Gemma’s answerphone in the hope that at some point she will pick up the receiver and talk to them.

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Tired old friend

Iron Man 12A, Nationwide Iron Man is a Hollywood superhero blockbuster and probably the first of a franchise, even though it already feels like the 64th. These movies are always, in their way, whopping piles of junk, but they can be hugely enjoyable whopping piles of junk. The first Superman with Christopher Reeve, Tim Burton’s Batman Returns and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man were all good, entertaining films, but is there anywhere left to go? The plots are now like old friends: a hero who is one thing by day and another by night; a svelte and lovely lady assistant who has no idea; an evil nemesis always intent on global domination (‘first, you; next, the world!’). But I can stay at home to see old friends. I don’t know if I want to go to the cinema for that.

Michael Tanner

Feeble Fidelio

Fidelio Teatro Real, Madrid For all its glories, Madrid is not a city that one associates with great opera performances, as one does Barcelona. Perhaps it’s not surprising: it’s only 11 years since the new Teatro Real opened, after delays on a British scale. The previous house had sunk in 1925, and the new one encountered every kind of problem before it opened in 1997. The wait was worthwhile.

Kate Chisholm

Changing perspectives

‘Could you account for everything that surrounds you in the course of a single second?’ asks one of the characters in Peter Ackroyd’s first play for radio, Chatterton: The Allington Solution (Thursday). ‘All the intentions, the wishes, motives, perceptions, judgments that swirl around any one of us.’ It’s a provocative question. And especially now in 2008 that we are bombarded by information, tempting diversions and constant external hubbub. How can we tune in to what we are thinking and make sense of our own reactions, thoughts and feelings, let alone take note of the bigger picture around us?

James Delingpole

Jane’s sex problem

I’m always on the lookout for writers who’ve had well-paid, fun, fulfilled lives but I hardly ever find them. Jane Austen, for example. You’d think that the very least God would have given her in return for Emma and Pride and Prejudice would have been a single man in possession of a good fortune, a long, happy marriage and lots of lovely kiddies. But no, God really hates writers, preferring to smile on Dan Brown. If you’re Jane Austen, the deal is you get a pretty rubbish life as an impoverished spinster, but the moment you’re dead everyone thinks you’re great, and goes on remaking films of your novels and slushy drama-docs with pretty girls in bonnets well into the 21st century.

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

American beauty | 30 April 2008

The American Scene The British Museum Coming of Age: American Art, 1850s to 1950s Dulwich Picture Gallery Although the potent influence of all things American has had a pernicious not to say deleterious influence on street culture and social attitudes in Britain, American art of the last century has offered a stimulus to many and certainly a yardstick to measure up against. Our art has not simply been made in the shadow of the American achievement (whatever Clement Greenberg might have wanted to think), but the extent and richness of the experimental territory covered by American painters (and to a lesser degree sculptors) between 1850 and 1950 remain a lasting inspiration.

Lloyd Evans

Slump fever

Gone With the Wind  New London Theatre How did they get it so wrong? Turning chicklit’s greatest story into a hit musical should have been a doddle. Just put the characters on stage and let the warm romantic breeze of the narrative carry you safely home. And that’s exactly what Trevor Nunn has done and yet the critics have misinterpreted Gone with the Wind and denounced it as a flop. I’m baffled. At last week’s Saturday matinée I joined a sell-out crowd and saw a handsome gutsy version of a completely captivating novel. Never mind the timeless magic of the storyline, look at the performances.

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Birtwistle’s brilliance

The Minotaur Royal Opera For the first time in the 12 years that I have been reviewing opera weekly, I have been to the first performance of a masterpiece. The Minotaur, so far as I can tell from one intense experience, has all of Harrison Birtwistle’s strengths and none of his weaknesses. He likes to take on big themes, and that leads him to mythology, whether domestic, as in the brilliant early Punch and Judy, or cosmic, as in The Mask of Orpheus and Gawain. Though both those operas have great passages, the former is sunk by prolix pretentiousness, the latter is damaged by diffuseness, even in its revised version. By contrast, The Minotaur is compact, lasting for about two and a quarter hours, and without a superfluous moment, gesture or note.

Lloyd Evans

The big sleep

Small Change Donmar War and Peace, I and II Hampstead Oh my God. Did that really happen? I knew nothing about Peter Gill’s 1976 play, Small Change, before arriving at the Donmar to see this revival under the author’s own direction. It’s a love letter, an immensely detailed and spectacularly superficial account of the working-class experience as related by four dimwits living and whingeing in south Wales. It may be a script but it isn’t a drama. Screeds of Dylanesque poetic observation are interrupted by shouting matches. There’s no story, nothing at stake for the characters, no suspense at all, just a pair of brainless rowdies and their battleaxe mums splurging out wordy tosh about their hopes and feelings and their thwarted this, that and the other.

Kate Chisholm

Talking too much

Something so weird has happened to the way we live now that Radio Two has decided it needs to dedicate a week’s programming to Let’s Talk About Sex. It’s designed, says the billing in Radio Times, ‘to encourage parents to speak more freely to their children about sex and relationships’. But there’s already so much ‘talk’ about sex on film, on TV, in the adverts, do we really need any more? And in any case what teenager with any sense of rightful pride would welcome a ‘conversation’ with The Parent about it?

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Self styled

Whitechapel at War: Isaac Rosenberg and his circle Ben Uri Gallery, 108a Boundary Road. London NW8, until 8 June It seems that Isaac Rosenberg thought of himself as a poet rather than as a painter, but that is to undervalue his distinct dual contribution as an artist. Although he exhibited little in his short lifetime, he trained at the Slade and was actually an artist–poet in the English Romantic tradition of William Blake. Remarkably, this is the first exhibition to examine his achievement solely as a painter in the context of his peers. Although there is not a great deal to see, the quality of the work assures Rosenberg’s place in the pantheon.

Deborah Ross

Too black and white

Persepolis 12A, London and key cities Persepolis, an animated feature about coming of age in Iran, is kind of interesting and is kind of original but its telling moments are told so often it’s like going out to dinner and being served the same course over and over. You’ll look at it coming and think, ‘Oh, no, not that again.’ Actually, this is not entirely true, and possibly unfair. There are some delicious, intensely enjoyable morsels to be had here and there, plus it probably features the best Iranian grandma you’ll see in an animated film about Iran this year. In fact, I’d bet my life on it.

Robin Holloway

Ill Met by moonlight

Nothing is sacred or unchanging. One of Radio Three’s most reliable sources of musical pleasure, the weekly Saturday opera relay from the Metropolitan in New York, has recently rendered itself all but unbearable. Not in performance standards, which continue a norm of decency and are at best superlative — casting just about the best money can buy, distinguished conducting, wonderful orchestra — but by a surrounding framework of ‘presentation’ so Philistine, vulgar, moronic, as to nullify, even destroy, the essence of what the whole effort purports to convey. I’ve dipped into most of the current season’s repertoire and been so put off as not to survive the course complete; and heard two operas from start to finish.

Simon Hoggart

Farewell, Foyle

So it’s goodbye to Foyle’s War (Sunday, ITV), for the time being at least. The series seems to have been cancelled not because it was no good; it was, for a TV ’tec drama, superb. Nor because it had poor ratings — they were huge for today’s crowded television schedules. The reason seems to be that it had the wrong kind of viewers, people who remembered the war or, increasingly these days, people who were born to people who remembered the war. It is a given of marketing that the young are the only target advertisers should bother to attract, since they are deemed to flit from brand to brand like binge-drinking butterflies. Older people are presumed to be set in their ways. No doubt some are.

Ursula Buchan

Art in Kew

In the 19th century, the painting of flowers was mainly the preserve of maiden ladies with too much time on their hands, whose watercolours would be framed by indulgent brothers, and hung on bedroom walls. Scientific botanical painting was left to talented, poorly paid artists, whose work was reproduced in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine and other learned journals, or hidden in the fastnesses of botanic gardens, where it was studied by scientists in search of answers to plant taxonomic questions. Despite the rise in its status and visibility in recent years, even now there are people who believe that botanical art is an oxymoron; that the requirements for scientific accuracy inevitably undermine, even remove, the opportunities for artistic expression.

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Won over by Golijov

Ainadamar Birmingham Symphony Hall Der Rosenkavalier Royal Festival Hall In a series of concerts in Symphony Hall with the perhaps unlikely title Passion from Birmingham, Osvaldo Golijov’s opera Ainadamar was given a semi-staged performance with the cast that made the bestselling DG recording three years ago. It’s repeated at the Barbican. With few genuine expectations and a fairly large dose of prejudice, I have to admit that the 80 minutes the piece takes were mesmerising, though I suspect that that might not happen a second time. The Argentinian composer operates in what is invariably called an eclectic idiom, and uses it to serve a strongly political and humanitarian agenda, with religious overtones — are they different from undertones?

Deborah Ross

Blame Quentin

In Bruges 18, Nationwide This film is about two Irish hitmen, Ken and Ray, who are forced to take a sort of minibreak in Bruges (hence the title; hence why this film isn’t, say, In Milton Keynes) on the instruction of their boss, Harry, who wants them to lie low for a while. The film is written and directed by Martin McDonagh, the celebrated playwright famed for The Lieutenant of Inishmore and The Pillowman, but I don’t know. In Bruges has some cracking lines in it, a cracking performance from Brendan Gleeson as Ken, and some very funny, provocative jokes, but I still don’t know.

Wednesday

Giannandrea Poesio

Feet of endurance

Entity Random Dance, Sadler’s Wells Paradoxical as it might sound, ballet’s rebirth is happening thanks to (and within) modern and postmodern choreography. Over the past 20 years, classical dance, considered by many to be a dead art, has attracted the interest of many non-classical dance-makers. While some have successfully revised and reinterpreted the narratives of the classical repertoire, others have opted to tackle more directly the classical vocabulary, which remains a fertile and apparently inexhaustible source of inspiration and choreographic material.