Culture

It’s 1960, and the clock has struck seven in the morning on Manhattan Island. A car weaves through the clamorous city as the morning sun settles. In the front seat are the Canadian-American painter Philip Guston and the British art critic David Sylvester; the pair have just enjoyed a sobering Chinese meal after a long night of drinking with Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, which called for the digestif of a drive. It has been an epochal night for Sylvester; he just doesn’t know it yet. In 1996, Sylvester, who would have turned 100 this year, wrote his essay “Curriculum Vitae” later reproduced in his acclaimed About Modern Art: Critical Essays 1948-2000.

And so House of the Dragon has come to the end of its second season. It is fair to say that, for all the intrigue and fruity British character actors on screen (first place as far as I’m concerned: the great Simon Russell Beale as Ser Simon Strong, “the only gentleman in an ungentlemanly world”), the series is still finding its feet and has yet to provide the visceral thrills that might be expected of it. As my esteemed colleague Matt McDonald described it, “the second season was basically all foreplay. The first season ended with ‘wow, they’re about to fight some dragons.’ Then this season ends after one dragon fight and the promise ‘oh wow, now they’re really going to fight some dragons.’” There are undoubted improvements in this more confident second outing.

It’s never nice to be wrong. Last November, with the unwanted superhero sequel The Marvels about to flop, the would-be series starter Eternals already unpopular and with Marvel’s hotly tipped next star Jonathan Majors on the verge of conviction for assaulting and harassing his ex-girlfriend, thereby imperiling the Kang Dynasty that he was supposed to star in, I — and, to be fair, many others — began to wonder if Marvel’s once-golden touch had begun to desert it. After all, since 2008’s Iron Man, there had been countless films, television series and other spin-offs from the studio; it seemed inevitable that audiences would eventually lose interest.

Last weekend’s opening of Twisters saw the windy picture receive both critical acclaim — although not in this magazine — and commercial success, blowing to a wildly impressive $81 million opening at the US box office. This was by no means a given for the tornado thriller, as the original film, although a smash hit when it opened in 1996, is largely unknown to the millennial audience who make up the majority of moviegoers who will flock to see a film as soon as it comes out; many of them were not even born when it was released. Instead, its appeal lies another way, in the casting of newly minted megastar Glen Powell in one of the lead roles.

Some shows, like Game of Thrones, are only great so long as they stick to their source material. Others succeed by respecting the lore and cannon of a beloved novel or comic, but tell an original story in that universe. HBO’s Watchmen is the pinnacle example of this; however, the first season of The Boys may be the only show that succeeded precisely by not being like its source material. The Boys comics shares Watchmen’s premise of exploring an alternative reality where superheroes are real; but whereas Alan Moore considered this premise richly, and opposed the concept of superheroes on philosophical grounds — against the worship of power and great man theory of history —  that isn’t so for Garth Ennis.

The telephone was ringing. On the other end was Markus Hinterhäuser, artistic director of the Salzburg Festival. “Robert, would you like to direct a new production of Jedermann for us next year?” A new Jedermann at the Salzburg Festival, but with only a few months to prepare? I hesitated for about one second before saying I would be delighted and honored to direct. Jedermann is the complex, frightening, inspiring and fascinating German adaptation by the great Austrian writer and poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal of the English medieval morality play Everyman. Hofmannsthal’s adaptation premiered at Berlin’s Circus Schumann theater in December 1911.

It’s been an unusually good year on TV, and the Emmy nominations reflect a quality of both breadth and depth. The likes of Shogun, Slow Horses, Ripley and, of course, Baby Reindeer don’t come along very often, but for them all to be competing against one another is going to give Emmy voters quite the headache. Obviously it’s all but impossible to compare many of these shows; the genre-bending black comic horrors of Baby Reindeer simply aren’t more or less deserving than the elegant noirish depravity of Ripley, both of which are up for Best Limited Series, but the nature of awards is that one has to be accounted the winner, and Richard Gadd’s none-more-hyped show is likely to walk away with several awards, and deservedly so.

“Did I just write the song of the summer?” twenty-seven-year-old Megan Boni, an aspiring New York-based singer-actress known on social media as “Girl on Couch,” asked her public a few weeks ago. Days before, she suggested that her TikTok followers set to music a thirteen-word satirical musing she had improvised about her undersexed Gen Z peeresses’ lofty romantic expectations. Known simply as “Man in Finance,” the song’s lyrics easily divide into four short verses that unfold like shallow ads in the “Personals” section of an old newspaper: “I’m looking for a man in finance/Trust fund/Six-five/Blue eyes.” Adaptations have gone viral on social media, gathering more than 80 million hits and earning Boni more than $300,000 in revenue.

Before the news of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump blew him off the front pages, the dramatic collapse of the trial of Alec Baldwin in a New Mexico courtroom was the most discussed story in American public life. Those attuned to cosmic ironies might note firstly that both the Trump and Baldwin stories revolved around the discharge of a firearm — accidentally and fatally in the case of Baldwin, deliberately and non-fatally in the case of Trump — and also in the abiding animosity between the two men, fanned by Baldwin’s continued impersonations of the former (and future?) president on Saturday Night Live. Yet the question now for Baldwin is what happens next.

The trailer for Ridley Scott’s new epic, Gladiator II, is undeniably impressive, but then it rather had to be. Rumors that its already massive budget had ballooned to as much as $310 million — which would mean it would have to be one of 2024’s highest-grossing movies just to break even, never mind making a profit — may have suggested that the film was in trouble, but an early screening of the preview at the CinemaCon convention in Las Vegas reassured exhibitors and studios alike, with the few journalists who had seen the footage rushing to extol its scale and grandeur. Now it’s been released online, and viewers have a chance to judge for themselves. (Its cinematic debut will come with Deadpool vs Wolverine.) Does it look like a worthy follow-up to Gladiator? https://www.

If you have a Netflix subscription, then you’ll quite probably be tempted to watch the new $150 million Beverly Hills Cop film. The movie is snappily subtitled Axel F — the name of the would-be iconic Axel Foley character, equally snappily embodied by Eddie Murphy, returning to play the part for the first time in three decades. In truth, the movie is an undemanding and entertaining watch that flies by in a couple of inconsequential hours. Directed by debutant filmmaker Mark Molloy, it brings Foley back to Beverly Hills — via some complicated plot mechanics that don’t need to concern anyone but the most anxious viewer — in order to become involved in a police corruption scandal.

When Brian Robbins, CEO of Paramount Studios, addressed the company in a town hall meeting on Tuesday, he was not in celebratory mood. Amid the grim and downbeat words he had to utter — “We know what a difficult and disruptive period it has been. And while we cannot say that the noise will disappear, we are here today to lay out a go-forward plan that can set us up for success no matter what path the company chooses to go down” — the news that the studio’s profits have declined by 61 precent over the past five years was described by Showtime CEO Chris McCarthy as “simply unacceptable.” Paramount is in big trouble. The only questions now are why, and what can be done to ameliorate the situation?

When the news of the Canadian actor Donald Sutherland’s death at the age of eighty-eight was announced yesterday, it was greeted with a sigh and a shout by his peers. A sigh, because every great actor’s death, even at a grand old age, is a sad loss, and a shout, because there will now be the niggling feeling that Sutherland never quite got his due treatment when compared to his peers. Yes, he won an honorary Oscar in 2017, and yes, he appeared in his fair share of hugely acclaimed and iconic pictures, from M*A*S*H to Pride and Prejudice. But Sutherland’s tendency to appear in a lot of undistinguished B-movies, especially in the Eighties, has counted against him.  This is deeply unfair. He was an actor who, even in the weakest films he appeared in, brought class and dignity.

Early on in her entertaining account of five years immersed in the New York art scene, author Bianca Bosker is informed that, as far as the art world is concerned, because she is a journalist, she is the “enemy.” Given that the job of a journalist is to find things out, then explain and communicate those findings, it is unsurprising that a hermetic, deeply self-protective society like the art world would be resistant to journalistic inquiry. In reality it’s not just Bosker’s profession that makes it difficult for her to get past art’s gatekeepers, but a whole litany of personal and social failings that are gleefully enumerated by an art dealer early on.

If you were standing somewhere around Hollywood today, you would hear a long, deep exhalation. The new Bad Boys film, snappily subtitled Ride or Die, has indeed ridden, rather than expired, at the US box office. It grossed $56 million in its opening weekend — and not only is this the highest opening for an R-rated film since Oppenheimer nearly a year ago, but it indicates that in a summer where blockbusters have been routinely un-performing (Furiosa and The Fall Guy may have been critically acclaimed, but it looks unlikely either will cover their considerable production costs), there is still hope for a crowd-pleasing action film that appeals to a wide audience. Yet the film’s success was also a quasi-referendum on the pulling power of its leading man.

Alec Baldwin is a family man through and through. The poster for Baldwin’s eponymous new TLC show — featuring the actor surrounded by his wife and gaggle of kids — is proof. The heartwarming scene almost made Cockburn forget that Baldwin accidentally shot and killed a crew member for the film Rust back in 2021.   On Tuesday, Baldwin and his faux-Spanish wife Hilaria announced their upcoming show via Instagram, inviting viewers into their home to see the “ups and downs, the good, the bad, the wild and the crazy.” The fifty-second promo features the couple's seven kids, all under ten, screaming in their sterile, white New York City apartment — music to Cockburn’s ears.  https://twitter.

The much-anticipated new Benedict Cumberbatch series on Netflix, Eric, initially sounds as if it could have been made at any point in the past four decades. Bankable leading man whose character is battling substance abuse issues and mental instability; check. Diverse supporting cast including at least one character who is not only struggling against racial prejudice but homophobia too, check. Gritty-yet-faintly exotic setting, in this case the pre-Giuliani New York of the Eighties, check. But there is another element in Abi Morgan’s psychological thriller that throws a spanner in the works, in the form of the eponymous Eric.

It must be nice to be Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos. Not only is he paid a truly eye-watering amount of money to be in his job (roughly $50 million a year, according to reports), but because of his company’s pre-eminent position in the streaming market, he is interviewed, largely uncritically, by major news titles, even when he says things that are obviously either wrong or deeply stupid. Thus it has proved in a recent conversation with the New York Times, in which he announced, of last year’s hits Barbie and Oppenheimer, “Both of those movies would be great for Netflix. They definitely would have enjoyed just as big an audience on Netflix.” To add insult to injury, he declared that the size of a screen was all but irrelevant, saying, “My son’s an editor.

Although this year’s Cannes Film Festival hasn’t concluded yet (it runs until this Saturday), there is a general sense that the true talking-point pictures have been frontloaded into the opening week, both in competition and out of it. Without doubt, the one that has attracted the most attention is Francis Ford Coppola’s sci-fi epic Megalopolis, which premiered last Thursday to a mixture of outright scorn and bemused but respectful appreciation, all of which suggests that, although it still lacks a US distributor, it will keep making waves upon its release later this year — although the chances of Coppola regaining anything like his $120 million investment are slim, to say the least.

If modern America were ever to have its own “the Great God Pan is Dead” moment, it would arrive in the form of Popeyes and KFC celebrating 4/20 as a marketing boon. After all, what better way is there to signal the end of counterculture than by chomping down on some discounted fried chicken? Devotees of the “4/20” marijuana festival, commemorated globally each year, have bemoaned a string of corporate sponsorship deals which are, they sniff, at odds with the event’s hallowed “hippie” origins. So when San Francisco decided earlier this year to cancel its annual 4/20 celebrations on Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park, citing city-wide budget cuts and a lack of lucrative brand deals, the whole affair was a little on the nose. Come on, man!