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Albums
Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou – Souvenirs
The piano style of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou - a...
Nathalie Joachim – Ki moun ou ye
For the follow-up to her Grammy-nominated debut album Fanm d’Ayiti,...
Behind the Song
Behind the Song: Leonore Overture, ‘Farewell Amanda’, ‘One Night’
Ludwig van Beethoven - Leonore Overture No. 1, Op....
Themes and References in Joanna Newsom’s Sapokanikan
In the music video for 'Sapokanikan', Joanna Newsom saunters...
Behind the Song: Robyn – ‘Be Mine!’
Beginning her career in pop music at the age...
Behind the Song: David Bowie – ‘Subterraneans’
'Subterraneans' is the closing song on what has become perhaps David...
Behind the Song: Van Morrison – ‘Crazy Love’
'Crazy Love' is the third track from Moondance, Van...
Tracks of the Week
Tracks of the Week 17.02.24
For the follow-up to her Grammy-nominated debut album Fanm...
Tracks of the Week 10.02.24
From 'Old Shep' and 'Old King' to 'Cracker Jack'...
Tracks of the Week 03.02.24
The creative life of the composer Cergio Prudencio -...
At the Movies
Parasite (2019)
★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - A family of four live in a cramped and roach-infested banjiha, a semi-basement apartment in Seoul. They crib free Wi-Fi from unsuspecting neighbours and a nearby coffee shop, and their only source of income, procured by the mother Chung-sook via WhatsApp, comes from the folding of pizza boxes for a local delivery service, a task at which they are only moderately successful...
Enola Holmes (2020)
★★ (2 out of 4 stars) - Enola Holmes (Millie Bobby Brown), the youngest sibling in the illustrious Holmes family, grew up for all intents and purposes as an only child. At the lavish country house which is now on the cusp of being consumed by nature, she was home-schooled by her mother, who provided an unorthodox education encompassing everything from word games, chess, and jujitsu to chemistry, botany, and lawn tennis played indoors...
Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) owns a warehouse which manufactures and sells novelty goods - toilet plungers with supposedly non-breakable handles and so on - but channels all of his hopes into one venture: having carried out his research diligently, and as far as the vagaries of the promotion will allow, he has come to understand that by purchasing gross quantities of Healthy Choice pudding...
We’re the Millers (2013)
★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - In what sounds like a riff on an old joke, a drug dealer, a stripper, a runaway, and a nerd climb into a camper van south of the border. David Clark (Jason Sudeikis) is a low-level marijuana dealer who finds himself beholden to his supplier, the sleazy businessman Brad Gurdlinger (Ed Helms), when a couple of street hoods make off with his stash. To cover the debt with a little added compensation, David reluctantly agrees to smuggle a 'smidge' of weed from Mexico...
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - From a modern perspective, the original and best film version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three almost seems to lack a final act: when the shakeout comes and the criminals attempt to make their getaway, there is no major chase sequence, limited gunfighting, and the villains for the most part - faced with the ambling steeliness of Walter Matthau's Lieutenant Zachary Garber - prove their own undoing...
World Cinema
Midsommar (2019)
★ (1 out of 4 stars) - Through a few snapshots of comforting mundanity - the boys' scenes could be from a Judd Apatow movie, minus the laughs - we come to learn of Dani and Christian, a young American couple whose long-term relationship has started to crack. Spurred on by his friends, who find her too needy, Christian has already begun separating himself from Dani, for her part made anxious by her bipolar sister...
Paris, Texas (1984)
★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) was introduced against a backdrop of blue skies and sandstone buttes, but his brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) wears a yellow Stetson cap and stands in front of a commercial tower block, which turns out to be painted. He sells billboard signs for a living, but agrees to travel to Terlingua, South Texas, to pick up his brother...
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - In 1902 an inscrutable gambler, John McCabe (Warren Beatty), arrives in the fledgling town of Presbyterian Church in the northwestern United States. A hazy rumour has him as a gunslinger, and McCabe uses innuendo and disorder to quickly assert his position in the town, acquiring three prostitutes and opening a whorehouse, to which he plans to add a saloon...
The Switch (2010)
★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - Kassie Larson (Jennifer Aniston) is in her thirties, and she's single, and with no romantic prospects on the horizon she decides she can no longer wait to have a child. She talks the matter over with her best friend Wally Mars (Jason Bateman) - they dated six years ago, and though it didn't work out they've got along swimmingly ever since...
Cactus Flower (1969)
★★★½ (3.5 out of 4 stars) - More than mere confection, which by nature lies there enticingly and dwindles the more that we eat, and just like the titular cactus which sits on dental assistant Stephanie Dickinson's desk, cannily marking her transformation, Cactus Flower positively blossoms. The third film in three years from director Gene Saks - hot on the heels of two resounding Neil Simon success stories...
Earthy Anecdotes
Earthy Anecdotes: Katharine Hepburn Steals Stephen Sondheim’s Plant
By the turn of the twentieth century, the Turtle...
Earthy Anecdotes: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Hellish Dinner Scene
One of the most influential horror movies of all-time,...
Earthy Anecdotes: Alex Ferguson, Mick Harford, And The League That Got Away
In the winter of 1991, Manchester United stood atop...
Earthy Anecdotes: The Premiere of The Rite of Spring
On 29 May 1913, The Rite of Spring, the ballet and...
Earthy Anecdotes: Zola’s House at Médan by Paul Cézanne
In Banks of the Marne by the French artist...
Poetry
Emily Dickinson – ‘I Can Wade Grief’ (1862)
Emily Dickinson was born on 10 December 1830 in...
Rabindranath Tagore, E. E. Cummings; Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Björk
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali polymath, best known...
‘Silentium!’ by Fyodor Tyutchev
Silentium!
Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal
the way you dream,...
Fyodor Sologub – ‘At Times There Comes a Strange Smell Wafting’
Fyodor Sologub was born Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov on 1...
James Joyce
Daily Visual 16.06.15: Bloomsday 2015
Bloomsday today in Dublin marks the culmination of a...
The Homeric Parallel in Ulysses: Joyce, Nabokov, and Homer in Maps
When Ulysses was published on 2 February, 1922, it was the...
Joyce, Nabokov, and Dirty Books: The Publications of Ulysses, Haveth Childers Everywhere, and Lolita
With Ezra Pound acting as intermediary, from the spring of...
Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha
'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...
Obituaries
Toots Hibbert, Reggae Pioneer and Lead Vocalist of the Maytals, Dies Aged 77
Toots Hibbert, the pioneering reggae musician who imbued his...
Juliette Gréco, Doyenne of the French Chanson, Dies at 93
Juliette Gréco, doyenne of the French chanson, died on...
Michael K. Williams, Actor Who Illuminated the Lives of Marginal Black Men, Dies Aged 54
Michael K. Williams, the actor who became known for...
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court Justice, Dies at the Age of 87
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, associate justice of the Supreme Court...
Albums
Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou – Souvenirs
The piano style of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou - a...
Nathalie Joachim – Ki moun ou ye
For the follow-up to her Grammy-nominated debut album Fanm d’Ayiti,...
Behind the Song
Themes and References in Joanna Newsom’s Sapokanikan
In the music video for 'Sapokanikan', Joanna Newsom saunters...
Behind the Song: Charles Mingus – ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’
Charles Mingus wrote 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat' as an...
Behind the Song: Van Morrison – ‘Crazy Love’
'Crazy Love' is the third track from Moondance, Van...
Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha
'M'appari' is the best known name for the central...
Behind the Song: Leonore Overture, ‘Farewell Amanda’, ‘One Night’
Ludwig van Beethoven - Leonore Overture No. 1, Op....
Tracks of the Week
Tracks of the Week 17.02.24
For the follow-up to her Grammy-nominated debut album Fanm...
Tracks of the Week 10.02.24
From 'Old Shep' and 'Old King' to 'Cracker Jack'...
Tracks of the Week 03.02.24
The creative life of the composer Cergio Prudencio -...
At the Movies
The Switch (2010)
★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - Kassie Larson (Jennifer Aniston) is in her thirties, and she's single, and with no romantic prospects on the horizon she decides she can no longer wait to have a child. She talks the matter over with her best friend Wally Mars (Jason Bateman) - they dated six years ago, and though it didn't work out they've got along swimmingly ever since...
We’re the Millers (2013)
★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - In what sounds like a riff on an old joke, a drug dealer, a stripper, a runaway, and a nerd climb into a camper van south of the border. David Clark (Jason Sudeikis) is a low-level marijuana dealer who finds himself beholden to his supplier, the sleazy businessman Brad Gurdlinger (Ed Helms), when a couple of street hoods make off with his stash. To cover the debt with a little added compensation, David reluctantly agrees to smuggle a 'smidge' of weed from Mexico...
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - The Coen Brothers' first foray on Netflix feels curiously well suited to the format: curious because beyond the vagaries of the term 'anthology', which on film has sometimes meant multiple directors and is nowadays more often used for television shows whose series are self-contained, straddling the line between more conventional movie making and episodic or serialised television, what The Ballad of Buster Scruggs most resembles...
Little Women (2019)
★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Greta Gerwig imbues the seventh film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's classic coming-of-age novel with deft characterisation and heady momentum, across and finally through the screen. Each scene bustles with gesture and intonation even when its components aren't rushing headlong through the streets of Manhattan, idling about the parks of Paris, or swirling the ballrooms and striding fields and beaches in the vicinity of Boston, Mass...
October Sky (1999)
★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - October Sky is a quaint coming-of-age picture utterly characteristic of this period in American cinema: polished but earnest, overtly sentimental, full of local colour, ostensibly presenting some hard-hitting themes without ever straying from the steely confines of quaint. It's in the same mould as films like The Cider House Rules and especially Billy Elliot, which it preceded by more than a year...
World Cinema
How to Steal a Million (1966)
★★½ (2.5 out of 4 stars) - Nicole Bonnet (Audrey Hepburn) is the daughter of an art forger, who has gathered so many supposed masterpieces in his private collection that he has won considerable renown in the world of art. Approached by the Kléber-Lafayette Museum, he proudly loans to the illustrious Paris institution (which for the sake of the film occupies the building of the real-life Musée Carnavalet) his most prized possession, his Cellini 'Venus'...
Three Men and a Little Lady (1990)
★½ (1.5 out of 4 stars) - Three Men and a Baby is more than a guilty pleasure, it's one of the defining movies of the 1980s for the easy chemistry between its three leads, and for the panoply of fashion, interior design, and architectural styles it affords, an unconstrained movement of plaids and pastels under the neon lights and glass hallways of their luxe apartment and out in the bustling parks and streets of New York...
Midsommar (2019)
★ (1 out of 4 stars) - Through a few snapshots of comforting mundanity - the boys' scenes could be from a Judd Apatow movie, minus the laughs - we come to learn of Dani and Christian, a young American couple whose long-term relationship has started to crack. Spurred on by his friends, who find her too needy, Christian has already begun separating himself from Dani, for her part made anxious by her bipolar sister...
Uncut Gems (2019)
★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Juggling a growing amount of debt, Howard has begun pawning off as sports memorabilia the collateral he receives for loaning out his jewels. When the opal finally arrives from Ethiopia, the basketball player Kevin Garnett can hardly avert his gaze. Howard accepts a 2008 NBA Championship ring as Garnett takes lend of the opal, immediately pawning it for the sake of a little liquidity unbeknownst to Demany and the Boston Celtics star.
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - From a modern perspective, the original and best film version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three almost seems to lack a final act: when the shakeout comes and the criminals attempt to make their getaway, there is no major chase sequence, limited gunfighting, and the villains for the most part - faced with the ambling steeliness of Walter Matthau's Lieutenant Zachary Garber - prove their own undoing...
Earthy Anecdotes
Earthy Anecdotes: Katharine Hepburn Steals Stephen Sondheim’s Plant
By the turn of the twentieth century, the Turtle...
Earthy Anecdotes: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Hellish Dinner Scene
One of the most influential horror movies of all-time,...
Earthy Anecdotes: Alex Ferguson, Mick Harford, And The League That Got Away
In the winter of 1991, Manchester United stood atop...
Earthy Anecdotes: The Premiere of The Rite of Spring
On 29 May 1913, The Rite of Spring, the ballet and...
Earthy Anecdotes: Zola’s House at Médan by Paul Cézanne
In Banks of the Marne by the French artist...
Poetry
Emily Dickinson – ‘I Can Wade Grief’ (1862)
Emily Dickinson was born on 10 December 1830 in...
Alexander Blok – ‘Night, street, street-light, drugstore’ (1912)
Alexander Blok (Александр Блок) (1880-1921) was the foremost of...
James Joyce
Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits; and the Jesuits and James Joyce
With the election yesterday evening in Rome of former...
The Homeric Parallel in Ulysses: Joyce, Nabokov, and Homer in Maps
When Ulysses was published on 2 February, 1922, it was the...
Daily Visual 16.06.15: Bloomsday 2015
Bloomsday today in Dublin marks the culmination of a...
Joyce, Nabokov, and Dirty Books: The Publications of Ulysses, Haveth Childers Everywhere, and Lolita
With Ezra Pound acting as intermediary, from the spring of...
Obituaries
Toots Hibbert, Reggae Pioneer and Lead Vocalist of the Maytals, Dies Aged 77
Toots Hibbert, the pioneering reggae musician who imbued his...
Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, the Influential Producer and Dub Pioneer, Dies at the Age of 85
Lee 'Scratch' Perry, the charismatic producer and restless pioneer...
Jean-Paul Belmondo, the Face of the French New Wave, Dies At the Age of 88
Jean-Paul Belmondo, the actor whose crooked nose and raffish...
Kenzo Takada, the Japanese Designer Who Revolutionised French Fashion, Dies at 81
With the wet weather and surging coronavirus already putting...
Tag: Indian Wells Masters
Albums
Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou – Souvenirs
The piano style of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou - a...
Nathalie Joachim – Ki moun ou ye
For the follow-up to her Grammy-nominated debut album Fanm d’Ayiti,...
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