Gosh, but I love me some Paul Verhoeven. To my mind, the brilliantly perverse Dutch director is one of the greatest satirists in film history – certainly one of the finest ever to have worked within the Hollywood machine. He is consistently interested in wrongfooting audiences – challenging them to question their own engagement in […]
Sexual intercourse, as Philip Larkin famously noted, began in 1963, “Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban / And the Beatles’ first LP”. By those lights – the ones that take something’s beginning as being the point at which its reality broke undeniably and irreversibly into all levels of public consciousness – queerness began a few years […]
I did a quick Q&A with Scottee about his solo show, The Worst of Scottee, for Run Riot. I reviewed the show in Edinburgh last year (read the review here) and thought it was extremely interesting. In the Q&A, he says he doesn’t want to do a show that’s him wanking into a mirror. Fair […]
As soon as there were VHS home-movie cameras, there were people remaking their favourite films at home. Maybe people were doing it before video, though no examples come to mind (tell me if you know of any…), but my hunch is that it’s to do with youth and timing. Home-movie technology on film was usually […]
Just a quick heads-up about a piece I did for the Guardian online earlier this week about the adaptive possibilities of cabaret compared to more conventional theatre models – special forces rather than regular army, if you like. Here’s the opening: Dripping with rococo ornamentation and covered in mirrors, the Café Royal’s Grill Room in […]
Review of a galvanising and heartbreaking performance lecture by Mat Frasier at the Science Museum about the historical representation of disability in museums
J.M. Tyree and I reviewed the Coen brothers’ latest film, Inside Llewyn Davis, for the February 2014 issue of Sight & Sound. Josh and I co-wrote the BFI Film Classic on The Big Lebowski in 2007 and have covered a bunch of Coen pictures for S&S since then. (Here’s our take on No Country for […]
And so Jarmania 2014 begins! This year, the twentieth anniversary of Derek Jarman’s death, sees a whole bunch of events dedicated to the artist and filmmaker. First out of the traps is Pandemonium, an exhibition by the Cultural Institute at King’s, where Jarman studied from 1960 to 1963, at the Inigo Rooms in Somerset House’s […]
Not that we needed one, but there’s a whole new reason to love the Royal Vauxhall Tavern: a life-size street-art stencil of Britain’s fave Olympic medalist/smiley twink/Speedo-model/same-sex-love poster boy, Tom Daley, brandishing a groin-level declaration that ‘All We Need Is Love’, complete with rainbow-hued love-heart. Created on Friday (January 17, 2014) by street artist Pegasus, the […]
I do love a bit of music hall. It’s a form that’s often seen as a bit cheesy – those nudge-nudge euphemisms and all those Victorian collars and frills – but there’s so much to cherish in its rampantly eclectic line-ups of disparate talents, beautiful spaces and assured audience rapport. (That side of things […]
