Arts Reviews

As I wrote a few weeks ago, there is a marvelous opportunity to bond with one’s children when you both conceive an interest, even an obsession, with the same musical act. Once upon a time, it might have been the Beatles, or Bowie or Madonna: now, it’s Taylor Swift, the all-conquering pop songstress who has not only taken over the world, but has made yet more untold millions with her concert film Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour. In practice, most of those seeing it will not have been able to get tickets to see her three-and-half-hour live show, so this slightly abbreviated version (a mere two and three quarter hours) will have to do. And my seven-year old daughter Rose is a Swiftie par excellence. We are going to have fun, I declare, and she rolls her eyes and says, “If you say so, Dad.

It happens to be a truth of modern travel: airports as destinations in themselves, designed to provide travel needs, shopping delights and above all, entertainment. Heathrow’s Terminal 2, the Queen’s Terminal, pays homage to the late Elizabeth II, who gave her blessing to the Harrods and Fortnam & Mason stores that line the waiting areas. New York’s LaGuardia has become a paean to the subway system, replete with murals and other memorabilia of that venerable institution. Las Vegas’s Harry Reid International Airport is a casino before the casino — try your luck before hitting the strip.   Into this tradition, Tulsa International Airport in Oklahoma falls.

After a relatively quiet few weeks at the US box office, now that the Barbenheimer phenomenon has finally receded from view, it has fallen to another all-conquering icon to drag audiences back to theaters in their millions. Yes, Taylor Swift is no longer content with conquering stadia, but has now managed to establish herself as an unparalleled draw for the big screen as well, with Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour opening in American cinemas. With a first weekend gross of $97 million, it will either be the highest October launch since Joker in 2019, or even surpass it. Not bad for something made on a budget of no more than $20 million, self-produced by Swift herself and bypassing studios to be distributed directly to theaters.

What would an American odyssey look like today? There are too many rabbit holes to go down, too many traps. Besides our fractious politics, everything in 2020s America is busted. Broken self-checkout machines and petty theft are scapegoats for a spiritual and economic crisis — it feels like the end of the world could come at any moment. Non-linear digital media and smartphones have destroyed the monoculture of popular movies and television that used to gird our pop culture. Everyone can find their own niche now, but we have so little to talk about together — not even the dread permeating the country. And it’s been this way for the better part of a decade.  The Sweet East presents the most accurate, from-the-front picture of America today.

It is fair to say that, of this fall’s new and revived television shows, the reboot of Frasier was seen as at best a difficult proposition and at worst a cynical exercise in artistic necrophilia. There was no doubt that the original show was one of the finest American situational comedies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; a pitch-perfect farce, acted and written with enormous sophistication by a peerless cast, even if Jane Leeves’s “Mancunian” accent as Daphne is still one of the most peculiar things to have been heard on television. Even a lessening of impact after Daphne and Niles finally became a couple did not stop Frasier being regarded with enormous fondness after the show came to an end in 2004.

“The grand picture of life lies in the little moments,” the Indian author Abhijit Naskar reminds us in his incongruously long poem “Visvavictor.” In that same spirit, I always like to remember Charlton Heston, who would have turned 100 on October 4, not for his larger-than-life Oscar-winning roles, but the fleeting cameo he played in that underrated social satire of American suburbia in the 1990s, Wayne’s World 2. Heston is on screen for all of thirty seconds, and dare I say it he steals the show.

A decade ago, Alfonso Cuarón’s sci-fi thriller Gravity soared into theaters, to ecstatic reviews and a vast box office. Its success was all the more surprising — and welcome — because it had been dogged by reports of disastrous test screenings and production chaos, with its innovative, visual effects-heavy story apparently beset by the envelope-pushing demands of the technology that it required to depict its world. The movie could easily have been a colossal flop, but instead it seemed to herald a brave new dawn for ambitious, intelligent science fiction filmmaking that soared into the stratosphere, in both senses. Ten years on, the success of Gravity, or even Ridley Scott’s The Martian, are very distant memories.

Sir Michael Gambon, who has died aged eighty-two, played countless iconic and legendary roles over the course of a sixty-year career on stage and screen. Yet the part that he will always be best remembered for — and, in truth, not one that stretched this fine actor to his limits — was that of Professor Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films. Gambon was offered the role after Richard Harris, who played the part in the first and second pictures, died (and after, rumor had it, Ian McKellen turned it down, not wanting to play another fictitious wizard after Gandalf). Gambon claimed neither to have read the books nor to know anything about the character, saying instead that he took on the role for his grandchildren.

At last, there is the Hollywood equivalent of white smoke in the Vatican. After nearly five months, the writers’ strike has at last — tentatively — been resolved, as the Writers’ Guild of America have agreed to terms with the studios, as represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The terms have not yet been publicly disclosed, but are said to be surprisingly generous, and favor the writers. It has been suggested that their major demands have all been met, including improved residual payments on streaming services, an increased number of writers employed on shows and, most importantly for many both financially and artistically, a curb on the way in which AI might be used to generate scripts and screenplays.

Since Netflix’s Sex Education began in 2019, it has won plaudits for being one of the most reliably entertaining shows on the platform, combining refreshing frankness about sex in all its forms with a finely judged balance between gross-out humor and genuine wit, while also being unafraid to delve into deeper emotional territory. Showrunner and creator Laurie Nunn — daughter of British theatrical royalty Sir Trevor — has proved a remarkable talent, not least for assembling a truly excellent cast of lesser-known actors who have all transformed into stars over the past four years. There is, inevitably, a problem with popular shows continuing beyond their natural ending, and that is a feeling of staleness.

In 2001, at the age of fourteen, Sam Lipman-Stern dropped out of high school in New Jersey and started working at the now defunct Civic Development Group (CDG) as a telemarketer. He stayed for seven years, calling up citizens to ask for money on behalf of police charities. It turned out to be a massive scam.  More than two decades later, Lipman-Stern, now thirty-six and a seasoned filmmaker, has exposed not only CDG — which underhandedly kept 90 percent of the proceeds it raised — but the entire industry in his frenetic, rip-roaring investigative HBO documentary Telemarketers.  Co-directed by Adam Bhala Lough and produced by the Safdie brothers, the three-part docuseries is a wild ride, largely due to Lipman-Stern’s archival footage.