Culture

He stands five-foot-seven in his stocking feet — five-nine in boots — but with Clarence White’s Telecaster slung around his neck and a thick head of gray hair roostered up, he looks ten feet tall. John Marty Stuart has plucked the strings of every major figure in country music. Growing up in Philadelphia, Mississippi, his heroes were bluegrass legend Lester Flatt and American prophet Johnny Cash. Before going out on his own, Stuart only had two jobs: he joined Flatt’s band in 1972 as a fourteen-year-old mandolin virtuoso, and after Flatt retired in 1978, he joined Cash’s band as a guitarist.

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.

The Thing is not a monster movie. Sure, John Carpenter was remaking the 1951 The Thing from Another World, itself an adaptation of the 1938 pulp-sci-fi novella Who Goes There? — but it’s not a shlocky B-movie horror. It’s too vicious, cynical and psychological for that. Rather, it’s the ultimate paranoia thriller. For the unfamiliar, the 1982 flick is about a group of researchers, stuck in an Antarctic base, who discover a strange shape-shifting alien, which consumes its victims and then mirrors their look, smell, speech and manner. They’re all marooned together, being hunted down by an unearthly terror, and any of them — friend, stranger, dog — could be it, waiting to strike.

If you had to pick the two Hollywood directors who have been the most over-exposed in recent years, many people would opt for two idiosyncratic and hitherto likeable figures: Wes Anderson and Taika Waititi. The reason opinion has cooled on both filmmakers, however, in the past couple of years is that their work — which has often been excellent in the past — has become so stylized, and so constant, as to be exhausting. Anderson’s most recent movie, Asteroid City, was greeted with sighs and weariness, despite being a smash at the box office, and Waititi’s much-delayed picture about soccer, Next Goal Wins, has premiered at the Toronto Film Festival to general yawns of “predictable” and “seen it all before.

The late-night talk show has been a staple of American television for three quarters of century. It is a tried and tested formula that works beautifully... until it doesn’t — as Jimmy Fallon learned this week when Rolling Stone published the feature “Chaos, Comedy, and ‘Crying Rooms’: Inside Jimmy Fallon’s ‘Tonight Show’.” There are millions of people who would sell their souls to make it Hollywood — and the competitiveness and desperation has been exploited time and time again by those at the top. But unlike many of the abusive tales that have been told over the past decade, the accusations against Fallon are watery at best.  In fact, the piece has bears all the hallmarks of a classic hit job.

Nestled in the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx are a series of vultures, who lurk, grotesque and yet strangely beautiful, among the greenery.  The birds number in their hundreds, are larger than life and glint with glitter in the sun. They aren’t real, of course, but part of Jamaican artist Ebony G. Patterson’s expansive show, ...things come to thrive... in the shedding... in the molting... Works in the exhibition range from cast-glass leaves and body parts — including severed feet — peeking out from the plants to the imposing sculpture “… fester …”, a ten-foot wall covered with more than 1,500 red gloves on one side and tassels, beads and tapestry on the other.

When the history of comedy’s resurgence in the early twenty-first century is written — when masses of people, silenced by the speech codes of the day, found solace and contrarian hope in the words of unsilenced comics — Shane Gillis will be a major turning point in that story.  It’s not just that he’s arguably the best stand-up under forty working today; it’s that his work won out over all the obstacles the world threw at him. He is now the comedy world’s embodiment of the Streisand Effect, where his attempted cancellation functioned instead as a rocket ship for his career based not on victimhood but on the stubborn nature of his skill. Gillis’s first special, Live in Austin, was a YouTube joint that has racked up 14 million views.

It seems DC’s thirst for restrictions did not end last April when the city dropped its mask mandate. Washingtonians still feel an incessant need to be regulated and the National Symphony Orchestra has just found the most recent method — nut bans.   In an email passed to Cockburn by a tipster about a concert starting this week at the NSO, orchestra management has established a “nut-free zone” in the building. Per their order, all performances September 5-8 will be strictly nut-free — and that’s not all. Trace amounts of nut oil will also be prohibited.  “No foods with peanuts or hazelnuts or foods cooked in nut oil can be brought onstage or backstage,” the email reads.

In the summer of 1997, one song was ubiquitous all over the world, namely the Swedish band Aqua’s novelty pop single “Barbie Girl.” A lightly ironic account of the exploits of the titular creation — “I’m a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world/ Life in plastic, it’s fantastic” — it might have irritated Barbie’s manufacturer’s Mattel, who unsuccessfully took Aqua’s record label MCA to court, citing copyright violation, but for everyone else, it was a half-amusing, half-persistent earworm that seemed as disposable and popular as the doll herself.

In the Nineties, David Fincher established himself as the cult director for a certain type of cineaste. After the misstep of Alien 3 (underrated, still not great), he came back triumphantly with the still-astonishing serial killer thriller Se7en, and then established his credentials with the millennial satire Fight Club. It was a box-office flop but attracted an immediate, fervent following who latched onto its director as a near-prophetic figure, capable of combining visual pizzazz acquired from his days as a music video director with a mordant, dark wit. He became one of those filmmakers who could simply be referred to by the initiated by his surname, like Scorsese or Spielberg.

The news that Denis Villeneuve’s keenly anticipated Dune sequel is to be delayed from its previously announced November release date until next March is both unwelcome and far from unexpected. It also brings back memories of the pandemic, when films were routinely postponed for months, even years; it is not hard to remember how the Bond film No Time To Die ended up having its original release date of April 2020 put back until October 2021, by which time Billie Eilish’s theme song had acquired all the familiarity of a much-loved old standard, and the film’s trailers had long since melted into ubiquity. And countless equally delayed pictures simply flopped at the box office, as audiences stayed away, bored by seeing the same marketing materials forever.