Culture

When The Flash opens at cinemas this week, its production company DC Studios and distributor Warner Brothers will no doubt be hoping that attention is diverted away from its troubled, pronoun-wielding star Ezra Miller and towards its multiverse qualities. To the uninitiated, this sounds simply as if the studio has rounded up every actor who ever played Batman (save Christian Bale, who has wisely moved onto other things), chucked a Supergirl into the mix and even produced a truly bizarre Nicolas Cage cameo as Superman. Even Christopher Reeve appears, from beyond the grave. But to its now-desperate makers, mindful of the massive financial success of Spider-Man: No Way Home, the film has to succeed.

Pat Sajak has been a staple of American television for forty years as the host of The Wheel of Fortune. The seventy-six-year-old announced this week that the next season of Fortune will be his last. Then what? Will Sajak go quietly into retirement, cashing in on one of those Margaritaville family vacation giveaways his show contestants scream about wildly and jump up and down over? Sajak himself has — with the humor he’s known for — shed little light on his next move, tweeting, “It’s been a wonderful ride, and I’ll have more to say in the coming months. Many thanks to you all. (If nothing else, it’ll keep the clickbait sites busy!

The Sign in Sidney Brunstein’s Window — set in the blustering world of 1960s New York bohemia — deals with so many hot-button issues it is hard to keep up. Patriarchy, anti-Semitism, gay rights, slavery, sex work, suicide, drugs, adultery, racism. It’s all there.  But as I watched Anne Kauffman’s superb, and at times transcendent, Broadway revival, it dawned on me that one theme unites them all: corruption.  The play’s moment of truth hangs on the revelation that a local Manhattan politician who preaches progress is actually a crook. But on a smaller, equally devastating level, it is also about the corruption of marriage, of bodies, of values, of morals and of hope.

Georgia O’Keeffe is beloved for her oil paintings on canvas showing flowers and animal skulls: the first all soft, sensual openings; the second, spiky points and hardness.  Her works on paper are less well known. Yet, as MoMA’s exhibition, Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time, argues, paper played a key role in her early experimentation and art. As she told Alfred Stieglitz, the influential art gallerist and photographer who became her husband, “Why — it’s just like scrap paper. I throw it in the scrap heap and go on to something else.”  Paper is the beating heart of this retrospective, which shows 120 of O’Keeffe’s works from fifty-eight separate lenders, and which range from charcoal sketches to candy-colored pastels, rich watercolors to grainy graphite.

For anyone of a certain age who grew up in the Eighties and Nineties, there was always a wistful feeling that persisted whenever a big-budget blockbuster came out. The likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis were often seen slaughtering (usually foreign) villains and dispensing manly quips. But why did they never team up to do so together? Was there not the possibility that, one day, a veritable Dirty Dozen of Hollywood hard men could be assembled to kick ass, take names and (perhaps) compare notes on agents’ fees, too? Well, Stallone himself was not deaf to the pleas of action-loving cineastes, and so his 2010 film The Expendables was an honorable attempt to make exactly this sort of film.

Here’s the kind of guy I am: my musical taste is small-c catholic and runs about 30,000 albums. (All CD and digital, no vinyl. I’m not a hipster prone to dropping thirty-five bucks on a picture disc of Ghost in the Machine or a “junkyard swirl”-colored 2-LP edition of Out of State Plates.) If you make good music, no matter the genre, I’m probably going to like it. On any given day I might alternate listening to some Webb Pierce records with the Annie Get Your Gun original cast recording, and then follow those up with some Pantera, and then some Dandy Livingstone, and then some Bananarama, and then some Albert King, etc. etc.

It must seem very strange to Armie Hammer — once a successful, if not quite an A-list actor, who has latterly been reduced to selling timeshares in the Cayman Islands — that his career has taken such a decisive dive into the dumpster. Not very long ago, he was appearing in leading roles in the likes of Death on the Nile and Rebecca, and then his life went into a nosedive because of allegations of everything from cannibalism to sexual abuse. In present-day Hollywood, there is no such thing as a presumption of innocence until guilt is proved, and Hammer was fired from various projects, as well as being dropped by his agency and management company. His days of fame appeared to be over.

Is The Idol a stunning piece of trash, or a trashy masterpiece? Whatever the answer, the HBO show, debuting Sunday, is sure to make an impression. It’s set to be 2023’s Spring Breakers; a lurid spectacle of Hollywood by blacklight, as Lily-Rose Depp’s Britney-inspired pop vamp Jocelyn falls for a manipulative cult leader, played by musician The Weeknd. And critics hate it. They cry it’s “toxic,” “grim, gross and vulgar,” “degrading and hollow.” The Idol is the latest show from Euphoria’s Sam Levinson, and fills the prestige 9 p.m. slot previously occupied by the high-brow Murdoch satire Succession. Succession was subtle, witty and emotionally rich, and became a perennial obsession of the writerly class.

The complaints about the Marvel Cinematic Universe are by now widely known. Their films follow predictable formulas and story beats. Characters become increasingly indistinguishable quip machines. The stakes are never high. The streaming content is overwhelmingly forgettable. Other than the death of Tony Stark onscreen and the sad passing of Chadwick Boseman offscreen, emotional moments are few and far between, as it's hard to care about characters when everything can be reset with a bit of multiverse mumbo jumbo. And then there's the problem of, well, as the Critical Drinker refers to it, THE MESSAGE. Expect a lot of that in the already twice-postponed production of The Marvels, girlbossing into theaters this winter.

The newest entry in the Legend of Zelda series, Tears of the Kingdom, was recently released to rave reviews.   Much like in its predecessor, Breath of the Wild, gamers make their way through the vast and boundless ruins of the Kingdom of Hyrule, playing as the hero Link on his epic quest to save Princess Zelda and defeat the evil wizard Ganondorf.  The game is an instant classic and highlights the action and intensity the Zelda series is known for. Thankfully, that intensity seems to be limited to the game itself and hasn’t bled into the real world.

HBO's flagship drama Succession came to an end on Sunday night. The tale of the Roy saga was heavily based on the Murdoch family, to the point that Rupert Murdoch's divorce agreement from his fourth wife Jerry Hall stipulated that she would be barred from providing plot points to the show's writers. But how close is the fiction to reality? Spectator chairman Andrew Neil — who spent over a decade as editor of one of Murdoch's top newspapers — joins Freddy Gray on Spectator TV to discuss. "There was enough of an overlap to make it interesting, and enough of an overlap to say, 'yeah, that's happened in real life, that's the kind of thing that goes on,' but not enough to give the lawyers at HBO palpitations," Andrew says. He describes how Logan Roy "ran his company like a king.

The finale of Jesse Armstrong’s show Succession — and it very much is a show where the creator and lead writer is the auteur — has been one of the most anticipated for any series in years. But us aficionados of intelligent long-form television are always primed for disappointment. For every Breaking Bad, which concludes satisfyingly and inspiringly, there is a Game of Thrones, which lazily drops in fan-service tropes and fails to bring any kind of rewarding closure to the show, alienating its audience in the process. So which way did Succession fall? In truth, there were moments in the fourth and final series where I was beginning to feel that the show had jumped the shark.

Even rock and roll can have produced few stranger paths than the one that led a then physically unprepossessing, raspy-voiced African-American named Anna Mae Bullock from her early days as a devoutly Baptist sharecropper’s daughter in Depression-era Tennessee, to her final years as a practicing Buddhist living in a whitewashed mansion overlooking the dove-blue haze of Lake Geneva. That was the life trajectory of the artist known to the world as Tina Turner, who died Wednesday at the age of eighty-three.

Amanda Gorman, the young female poet who read at Joe Biden's inauguration lamented on Tuesday night that her poem had been banned by a Florida school library. “Just found out my inaugural poem 'The Hill We Climb' has been banned from an elementary school in Miami-Dade County because it causes "confusion and indoctrination,” America's first National Youth Poet Laureate tweeted.  The poem, however, was never banned. Instead, according to the Miami-Dade school district, “The Hill We Climb” was moved from the elementary section of the library to the middle-school section.  “It was determined at the school that ‘The Hill We Climb’ is better suited for middle-school students and, it was shelved in the middle-school section of the media center.

You know something dire is happening in the world if Dolly Parton’s feathers are ruffled. Dolly, an American sweetheart known for her blonde, bouffant hair, downhome, sweet and simple honesty (and a couple other big things), has released some songs from her upcoming rock album, Rockstar. And golly Dolly, are they ever feisty. The fact that Dolly is releasing a rock ’n’ roll album at all points to a serious cultural reckoning. Dolly, now seventy-seven years old, is more known for such innocent hits as “Love Is like a Butterfly” and “Coat of Many Colors” than for having a black-leather edge associated with sex and drugs. Yet such are the times we live in.    At the ACM Awards a couple weeks ago, Dolly debuted “World on Fire” from Rockstar.

On Sunday April 16, the curtain went down on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera for the last of 13,981 performances on Broadway, a titanic thirty-five-year run grossing north of $1.3 billion. The end of an era? Not quite — dating back to the 1979 opening of Evita, Lloyd Webber musicals have run continuously on the Great White Way for forty-four years. That streak is now hitched to the fortunes of Bad Cinderella, which opened just weeks before Phantom closed. The show gets a lift from a lush score and some winning numbers, as well as sumptuous set design. The whole premise, however, turns out to be a pumpkin, and it may spell midnight for the composer’s magical run within the year.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge must be destroyed before it's too late. The short-bob comedienne fond of wall-breaking and lazy edits has, in very short order, emasculated and destroyed multiple franchises thanks to the overwrought praise for her adaptation of her one-woman show, a descriptor that should itself elicit a bit of vomit in the back of the throat. Not content to politicize Star Wars as an irritating droid in Solo or to chop off the balls of James Bond in Daniel Craig's swan song whose name no one remembers, Waller-Bridge has now set her sights on a firmly American man to take down: Indiana Jones, whose fifth edition box office she will eradicate in spite of all the goodwill of these United States. https://twitter.

The British comedian, actor and author Charlie Higson is famous internationally for being one of the writers that has carried on the mantle of Ian Fleming by writing novels and stories that continue James Bond’s adventures, most recently On His Majesty’s Secret Service, published to coincide with King Charles III’s coronation. Yet in a recent interview with the Sunday Times of London, Higson was openly dismissive of the recent Daniel Craig-starring 007 films. He said “I went to see No Time to Die with my oldest boy, Frank, who is thirty, and he said, ‘That felt like a Bond film made by people who are embarrassed to make a Bond film.’ You had to watch two films in advance to know who such-and-such is and you think, ‘Oh, fuck off with that.