Issue 620

Defiance

DRAMA/WAR The suggestion in Knocked Up that Steven Spielberg’s Munich was ‘Rambo for Jews’ seems to have inspired Edward Zwick’s latest project. After military epics Glory and The Last Samurai, Zwick arrives at the remarkable true story of the…

Beverly Hills Chihuahua

COMEDY/ADVENTURE The gritty, seedy world of Mexican dog fighting evoked in Amores Perros is (unsurprisingly) entirely missing from this brightly-lit family comedy from Raja Gosnell, the auteur behind Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed. Beverly…

Seven Pounds

DRAMA Will Smith is the most bankable star in America. Last year the mediocre I Am Legend opened with a whopping $77 million in its first weekend. Hancock rang tills this summer to the tune of $62 million. However, both those films operated in strong…

Brian K Vaughan & Pia Guerra - Y: The Last Man

SCI-FI Brian K Vaughn is one of the most interesting writers in comics Runaways, Ex Machina and Pride of Baghdad offering a new perspective when it comes to graphic storytelling. Y: The Last Man has been similarly praised and deservedly so. In…

Paris Blues

DRAMA The late Paul Newman is jazz performer Ram Bowen in this laidback drama of left bank insouciance from 1964, directed by Martin Hud Ritt. Ram hangs out in Paris with fellow American musician Eddie Cook (Sidney Poitier). They meet a couple of…

Slipknot

METAL For any rock band worth their salt, it’s all about the guitars. BIG. HEAVY. GUITARS. Slipknot have their fair share of shredding riffs and six string belligerence, although the first thing that hits us tonight, aside from the explosions and…

Hitlist - Visual Art

● Close Up Last chance to catch this highly recommended show, curated by Dawn Ades and Simon Baker, which explores the development and impact of the extreme close-up in early 20th century photography and film. Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun…

5 Things you might not know about - The Mighty Boosh

1 Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt decided to become a double act while appearing as a penis and a whale in Stewart Lee’s 1997 Edinburgh show, King Dong v Moby Dick. Lee in turn directed their ‘99 bonanza Arctic Boosh which was nominated for the…

Idlewild

ROCK RESIDENCY This was always going to be a sentimental trip, Idlewild revisiting each of their albums over consecutive nights. In my case, seeing the band for the first time on the 100 Broken Windows tour in 2000 and now again, eight years later…

Sakuran

MANGA ADAPTATION A bit like Edinburgh’s number 30 bus, Mika Ninagawa’s adaptation of this noted Manga comic series by Moyoco Anno travels an epic, seemingly endless journey, but goes nowhere interesting on the way. The scenery is better though, with…

Sex Drive

COMEDY Determined not to start college a virgin, semi-nerdy teenager Ian (Josh Zuckerman, best known as Young Dr Evil in the Austin Powers sequel Goldmember) drives across country to bed a red-hot babe he met on the internet named Ms Tasty. Fuelled…

Stage Blood, Roads to Siam and Divorce

NO WAVE & POST ROCK Divorce have clawed the title of ‘most exciting group in Glasgow’ from the cold, dead hands of whoever held it before. Having brought Optimo to its knees back in November, the four-girl, one-man group’s live show includes…

Tall Headlines

DRAMA Good show Odeon Entertainment for premiering on DVD a series of forgotten British films from the post-war period. They’re not exactly lost classics, but as the 1952 melodrama Tall Headlines illustrates, these films are certainly decent enough…

Rolo Tomassi

HARDCORE With the current trend for turning any conceivable subject matter into a feelgood singalong musical, it seems only fair and logical that Linda Blair’s most famous film role should be immortalised in song eventually. Or so it would seem…

Luke Haines - Bad Vibes

MUSIC MEMOIR ‘I am a cruel and pious man,’ mourns Luke Haines. History hasn’t had much time for the 90s-vintage indie iconoclast, instead celebrating the more palatable same-but-different likes of Jarvis Cocker. Yet those whose memories stretch back…

Ryu Murakami - Audition

THRILLER NOVELLA Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike’s cult favourite has all but eclipsed the psycho-sexual-thriller novel by Ryu Murakami on which the 1999 movie is based. The simple prose of Murakami’s slim volume (here translated by the author’s…

James Hider - The Spiders of Allah

WAR REPORTAGE This first book by James Hider, Middle Eastern Bureau Chief for The Times, is essential stuff for anyone concerned with the dangerous condition of the region in the 21st century — and that should be just about everybody. However, not…

Tobias Hill - The Hidden

MYSTERY DRAMA Uncovering the mystery of Tobias Hill’s new Greek-set novel is as slow and meticulous as the archaeological dig at its centre. Hill revels in detail: historical descriptions of mysterious Sparta, moments from a memory best forgotten…

Gilbert Hernandez - Speak of the Devil

CRIME One half of Los Bros Hernandez takes time off from the long-running magic realist Mexican soap opera of Love & Rockets for this nasty little tale that mixes teen melodrama with stalk’n’slash chills. It’s a crazed cautionary tale in which a…

Will Eisner - The Best of The Spirit

SUPERHERO With his domino mask, blue suit, red tie, blue fedora hat and gloves, Denny Colt aka The Spirit was what one newspaper in the 1940s referred to ‘the only real middle-class crimefighter’. Created in 1940 for a strip in a Sunday newspaper…

Johnny Griffin - Live at Ronnie Scott’s

JAZZ This live recording from the Soho club last May proved to be the swansong for the hard-hitting American tenor man, and if the octogenarian was no longer at his peak, he more than holds his own in some very fast company, including American…

Loop - Heaven’s End; Loop - Fade Out

PSYCHEDLIC ROCK Spacemen 3 and Croydon’s Loop have been inextricably linked over the years, not least because Sonic Boom of Sp3 (wrongly) accused Loop of nicking his band’s droning tripped out sound. They were in fact coming from similar viewpoints…

Gore - Mean Man’s Dream •••• ; Gore - Hart Gore •••

ROCK Gore were never really a particularly fashionable proposition – a pummelling Black Sabbath-esque instrumental rock trio from the Netherlands – who stomped their way through the 80s and 90s in the company of the likes of Big Black and Henry…