Cultural News Today

The actor-writer-director’s adaptation of Steve Erickson’s 2007 book on 70s Hollywood is a film of staggering incompetence All things considered, March 2011 was a pretty good month for James Franco. Years before the unseemly scandals that have since marred his career, he enjoyed the level of industry cachet befitting a young talent coming off their first Oscar nomination (even if they’d really bit the big one in their capacity as co-host ). Perhaps Franco was feeling creatively emboldened by recent dabbling in novels and multimedia when he decided to take on a new challenge in his fledgling vocation of directing. Franco purchased the rights to Zeroville, an acclaimed and reputedly dense novel wending a noir-influenced path through New Hollywood, with the intention of making his most ambitious feature film yet. Related: Is See You Soon the most hilariously awful film of the year? Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2lHRTx8

In 1987, Dan Watson’s dance routine failed to nab first prize from a panel of pesky bluecoats. He revisits this haunting childhood experience in his new comedy show, Venus Good art often chimes with our own life experiences and gives us cause to reflect on our memories, loves, hopes and fears. But rarely is the connection quite this niche. In 1987, a roughly seven-year-old Dan Watson failed to win a dance contest at a Pontins holiday camp. It’s an experience that haunts him, to the extent that, 32 years later, his comedy-dance-theatre show Venus is all about it. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2mJ1TGp

Royal Court, London Churchill’s four new pieces entertainingly explore myths, mundanity and gore Every Caryl Churchill play is an experiment with form. Her latest work comprises four pieces that get progressively longer as the evening continues. But, while each work has its own distinct identity, the unifying factor is the human need for myths, legends and stories and the imminence, as well as the immanence, of death. Together they make a strangely compelling quartet. The last piece, Imp, is much the longest and a mix of the funny and macabre. It presents us with a couple of ageing cousins who live together in fractious harmony and whose sedate existence is governed by a dark secret. Jimmy is a depressive who finds solace in running and who recounts overheard stories that echo King Lear, Hamlet and Oedipus Rex. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2mPRvfV

School climate strike activists call on theatre group to sever ties with oil firm School climate protesters who took to the streets in huge numbers across the UK last week are threatening to boycott the Royal Shakespeare Company over its sponsorship deal with BP. In a letter being sent to the RSC on Thursday, a group representing young people in towns and cities across the UK, says it will launch a boycott campaign unless the theatre company severs its ties with big oil. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2ldsUkR

Caspar Seale Jones’s drama about a young woman afraid of her past is a masterclass in engrossing, show-don’t-tell film-making Here’s one of those rare lowish-budget, entirely off-radar British debuts that feels like a discovery. Adventurous writer-director Caspar Seale Jones has relocated a stock horror starting point – fraught young woman fleeing something abominable in her past – to Japan, which instantly gifts his frames more distinctive vistas than all those potboilers pursuing teenagers through the streets of Peterborough or Stroud. More intriguingly, To Tokyo is in that Japanese folk-horror tradition that yielded Onibaba and Kwaidan, making merry-macabre use of a still relatively unfamiliar set of demons and ghouls. To Tokyo scores high on dreamy-bordering-on-nightmarish atmosphere. On learning her mother is gravely ill, Alice (Florence Kosky) passes into either a fugue state or an actual wilderness that encompasses forests, deserts and a mountainside hut where she slaps on war...

A cop becomes obsessed with a logic-defying serial killer in an extremely silly yet undeniably entertaining genre-switching film Like a lamb stridently making its own way to the slaughter, the goofy Netflix thriller In the Shadow of the Moon is a curio begging to be torn apart. It’s a film so odd and unwieldy that it’s impossible to finish watching without exhibiting some sort of extreme, visceral reaction. I would understand annoyance, befuddlement, shock or incredulity and I imagine director Jim Mickle would empathise but as I scratched my head, I also found myself oddly charmed by its brazen nuttiness, a film aiming for the stars and, sometimes, almost succeeding. Related: Between Two Ferns: The Movie review – ramshackle cameo comedy Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2mLbUD6

‘I used bacon, garlic and blueberries for eyes, the teeth are lima beans and the tongue is the piglet’s own’ The first Donald Trump sculpture I made was out of a chicken. It was July 2016, when he still seemed relatively harmless and I never thought his presidency would come to pass. I’d read the stories of him dodging Vietnam and I thought the chicken was perfect material, especially with its thin skin. Then, a few months later, the Access Hollywood tape came out with him saying he could grab women by the pussy. He was suddenly a lot more disturbing. I wanted to show his true nature. I made this piece out of a dead piglet. I used most of its skin to create the face, then took the snout for his nose. You can see the dimensions of the piece because the piglet’s tail is at the bottom. It has the US food agency stamp that certifies this is American meat. It was important to show that this is not just about one person – it is an American problem. Continue reading... from Culture | Th...