★★☆☆☆
Two Stars

Jennifer Aniston goes without make-up or a laughter track to demonstrate her “serious” side in Cake, a half-baked sugary affair that spends a little too long in the oven without ever really rising. If there weren’t enough cake-based puns packed into that sentence for you, you’ll be even more disappointed with the distractingly absent eponymous cake from the actual film itself, at least not until the final act – and even then it just seems a little bit shoehorned – a little bit half-baked.

Aniston gives it her all as Claire, a woman whose chronic pain and scars (both physical and emotional) seem to give her a get-out-of-jail-free card to treat everyone in her life as if they owe her something. Wallowing in her depressive slump and dissatisfied with the corny condescension of her support group, Claire becomes fixated on the suicide of one of the group’s members – a young woman named Nina (Anna Kendrick), who threw herself off a motorway bridge. Claire never really knew Nina, but she’s compelled by the conviction of her suicide – much to the annoyance of the group’s leader (a woefully underused Felicity Huffman), who she blackmails into providing her with Nina’s home address.

We never really understand why Claire is so determined to seek out Nina’s residence, but her conveniently hunky widower Roy (Sam Worthington) seems to compensate for any incredulities we may have. Before long, Claire and Roy strike up what at first seems the most inappropriate of friendships, but slowly develops into an almost touching connection between two very lonely people. But things aren’t destined to go that smoothly for Claire, who begins seeing whacky hallucinations of Nina’s ghost – taunting and shaming her very existence and confronting Claire with the big question of why she too hasn’t killed herself. It’s all rather bleak.

Instilling a little bit of sanity and regulation into Claire’s life is her housemaid Silvana, in a scene-stealing turn from Adriana Barraza. Silvana knows Claire better than anyone, but she somehow refrains from asking Claire what Nina so bluntly does: “why are you such a c***?”. Instead, Silvana waits on Claire hand-and-foot, patiently accepting her pain, profanity, and pill-popping – she even makes bizarre dangerous trips to Mexico to provide Claire with drugs. But even through Silvana’s tolerant eyes, it’s often hard to see Claire as anything but pissy.

The truth, as we slowly learn, is that Claire pushes people away. After her tragic accident she loses everything dear to her and is henceforth hesitant to bring herself close to anyone again. There’s a well-worn Ebenezer Scrooge arc at Claire’s centre, and her journey is a little bit too predictable. Cake was clearly intended to be something of an “ugly” role for Aniston à la Charlize Theron in Monster – perhaps even an Oscar-fishing ploy – but a thin script and thinner yet characters forbid her from ever receiving the support she requires.

Claire’s abrasive personality ultimately proves too much. It’s a sincere attempt at throwing vanity to the wind for Aniston, but there are too many well-trodden tropes and clichés crammed into Cake’s overwrought running time and the film enjoys teasing out its subplots a little too gradually. The simple fact is that it’s hard to like a character like Claire, whose contempt and short-temper topple over the edge of “black comedy” and become something altogether more annoying. It’s a recipe that just doesn’t work – the proof is in the pudding.

The first thing to be said about Earl Sweatshirt’s new album is that it’s by no means an easy listen. Then again, it isn’t meant to be. It’s not written for the consumer. It’s not written for the reviewer. It’s written for him. The recent Lil Chris tragedy has cast the spotlight firmly on the difficulties of young fame, especially in the music industry, and it’s clearly a running theme in Earl’s latest offering. To put it in perspective, Earl is world-famous and the age of a finalist. While you’ve been grappling with Spenser, he’s spent the last few years of his life grappling with fame, fortune and everything that goes with it. Considering he cancelled tour dates last year, it’s hard not to associate the album’s content, and title, with the struggles he’s had with exhaustion, both emotional and physical. 

On the first track, ‘Huey’, Earl is already talking about drugs and the effects they’ve had, “And my bitch say the spliff take the soul from me.” The album continues in this vain, with Earl refusing to shy away from the big issues. In ‘Off Top’, he talks about racism in his childhood, “Raised up where every mouth that speak the truth get taped shut/ Peep the evening news, my nigga, we don’t do the same stuff.” While his lyrics are introspective, the backing sounds on the album feature the laconic beats and off-point synths clashing chords that we’ve come to expect from Odd Future, yet even murkier and more blurred.

In the lead track, ‘Grief’, Earl doesn’t trust anybody, “All I see is snakes in the eyes of these niggas,” and you get the impression that in writing this album he was dragging himself out of a hole. It’s an album that might get over-looked with the release of To Pimp A Butterfly, but the emotional and artistic depth of I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside definitely make it worth a listen.

Sam McTrusty was a little distracted at the beginning of our call. His fellow bandmember, the Twin Atlantic guitar player Barry McKenna, had apparently parked up next to him, got out, opened his shirt and started dancing in front of the window in the realisation his mate was doing a phone interview. Thiswas yet another sign of a band still going strong after eight years together. Sam mentioned that he feels very lucky with how the dynamics of Twin Atlantic have evolved, and that theyare at their happiest and most comfortable position right now. It’s easy to see why; their latest album, Great Divide, has received a great deal of positive press. It reached number six in the album charts, and one of their singles was premiered by Zane Lowe on BBC Radio 1 as the “Hottest Record in the World”.

Twin Atlantic came about in 2007, when all four members abandoned their jobs and universities to form a band, transforming music from their part-time hobby to their livelihood. Sam himself gave up art school, which he sees as the driving force behind his introduction to music and song writing. “If it wasn’t for my drawing and painting, I wouldn’t be in a band.” The art world, and indeed his fellow art students, introduced him to bands and music in a way he’d never encountered before. He found that music motivated him far more than his studies. Since the band has grown in popularity and fame, Sam has had little time to keep up his drawing and painting, but seems very contented with his lot.

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As he should be. The self-described ‘rock band from Glasgow’ have been going from strength to strength, while never leaving their Glaswegian roots behind. If you’ve ever heard a Twin Atlantic song, you will know that one of the most distinctive elements of Sam’s voice is his enchanting Glaswegian accent. You’d be surprised to hear that he’d ever sung along to Blink-182 in a “fake American accent”. This Scottish touch has made the band stand out amongst a sea of rather generic voices, something that Sam finds rather strange, “It does surprise a lot of people, but the surprise should be that they’re surprised, because we are Scottish.”

The Glaswegian influence doesn’t just stop there. Sam’s pride for his hometown is apparent, although he is wary of the widespread reputation it has gained as a dangerous city. He explains that while this is true to some extent, Glaswegians are also the friendliest people you’ll ever meet, and you’d struggle to have a bad night out there. In Sam’s words, “People like to party here but we also like to fight.” These contradictions have led to the city feeling somewhat confused and conflicted, almost ideal conditions to allow creativity to thrive. Sam himself turns to the weather, rather poetically, to explain the large amount of creativity that Glasgow seems to foster. “The weather here is so fucking weird that in turn it makes all the children that grow up here a little bit weird, because you spend so much time indoors, you have to lean on your imagination.”

Sam’s imagination is clearly still thriving, wet weather or not. The band’s aim when they formed was to bring more honesty to rock music. They didn’t want to swing into either extreme of rock: on the one hand, it can be overly serious, while on the other, theatrical and over-dramatised. Instead, they prefer to draw upon raw human experience of love and loss, themes that underlie most of their songs.

This honesty can go some way to explain their popularity. Combined with the authentic accent, the music and the feeling behind it gains an unusual element of credibility. Their live performances burn with the energy and passion of earnest men. They have been privileged enough to play in some beautiful venues, such as Koko in London or Ontario Place in Toronto. They will embark shortly on yet another UK tour, which will culminate in a headline show in their hometown. If you’re looking for complexity, Twin Atlantic are not for you; Sam refuses to over-categorise the music, claiming that labels such as Scottish-angular-rest rock, “driven by pop with an underlying tone of appreciation of song writing from the past,” are far too pretentious for them.

However, if you’re looking for classic British rock music with an honest heart, there will be few better examples. As Sam says, “We’re just a rock band and I think that’s cool.” Me too.

This past week, while US President Obama conducted a state visit to Jamaica, so too passed the 150^th anniversary of the final battle of his nation’s Civil War. As the topics of Jamaica’s modern challenges and the two countries’ intertwined histories of slavery converge, the OXO Tower’s current exhibition, Jamaica: Hidden Histories, seems all too pertinent.

With the photography of Sir H. H. Johnston, the exhibition presents the conditions of rural Jamaican life with such a wonderful rawness as to have seemingly lost nothing in that risky transition between the scene and the lens.

Even after the 1833 abolition of slavery, the island’s black population remained in a state of abject poverty with an almost-complete reliance on their former masters for work. Only with the sterling work of cooperating labour movements, trade unions, and exemplary public figures such as Norman Manley would the exploitation of international corporations be curbed to instead bring some actual benefits for the island’s citizens. With the political stagnation of the post-independence 1970s and the consistent economic decline since then, however, such benefits have largely been futile.

For a time, the idea of a sovereign West Indies Federation – one which unified the islands of the Caribbean in a way the colonial powers always feared and sought to prevent – seemed an appealing one, but the craving for national independence around 1962 overwhelmed the dream of a new commonwealth. 

This independence brought with it a reassertion of Jamaican values and practices, from art and language to music and dress. These were championed abroad as well as at home, from the Bronx to Battersea, and the Jamaican influence in these metropolises is detailed at the exhibition in its full vibrancy and passion. 

Through global fame in reggae and cricket, Jamaica was able to present itself in the way it should have been able to decades previously when Caribbean migrants aboard the SS Empire Windrush were brought in to help rebuild post-War Britain. Bob Marley was extremely popular, and the West Indies cricket team in 1963 beating their former colonial masters at their own game, from Old Trafford to The Oval, dismantled any residual claims to the legitimacy of white superiority.

Yet with Marley’s death long ago, the glory days of Caribbean cricket fading now to a memory, and the current critical condition of Jamaica’s economy, it would appear that there would be more cause to look back to better times than forward. Rather than dwell in the past, however, Hidden Histories presents it to us not merely as a collection of artefacts but as a repository of rich materials from which an equally strong future can be built.

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Hidden Histories runs until the 17^th of May at Oxo Tower Wharf, Bargehouse Street, South Bank, London, SE1 9PH. Open from 11:00am – 6:00pm. Admission is free.

If ever an army could claim to possess ‘strength in numbers’, it was the Iraqi security force in June 2014. The Americans’ strategy for rebuilding the Iraqi army, after its near instantaneous dismantlement in 2003, displayed great faith in the power of big numbers to resolve a tricky situation: by the time they withdrew in 2011 they had spent £25 billion on the creation of a million man army to keep the country stable. Yet when in June 2014 the fifty thousand man garrison of Mosul found themselves besieged by thirteen hundred Islamic State militants, they were as quick to rout as Saddam’s forces in 2003. Their doing so, at the time, made no sense. It seemed like an anti-miracle: an event too fantastically dreadful to be explicable. 

The purpose of Patrick Cockburn’s book, The Rise of Islamic State, is to make sense of this catastrophe as the product of American blunders, Iraqi prejudices, and the calamitous geopolitical situation in the Middle East generally. One might think his strident belief that America is partially culpable for the rise of ISIS would blur his account of it with polemic. But Cockburn’s style is not that of the highfaluting rhetorician; his prose consists almost entirely of the sober accumulation of hard facts, and these do not cast a favourable light on Washington. ‘Big numbers will solve everything’ wasn’t the only article of faith the Americans mistakenly held – big corporations too, it was insisted, should sell supplies to Iraqi commanders instead of the government giving them to them. By making Iraqi commanders responsible for purchasing their own soldiers’ supplies, Washington accidentally provided them with the opportunity to profiteer on a major scale. He writes:

“It started when the Americans told the Iraqi army to outsource food and other supplies around 2005. A battalion commander was paid for a unit of 600 soldiers, but had only 200 men under arms and pocketed the difference.”

This kleptocracy was driven by need as well as desire: until very recently officers had to pay for their commissions, the cost of which they then had to recuperate. No matter how assiduously Obama tries to disassociate ISIS from Islam, this book makes clear that the war against it was caused by faith – his own government’s faith in the private sector. Cockburn doesn’t let off the Americans easily: in his view this failing was just one of many within a disastrous foreign policy, which has stage managed the situation in Iraq to create a farce, and then a tragedy. For instance, he incorporates into the book an interview with a jihadist who rejoiced when the Americans armed the ‘moderates’ in Syria because his war band was immediately able to buy or steal them.

The attempt to write a history of the present is one especially likely to be thwarted by its author’s subjectivity, yet throughout his book Cockburn maintains a near magisterial perspective, identifying the blind spots in the Western media’s portrayal of the rise of ISIS as cogently as he provides own view. He writes that:

“[In the summer of 2014] there was an excessive focus by the media on the actions of Western governments as the prime mover of events. This was accompanied by an inadequate understanding of the significance of developments on the ground in Iraq and Syria as the force really driving the crisis.”

It is perfectly understandable why Western governments would comfort themselves with this solipsistic fiction given how rapidly the situation evolved in the second half of 2014. The best evidence for the success of Cockburn’s account of ISIS’s evolution is that his argument has not itself been made obsolete by the rapid changes in the Middle East since its publication. The Western media is still solipsistic, and this is best borne out by the recently concluded siege of Kobane. A battle of little strategic importance, it was portrayed to be crucial not only because, unlike most of the fighting, it could be easily reported on by Western journalists, but because it provided hard, if misleading evidence, of the effectiveness of coalition airstrikes. The avidity with which the media reported on the fighting made the eventually Kurdish victory seem momentous. It was not, and the media saw in it what it wanted to see.

That a book so hastily written could also be so prescient shows that Cockburn is one of our sanest and most disenchanted foreign correspondents writing about the Middle East today. I started his book because I didn’t trust the news, and I finished it wishing I could, wishing Cockburn was wrong about the West’s part in the creation of Islamic State.