★★★☆☆
Three stars

On the surface, The Theory of Everything ticks a lot of boxes for forthcoming success in the movie awards season: an able-bodied actor playing a disabled character, a plot about an underdog who succeeds in the face of all the odds, a personal drama flecked with existential questions about creation and the nature of the universe. It’s a truly exotic mixture of domestic turmoil, the acute reality of disability and supernovas.

The film charts the remarkable life of Professor Stephen Hawking, the physicist known for his pioneering theories about the universe’s origins and his lifelong battle against motor neurone disease. Constructed as a chronological tale that follows Hawking from his days as an awkward Cambridge graduate through to international scientific superstar, the plot covers in equal measure his personal battles. It not only covers Hawking’s attempts to prove a diagnosis of a two year life expectancy wrong, but also the struggles his wife confronts in the face of a husband who is physically degenerating.

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The film is foremost a performance-driven piece, and these struggles between husband and wife are brought to life by the captivating central performances of Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones. Jones brings tremendous emotional credibility to the character of Jane Hawking, who is burdened with the realities of her husband’s burgeoning success. Whilst Stephen enjoys worldwide academic acclaim, Jane is confronted with the mundane exigencies of everyday life: clothing, washing, feeding and caring for a husband in a worsening physical state. Caught between an inescapable sense of hopelessness and the perpetual drive to see Stephen carry on, Jones brilliantly and subtly captures the role of a woman whose life becomes dominated by her spouse.

Of course, Redmayne’s towering portrayal is the film’s central talking point, and it is joyous, in parts, to watch. Throughout, the uncanniness of Redmayne’s performance is striking, from the physical twitches, to the facial contortions, down to eye movements and blinks. It is a performance driven by nuance, which never strays into parody, gratuity or distaste. Yet, it is the earlier scenes, of Stephen as a still able-bodied graduate in Cambridge that were the most entrancing. There was something particularly magical about viewing a side of Stephen Hawking none of us would ever have seen or even imagined him as – a socially clumsy, fantastically intelligent and charming university student. Factual accuracy aside, Redmayne perfectly captures an imagined version of Hawking in his youth, and those scenes in Cambridge towards the beginning of the film were by far the most enthralling.

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Yet, there was something deeply incongruous about these brilliant central performances and the film’s numerous flaws. For one, though the performances bring tremendous emotional clout to the personal side of Hawking’s life, the script dumbs down his scientific achievements to a gallingly infantile degree. If there were more than four sentences describing what major breakthroughs in physics Hawking pioneered, I would be surprised. I understand his work to be immensely complex, but I entirely doubt his leading theoretical work about radiation emitted by a black hole is best explained by drawing a spiral in beer foam on a pub table.

Equally, for a film that attempts to chart an enormous, perhaps too large, chunk of Hawking’s life, scenes meant to symbolise the passing of time were done remarkably ineffectually. The montages disguised as vintage home-movie clips, shot in an almost Instragram-filter-esque homage to 1980’s handheld camcorder footage, were particularly naff and felt deeply out of place with the rest of the film’s beautiful, and measured, cinematography. The all-too-frequent use of these scarcely disguised sequences only served to highlight that the script couldn’t tackle so much of a very eventful life.

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Moreover, the script quickly became formulaic, with these passing-of-time moments often used to break up the repeated sequence of academic advance tarnished by a personal setback. Whether that was Stephen gaining a PhD, yet simultaneously resigning himself to life in a wheelchair, or the publishing of A Brief History of Time, set against him contracting pneumonia and subsequently losing the ability to speak, the script was cyclical to the point of tedium.

And although these personal dramas were effectively realised, it was hard to feel compassion for Jane in these moments. Though acted well by Jones, Jane as a character came across as perpetually frigid and dislikeable; hardly the sympathy-inducing persona the film was trying to fit her into. Equally, her falling in love with family-friend-turned-assistant-carer Jonathan was rendered so blandly that it was hard to feel anything at all for either of them, besides a sense of curiosity as to why the film had dedicated so much time to that side story.

When compared to that other cinematic depiction of genius out at the moment, The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything is the better film. It is more nuanced in its central depiction, more emotionally evocative without straying into crass sentimentality and far more carefully constructed. Yet, both films suffer from the exact same flaw; inadequate scripts that only serve to impair truly remarkable acting performances.

★★★★★

Five stars

Artists, who were once revolutionary and subversive in their time, seem to lose their edge upon acceptance into the canon. Not so with Egon Schiele. As far as this country is concerned, perhaps Schiele hasn’t even made it into the canon. Indeed, the recent retrospective at the Courtauld gallery in London elicited such a mix of reactions that it seems the artist’s radical, shocking and uncompromising work remains as disputed as ever. Time Out’s Martin Coomer stated bluntly, “With Schiele there is no poetry,” whereas the Financial Times’ Jackie Wullschlager not only dubbed the show the work of an arrested genius but also one of London’s best exhibitions in 2014. 

Either side of this divide, the issue of how to approach Schiele’s sometimes aggressive and disturbing exposition of sexuality features prominently. The conservatives see his work as yet another expiation of obscenity and perversion, foisted upon us by the regrettable tendencies of so-called modern ‘art’. Another approach simply dismisses Schiele as a morbid, promiscuous exhibitionist whose theatrical voyeurism is little more than an adolescent vanity project. But the believers among us see Schiele as a groundbreaking visionary whose works, unnerving as they can be, represent a revolution in the understanding and depiction of sexuality. Whichever side of the debate you fall, this exhibition has to be praised for giving fair representation of everything, from the most “acceptable” to the most provocative. 

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For me some of Schiele’s most affecting works, are the most difficult to process. In haunting self-portraits, such as ‘Nude Self-Portrait in Gray with Open Mouth,’ Schiele depicts himself naked in arresting contortions, coloured in sickly pallid tones. These paintings do not merely show angst, they portray an angst that reaches out a sickly hand and drags you into its horror. Then there are the unnervingly sensual nudes – ‘Mother and Child,’ for example, is pictured in full oedipal transgression and the undeniable eroticism of the figure sits uncomfortably with the incestuous setting in which it appears. Perhaps it’s becoming clear why ‘Schiele, the radical nude’ is the first ever-major Schiele exhibition in Britain.

The acuity of the effect also owes much to the thinking behind the arrangement. Following a broadly chronological pattern, we trace some of the early works before the war in preparation for a large, second room in which we see the artist in full maturity. What makes the arrangement so compelling is how curator Barnaby Wright shows a dissonance between the form and content in Schiele’s work. For example, the first series of paintings were primarily solitary female nudes. Yet stylistically they felt very different; some of them highlighted Schiele’s very particular reverence for the female form, fetishizing curves in sensuous poses. Others depicted the same subject with a radically different effect – not erotic but graphic, even grotesque. Yet they were in many ways identical to the previous portraits. This careful design of the exhibition very cleverly used Schiele’s dynamism, to make the viewing experience consistently intriguing and surprising.

In addition to Schiele’s expressive range, the exhibition highlights his immense technical ability. Peer closely and you find a calculated method in the madness. For example, look at the precision of Schiele’s brushwork. His lines are at once strikingly bold and incisive, yet always conveying a hazy dreamlike effect that makes his pictures feel like part of a hallucination. There is also a subtle beauty in his composition with colour. His palette is for the most part confined to shades of red and orange, yet paradoxically, this restriction is what makes his work so expressive and lyrical. Indeed, the subtle mixtures and layering of tones create some truly beautiful combinations. It is also undeniable that Schiele is a virtuoso of figurative painting. As unpleasant as his deformed specimens are, they show an exceptional ability in execution and conception.

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In short, if not for pure curiosity, or even the opportunity to have a good grumble, I would seriously recommend you take a look at this exhibition. See on which side of the divide it will cast you, unlike much contemporary art, it will cast you on one side or the other. Schiele’s liminal status in the canon, reminds us that before the platitudes of later critics, the work of the great painters was never as easy to deal with as the art books now suggest. In this regard, this exhibtion gives us a sense of history as it was in its moment. Even now the startling nature of Schiele’s work conveys the radicalism and vitality with which his generation changed the art world.  

“Schiele: The Radical Nude” is showing at the Courtauld in Somerset House until the 18th of January 2015. 

After threats by the North Korean affiliated organisation the Guardians of Peace and the cancelling of the New York première, followed by the decisions of major cinema chains in the US not to screen the movie, it was looking unlikely that The Interview would ever be released. The international situation has been discussed by people as varied as President Obama, who criticised the decision by Sony Pictures to cancel the release of the film (In typical fashion, Fox News incorrectly reported that Obama had banned the movie in the US), to Dr Evil, who made a welcome return on SNL. Finally, on midnight of Christmas Eve, the movie was finally released online in the United States, and it was rolled out to cinemas later that day.

Written by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and Dan Sterling, The Interview follows Dave Skylark (James Franco), host of the talk show Skylark Tonight, and Aaron Rapoport (Seth Rogen), the producer of the show. The talk show is vapid and focuses on celebrity gossip, much like if the gossip column of the Daily Mail took the form of a show. The movie begins with Dave interviewing Eminem, who is defending his controversial new lyrics about hating old people. It’s all strong satire and really funny, because this is what Rogen and Franco do best – This Is The End was just an entire movie of celebrities portraying themselves and lampooning American pop culture (but mostly themselves). Despite the popularity of the show, Aaron has high ambitions to do “real journalism” and make the show more serious, which can’t be achieved by reporting that Matthew McConaughey has just had sex with a goat or featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt stroking a group of cats (I must protest that an hour of watching him stroke cats is an excellent idea for a programme).

It is here that we find out that Kim Jong-un is a big fan of American TV, specifically the Big Bang Theory and Skylark Tonight. Well, there’s no accounting for taste. However this fortunate piece of news about Kim’s poor viewing habits leads Aaron to an idea – perhaps they can make the programme more reputable by conducing a serious interview with the elusive supreme leader of North Korea. Dave is interested: maybe Ron Howard will make a movie about them in the future, a reference to Frost/Nixon, an excellent film on the landmark interviews of 1977. The initial premise of The Interview can certainly be compared to Frost/Nixon: lightweight talk show host plans to conduct a serious political interview with an elusive leader (or ex-leader). However, this is not a Ron Howard movie. After some obligatory slow-mo frat party dancing to celebrate, a scene which is in every single Rogen and Franco film, they are contacted by the CIA. Agent Lacey (Lizzy Caplan) asks them to use this interview opportunity to “take out” Kim Jong-un. Cue extended scene of Aaron and Dave misunderstanding “take out”. Oh, to a party? Nearly every joke in this movie, no matter how funny, overstays its welcome. This is one of them.

Aaron and Dave fly to North Korea to meet Kim Jong-un (Randall Park). Dave and Kim get on famously, bonding over their love of margaritas and Katy Perry. Randall Park is great and a highlight of the movie. Whereas the rest of the film was filled with the usual hit-and-miss innuendos, dick jokes, and bad accents common to Rogen/Franco films (after their collaborations on Pineapple Express, This Is The End and the homoerotic Bound 2 parody I feel compelled to refer to them as a single entity), the depiction of the pop-loving crazy Kim Jong-un is actually pretty funny.

It’s a shame that there has been so much media attention on what is essentially a mediocre comedy. It never reaches the comedic heights of the Rogen and Goldberg scripted Superbad. There are some great characters, such as Sook (Diana Bang), a North Korean head of propaganda, and Kim Jong-un himself, but unfortunately the main characters, especially Franco’s smug Dave Skylark, are generally unlikable. There is also reliance on repeating the same juvenile jokes throughout the film, most of which fall flat. Let’s not pretend that this film was making a political statement. It’s not. It chose Kim Jong-un to lampoon, but none of the parody or comedy is political in nature. There is a very naive assessment of the political situation, just used as a foundation for Rogen/Franco to lay all their Lord of the Rings references and penis jokes on. Perhaps the best aspect of the film was the fascinating and embarrassing emails leaked from studio executives at Sony Pictures, as a result of cyberhacking in response to the film. However, putting all the degradation of international relations and the emails about Angelina Jolie and Leonardo DiCaprio aside, and reviewing it as just an ordinary film, it is simply a mediocre comedy. It is what I’ve come to expect from Rogen and Franco in recent years, which is a shame, since they’ve done some great things in the past. I expected casual misogyny, extensive innuendos, jokes that go on for too long, bad accents and celebrity cameos. Sadly, I got exactly what I expected.

★★★★☆

Gigs that are organised by Robert Smith are not for the faint hearted. Some more senior lead singers are happy with bashing out a few greatest hits, departing as fast as they can from the stage clutching a wad of money and leaving a crowd dissatisfied.

But The Cure are no such band. Despite being an entity for nearly forty years, their setlists have only ever grown. And the first of their three night residency at the Hammersmith Apollo is no exception.  The band clearly cares about their fans. Yes, they played hits. ‘Lullaby’ was hypnotising as ever. ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ prompts the usual vocal imitation of the bands trademark guitar riff . ‘Pictures of You’, no matter how many times I’ve seen it performed, is always beautiful and tear jerking. But this mammoth forty song, three-and-a-bit hour set is packed with rarities galore. Casual and dire-hard fans are appeased alike and neither can complain that they don’t get their sixty quid worths of live music. ‘A Man Inside My Mouth’ makes its first funky-synth live debut ever at the Hammersmith. “It’s nice to play some different stuff”, Smith quips in a brief remark to the crowd as he takes a brief break from his adorable teddy-bear like dancing. The Cure have toured pretty much constantly since 2011, but it’s so refreshing to see a classic band not rattling through the same set gig after gig. For once, there is an element of surprise for an audience used to being able to check setlists with a swish and a flick of a Smartphone.

There’s something here for everyone, songs from every album of their career appearing at some point in the set. I mean, with four encores, how could their not be at least one of your favourites played at some point? As a lover of their earlier work, it was great to hear ‘M’ and ‘Three Imaginary Boys’ finally make their way back into their set after a lengthy and unjust absence. Likewise, 1981’s standalone single ‘Charlotte Sometimes’ sounded sublime, oozing with gothic delight as the stage fills with dry ice and the dirge-like synth kicks in.

However, admittedly, listening to The Top played in full was not quite as enjoyable. The band have always steered clear of playing the majority of the album live since it was released. “We haven’t played this one since we last played here in 1984”, remarks Smith before breaking into yet another such track. And as ‘Give Me It’ closes the main set, I understand why. The album has some great songs, performed to a tee on the night. ‘The Caterpillar’, with it’s chaotic piano is heart-warming, whilst ‘Shake Dog Shake’ works great as a wickedly sleazy opener to the night. But playing the whole thing in one night? A bit too far I thought at the time.

But then Smith comes back on stage wielding a child’s spinning top. I thought I’d tripped out momentarily or died and gone to a Cure themed heaven. I mean, seeing any fifty-something year old man bearing a child’s toy is a somewhat odd sight, let alone when it is brandished by a lipstick-wearing musical genius on the stage of the Hammersmith Apollo. He holds it to the mic, cranks it up and the haunting desolation of ‘The Top’ begins to unfurl before us. The song is lament of desertion, of isolation in a barren and empty world. I’ve waited years to hear it live. Not only do I finally understand the pun in the title now, but I realise that someone else must feel the same way about other songs I don’t particularly like myself. As well as clearly enjoying themselves throughout the entire set, the band make a huge effort so that everyone there enjoys themselves. Yes, the set was eclectic and bizarre in places, but so well preformed I could have happily stood there for another two hours and basked in their blissful musical beauty. Although, please, please don’t shout ‘Lovesong’ next time, Rob. It’s a romantic number, not a football chant.    

In 1995, The Notorious B.I.G. released a B-side called ‘Who Shot Ya?‘ and hip-hop changed. Two months earlier, friend-turned-rival Tupac had been shot five times in a robbery in Manhattan, and despite claims from Biggie that the song had been recorded before the incident, there was no escaping the implications in the song’s lyrics (“Who shot ya? Separate the weak from the obsolete” and “I’m Crooklyn’s finest/You rewind this, Bad Boy’s behind this” – hardly subtle). Tupac responded with a diss of his own, and the most famous feud in music was born.

The 90s were the glory days of hip-hop rivalry. Before the bullets flew, infamously, between East and West Coast, it was lyrics that made or broke careers. If earlier beefs involving the likes of KRS-One and LL Cool J had been the birth of the diss track, songs threatening serious violence like Tupac’s ‘Hit Em Up’, Mobb Deep’s ‘Shook Ones Pt. 2’ and ‘Who Shot Ya?’ represented its baptism of fire, pushing things in a new direction. Tupac vs. Biggie, Death Row vs. Bad Boy Records, Suge Knight vs. Puff Daddy; aggression was the new flavour of hip-hop, and it didn’t exactly hurt record sales either. Over the next 20 years, the players would change but the game would remain much the same.

Interestingly, perhaps the most notorious diss released after Biggie and Tupac’s deaths – Nas’ ‘Ether‘ – wasn’t aimed at the other side of America, but at fellow New York rapper Jay-Z, by then well-established but yet to release The Blueprint. A song of extreme vitriol which dripped homophobia and misogyny, ‘Ether’ nonetheless eviscerated Jay. With a hook consisting of a distorted sample of Tupac shouting “Fuck Jay-Z” between verses in which Nas accused him of stealing from KRS-One and hijacking Biggie’s legacy, the song was released on Jay’s birthday. It was the seminal, classic diss.

Around the same time, Eminem was changing the game. Unafraid to attack and offend pretty much anyone, including non-hip-hop targets like Moby, Christina Aguilera, Dick Cheney and, famously, his ex-wife Kim and his own mother, Em’s disses would often call out multiple figures in pop culture over the course of perhaps 16 bars before he turned his attention to something completely different (the best-known examples being ‘The Real Slim Shady’ and ‘Without Me’: “You waited this long, now stop debating/Cos I’m back, I’m on the rag and ovulating/I know that you got a job Ms Cheney/But your husband’s heart problem’s complicating/So the FCC won’t let me be/Or let me be me, so let me see/They tried to shut me down on MTV/But it feels so empty without me”).

It was this hyperactive, shameless assault on what seemed like anyone who came into Slim Shady’s consciousness as he rapped that made him so popular, though that’s not to say Eminem couldn’t lay down something more traditional and less erratic. He proved that during his feud with rapper/producer Benzino and The Source magazine during Benzino’s tenure as editor via ‘The Sauce’, a track often credited with destroying the publication’s credibility.

Nowadays the double effect of worldwide success – with the hundreds of millions of fans and also significant respect from other rappers that it entails – has meant that Eminem has toned things down and pretty much retired from sparring (with an unbeaten record, incidentally). Though his protégée 50 Cent has resolutely carried on his feud with Compton rapper Game, things are quiet at Shady Records these days. It’s a younger generation who provides the drama in hip-hop now.

In a sense, things are different from before. The most sensational “diss” in the last couple of years was Kendrick Lamar’s infamous verse on Big Sean’s ‘Control’, which wasn’t exactly a diss but more of a call-out to pretty much every young rapper on the scene right now in one breath (J. Cole, Big K.R.I.T., Wale, Pusha T, Meek Mill, A$AP Rocky, Drake, Big Sean, Jay Electronica, Mac Miller and Tyler, the Creator, to be precise). The internet suffered paroxysms of joy when the verse came out, followed by further joy at the responses of a number of the rappers named over the next few weeks, rising to Kendrick’s challenge. The verse was good-natured, though, if competitive, and to find real venom one has to look elsewhere.

Enter the G.O.O.D. Music-Young Money beef. Originating between veteran Common and YM golden boy Drake, their respective labelmates Pusha T and Lil’ Wayne were quick to get involved. The feud has bubbled under the surface for a few years now, surfacing openly every now and then to produce quality disses like Wayne’s ‘Ghoulish’, and Pusha T’s ‘Don’t Fuck With Me’ and ‘Exodus 23:1’. Pusha seems to go in harder than the others, for some reason (“Fuck you playing games for?/ Don’t be scared, get everything you came for/They got you talking that big shit/Little do you know we don’t miss shit/Them n****s using you as a pawn/You see they never loaded their guns/Now you out here all by yourself/Ask Steve Jobs, wealth don’t buy health”).

Common kills it on ‘Sweet‘ too, though he finds it hard to find new material to diss Drake with. After all, the Toronto rapper is hip-hop Marmite – you love him or you hate him – and he has beef past and present with almost everyone around. Everything that can be said against him already has, numerous times. Including open and veiled attacks in the media and on wax, Drake’s been dissed by Chris Brown, Common, Pusha T, Ludacris, Jay-Z, DMX, Kanye and even labelmate Tyga (“I don’t like Drake as a person. He’s just fake to me.”). Tyga’s attack, which extended to Nicki Minaj, is symptomatic of YMCMR’s tendency to fight in-house – Wayne’s rapidly-escalating dispute with label head Birdman is only the latest in a series of not-so-veiled shots within the label.

Where Pusha T is keeping the traditional diss alive and well, there are others dragging the proud tradition of hip-hop beef through the gutter. Self-proclaimed Queen of Twitter Azealia Banks has managed over the last two years to perfect the art of attacking other artists despite not actually releasing her debut album until this November. Of targets including Angel Haze, Action Bronson, Kreayshawn, T.I., Nicki Minaj, Jim Jones, A$AP Rocky and Iggy Azalea, only the last two really justified any attack from the vituperative rapper, and Bronson’s reaction to her was one of ridicule rather than any serious consternation. Most of the others pointed to her lack of a major hit besides ‘212’. Banks is proof that rappers can embarrass themselves by launching attacks, too.

Beef is an integral part of hip-hop. Much like how technology advances fastest during periods of warfare, so rappers improve and write better when they have something to prove and someone to put back in their place. That’s not to say advocating rivalry equates to advocating violence – the two biggest names in the history of the genre both had lives cut tragically short allegedly as a result of the East-West Coast feud, but even then it could be argued that their fame was enhanced thanks to it.

Ultimately, Kendrick has the right attitude on ‘Control’ – competition makes you raise your game and calling out those other rappers raised not only his profile but theirs too. It benefits everyone, not least fans of those involved, and should be lauded for happening now as it happened twenty years ago. Jay-Z put it best when he reminisced about Biggie in a 2012 interview with MTV, “You’re just as good as your competition around you. You know when someone else pushes you to really step your game up? That song, it was so crazy. It just had an effect on everybody. The world stopped when he dropped ‘Who Shot Ya’.”