★★★☆☆
Three Stars

At times in their career, Queens of the Stone Age have sounded like a world-class backing band for a non-existent superstar, and this continues to be something of a problem here. For all the quality of the musicianship, there is something missing.

This is a record built from the bottom up; monolithic slabs of bass and primal backbeats form the bedrock of the album. A bassline of Neolithic simplicity and power saunters in at the start of album opener ‘Keep Your Eyes Peeled’, and against this thunderous introduction then the plaintive vocals of Josh Homme seem curiously unnecessary. This problem recurs throughout the album.
Album highlight ‘My God is the Sun’, for example, is propelled by a ferocious cameo return from Dave Grohl and a writhing bassline which together utterly swamp the vocal performance.

When Homme’s voice is given more prominence, for example on piano-led ‘The Vampyre of Time and Memory’, the result is often turgid and angsty. The record is at its best when it eschews attempts at melodic introspection for heavier numbers, powering out riffs like The Velvet Underground on steroids.
One way the band remedies this shortcoming is bringing in Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor and Elton John to take over vocal duties, providing much needed variety. Sir Elton’s piano line bouncing through the riotous ‘Fairweather Friends’ like a drag queen striding through a bar fight is one of the most refreshing moments of the album.

There’s no question about it, QOTSA have really matured as a band; this album is by far their most complex and innovative yet. However, rock music is not always about subtlety. Their earlier albums were unashamed of their simplicity, and it was this which bestowed on them a crude power which is sometimes lacking here.

Like Clockwork… proves that QOTSA are still capable of producing great rock songs, and it is just a crying shame they sometimes lose sight of this simple goal.

Track To Download: My God Is The Sun

A conversation with Afrika Bambaataa is the equivalent to receiving a history lesson in hip hop. The man affectionately known as ‘Bam’ is also regarded as the ‘Grandfather of hip hop’. He is best known for the 1982 single ‘Planet Rock’ which influenced a generation of hip hoppers, and continues to influence today having been ranked 21^st in VH1’s 100 Greatest Songs of Hip Hop in 2008. The song samples Kraftwerk, which resulted in a lengthy legal dispute, and is credited with developing the electro genre, which paved the way for house and trance.

Nowadays, Bam keeps to a lower profile, having collaborating with the Mighty Mocambos and Charlie Funk on various singles over the last year. He is still the head of the Universal Zulu Nation which he set up in the early 70s in the South Bronx and his vision is “just to keep the culture alive and make people enjoy themselves”. The Zulu Nation, which works within the ‘Hip Hop Declaration of Peace’ to promote ‘conscious hip hop’ is about “keeping true to the whole culture, not merely the media dealing with the corporate side of rappers”.

Bam has a number of reservations concerning the “corporate side of rappers” nowadays, and commercialisation in general asking “Why you’re not playing old house music with new house music, why you not playing old rock music with the new rock music?”.

Not known for his rapping skills, having primarily been a DJ and self-appointed ‘master of records’ throughout his career, the influence of the art form is prevalent in his long monologues. Given at high speed, they are hugely entertaining, rhythmic, and above all, impossible to transcribe. His emphasis when discussing house and rock though, and any other music “I don’t care if its hip hop” is to “play the old with the new and the new with the old”. “mix it up all the time, mash it up!”.

As a result of this commercialisation the fifth element of hip hop, ‘hip hop knowledge’ has been relegated to an underground factor, not it’s primary force as it was with Bam’s ‘Planet Rock’, Flash’s ‘the Message’ and Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power’ in the early 80s before the development of gangster rap. “If you gonna call a woman a ‘B’ or use the ‘N’ word when there’s music telling you to ‘Fight the Power’ or organised in consciousness, play it all. If you have 24 hours, 365 days, 366 in a leap year, why you can’t play the old with the new, the new with the old and this way people can know where music came from back then, where it is now and where it goes for the future”.

Musically, Bam feels constricted commercially. Whilst some “stations might throw in a little touch of international flavour of music” the knowledge of hip hop has, once again, been relegated to the underground from where it started in the South Bronx where “from chaos comes something that becomes direct for the people so something came to the people there and now from those people it’s stretched to all the people of the world”. In the first instance, hip hop was an Afro-American form, one to create a voice on the periphery which had previously been absent within the ‘burning Bronx’. This was supplemented by the various break-beats Bam deployed with James Brown who “is hip hop” being a key feature morphing into a collection of styles.

Nowadays, “you get people saying I’m a house DJ, I’m a reggae DJ’ it’s like apartheid.” Nowadays, when the world is once again “dealing with so much chaos”, and with the globalisation of hip hop that was enabled by Bam and his Zulu Nation in the 80s, a similar creation could save the fate of hip hop today. In the words of Bam and the Soul Sonic force ‘everyone, just rock it’.

Afrika Bambaataa played at Cellar on June 6th.

Mid-May is a very busy time for the movie industry’s finest. The old, the new and the breaking through descend upon Cannes for one of the most important festivals on the Hollywood and global film calendar. So why is it so important? The Cannes Film Festival is a great opportunity to showcase work from across the world, allowing underrepresented categories a chance to get seen, and giving us a snapshot of what might be popular at the cinema in the months ahead. 2013 saw young romance à la 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom exchanged for flapper girls and hip-hop with Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby kicking off proceedings.

The ‘Official Selection’ contains two main categories. Un Certain Regard features original, less mainstream works whilst the Competition category gives us the most clues as to what will soon be hitting our screens. This is judged by The Competition Jury, comprised of those held in high esteem by the industry powers that be. This year was particularly interesting with director/god Steven Spielberg presiding over the panel joined by Nicole Kidman, We Need To Talk About Kevin director Lynne Ramsay, Life of Pi genius Ang Lee and Django star Christoph Waltz.

So what happened? Despite the buzz around the Coen brothers’ Inside Lleweyn Davis, Ryan Gosling’s latest Only God Forgives, and James Gray’s return to Cannes with The Immigrant, the jury threw a curve ball by awarding the Palme d’Or to Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Colour. Why the big surprise? This French film is based on a novel which follows the relationship between two lesbian students in Lille. It’s said to be highly sexually explicit and so controversial it is unlikely it will even be shown in Kechiche’s native Tunisia. Coinciding with the legalisation of gay marriage in France, this festival’s jury could be accused of weighing in with a political verdict but perhaps this will be a catalyst for giving cinema a new voice. Eyebrows have definitely been raised. This is far more controversial than last year, when Michael Haneke won the Palme d’Or for the second time in his career with Amour. Not only have Spielberg and Co upset the odds here, they have also issued an invitation to the likes of BAFTA and the Academy award judges to join the debate. But will they?

Unlike last year’s crop of Hollywood productions flooded with big name actors, this year saw a greater mix of Italian, French and even Japanese movies, although the female directors still haven’t quite broken through. Favourite Inside Lleweyn Davis took the Grand Prix, with Oscar Isaac receiving high acclaim for his role as a folk singer in 1960’s New York. This is also worth checking out if you want to see Carey Mulligan sing with Justin Timberlake, which of course you do. One theme that does seem to continue from Cannes 2012 is a keenness to shun the OTT. Soderbergh’s latest Behind the Candelabra failed to make an impact even though Matt Damon (aka Jason Bourne) dons a wig and ridiculous make-up as Liberace’s young lover Scott Thorson. Likewise, Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring has received a mixed response despite opening the Un Certain Regard category. Emma Watson swaps Hermione for hussy in this crime story playing Nicki, a pole-dancing yoga teacher who joins a celebrity-obsessed group of girls in robbing various Hollywood stars. Still distancing herself from the HP franchise, this may finally do for Watson what Cosmopolis did for Robert Pattinson.

Full of controversy, excitement and intrigue, there is never a dull moment at Cannes. The question now is who will prevail at the box office. Soderbergh’s glitz and glitter? The Coen’s folk-singers? Or Kechiche’s young lovers? Only time will tell…

Up the Women is the new BBC Four sitcom penned by Twenty-Twelve and Spaced star, Jessica Hynes. Set in 1910 in a village hall in the Oxfordshire countryside, the Banbury Intricate Craft Circle convene every week to stuff their faces with Victoria sponge and pretend to cross-stitch. But change is afoot. Margaret (Hynes), a deeply intelligent, patient woman who writes love poems about Ovid and makes jokes about Newton’s third law, has been swept up in a women’s suffrage march on a visit to London. She finds it so empowering that she becomes determined to bring the same fighting spirit to Oxfordshire, by proposing to rename the group ‘The Banbury Intricate Craft Circle Frankly Demands Women’s Suffrage’.

Unfortunately, bringing the women’s movement to Oxfordshire is not going to be quite so easy. The megalomaniac matriarch of the craft circle, Helen (Rebecca Front), finds the idea horrifying. ‘Women,’ she says, with frosty determination, ‘should not have the vote. We are simple, weak, emotional creatures.’ Not to mention that all the suffragettes are ‘mannish, flat-footed, bottom-heavy spinsters’. She immediately becomes the founding member of The Banbury Anti-Suffrage League, and takes the ginger parkin with her. Will Margaret be able to convince the rest of the group to fight for their right to vote?

Hynes and Front are fantastically funny as always, but unfortunately the sophisticated characterisation of Margaret and Helen does not extend to the rest of the female cast. Raucous grandmother Myrtle is predatory in her approach to flirtation, Eva’s thick as two short planks and is single-wombedly responsible for maintaining the Banbury population, Emily’s bottom lip juts out so far it could be seen all the way from Kidlington, and Gwen is an ineffectual babbler who (we are reminded every two minutes) has never found a husband.

There’s nothing groundbreaking here, and the humour occasionally falls back on bawdy jokes, made worse by a grating laughter track. Make no mistake: this is a tame sitcom. But as conventional comedy goes, Jessica Hynes has done an admirable job. Up the Women’s quaintness is endearing, its mockery of gender norms gently incisive, and Hynes’s mansplaining-induced grimaces painfully familiar. I am looking forward to seeing the characters and plotlines develop as the series continues. Whoever said feminists don’t have a sense of humour?

★★★★☆

The Sunset Limited, a dramatic novel by Cormac McCarthy (author of The Road and No Country for Old Men, both adapted into feature films), is the story of Black and White (the two characters’s actual names are never revealed). White attempts to commit suicide by throwing himself in front of the Sunset Limited, the train linking Louisiana to California, and Black saves his life and brings him back to her bed-sit where their conversation forms the whole content of the play.

Sophie Ablett and Sam Ereira, Black and White respectively, indicating their skin colour and the social divides deriving from it, create a compelling dynamic through their conversation. At first Black has the upper hand as she quizzes White on the reasoning behind his suicide attempt, and tries to share her religious faith with him. White is a professor and an atheist, and his depression and despair are clear with lines such as “You see what it is you’ve saved!” and “It sickens me to see myself in others.” Ereira’s portrayal of a man on the brink of suicide is convincing and deeply moving. Ablett’s mastery of the deep Southern accent is impressive and unfaltering, and its contrast with Ereira’s smoother accent indicates the class divide and reflects their totally opposite lives, confronting here in the stifling atmosphere of the apartment. White, overwhelmed and irritated by Black’s complete confidence in God and life, attempts to leave at several intervals during the play, and Black stops him, saying she will accompany him to his apartment. Her unfaltering care is explained when she reveals that she helps drunks and crack addicts regularly. She assures White that he “wants what everyone wants, wants to be loved by God.”

The conversation moves in circles, sometimes frustratingly so, but the actors deal with the intensity of the script so well that the over-arching themes come through and the dynamic of the relationship is always clear. Gradually White takes the upper hand from Black, and his professorial arrogance comes out as he flat-out denies Black’s faith, and the strength of Ereira’s explosive performance at the end is such that it noticeably shakes Black’s faith. “I don’t want God’s love”, he shouts, and the door of the bed-sit, as he’s about to exit, becomes symbolic: “Who is out there? I want to rush to nuzzle his bony cheek!”. Ablett makes a great show of Black’s despair, now that the tables have turned and White has exited to his faithless world. The theme of language, running through the play, is picked up again at the end when she confronts God and asks him why he “didn’t give her the words” to convince White.

An intense, confrontational conversation is well played out by the two talented actors, and the stifling space of the apartment is turned into an area of intellectual and cultural exchange. Ablett and Ereira are fascinating to watch, and though the play is necessarily a bit static, the acting makes the most of the space. The Sunset Limited will be showing from Monday to Thursday, at 11 in the morning (for this is the time the action takes place), at the Michael Pilch Studio, on Jowett Walk. The incentive of brunch included with the ticket should not be needed to convince you all to go and watch this new, rare American gem on the Oxford theatre scene.  

I had wanted to make a short film for a long time. I’d directed a lot of trailers and promotional videos beforehand, which I always hoped would be practice for something more my own. I’d also written a couple of plays, which helped me hugely in constructing the story. But The Wishing Horse is my first short film. 

Find your story

It’s a real challenge having to tell a story in ten minutes, but the best shorts are ones with a strong narrative.

The Wishing Horse is only ten minutes long, but I’ve tried to tell a story that plunges you deep down into the main character’s head, into her melancholy and dreamy world. It was also important to me to have some resolution: a lot of short films are mood pieces, or first acts of stories yet to be told, like business cards. I wanted to create something small, but complete, and hopefully that comes across in the finished film.

It’s based on a myth that if you touch the chalk white horses of England, they will grant you a wish. A girl, Lily, who is in mourning for her father, starts to see a strange white horse when she’s by herself. Whether real or imaginary, it helps her deal with her grief.

Assemble a dedicated team

The project started when I asked Aidan Grounds, who produced Playhouse shows like The Hothouse and The Seagull before graduating last year, if he wanted to turn a script I was working on into a short film. Aidan said yes, which was quite a leap of faith because I hadn’t done that much on the scale we wanted The Wishing Horse to be. We then recruited Emily Precious, who had also produced tons of theatre while at Oxford. Em and I got on almost instantly. She has about fifty folders for her emails and colour codes them all. 

Next, the three of us started putting together a team. It was comprised mostly of Oxford graduates – I think it’s natural really to want to continue strong working relationships – but we added some very good current students as well, and now that we’ve got to the post-production stage we have been lucky enough to enlist some industry professionals.

Scout out acting talent

We auditioned widely in Oxford and in London and eventually cast Imogen West-Knights as Lily. Imo is a finalist at Exeter College, and she played the part beautifully. We were concerned about finding a natural screen actor, as we were used to working with theatre, but Imogen convinced us immediately: despite her background in comedy she brings a very graceful subtlety to the part. She took the finesse you need for comic timing and very elegantly used it for a more serious role.  

Prepare for shooting

With everything in place, I was still very nervous before our week long shoot. There were a lot of things that could have gone wrong, but we had perfect weather every single day and the crew were phenomenal. People were often working on three or four hours sleep a night, and no-one complained. In the end, the whole thing turned out much better than we had imagined it could.

Don’t be shy asking for favours

Post-production is going well, mainly thanks to peoples’ goodwill in giving us discounts on filming permits and a camera. Many of our friends also backed us on Kickstarter, which we were very grateful for. Now Molinare, responsible for films such as The King’s Speech, and Air-Edel, who recently did the music for Anna Karenina, are generously helping to finish the film.

Get it out into the world

The last stage is still to come though, and that’s distribution. We’re knocking up a list of film festivals to submit to at the moment and will push the film as hard as we can over the coming months. I really hope it does well – at the first meeting I had with Aidan we decided that we would aim to screen it at at least one good film festival.

I’d like the film to be seen in Oxford too. I really feel that the film scene is changing in the university at the moment. I’d like The Wishing Horse to be part of that. So many more people are making short films and trailers than a year ago and the quality keeps improving. 

Get support from the Oxford Film Fund

Last year, I set up the Oxford Film Fund with Jess Campbell because we were impressed by the high standards of Oxford theatre, but felt that the same wasn’t true for filmmaking. We wanted to make filmmaking in Oxford more collaborative and communal, so that people getting started can draw on the experience of those who have already done it. 

I think that is happening now. TAFF and OUDS have already been a huge part of this, and the idea is that The Wishing Horse will keep the momentum going. Everyone on the team (apart from the professionals!) has a learnt a huge amount from the project, and that knowledge should be passed on to current students through the Oxford Film Fund.  

No more excuses

I think the only way to learn filmmaking is to just do it. I hope that’s what The Wishing Horse will encourage other students to do. To find out more about the project, visit our website at www.thewishinghorse.com. 

If there’s any theme that unites the several dozen pilots to be seen on American screens a few months from now, it is ‘the single word’. After the success of last season’s Revenge, series creators seem to have a fascination for creating hype around one particular act or concept. Gone are the shows named after families, like the seventies hit The Waltons or The Sopranos. Police procedural or detective series such as Law and Order or CSI also seem to have fallen out of fashion. The pattern for the upcoming season’s selection of pilots is the single-word title.

One of the forthcoming series creating the most hype is ABC’s Betrayal. ‘Isn’t that the name of a Harold Pinter play?’ you might ask. But the commonness of the name is not really at issue. If the project were a film or play, it might still stand a chance despite its unoriginal title. But how is the idea of Betrayal to fill a series intended to go on for four, five, or maybe seven years? The premise of the show is a bored female photographer, stuck in a stiff, dull marriage, who begins an affair with the lawyer for the defendant her husband happens to be prosecuting. Among the critical responses for previews of pilots so far, Betrayal is probably the most panned, despite having the most conventional and maybe even accessible storyline. The initial plot of the series arouses some interest. But the problem with it as a series is its lack of one theme. In examining the hit television dramas that have been aired on our screens for the past thirty years, each one has revolved around one particular setting or one particular goal which has always allowed something new to happen. The abundance of legal dramas – L.A. Law, Boston Legal, and most recently The Good Wife, means that scandal and power play will always be on the cards. The second most popular category is the medical drama – where strange diseases and risky operations, plus a character’s life on the line every week, tends to hook viewers. Otherwise, more unconventional institutions have domineered the series – like the Italian mafia in The Sopranos, the White House in The West Wing, and a family business-run funeral parlour in Six Feet Under. Other dramas which don’t depend heavily on their settings depend on their characters. Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives relied almost wholly on the extent to which they garnered viewers’ sympathy; precisely because both dramas had four female leads around whom the series revolved.

If we take this new drama Betrayal, what is the series actually about? Betrayal? And, in that case, how many betrayals will there be? Will there surely not be a temptation for the series to become a legal drama – given that lover and husband are attorney and prosecutor? Or will this just be a drama focused on the characters all betraying each other? If so, how do we know who is ‘good’, and who is supposedly ‘bad’? Would it not be easier to simply have the series revolve around its protagonist Hannah?

The other series planned for ABC likewise don’t show much promise, with one recent article telling the readers there is ‘not much to celebrate’. Another one-word title drama, Resurrection, is already apt to create controversy. It focuses on a small boy who ‘returns from the dead’ thirty-two years after his untimely demise. One has to question how much ‘resurrection’ there plans to be in a series initially about the comeback of this one boy. If it wavers somewhere between fantasy and reality, how much can the audience handle that? Even the most successful vampire-oriented shows have their share of relationship problems most audiences can relate to. If the subject of a show is resurrection, is it going to tell us about how difficult it is to connect with the living when one comes back from the dead? And, furthermore, this being a completely impossible idea, is that something we would want to explore?

Although one-word titles can often be limiting, of all the names of forthcoming series nothing is quite as exclusive as Killer Women. Immediately there is something clichéd about such a name; and when the viewer finds out what it really alludes to, it just becomes laughable. To some it might sound like a documentary about female murderers. Actually, it’s a drama about women in the highest ranking investigative branch of the South: the Texas Rangers. It’s a police procedural with a twist, but its Mexican predecessor, Mujeres Asesinas, was responsible for its ambiguous name. To give it even more of an anti-police procedural slant, the lead detective is a former Texas beauty queen. ‘Why?’ you might ask. Does that make her a ‘cooler’ detective?

In terms of whose list exudes the most charm, NBC scores slightly better. The Blacklist has James Spader as an ex-con prepared to sell out his former co-cons to the FBI, and in particular, a certain female agent played by Megan Boone. The premise of the show certainly outdoes a lot of its competitors; as a fugitive spared prosecution for his effort to collaborate could make for some interesting intrigue, illicit romances, and twisted loyalties. It does have the capacity, however, to become one of those thrillers where the loud film music tells us more about the action than the dialogue. One of the common trends in today’s television series market is having the soundtrack do the talking for you. Why? If a murder takes place on screen, we don’t need the banging of drums drowning out all noise. Or if there’s a love scene, there’s no need for any brass instruments. What we see will translate the message. To have the message transmitted through ridiculously unusual camera angles or a blaring soundtrack is the equivalent of someone coming out onstage mid-Romeo and Juliet, and telling us: “They’re in love; it’s very dramatic, be suspicious of what’s to come.” The viewers get the hint. 

When it comes to obscenely implausible plots, nothing quite wins like NBC’s Crisis. It centres on the ambush of a group of school students including the President’s son, which then plunges the whole nation into the unthinkable: a crisis. All very well for the first episode, but will there be a crisis every week? Or is this going to be a six-year series about America being besieged by some group of kidnappers? It has the potential to make a good B-movie, but not a successful series. If it’s lucky, it won’t be substituted by a mid-season replacement.

That said, Crisis has nothing on CBS’s Hostages. It is about a doctor, recently asked to operate on the President, whose family is taken hostage by a corrupt FBI agent. The agent then demands that she kill the President to save her family. It will be interesting to see how long it takes her to make up her mind, and for how long the show can have the title ‘Hostages’ with her family no longer being ‘Hostages’. Unless of course, it becomes a show about the FBI kidnapping White House-associated people and their families at random, something I’m sure would sit comfortably with the actual Federal Bureau of Investigation. For all the massive hype the series is bound to receive (it stars Toni Collette and is produced by Warner Bros.), the direction which the plot could go in is unwaveringly unpredictable. Of course in most series this is a good thing. But here the very concept which infuses this series seems lost. 

The next of the CBS dramas is Intelligence, about a superlatively clever guy who is the first to have a microchip inserted in his brain which allows him to ‘detect anything’. His ‘intelligence’ means that he must be guarded by a Secret Service agent. There seems to be a desire to replicate Homeland, purely, it must be said, because it won the most Emmys last year. Crisis has a fictitious President; so does Hostages, and here we have another series citing secret service agents. Again it’s something which might be intriguing for viewers with a penchant for high-tech thrillers, watching people breaking into computers and mind-reading, but what are all the rest of us supposed to do?

The rest of CBS’s new shows appear to be sitcoms, and it’s Fox which has possibly the most believable idea for a show: Rake, a drama about a womanising, gambling, father-lawyer played by Greg Kinnear. Based on a successful Australian series, at least it stands a chance of being renewed for a second season. However, that depends entirely on the main part. If all the drama revolves around the lead, then it’s Greg Kinnear who carries the show on his shoulders. Critic Jaimie Etkin has already written of the character: “Kinnear’s Keegan Deane is not charismatic in the least, he’s just a backwards mess.” So one can only hope.

Lastly, and most disappointingly, cable channel HBO does not look like it has a new hit on its hands. Although its schedule is not yet absolutely certain (unlike network television schedules), so far the most talked-about series is Getting On, a US adaptation of the British sitcom about doctors and nurses working in the geriatric wing of a hospital. More promising is the conceit of Criminal Justice, about a man who wakes up in the morning to find his party girl mate stabbed to death, with no recollection of what happened. The only reason that it’s promising, however, is because it has James Gandolfini. Its focus not being sufficient for a multi-year series means that it will only run as a long mini-series. Another hyped-up programme, The Missionary, does have some potential. A period drama, it follows an American missionary in Berlin in the late 1960’s, who somehow becomes involved with the CIA. At least it might salvage the channel’s prestige, and make up for the holes in viewing schedules that ABC and CBS are about to create for the average American.