It might only be November but that doesn’t stop Cherwell deciding that a thorough(ish) round up of 2012’s musical offerings is in order. Oh no sir-ee.

It might only be November but that doesn’t stop Cherwell deciding that a thorough(ish) round up of 2012’s musical offerings is in order. Oh no sir-ee.

While 2012 has seen strong follow up albums for well established artists (Radlands from the Mystery Jets, Battle Born from The Killers) we’ve also seen an excellent wave of new music in the form of Alt J’s An Awesome Wave (a deserving Mercury Prize winner) and Django Django’s eponymous debut album. So who said the age of the album was done, dead and buried?

Choosing just one album out of the scores of deserving ones is an admittedly gargantuan task. In fact, it’s pretty much impossible so in offering Clock Opera’s debut album Ways to Forget I’m choosing one of scores of worthy albums. In fact in one week’s time this will probably be no longer my favourite album; I’m fickle that way.

Kicking off with opening track ‘Once and For All’ and its exultant climax, there remains something heart-wrenchingly uplifting about this album. Guy Connelly’s raw falsetto retains something of an angelic purity in the midst of frenetic synth and electro-keyboards.

Meanwhile ‘Move to the Mountains’ is a humble, quaint and gentle tale of leaving the city in the return to nature, and its staccato beat is ridiculously infectious.‘Man Made’, on the other hand, is suffused with a synth-heavy euphoria and layered up sound. While none of this distinguishes it massively from other music floating out there, Clock Opera’s Ways to Forget represents a gloriously idiosyncratic variety.

You’ll probably think there are ‘better’ albums out there (and you may well be right) but the dynamism and innovation underpinning Ways to Forget surely marks it out as one of the year’s triumphs. And music is all about the subjective anyway, right?

The New Pornographers are one of my favourite bands. They are a Canadian supergroup, featuring members of many other notable bands (including Destroyer and Neko Case), and they possess a seemingly superhuman level of enthusiasm and energy. They are also an indie band, but without the snobbish, cooler-than-thou aspect that many artists under that description seem to enjoy flaunting. The music they make is joyful and accessible, but unfortunately they didn’t release anything this year.

Thankfully their frontman, Carl Newman, released a solo album under the name of A.C. Newman. Shut Down the Streets is a more chilled-out affair than his New Pornographers output. Where albums such as Twin Cinema or Together were organised chaos, this is all strummed acoustic guitars, boy-girl vocal lines and chamber-pop flutes.

I admit that this description makes the album sound like a mixture of Belle & Sebastian and Jethro Tull, but I assure you that it’s better than that. Quirky lyrics, lush orchestration and passionate singing haul the basic material from the trap of kooky-folkiness into the realms of respectable and, crucially, exciting music. Newman is a talented and genuine artist in his own right, and this album proves that he is more than just a component of a supergroup.

My only regret is that I haven’t seen any of the songs performed live. ‘I’m Not Talking’ would be an excellent crowd pleaser, and I can imagine that the stomp of ‘Hostages’ would translate well to a stage. Sure, there’s a chance that the slower songs on the album could dissolve into iPhone-aloft sway-alongs, but that’s true with any album.

Although there have been some strong contenders, including Channel Orange by Frank Ocean and What We Saw From The Cheap Seats by Regina Spektor, I think this album is the best that 2012 had to offer.

Twitter: giving a voice to the disenfranchised TV viewer or stroking the egos of prissy bubble-wrapped bloggers? Enhancing your watching experience with a public commentary or ruining your Saturday evening with incessant mentions of ‘Rylan from X-Factor’? Really easy to get to grips with or about as useful as the Marauder’s Map to a muggle? Well, we’re here to help you get started or, if after six months you still have only 30 followers, kickstart your microblogging experience into twitter fame and fortune.

How to tweet…

Live-tweeting is a dangerous game because you’re entering a market that is saturated with the unregulated opinions of thousands of other guppy, TV-addled armchair pundits. Observations like ‘RIP Lady Sybil’ or ‘Dimbleby’s forehead is so sweaty!!’ are unlikely to win you legions of admirers, because, let’s face it, you’re not saying anything interesting. Whilst it’s almost always preferable to wait until after the broadcast in order to give your scathing/insightful/sycophantic input, if you have to live-tweet make sure you say something worth the 140 characters, or something profoundly shocking. Try ‘so glad that Lady Sybil’s dead’ or ‘I’d like to lick the sweat off Dimbleby’s forehead’ in order to get a few extra followers.If you’ve just seen a film and are desperate to tweet about it then it’s best to not even wait until the popcorn’s been swept up. The moment the credits are rolling no one can really tell you to put your phone away, so whip it out and give that opinion that the universe has been craving. ‘That was soooo good! I smell Oscars’ is a useless tweet to anyone who doesn’t know which movie you’ve just watched, whereas ‘Paranormal Activity 4 gave me nightmares about a world where people make shit films (and there are ghosts)’ is a much more specific tweet for your adoring public. Does anyone really want to hear your opinion? No, but if you relentlessly self-promote then, eventually, you’ll deceive a certain amount of people into believing you have some authority about what you’re saying.

Who to follow…

The best tweeters come from far and wide, but regularly come up with pithy one-line opinions that express exactly what you’re thinking – just more funnily and with fewer typos. Some of the best film tweeters represent the funniest film websites, so try checking out  @ultraculture, @IncredibleSuit and  @TheShiznitfor consistently witty opinions. For more erudite views, you might like to check out this term’s interviewee @PeterBradshaw1, The Times film critic  @MuirKate and Wittertainment’s @KermodeMovie.TV is much more of a free-for-all, so it might be best for you to pin your colours to the mast of a TV comedian. @DavidSchneider is back from the break he took for *unexplained* reasons, and regularly provides us with gems. Likewise, @StephenFry is often interested in what’s on the box and @RickyGervais can usually be counted on to express the opposite opinion to whatever consensus has emerged. But your best bet is to check out which TV shows are trending and explore from there. If anyone is really writing psycho-sexual tweets about David Dimbleby then you need to get following them asap. Oh, and while you’re at it, why not follow our recently launched, and totally amazing, @CherwellFilmTV? We sometimes retweet the hilarious, broken English promotional tweets from the Turf Tavern and, if that isn’t worth reading, then I don’t know what is…

What not to do…

The list of ‘what not to do’ on Twitter is potentially inexhaustible. It starts with the patently obvious, like not tweeting a close-up picture of your penis Soulja Boy, to avoiding accidentally tweeting your flirty DMs. When it comes to Film and TV, the main problems occur when you are (a) not relevant, (b) not funny, or (c) really racist. The first two are much more common problems but do not carry the threat of gaol time, so try and focus equally on all of these things.You can avoid the irrelevance issue by resisting the temptation to tweet about  Seinfeld, anything on TCM or the 1996 Steven Seagal movie, The Glimmer Man. You can avoid being unfunny by retweeting the carefully composed tweets of our recommended tweeters (or just outright stealing them; IP is as important to Twitter as it is to the Chinese government), suddenly becoming really funny (potentially difficult, might require you to get bitten by Eddie Izzard) or just sticking to tweets where you have something original to say. Avoiding the third of our problems is really reliant on you being an intelligent, tolerant person and vigorously applauding all Spike Lee movies.Well, now you’re ready for Twitter. Go out there and spread your seed over the internet in gobbets of 140 characters or less. Tweet us with all your film and TV opinions (nonboring ones, please) to  @CherwellFilmTV or use the hashtag  #CherwellFilmTV and we’ll aggressively retweet you to thank you for making it to the end of this article. 

The timing of this second series of The Hour has worked out pretty nicely for the scriptwriter: the programme centres around a struggling BBC news programme whose head has been sacked and whose stories are being stolen by an ITV rival. Ben Whishaw has shot to international fame as Q in the latest James Bond since playing Freddie Lyons in series one, and – just as we’d all started experiencing severe withdrawal at the lack of Peter Capaldi verbally eviscerating people on our screens – here he is being parachuted in as the new head of news, threatening people left, right and centre.

If the timing has worked out well for the show itself, we can’t say the same for its characters. Hector (Dominic West), the show’s host, has been late to work every day for six months. Having become something of a celebrity he prefers spending his time in nightclubs rather than actually coming to the office or ever going home to his long suffering wife. She shows refreshing signs of mounting a backlash: now she has been waiting 18 months for a baby and stands at home in her marshmallow-pink prison of a kitchen, frantically baking as she watches the clock – ‘homemaking when there’s nothing to homemake for.’

On Freddie’s surprise return to the team, at first it seems best friend Bel (Romola Garai) may have finally realised in his absence that she’s as in love with him as he always has been with her, only to turn up at his house two months late – two months after his marriage to Camille. In the midst of all this personal angst there is the continuing presence of the major period stories. Before it was the Suez crisis dominating the news; this time its Sputnik and the nuclear arms race. One difficulty with the programme is that it doesn’t seem sure what it’s trying to be: political thriller, period soap, or murder mystery? There are elements of all of these in this opener, as Morgan sets up a lot of potential plot strands without following any of them too far.

Regardless, the cast is exceptionally strong, the supporting roles (Anna Chancellor, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Peter Capaldi) as much as the central three who are played to perfection. It’s smart, stylish and beautifully shot, so whatever this series is set to become, it’s sure to be worth a watch each week.

4 STARS

Since his string of hits like Hollywoodland, Smokin’ Aces and The Town it seems Ben Affleck is incapable of putting a foot wrong. The latest from the actor, producer and director sees the CIA devise a plan to rescue six hostages from the American Embassy during the hostage crisis when the Iranian Revolution peaked in 1979. This seems like unusual subject matter but the intrigue  will get even the most dubious cinema-goer on board. It is the fascinating nature of this declassified operation combined with real footage inserted smoothly throughout which gives a real feel for the era and the reality of the situation facing our helpless hostages. 

The moustachioed Affleck adds to the dodgy tie, over-sized glasses and slightly ‘socks and sandals’ look invoked in the operations room providing a sense of comedy to proceedings in the face of severe technological limitations. It is in this smoky ops. room that we get the set-up: six hostages stuck in a country experiencing great unrest with the majority of the population searching for the embassy workers to settle their score, how do we get them out? 

Once the conundrum is set and we’ve glimpsed the rioting throngs of flag-burning Iranians, up crops ‘the best bad idea we have.’ In comes Tony Mendez, one of the agency’s best, with a rather eccentric pitch. The plan: we fake it as a film crew for a sci-fi movie called ‘Argo’, pretend we’re seeking film locations in Iran,  absorb the hostages into the crew and out we head straight to the airport. However, the audience would be greatly mistaken for believing much hilarity and a slow descent into comedy would follow. Although there are laughs throughout, the sense of seriousness is slowly built to the point where the audience is struggling to resist shouting encouragement at the screen. The fact is, this film is incredibly absorbing; the writers don’t engage in predictable love stories or hysterical captives, they do something different. They let you draw your own conclusions and let Affleck display his acting prowess and the dimensions of his character. But above all they let the audience empathise with the characters on a basic human level without needing to know their various relationship histories or all the usual features of over-writing which make the initial scenes of so many movies a drag. Take note film-makers: different is good. Different leads to you finding yourself almost falling off the edge of your seat with tension. This is the sign of a truly great movie. 

It is important to mention this film is not all about Affleck. Old hand John Goodman (The Big Lebowski, Monsters Inc, The Artist) puts in a great double-act performance with academy award winning Alan Arkin (Little Miss Sunshine, Edward Scissorhands, Get Smart) to provide light relief amongst all the nail-biting. One of this film’s strengths is that when such quality acting as a given, more time is spent on the story, the visuals and the writing. One thing is for sure, it definitely shows.

5 STARS

The characters begin dead and the tribunal appears to be decided before it’s even begun. This sense of futility in Friel’s Freedom of the City hangs over the performance, clouding even the larks of Skinner and Lily as they parade around in the Mayor’s garments. After reading Woolley’s earlier preview, I had high expectations for the Freedom of the City. I was not disappointed. It was a brilliant choice of setting; the intimacy of the Morris Room where the actors emerged from the audience created an intense performance that could never have been achieved on a more conventional stage. Admittedly, some technical difficulties emerged from this choice of setting. For example, it would have helped the actors to have had another entrance to avoid bumping into each other when exiting and entering and the taped music played from the back of the room was a bit intrusive if you were sat beyond the first four rows; however, the realism that this setting brought to the performance was well worth these slight distractions.

The live music was a well-executed addition that again added to the hard realism that Sayers and Levinson appear to be aiming for. Although the three leads, Ballard, Furey and Wynn-Owen gave admirable performances, it would have been nice to have seen them relax into their roles a little more. The strength of the accents also required the lines to need a slower delivery than was assigned to them; indeed, Furey delivered her lines at a speed that was incomprehensible at points. The real highlight of the piece for me was the strength of the tribunal scenes, particularly the relationship portrayed between the judge and the Irish characters. The sociologist, the priest and the journalist were also played extremely well, all this helped to construct Friel’s palimpsest of this fateful event in Irish history. Overall, the whole concept of the play was brilliantly unpacked and it truly offered a theatre experience that you would not receive at the Playhouse. 

The Get-Out is the best piece of student writing I have seen at Oxford. Like all new plays it had that moment, about ten minutes in, when you nervously think “is this going to work?” – occurring in this case because Flanigan makes use of two unashamedly over-worn motifs: “talented small-town boy leaves for the city” and “corporate fat-cats try to shut down the charitable underdog”. But it works because it’s funny.

The play is built on two complementary asymmetries: one between the three adults running the theatre group and the teenagers in it, and the other between the “the morning after” – the first half of the play – and “the night before” – the second half of the play, after which the stage, characters and plot were left with a lovely sense of closure, because every detail – post-its, pillows and cigarette butts – was put exactly where it began. The direction (Josie Mitchell) shows impressive range: as clear and dynamic in the tense and silent scenes, as in the scenes of cacophonic revelry.

The acting was consistently strong and entertaining – if a little self-conscious at the beginning. The accent-coaching the actors are rumoured to have received evidently had paid off; and, if their intonation was at times imperfect, this was probably best for the intelligibility of the performance. Particularly notable was Ella Waldman who managed to maintain her Northern Irish trill while giving a quite lengthy and vehement speech. As a group the ‘adults’ (Waldman, Lloyd Houston and writer Mary Flanigan) gave mature performances with subtle and life-like interactions, each betraying moments of weakness through comically strong personalities, creating variable degrees of likability and an invariable humanity. 

Most impressive – because so easily got wrong – was the acting out on stage of adolescent drunkenness. Flanigan gets away with reminding the audience their own most embarrassing and least genuinely witty memories because each her characters diverges sufficiently from their stereotypes to enable original and yet recognisable parody. (Kudos should here be given to the costumes, which brought back vivid gold-hooped memories of school.) I was especially impressed with Luke Rollason, whose short-but-sweet drunken protestations were executed to delightful comic perfection, despite The Get-Out being his thespian debut (excluding a short stint in a nativity in primary school).

The real success of The Get-Out is to offer an obscure situation – a Northern Irish youth theatre group – and render it intriguing and entertaining without reducing it to its universal bones. As a Londoner with a extremely superficial knowledge of Northern Ireland, I was drawn in and educated by the more culturally specific aspects of the play (the charming slang, for example); a distanced positioning which cleverly mimicked the experiential gap between the adolescents, and the adults running the theatre group.

 The Get-Out was an exciting and professional production, succeeding where so much student theatre fails, because of its unusually considered scope: it was clever-funny and slap-stick funny; political and accessible; well-written, well-acted and well-directed.

Watch this space.