Pillion review — Harry Potter's Dudley Dursley submits in the suburbs
Graphic oral sex, sado-masochistic wrestling and a truly X-rated camping trip — this is Dudley Dursley as we've never seen him before. Harry Melling has made a manful effort to leave behind Dudley, the abusive brat in the Harry Potter films for which he is known around the world. Melling impressed as a chess champion in The Queen's Gambit, Edgar Allan Poe in The Pale Blue Eye and Malcolm in Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth, but he may have found the role that banishes the ghost of Dudley for good.
Pillion, which premiered at Cannes, is the hilarious and moving directorial debut of the British film-maker Harry Lighton. Melling plays Colin, the suburban sex slave of a tall, ravishing biker called
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The Sun
11 minutes ago
- The Sun
Jaqueline Jossa calls Dan Osborne the ‘best daddy ever' in sweet Father's Day tribute after marriage woes
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The Guardian
13 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Anna Karenina review – Tolstoy's tragedy fizzes with theatrical brilliance
The stampede of actors making their way from screen to stage continues with Natalie Dormer's return to the boards as the lead, tragic figure in Leo Tolstoy's story of one aristocratic unhappy family. She is exceptional in the part of Anna, inhabiting the boldness, insecurity and anger of the discontented wife seeking her freedom through romantic passion. But there is little chemistry in her relationship with Vronsky (Seamus Dillane) – the rakish military man for whom she leaves her loveless marriage, and he is a non-character, left uncoloured. Phillip Breen's adaptation of the novel is however, always original, without playing fast and loose with the story. There is an inspired use of music, especially in the sound of a weeping or skittering violin. It is theatrically daring, with the ensemble sitting on regal seats when they are not performing, and a loose, handsome set, designed by Max Jones creates a sense of desolated opulence. Modern language is set against the period setting and dress. 'Marriage, I'd rather stick pins in my eyes,' says longsuffering wife, Dolly (Naomi Sheldon), summing up the kernel of Tolstoy's story in vernacular. The intention, it seems, is to bring these characters closer home to us. But the emotional life of the story seems rather too surface-bound. Scenarios and relationships are infused with a high wire kind of comedy which works to amuse, but it keeps the drama from gathering tragic depths. And there are too many directorial tics and flourishes which are clever but blithe. The set has the sense of a child's nursery, with Dolly or Anna's children playing with toys around its edges. It is one of Breen's clever flourishes, relating to the weaponising of children within marriage – particular in the case of Karenin (Tomiwa Edun), Anna's spurned husband, who enacts his vengeance through their son, from whom Anna becomes forcibly estranged. The production glows with the ambition of reflecting the full scope of the novel, from the era's discoveries – electricity and trains – to social divides, to arguments around love v marriage, and the moral relativism of Russia's gilded nobility. But it feels simultaneously brisk and too long, at three hours, in trying to cover so much. It strives to capture the psychological acuity of the novel too. Characters talk their feelings aloud so we hear what they feel and what they say. It is a heavy-handed way to animate their inner worlds: a 'telling' over dramatising, with an uncertain note of comedy. There is a convincing fractiousness between unfaithful husband Stiva (Jonnie Broadbent, a mischievous wastrel), and Dolly; Sheldon gives a compelling performance of marital regret, her outcome an inverse parallel to Anna's social shaming. Together the characters encompass the catch-22 for women marooned in bad marriages – they suffer whether they walk out or stay. But the modern language sits awkwardly when it is underlined in Dolly's verbal meltdown, bringing a maelstrom of F-words in inner monologue. The relationship that sparks most on stage is that between Levin (based on Tolstoy himself, played by Dormer's partner David Oakes) and Kitty (Shalisha James-Davis), from its humour to its tenderness. Anna's outcome is foreshadowed from the start with a barrage of theatrical devices: music that mirrors the noise and speed of a train, a child's wooden train set at the front of the stage, and characters performing locomotive sounds, including hoots that sound like screeches of pain. They lay out the ground for Anna's terrible end across the train tracks. Except here, there is only a vague symbolic suggestion of it. Those who know the story will see the subtlety but those encountering it for the first time may be left with an approximate idea of what has happened. You do not feel its tragedy, perhaps as a result, nor the emptiness of Karenin's vengeance on Anna, which leaves his son bereft of maternal love. Instead, you admire the production for its sometimes brilliant ideas. Anna Karenina is at Chichester Festival theatre, until 28 June
Telegraph
26 minutes ago
- Telegraph
‘Lars and Kirk were pretending they were gay': The Metallica album that incensed their fans is back
I was just 24-years-old when I attained my most cherished, and most perfectly useless, claim to fame. On a broiling summer's evening in 1995, at the cramped Astoria 2 club on Charing Cross Road in London, I became one of just 900 people who saw Metallica perform their best-ever concert. That summer, the San Franciscan quartet were still a year away from entering their career's second act. Known now as 'Nineties Metallica,' this epoch began with the release of Load, their complicated sixth studio album, which is this week re-released in stupendously lavish form. Containing no fewer than 16 discs, its 230 tracks include remixes, demos, outtakes, cover versions and live material from stages including the Astoria 2. Booklets and other paraphernalia are also included. All of it can be yours for just a penny shy of £250. This bountiful edition serves as a reminder that few bands are as adept as Metallica at documenting their activities, and that almost none are as truly hopeless when it comes to editing themselves. It isn't simply a matter of bonus material, either. In its original form, Load runs to a minute shy of 80 minutes. Unveiled the following year, in 1997, its sister LP, Reload, is only a blush shorter. To put it kindly, both would have benefitted from a spot of judicious pruning. At the time of its release, Load heralded a period of reinvention for Metallica. As well as ditching their famous logo – unheard of for a metal act – the accompanying cover artwork, a mixture of semen and cows' blood by the New York artist Andres Serrano, was said to represent the exhilarating pain of rebirth. Equally alarming, at least in a time before nu-metal upended the aesthetic rules completely, was the sight of the band returning to the fray with – brace yourselves – short hair. Determined to push the envelope further, the artwork's inner sleeves feature photographs taken by Anton Corbijn of drummer Lars Ulrich and lead guitarist Kirk Hammett – always the group's progressive wing – sporting feather boas and make-up. As if fighting a rearguard action, vocalist and rhythm guitarist James Hetfield could be seen throwing devil horns in a leather jacket bearing a Slayer badge. Recalling the tensions of Load's disputatious genesis, in a 2009 interview with Classic Rock magazine, Hetfield said that 'the whole 'We need to reinvent ourselves' topic was up [for debate]. Image isn't an evil thing to me, but if the image isn't you, it doesn't make much sense.' He then accused Ulrich and Hammett of going 'after a U2 kind of vibe, Bono doing his alter-ego.' He continued: 'I couldn't get into it. I would say at least half the pictures that were to be in the booklet, I yanked out. The cover went against what I was feeling. Lars and Kirk were very into abstract art, pretending they were gay. I think they knew it bugged me. I think the cover of Load was just a piss-take around all that. I just went along with all this crazy stupid s--t.' In the past, Metallica's finest moments had been defined by the energy and tension created by the sound of Hetfield and Ulrich butting heads. But the defining characteristic of Load is a loss of focus. Contrivance, too, queers the deal. Having conquered the world of metal with world-class elan, Metallica's attempts at transforming themselves into a hard rock band were largely lamentable. They just weren't suited to playing it loose, or, as Lars Ulrich put it in what seemed like scores of interviews, of being 'greasy'. As such, the fingers-in-the-belt-loop stomp of songs such as Ronnie or the achingly thick-headed 2 X 4 marked their creative nadir. There are some fine moments here, though. After months in therapy, Hetfield's determination to lay bare his troubled soul lent epics such as Bleeding Me and Outlaw Torn a remarkable gravitas. Long gone were the days when the singer poured his fear of a loss of agency into songs about being trapped under ice or strapped into an electric chair. With its chorus line of 'so tear me open but beware, there's things inside without a care', equally, Until It Sleeps was a lead hit single of substantial heft. Metallica also needed to escape the corner into which they'd found themselves. The success of their previous LP, the eponymous record known to all as The Black Album and released five years earlier, was such that it exited the US chart only weeks before the arrival of Load. By becoming one of the most dominant bands in the world, the shadow of the past cast a pall over their route to the future. In a creative sense, the problems facing the group were existential. As the official opposition to radio-friendly pop and hair metal, Metallica had spent much of the Eighties as outsiders who sold millions of albums without bothering, even, to release singles. When at last they did, with One in 1989, the song was paired with a video entirely antithetical to the visual candy floss served up by bands such as Bon Jovi and Mötley Crüe. Featuring clips from the film Johnny Got His Gun, about a soldier who returns from war without arms, legs, or any of his senses, the clip proved so traumatising to one of my friends – who first saw it as a teenager – that he's unable to rewatch it even today. Even when Metallica did deign to engage with the music industry on something like its own terms, the presence on the airwaves of hits such as Enter Sandman and The Unforgiven suggested the group had dragged the mainstream in their direction as much as the other way around. To put it simply, Metallica were simply too popular to be ignored. In a cover story from 1992, Rolling Stone headlined an interview with James Hetfield with 'the leader of the free world speaks'. Despite claims from some quarters of having 'sold out', when the mood seized them, this exalted status did nothing to blunt the group's rabid ferocity. Versions of songs such as Battery and Whiplash, from the 1993 concert boxset Live Sh-t: Binge & Purge, are so wholly berserk that it seems unthinkable that one of the most popular acts in the world could make such a racket. That Metallica should be applauded for dragging the centre of sonic gravity to such extremes is a given. All the same, the fact remained: as Load hovered into view, for the first time, these erstwhile insurrectionists had become the establishment. 'When The Black Album came out no one knew who Kurt Cobain was,' noted Lars Ulrich, in a 1996 interview with Kerrang! 'Just think about that for a minute.' How true. In the five-year wait for Load to hit the racks the world of loud music had changed in unpredictable ways. Not only had an Alternative Revolution spearheaded by Nirvana tolled the bell for scores of hopeless hair metal groups, but punk rock, too, had flooded the mainstream. With the release of Dookie, in 1994, Green Day, like Metallica before them, became the latest band of outsiders from the Bay Area to have sold more than 10 million albums. Metallica responded to the new environment well. For their first US tour in support of Load, the group were anointed headliners for the Lollapalooza festival, which had been created by Jane's Addiction frontman Perry Farrell five years earlier. In what sounds like a very good day out, at the headliners' behest, the bill also featured Soundgarden, The Ramones, Screaming Trees, Rancid and the Cocteau Twins. 'In 1992 Lollapalooza was the alternative to our [notoriously excessive] tour with Guns N' Roses,' was Ulrich's take on the situation. 'But to me, Metallica and Lollapalooza in 1996 doesn't seem that strange. It was getting a little stagnant, because how alternative is Lollapalooza when in America the alternative is the mainstream?' For his part, Hetfield was rather more circumspect. 'People think way too f—ing much about our motivation,' he said. For all of its misfires, the Nineties should be remembered as a period in which Metallica fizzed with fascinating ideas. In 1997, the launch of Reload heralded a public appearance, in Philadelphia, with the unbeatable title The Multi-Million Decibel March. The following year, during a short tour in support of the cover versions album Garage Inc. on which the band played material by other artists, they satiated their audience's desire to hear songs such as Master Of Puppets by having a Metallica tribute act open the show. This just happened to be the period during which Metallica found themselves hurtling towards a terrible fracture. Along with the departure of their bass player, Jason Newsted, the decision by Hetfield to disappear (unannounced) to rehab for months on end threw the future of the group into doubt. That they later chose to bare these traumas to the world, in the form of the 2004 documentary Some Kind Of Monster, shows why this band was different, and braver, than others. Note the past tense, though. With the exception of the brutally uncommercial Lulu, a collaboration album with Lou Reed from 2011, risks of this kind are no longer taken. Today, the motivating factors are money and nostalgia. A brand as much as a band, the men who changed the face of heavy music more than any other are now little more than a group of lavishly remunerated creative has-beens. Presently out on the road in the US and Canada, Metallica's remarkable, and remarkably successful, hustle of playing different setlists over two nights in stadiums across the country means that fans who wish to hear all of the band's most popular songs are required to pony up twice. Ticket prices for their UK tour next summer range from £181 to – and this is not a misprint – £2,095. As someone who saw the group, in 1986, for little more than a fiver, it could be, of course, that I'm wrong to chafe at the unapologetic ruthlessness with which Metallica have set about testing the boundaries of what the market will stand. Somehow, though, I don't think so. Which is why, for all its many faults, the new iteration of Load affords a compelling glimpse at a group that is vastly different from the one that exists today. In their arduous determination to find new ways with which to express themselves, and to bet the farm on an album that even their most loyal constituents afforded only a hesitant thumbs up, back then, Metallica were more than a remnant of the past.
