Latest news with #CatPower
Time Out
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Like any good matchmaker, Song wants to give her audience everything it desires
Be warned: despite its glossy cast and slick marketing, Materialists is not a romantic comedy. As to what it is instead, not even its creator seems entirely sure. At first, writer-director Celine Song (Past Lives) appears determined to turn genre conventions inside out: to expose romance as the soulless simulation it often seems to be. So, in classic romcom tradition, our heroine Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a pragmatic matchmaker so successful in juggling dating algorithms that she's celebrating her ninth client wedding. And it's at these nuptials that she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), a financier her industry considers a 'unicorn': handsome, wealthy, and tall. (Lucy's clients, like the film itself, fetishise male height and female youth, so if you are a man under six feet or a woman over 30, prepare to feel vaguely unworthy.) Coincidentally, Lucy's ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans) is also at the reception. But while Harry is a guest, John is a waiter. And therein lies her dilemma: does our material girl choose love or money? For a while, Lucy enjoys the fancy restaurants, enormous bouquets and easy life that Harry offers. But Lucy's Cinderella story hits midnight in a jarringly dark manner, when a client experiences unexpected tragedy. And suddenly, Lucy wonders whether John – with his two roommates, lack of savings, and uncertain future – might actually be the stronger prospect. Song has, undeniably, done a beautiful job composing this visually absorbing film. Cinematographer Shabier Kirchner – who also lensed her lovely, Oscar-nominated debut – knows just how to capture New York with both illusory sheen and palpable warmth. The impeccably cool soundtrack is packed with the likes of Cat Power, St. Vincent, and Japanese Breakfast. And the settings are a dream, from Harry's magazine-spread apartment to Lucy's loft-like office. But everything else comes across as constructed, too. Song's ambitious desire to dismantle and reconsider contemporary fairy tales is admirable, and intriguing. Is love truly just a commodity, as nearly everyone here seems to believe? The answer to such a blunt question requires a level of equally unsparing honesty, whether cynical or sincere. And unfortunately, her uncertain script tries to have it both ways. So while the actors are individually appealing, their characters feel like paper dolls designed to represent concepts, rather than generate chemistry. Like any good matchmaker, Song wants to give her audience everything it desires: the packaged fantasy of a Hollywood product, and the earthy emotion of a solemn indie. But even her wavering heroine gets tired of debating between heartfelt conviction and practical avarice. When it comes to love – and work – you can only hedge your bets for so long. Eventually, Lucy learns, you're gonna have to pick a side.
Spectator
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
The charm of Robbie Williams
What could it possibly feel like to be a sportsperson who gets the yips? To wake up one morning and be unable to replicate the technical skills that define you. To suddenly find the thing you do well absolutely impossible. Golfers who lose their swing, cricketers whose bowling deserts them, snooker players who can't sink a pot. Stage fright – something both Robbie Williams and Cat Power have suffered from – is much the same. Williams took seven years off touring last decade because of it, which must have been devastating for someone whose need for validation is so intense that he has made it his brand. Chan Marshall, the American singer who performs as Cat Power, toured through hers, resulting in shows performed on stages in near-darkness, or that ended early or were undermined by alcohol and the other things that terror forced on her. Both are now in their fifties, both still performing, both very consciously revisiting the past in their own ways, and you couldn't have got two more different performances. Williams, early in proceedings, announced his intention to be recognised globally as the King of Entertainment – Michael Jackson having already taken the title of King of Pop ('And you don't even have to come for a sleepover at my house!'). And truly, we were entertained. Even the boring bits – and there were boring bits, usually played out on the video screens – were entertaining by the standard of the boring video bits at stadium shows. The only part that was truly misjudged was a singalong medley of covers – he'd just done 'Let Me Entertain You' and been joined on the chorus by 60,000 people, so he didn't need to get the crowd loose. Better Man, the ape-as-Robbie biopic, has plainly resurrected him as an item of public interest after a period in which his appeal was becoming, Spinal Tap-style, a little more selective. 'Robbie fucking Williams. Back in stadiums,' he noted, and one wouldn't have predicted it even a couple of years ago. At heart it was a variety show: rock songs, singalong ballads, a load of jokes, a couple of set pieces and a pair of standards. Performing 'My Way' and '(Theme From) New York, New York' absolutely straight and with complete sincerity, gave away the lineage in which he places himself – and it's not next to Oasis. Obviously, he sees himself as an old-fashioned song-and-dance man, and he's a very, very good one – whether in end-of-the-pier or big-stadium mode. At a press conference in San Francisco in December 1965, Bob Dylan was asked whether he thought of himself as a singer or a poet: 'Oh, I think of myself more as a song-and-dance man, y'know.' That is the sole point of connection between Williams and Cat Power; for while he ran into the spotlight, she stayed in the shadows: her songs at the Barbican had no hint of dance about them. Her set, based on Dylan's 1966 tour with the Band (with an acoustic first half, then an electric second), has had writers asking why? Let's assume she just likes the songs, and if Bob Dylan is going to play them like this, why shouldn't she? But watching her expert band recreate what Dylan called 'that thin, wild, mercury sound' was a reminder that she could never hope to recreate the cultural force of Dylan going electric; that music loses its power shorn of context. The trio of records that unveiled Dylan's sound – Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde – are one of the rare points in pop history where you can hear a style of music being invented as it is recorded: if it were made now, you'd call it Americana, a thrilling amalgam of country, folk and R&B played by kids who'd grown up on rock'n'roll. It is thrilling because you can still hear history being made. But repeating it 59 years later? This was the rock equivalent of watching a BBC2 documentary where Lucy Worsley stands in front of someone pretending to be Richard III and enquiring about a horse. The songs with Robbie Williams's name attached to them are not as profound as those with Dylan's name attached to them. 'You think that I'm strong/ You're wrong/ You're wrong/ I sing my song/ My song/ My song,' will never win the nobel prize for literature. But the nakedness of Williams's neediness, and his complete awareness of his own limitations, is winning. Where Power has all but removed herself from her own performance, Williams's show is about one thing: him and only him. Not even the music. Just him.
