24th November 2009
Sage Pearce-Higgins What do you get if you cross a famous American soloist with a top British orchestra in a programme of 18th century central European music linking late Baroque with Classical? The answer: a bit of a mess. Thursday’s concert was perhaps a snapshot of the difficult position the contemporary concert of classical music ...
10th November 2009
Harry Tattersall Smith What do Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and the Chuckle Brothers have in common? If you’re wondering whether Barry and Paul have recently been involved in mass genocide then, as far as I am aware, you’d be wrong. They are in fact all advocates of something society — and perhaps more importantly, testosterone ...
9th November 2009
Sarah Smith New Principal, Anton Muscatelli, is facing “the worst piece of staff relations … in a very long time”, according to one senior academic, after announcing plans for a complete overhaul of Glasgow University’s teaching and management structure. The restructure is to help Glasgow become one of the top fifty universities in the world, ...
9th November 2009
Tom Bonnick This October marked the thirtieth anniversary of one of the most enduring and hilarious works of fiction ever written. Normally, this should be a cause for unbridled joy and celebration, but in the case of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it is impossible to feel wholehearted happiness, because the series’ author, Douglas ...
9th November 2009
Leon Weber At this year’s Cannes film festival, the controversy surrounding Lars von Trier’s Antichrist came at the expense of Austrian director Michael Haneke, who won the Palme d’Or over von Trier for his latest film, The White Ribbon. Funnily enough, it is the controversy of Haneke’s films that have made him a regular nominee ...
9th November 2009
Lee Roden Aside from a three day period where people relentlessly set off explosives during the night, November tends to be a boring month. It was much to my delight then that I discovered the GFT was taking part in a month-long French cinema festival, mixing both the old and the contemporary. Yet, to my ...
9th November 2009
Lucia Hodgson To kill Guy Pierce and Ralph Fiennes within fifteen minutes of them appearing on screen is a brave move. But then, Kathryn Bigelow has always been a brave lady. Her back catalogue of masculine blockbusters is impressive, including Near Dark, Point Break, and Strange Days. So it came as no surprise when it ...
9th November 2009
Marta Sørenson Considering how badly this movie wants to tell us something fresh and profound about the last forty years of American military intervention, it uses up a hell of a lot of our time and patience to talk about a million other things, talk being the operative word. Whatever stories about war and peace ...
9th November 2009
Tom Bonnick There is something about the glittering list of names that appear in the opening credits of Fantastic Mr. Fox that seems to suggest that fate had a hand to play in the making of this picture. In retrospect, it seems only inevitable that George Clooney would, having acted out every possible permutation of ...
9th November 2009
Jessie Rodger In Lara Favaretto’s new exhibition at the Tramway I was struck immediately by the striking image of a car wash brush freed from the confines of its daily existence and dynamically thrown into an artistic situation. This created an engaging concept. Something so familiar to us, that we have the habit of viewing ...
