Hackney Empire New Act of the Year – Audition #6
Well I must have been onto something in my last audition roundup because Roland Muldoon has echoed my observation that today’s young comedians eschew, by and large, political or social commentary. Muldoon – the guy who ran the Empire for 20 years and who still does the New Act of the Year competition there – went off on one at the School of Comedy’s Funny Festival, as reported here in Chortle.
His rant can’t have done any favours for the nerves of last night’s auditionees. (Yes, they all read Chortle.) (It is a weird business.) Yet it was the strongest group we’d seen yet. more »
Tracer Hand in Do You See / FT / The Brown Wedge • 1 Comment
You’d think that “Wanna Be Startin Somethin” would be the ideal way to open a movie about Michael Jackson. In This Is It, though — patched together from four or five rehearsals for the 50-concert extravaganza which famously never took place — Jackson just sort of shuffles to it, stiffly, barely dancing, like a Frankenstein parody of Bill Cosby’s own parody of dancing. I wondered if I had wandered into a Kraftwerk concert film by mistake. That hip shake looked seriously Teutonic.
Saw New Moon tonight. Survived the emoness of the film, though was disappointed by the halfhearted emo-ness of the soundtrack. Yes Death Cab For Cutie, yes Lykke Li, and how you managed to get proto-emo Thom Yorke on the soundtrack I don’t know. But what they really wanted was a thematic soundtrack by one band only. And there is one band who have already written a soundtrack for this more lupine entry of the Twilight saga. And that band obviously being Duran Duran. So the soundtrack as it should have been:
Spinal Tap does not go up to eleven. Crank could be cranked up a bit. Even a film like Transformers with its non-stop explosions and destruction does not come close to the new holder of this title. Enter the little movie that could, Tulpan from Khazakstan. Initially you would not peg this tale of nomadic sheep herding on the Khazak steppes to have the means to be that loud. In doing so you underestimate the natural sounds of storms, wind and very noisy sheep and camels. You also disregard the ear splitting volume of any motorised vehicle in this environment, and the associated increased volume of any music played to drown it out. And you are probably not considering quite how loud, and annoying, an eight year old child singing at the top of her lungs to deliberately irritate her father can be. All of this is deliberate in Tulpan, the noise just stresses the loneliness of steppes life. 
One oddity about this year’s hopefuls* is that not one has done political material. What are the chances? This is a fairly catholic smattering of forty or so comedians from all over the UK (though mainly London) and after a few nights of hearing yet again from the person on stage that he is “quite tall, people always notice that” or indeed “why is my beard ginger”, as was asked last night via the medium of song by a man seated behind a synthesizer (remember, I go to these things so you don’t have to), the total avoidance of such a rich seam of ridiculousness as national politics seems downright bizarre. 
Stand-up comedy, like all art forms, has a few hardy perennials. In the plastic arts you’ve got landscapes painted with oils, for example. In standup you’ve got jokes at the expense of disabled people. In theatre, say, you’ve got big brassy musicals. In standup there’s a widely shared pride in how dangerous/boring one’s home town is.
The last big event the Hackney Empire will put on before it goes dark for an indefinite amount of time next year – 
This is one where the critical consensus was exactly that. Everyone agreed that Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia is half a good film, that half being Meryl Streep’s biopic bit of Julia Child. But is that any surprise? One half of the film is a light telling of a woman learning how to do something wonderful, in a picturesque Paris post war. It has the sweep of history from Stanley Tucci playing her husband who is a diplomat, it has the Gallic sexism of the time and in Julia Child it has a wonderful role, which Streep more or less does a broad impression of whilst wearing stilts. It may not offer much in the way of insight, but it is at least a sweet story of a nice person overcoming the few obstacles life has put in her way to become happy. And it also has Jane Lynch as her even taller sister, which is always going to be good.