The Social World

Author: Alexander Larman

  • Is Austin Butler a movie star?

    Is Austin Butler a movie star?

    In the old days of Hollywood, stars and starlets alike were anointed as “It” girls and men. Nobody was ever quite sure what “It” denoted – star quality, sex appeal, charisma, a willingness to sleep with studio executives – but when they were told they had “It,” their careers appeared made, for the present time at least.

    Today, however, with Marvel and superhero films largely making the idea of the movie star irrelevant, the concept of “It” is ever decreasing. I am sure that David Corenswet, this year’s Superman, is a lovely man, but I would struggle to recognize him if I passed him on the street without his Super-costume on. Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt aside, it seems as if the era of the old-school male leading man is past us now. Which in turn, bluntly, means that nobody is going to see the pictures that younger, supposedly hot actors are appearing in.

    While we must wait and see whether Edgar Wright’s new version of The Running Man, with borderline movie star Glen Powell, will be a hit or flop, another leading man has recently appeared in a similarly kinetic picture. When Austin Butler emerged onto screens in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, it was one of those rare star-is-born moments that seemed the perfect synthesis of actor, role and vehicle. He was nominated for an Oscar (which he should have won) and since then has capitalized on his success with roles in everything from Dune Part Two and Eddington to the main part in the megabudget series Masters of the Air. Now, he has his first bona fide cinematic lead in Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing, which should, by rights, catapult him into the Hollywood A-list.

    It says a lot for the perverse Aronofsky (the man, lest we forget, who gave us the horrors of Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan) that he should take his handsome leading man and subject him to untold horrors through the relatively brief course of the picture. These horrors include, in no particular order: Butler’s character being beaten so hard that he loses a kidney; following sundry threats, having his face rearranged so often that it begins to look like an abstract work by Picasso (late period); and, perhaps most egregiously of all, being required to sport a deeply unflattering Mohican hairstyle for reasons that become clear while watching the film.

    Butler’s character is a once-promising baseball player turned alcohol-loving bartender who finds himself involved in grim levels of violence after he reluctantly agrees to mind his British punk rocker neighbor’s cat. Various criminals are after something – money – and Butler’s good-natured Hank finds himself, in classic Hitchcockian fashion, becoming the wrong man in a series of vicious pursuits. By the time that a wonderfully deadpan Liev Schrieber and Vincent D’Onofrio turn up as a pair of deeply observant and deeply violent Hasidic Jews, all one can do is surrender to this wild, often horribly unpleasant ride.

    Will it do anything for its young star’s career? It’s hard to say. The character is not wholly sympathetic – the reason for his baseball career being abandoned is that he causes the death of his best friend in a drunken car accident – and Hollywood tends to like its heroes to be square-jawed and masculine. Look at Cruise in Top Gun, Pitt in FI: they are playing Men with a capital M, thoroughly heterosexual archetypes who can save the day and get the (age appropriate) girl with time to spare. Butler may be just as good looking as those two sexagenarians, but there’s an angst and a wryly observant wit to both character and actor that means he probably doesn’t want to be the next standard-issue heartthrob. Lest we forget, this is the man who carried on speaking like Elvis for months after he stopped filming, on the grounds that he could no longer remember what his natural accent sounds like.

    Caught Stealing may not be a masterpiece, or anything close to Aronofsky’s best film. But it is trashy, nasty B-movie fun that channels the spirit of After Hours and The Big Lebowski to entertaining effect, and it proves that Butler might be something even more interesting than the next leading man: he might be the next Jude Law. And that, as anyone who’s followed Law’s remarkably varied and entertaining career, is something worth aiming for.

  • RIP Giorgio Armani

    RIP Giorgio Armani

    When I was younger, I once saw an Armani overcoat in the window of the company’s store in London and vowed that I would do everything I could to buy it. It seemed to me the quintessence of sophistication and style, being a beautifully cut, long, dark coat that flattered its wearer’s body shape and gave them the look of being classy and well-heeled. A year or two later, I was able to buy it in the New Year sales. I remember feeling like a million dollars every time I wore it. Perhaps as a precaution, I even bought another, inferior overcoat for everyday wear, so as to preserve my favorite.

    In any case, I still have that coat, decades later, and I wear it, proudly, on special occasions. So the news of the death of the fashion designer and style guru Giorgio Armani at the age of 91 made me feel more than usually sad, as if I had a personal connection of sorts to the man. I know, of course, that this is just projection on my part, but there are few men who came of age in the Eighties and Nineties who don’t hear the name Armani and immediately associate him with the very epitome of male tailoring. Less flashy and over the top than his rival Versace, classier and more understated than Dolce and Gabbana, Armani has a fair claim to be the most influential designer of the modern day.

    A large part of this, of course, was his work with celebrities and on film. He designed Richard Gere’s ineffably elegant costumes for the cult hit American Gigolo, which launched Gere’s career but also established Armani as the go-to figure for stylish men’s fashion. His work on the 1987 film The Untouchables did him no harm whatsoever in this regard either – gangsters have rarely looked so chic as they died – and he continued to work on pictures as diverse as The Dark Knight and, perhaps inevitably, The Wolf of Wall Street. The latter continued a long association with Martin Scorsese, who even directed the 1990 short Made in Milan about the designer; far from being a puff piece, it stands up as well as any of Scorsese’s longer features.

    Armani was, of course, a hugely wealthy man – a billionaire, probably several times over – who operated his empire with intelligence, discretion and extreme good taste. His company’s existence was not without occasional touches of controversy, such as its continued decision to sell products in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, and it was an amusing piece of ego massage in 1999 to learn that the Guggenheim Museum’s lavish retrospective of Armani and his work came shortly after a substantial (and undoubtedly welcome) donation from the designer. Still, compared to, say, John Galliano, Armani’s was an existence largely devoid of scandal and excessive intrigue. Even when he revealed in a rare Vanity Fair interview that he was bisexual and that his long-term partner, architect Sergio Galeotti, had died of AIDS in 1985, this did not raise eyebrows. With Armani, unlike many of his peers, the personal life paled in comparison to the work.

    Celebrities, of course, will be mourning him. Russell Crowe, a committed fan of his clothes, posted on X, “Mr Armani has made a deep contribution, to fashion, to design, to popular culture. His energy, vision and finesse has made a mark acknowledged around the globe. I adored him. He was so kind.” There will be countless others who express similar sentiments, some more vividly and articulately than others. But what is vital to remember is that Armani’s clothes bestowed style and elegance upon everyone who bought them, whether they were the multimillionaire A-listers wearing them to premieres and awards ceremonies or those, like me, who saved up to buy one statement item by him. His name and company will, of course, live on, probably as long as clothes are bought and worn, but it seems unlikely – even impossible – that anyone will ever equal his influence and chutzpah in our increasingly unstylish, bland age.

  • In praise of Tony McNamara

    In praise of Tony McNamara

    American audiences did not exactly flock to the Benedict Cumberbatch-Olivia Colman comedy The Roses last weekend, but those who did may have been pleasantly surprised, as well as appalled. Although the publicity and trailers took care to stress that it was the new film from the director of Meet The Parents – and certainly some of the more elaborate set-piece slapstick scenes bear the hallmark of the filmmaker Jay Roach – the true auteur of the picture should be regarded as the screenwriter Tony McNamara, who was previously responsible for the Yorgos Lanthimos collaborations Poor Things and The Favourite, both of which saw his screenplays Oscar-nominated.

    The 58-year-old McNamara is an unlikely late bloomer in Hollywood circles. Although he was reasonably well known in his native Australia, where he wrote and created numerous television series, it was not until he was brought in to rewrite 2018’s The Favourite that he moved into the industry A-list. That screenplay was co-credited to McNamara and the British screenwriter Deborah Davis, but since then he has moved from success to success, honing an inimitable, profanity-heavy form of dialogue that is equal parts Paddy Chayefsky, Aaron Sorkin and Joe Orton. There is no screenwriter today who uses the word “cunt” more eloquently or more amusingly, and indeed its well-deployed use in The Roses by its British stars leads to much of the film’s hilarity, and shock value.

    McNamara currently occupies an interesting place in Hollywood. His work on the surprisingly good Emma Stone/Disney picture Cruella showed that he could come up with biting one-liners that didn’t rely on obscenity for comic effect, but his Lanthimos screenplays and The Roses specialize in the kind of barbed, horribly quotable dialogue that leads audiences to howl with laughter even as they have to double-check with one another that, yes, they did just hear that particular misanthropic utterance flying past, with the speed and deadliness of an arrow.

    His films are exceptionally fine works indeed – even The Roses and Cruella clearly show that he is the maestro at creating dialogue that actors love to spit out at one another – but, for my money, his greatest achievement to date was the truly remarkable Hulu series The Great, which somehow ran to three seasons and featured the likes of Nicholas Hoult, Elle Fanning and Gillian Anderson giving some of the greatest performances of their careers. The series was filmed in Britain (the country, you feel, that is closest to McNamara’s heart, given that all his recent projects have been shot there) and deals with an absurdist view of the lives of Catherine the Great and Peter the Great in eighteenth-century Russia. It was hilarious and horrifying in equal parts, never shying away from bleakness or nastiness, and the sheer quality of the writing was recognized by the Writers Guild of America, who bestowed two consecutive awards on McNamara.

    There are potentially more tedious things in the future – a Star Wars picture, apparently, to be co-written with Taiki Waititi and a comic book film – but these are bill-paying jobs that, hopefully, the writer can work his unique alchemy on, a la Cruella. He began his career directing his own material and hopefully an enlightened (and brave) studio will allow him similar control over something of his own creation in the future: McNamara unchained is a fascinating, giddying prospect indeed. Still, even when he’s working in mainstream cinema, he’s head and shoulders above the competition – The Roses has a Great Expectations joke all the better for not being spelt out – and this latest, hilarious instalment in a very distinguished career is a cherishable joy. The characters might be going through their own hell, but the screenwriter has created a very specific, very sweary comedic heaven. We are fortunate to be in his orbit.

  • Is Jack White washed up?

    Is Jack White washed up?

    Once, it might have seemed strange for American politicians to use a rock star as a proxy means of sniping at one another, but these are not normal times. Gavin Newsom used the White Stripes’ song “Seven Nation Army” on Instagram to soundtrack various campaign posts, and the band’s songwriter Jack White commented that “Fans of this song and also democracy, notice that I’m ok with this track being used in this manner. Not so much when Trump and his gestapo try to use one of my songs. Keep hitting him back Gavin!” For good measure, he also attacked Trump’s redesign of the Oval Office, calling it “disgusting… a vulgar, gold leafed and gaudy, professional wrestler’s dressing room.”

    This went down badly with the President, who hit back via his communications director Steven Cheung. White, we learned, is a “washed-up, has-been loser” who has spent far too long “masquerading as a real artist.” The musician was stung by the criticism and responded on Instagram: “How petty and pathetic and thin skinned could this administration get? ‘Masquerading as a real artist’? Thank you for giving me my tombstone engraving! Well here’s my opinion, trump is masquerading as a human being.”

    On and on the excoriation went. White eventually concluded – after describing the President as “that orange grifter,” “a low life fascist” and a conman – that “no I’m not a Democrat either, I’m a human being raised in Detroit, I’m an artist who’s owned his own businesses like his own upholstery shop and recording label since he was 21 years old who has enough street sense to know when a 3 card monte dealer is a cheap grifter and a thief.” Clearly, the criticism had stung, hence the baroque invective of the response. But did Cheung have a point?

    White – let us be frank – owes his considerable fame and fortune to his work with the White Stripes. It now seems bizarre, but the band’s most famous and successful album in the United States was not Elephant, which contains their best-known and most iconic song, “Seven Nation Army,” but their final, 2007 release Icky Thump, which sold a huge number of copies to a thrilled public. Had the White Stripes continued, fame and fortune were assured, but White abruptly diverted his energies into solo projects instead, announcing in 2011 that his act had ceased “mostly to preserve what is beautiful and special about the band.” (Romantic strife between him and the drummer, Meg, his ex-wife, probably didn’t help.) They reunite this year to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; we shall see if the inevitable performance is the precursor to anything more lasting.

    He certainly hasn’t been resting on his laurels since 2007. White has released six solo albums under his own name, two albums with the Raconteurs, and three LPs with the Dead Weather. Most of them have been successful – both his 2022 albums, Fear of the Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive, entered the Billboard Top 10 – and critical acclaim comes as easily to White, one of the most prolific and admired American songwriters of the past quarter-century, as it did to his idols Loretta Lynn and Muddy Waters. It was not for nothing that the awestruck New York Times said of White in 2012 that he was “the coolest, weirdest, savviest rock star of our time.”

    Has the blossom fallen from the bud since then? In all honesty, not in any way that should make any significant difference to public appreciation of the now-50-year-old musician. Inevitably, he will forever be remembered as the composer of “Seven Nation Army”; nothing that he has done since is as iconic as that. Yet perhaps now he has found a new, exciting public role, as botherer-in-chief to the Trump administration. The mantle previously was held by the actor Robert De Niro, whose usual public inarticulacy slipped from him when he was lambasting the President, but perhaps someone else should pursue such a course. If it is to be White – in his own words, less a Democrat and more an outraged independent businessman – then the next few years could be incendiary indeed.

  • With Love, Meghan 2 is just as vacuous as season one

    Like death and taxes, the second instalment of With Love, Meghan has come around again, sloughing into view to the usual chorus of disapproval and confusion. The news recently broke that Netflix has deigned to allow Harry ’n’ Meghan another five years of deciding not to make their future projects. In light of that, this second series of the hitherto unloved show – filmed at the same time as the first – has been presented to a previously indifferent global public in the hope that it will distract from many of the unflattering and embarrassing stories about the Duke of Sussex that have proliferated this year.

    Harry is entirely absent from this series of With Love, Meghan, although he and the couple’s children are often referred to. Instead, this is Meghan: the solo show, and as she trills Californian-inflected pieties to her sycophantic assortment of not-so-special guests, there is the occasional gleam of desperation just about visible underneath her equally gleaming smile. It is fair to say that the many attempts to launch her as a solo star – via television, podcasts and, of course, her “As Ever” product range – have not been as successful as she (and those with a vested interest in her earning power) might have wished. Unless she is prepared to write yet another tell-all memoir, she risks dwindling into obscurity.

    With this in mind, what’s With Love, Meghan II like? The surprising answer is that the second run-around is actually slightly more bearable than the first. Don’t get me wrong – it’s still ghastly, tedious dreck, seemingly produced for an audience that has no critical faculties whatsoever and is content to regard whatever is taking place on their televisions without any necessary judgement – but it throws up a few minor points of interest, which is more than the earlier series did. The presence of the Michelin-starred British chef Clare Smyth – who did the catering for Harry and Meghan’s wedding – in the sixth episode lifts proceedings considerably. Smyth is a proper person, unlike most of the non-entities featured here, and in her brief appearance manages to imbue the show with a professionalism and dry wit that are entirely absent from the platitudinous nonsense elsewhere.

    This is brand reinforcement, pure and simple

    As for the rest of it, your tolerance and enjoyment for therapy-speak and carefully ladled-out nuggets of minor gossip will be tested. Meghan offers fleeting, inconsequential details that are expressed with virtually the same amount of gravity, whether it’s her reminiscing about her love for the “grandma radio” show Magic FM, describing her three-week separation from her children in the aftermath of the Queen’s death as something that left her “not well,” or the revelation that she made her husband a personalized baseball cap for his 40th birthday party, emblazoned with the logo PH40. There is also the surreal reminder that Meghan and her friend Chrissy Teigen briefly appeared as briefcase-wielding models on the American version of the quiz show Deal or No Deal, although sadly Meghan never appeared alongside Noel Edmonds, which would have made for a cosmic shock of toxic proportions.

    I cannot imagine that those who shunned the first series of With Love, Meghan will be lured back in for this go-around, and I’m already dreading the Christmas special. The food cooked is largely unappetizing, and viewers are likely to be mystified by both the identity of the “special guests” and why, say, putting a roast chicken in the oven is treated with the kind of reverence usually reserved for the opening of the Ark of the Covenant, but this is not the point. 

    This is brand reinforcement, pure and simple. And should – heaven forbid! – Harry and Meghan ever go their separate ways, this is a reminder that the distaff half of the brand is more than capable of putting herself out into the public eye as a solo prospect. That revelatory memoir has, you feel, just come a tiny bit closer.   

  • Will Virginia Giuffre sink Prince Andrew?

    There’s an old saying that revenge tastes best when served cold. The late Virginia Giuffre has gone a step further by serving up her final helping of vengeance against Prince Andrew by publishing her sure-to-be-revelatory memoir, Nobody’s Girl, from beyond the grave this October. Giuffre collaborated with the writer Amy Wallace on a 400-page book that is expected to divulge in no doubt excruciatingly painful and embarrassing detail, the various relationships that she had with the notorious likes of Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and – of course! – the Duke of York himself.

    Announcing the book, her publisher Knopf claimed that it would offer “intimate, disturbing, and heartbreaking new details about her time with Epstein, Maxwell, and their many well-known friends, including Prince Andrew.” Although Giuffre died by suicide in Australia in April this year, at the age of 41, she sent Wallace an email expressing her wish that the book should be published in any event, saying that: “The content of this book is crucial, as it aims to shed light on the systemic failures that allow the trafficking of vulnerable individuals across borders. It is imperative that the truth is understood and that the issues surrounding this topic are addressed, both for the sake of justice and awareness.”

    Knopf supposedly paid millions of dollars for the memoir, matching the rumored multi-million pound settlement that Giuffre reached with Prince Andrew in 2022 out of court, which allowed him to avoid the potentially disastrous – and legally hazardous – prospect of testifying in court in the civil sexual assault case that she brought against him.

    It was widely speculated that Andrew was informed by his family (or, at least, his late mother) that if he was not entirely certain that the case would go in his favor that he would have to pay up, but that if he was not cleared in a public forum that he would no longer have a place in the royal family. This has largely proved to be the case ever since, and although the Duke occasionally appears, embarrassingly and briefly, at set-piece events such as Christmas get-togethers at the royal country retreat of Sandringham, he has effectively become a non-person.

    Will the book be great literature? That seems doubtful

    Although Andrew might wish that his withdrawal from public life is enough, that seems unlikely to be the case. The rumors surrounding his behavior with Giuffre (and others) are sufficiently widespread and persistent firstly for a recent biography of him, Entitled, to be a number one bestseller in the United Kingdom (although some critics, including me, found the book to be a relentless hit job that grew wearying long before the end) and now for the publication of Nobody’s Girl to be one of the biggest literary events of the year, perhaps even the decade.

    Will the book be great literature? That seems doubtful, but it will, without any doubt, be essential reading for anyone who is interested in the downfall of wealthy and powerful men. It’s not even impossible that it might have some light to shed on that most vexed and controversial of issues, namely whether her tormentor Jeffrey Epstein really did repent of his sins long enough to commit suicide, or whether someone else stepped in during one of the convenient periods that the prison CCTV cameras were turned off.

    In any case, Giuffre’s book will be unmissable proof that, even with its author no longer present to point the finger, she is still wholly capable of causing reputational damage to the great and the not-so-good. Many of those surviving may have breathed a sigh of relief at her death. This news has proved that such an exhalation would have been deeply premature.

  • I actually feel sorry for Prince Andrew

    I actually feel sorry for Prince Andrew

    “Many would have preferred this book not to be written, including the Yorks themselves.” So Andrew Lownie begins his coruscating examination of the lives of Prince Andrew and Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson, which has excited significant media attention due to its scandalous revelations. Lownie, a historian and literary agent, has pivoted away from an earlier, more conventional career as a biographer of John Buchan and Guy Burgess to the self-appointed role of royal botherer-in-chief. After earlier, similarly scabrous books about the Mountbattens and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (formerly Edward VIII and his wife, Wallis Simpson), he now finds his first contemporary targets, and the results are predictably marmalade-dropping.

    Prince Andrew’s decline in public popularity over the past decade, exacerbated by stories of his ill-considered friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and rumors of the sexual abuse of the underage Virginia Giuffre, was capped by his disastrous 2019 interview with a disgusted-looking Emily Maitlis, a presenter on Britain’s Channel 4, in which he tried and failed to salvage his reputation with a series of bizarre admissions that made him look both stupid and sinister. Today, he has an uneasy relationship with members of the wider royal family, who would like to be shot of him but are reluctant to cast off one of their own; and suspicions persist that it will only take one more scandal for him to be banished to reputational Siberia.

    Entitled, then, is designed to serve two complementary but distinct purposes. It is the first serious attempt to deal with the life story of a grotesque man who was nicknamed “Baby Grumpling” shortly after his birth in 1960. He was his mother’s favorite child, but even she acknowledged that he was “not always a little ray of sunshine about the house.” The bullying, arrogant boy who would rhetorically ask his Gordonstoun contemporaries “You do know who I am?” would grow up a lonely, essentially friendless figure. Even the knowledge that “Randy Andy” was, in the words of one former lover, “a well-built gentleman” would eventually become his undoing. Lownie writes that Andrew reputedly slept with more than 1,000 women, of whom by far the most notorious (supposedly) was Giuffre, who eventually won an out-of-court settlement rumoured to have been around £10 million.

    But Entitled also aims to delve beneath the benignly useless exterior of Ferguson – described by one source as “all high jinks and jolly hockey sticks and practical jokes.” Lownie suggests she is rather a pitiful figure who has clung to her ex-husband’s coat-tails in an attempt to maintain her status and income alike. She has always suffered insecurity about her appearance and weight, but her financial illiteracy was such that a court case revealed: “Sarah had explained her actions by saying she was drunk, was trying to help a friend and in debt.” Perhaps only drink could account for the decision to write a series of lifestyle books entitled Madame Pantaloon.

    Lownie achieves the near impossible: one almost feels sorry for Prince Andrew

    Yet if Fergie comes across as an essentially comic character, the Duke of York is a villain. Lownie clearly loathes the man, who is depicted in the most unflattering light at virtually every turn. If one contemporary attempts to excuse the worst of his behaviour as being driven by shyness or a desire to help friends, another source, usually anonymous, will testify to his arrogance or snobbery or some other unpleasant trait. He gets some grudging credit for his courage during the Falklands War, in which he participated as a helicopter pilot; but it is made clear that the exaggerated reporting of his exploits was driven more by duty than genuine admiration. And by the time we are offered a minutely detailed account of his Epstein-triggered disgrace and downfall, Lownie achieves the near impossible: one almost feels sorry for Prince Andrew. 

    This is not a book that any of the royal family will enjoy reading. There are casually delivered revelations, such as Prince Philip (Elizabeth II’s consort) having had an adulterous affair with Ferguson’s mother Susan in the 1960s, that no other biographer has ever made public. And there is a discussion of Andrew and Harry having a fight in 2013, following which Harry allegedly told William how much he hated his uncle Andrew. Lownie concludes cheerily: “It is ironic that the Duke and Duchess of York, ostensibly the strongest defenders of the monarchy, may through their behavior between them have done most to hasten its demise.” It is hard not to believe that the author would relish such a downfall.

    One cannot help wondering whether Entitled, which combines high-minded contempt and bitchy gossip in readable but seldom inspired prose, is the precursor to another, yet more scandalous account by Lownie of the younger members of the royal family, specifically Harry and Meghan. Perhaps it will be called Dumb and Dumber. In any case, this is a fascinating if oddly joyless book that will no doubt sell in huge quantities. But be prepared to feel queasy after this wallow in the dark side of noblesse oblige.

  • The greatness of Bob Odenkirk

    The greatness of Bob Odenkirk

    If viewers of Breaking Bad had taken bets during the show’s original run on which of the cast was likely to become a breakout action-film star a decade after the series finished airing, Bob Odenkirk would likely have been near the bottom of that list. The young actor Aaron Paul was perhaps the most obvious prediction, but Jesse Plemons, Dean Norris – even a grizzled and pumped Bryan Cranston – were all more predictable choices to do an alpha-male Liam Neeson-meets-Keanu Reeves act than the foppish comic relief Jimmy McGill, aka criminal lawyer (in both senses) Saul Goodman.

    Still, it’s 2025, and Odenkirk has just released the sequel to 2021’s sleeper hit Nobody, which saw him take on the John Wick mantle as Hutch Mansell, a nebbish paterfamilias whose boring suburban life conceals an unexpected past as a deadly assassin. Nobody was hugely entertaining, not least because Odenkirk’s exceptional comic timing and likability meant that what could have been a grim exercise in box-ticking and head-banging instead became delightfully amusing, not least in the near-surreal casting of RZA as Mansell’s adoptive brother.

    The sequel, Nobody 2, is more of the same, with Sharon Stone added as a camp villain and an amusingly dreary amusement park setting. And once again the now-62-year-old Odenkirk (looking his age, intentionally) is required to beat seven bells of ordure out of various miscreants who have wronged him and his family. It’s great, unpretentious fun, although it seems to be underperforming at the box office; at this rate, there will not be a Nobody 3. That’s a pity, because the film is a demonstration of the versatility of an actor who seems capable of doing virtually anything, and doing it exceptionally well. For a man who looks like a natural Sir Andrew Aguecheek from Twelfth Night, knock-kneed and lily-livered, he proves a great pleasure to watch kick ass and take names with the best of them.

    Still, if Odenkirk is now a household name thanks to Breaking Bad and its successor Better Call Saul, in which he took center stage and added shadings of drama and existential despair to his hitherto-jovial fraudster, it has been a long, grueling journey to A-list status. Throughout the Nineties and Noughties, he did all the things that a comic actor was expected to – appearing on Saturday Night Live and writing for it; taking part in some of the great sitcoms of the era, from Seinfeld to Arrested Development; making cameos in big comedy pictures such as Wayne’s World 2 and The Cable Guy – but nothing seemed to stick. It was not until Saul Goodman came opportunistically knocking that Odenkirk’s career went into the stratosphere, and he must thank his lucky stars for Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan each and every day. Even a heart attack a few years ago on the Better Call Saul set could not dent his prowess, thankfully.

    He recently made a well-received Broadway debut as the once-successful, now-flailing real estate salesman Shelly “The Machine” Levene (a role previously played by the likes of Jack Lemmon and Al Pacino), showing his ability to combine humor and pathos with extraordinary skill. He has plenty of film work coming up – indeed, his appearance as the oft-absent March family patriarch in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women suggests that he is just as adept at period drama as he is at contemporary comedy – but it would be a pleasure to see this fine and versatile actor return to the stage in anything from Shakespeare to contemporary plays. Odenkirk would make for a superb Willy Loman, a heartbreaking Malvolio or a hilarious Richard III. Yet in any case, whatever he does next will be worth watching. He may have known what it’s like to be a nobody for a prolonged period of time, but now, at last, the former Mr. Show has attained the prominence that he deserves.

  • Alien: Earth is unfriendly and brilliant

    Alien: Earth is unfriendly and brilliant

    Another day, another bunch of rampaging, acid-blooded xenomorphs. Noah Hawley’s new series, Alien: Earth, comes hard on the heels of the profoundly forgettable but commercially successful latest installment in the film saga, Romulus. That film got into trouble with certain viewers for its artistic necrophilia in the artificial-intelligence-assisted resurrection of Ian Holm’s character Ash from the first Alien film, as well as some rather laborious fan service in the repetition of various hard-as-nails catchphrases. But still, its box-office revenue indicated that there is still, after four and a half decades, a hearty appetite for audiences who want to be scared witless by rampaging extra-terrestrials: the very opposite of kindly, friendly ET types.

    Hawley’s show has been described, perhaps optimistically, as doing the same for Alien that Andor did for Star Wars. Certainly, it has the same grimly detailed, adult-oriented approach, focusing on the nitty-gritty of life in 2120 where the world is no longer ruled by government but by five all-powerful corporations, of which the original series’ Weyland-Yutani, first glimpsed briefly in the second episode, is but one among equals. The latest interloper is none other than the Prodigy, run by the Elon Musk-esque disruptor Boy Kavalier (a fascinatingly smarmy Samuel Blenkin, in what will surely be a breakthrough role), which takes a particular interest when a Weyland-Yutani spacecraft crash-lands into Prodigy-owned territory. As anyone who has seen any of the other Alien series will know, Weyland-Yutani are not good people, and so there are terrible, never-before-seen horrors on board, which duly escape. Bloodshed ensues.

    What makes Alien: Earth distinctive and will undoubtedly account for its interest over future weeks, is that Hawley has followed the lead that Ridley Scott established in his last two pictures, Prometheus and the underrated Alien Covenant. There, the android David, as played beautifully by Michael Fassbender, was as much a source of interest to Scott as any of the xenomorphs, and by Covenant, the TE Lawrence–styled robot, which had absorbed artificial intelligence to a frightening degree, was shown to be superior to any of the comparatively dopey humans in every regard.

    This has persisted into Alien: Earth, as we are shown Boy Kavalier’s grand plan: he wishes to create a new marriage between human consciousness and android bodies in the form of so-called synthetics, which will be a new and groundbreaking means of creating life, surpassing cyborgs and other androids in the process. The casting of Timothy Olyphant as the unnervingly softly spoken, Rutger Hauer–styled synthetic Krish only serves to make one wonder what the hell is coming next.

    If this sounds like a potentially uneasy combination of Frankenstein-esque philosophizing and Aliens-esque hugger-mugger, then rest assured that Hawley, probably best known for his Fargo television series, has responded to the Alien legacy with considerable aplomb. It is generally accepted that the first two films are the best, and it isn’t hard to see the DNA of Scott’s original here: the show even opens with a doomed spacecraft, the Maginot, and its similarly imperiled ensemble, all of whom (bar one) swiftly meet suitably horrible ends.

    Yet by the time that Alex Lawther’s reluctant grunt-cum-medic Hermit – brother of the excellent Sydney Chandler’s child-like synthetic Wendy – appears, there is a welcome return to James Cameron-esque scenes of peril and extreme violence, including, rather brilliantly, a gang of eighteenth-century styled 1 percenters being torn limb from limb by a deeply unimpressed xenomorph. There’s plenty of black humor here (a Hawley specialty) and even if the first two episodes move slowly at times, there are intriguing threads being laid down for future shows, perhaps even a second series. On this evidence, that would be extremely welcome.

  • Terence Stamp owned the Sixties

    There are two famous images of the late Terence Stamp, one taken from one of his films, the other from a photoshoot by Terry O’Neill in 1963. In the first, he is shown in his regimental outfit, in character as the dashing but weak Sergeant Troy from the 1967 adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd, with his inamorata Julie Christie, who played Bathsheba Everdene, beside him. In the second, he is shown looking intensely directly into O’Neill’s camera next to another lover of his, the model Jean “the Shrimp” Shrimpton, in a startlingly modern image that looks as if it could have been taken today. In both cases, Stamp looks like what he was: the single coolest man alive.

    When he was given a good script and a good director, Stamp was still magnificent

    When people tend to write about the legacy of the Sixties, it’s usually a lazy list of clichés: Woodstock, the Beatles, “Summer of Love,” long hair, great billowing clouds of marijuana smoke. What should always be on this list is the Kinks’ song “Waterloo Sunset,” which is not only one of the greatest singles of the decade, but an ode to Stamp and Christie, specifically in the lyrics “Terry meets Julie / Waterloo station / Every Friday night” and then “But Terry and Julie / Cross over the river / Where they feel safe and sound.” Ray Davies, the songwriter, then goes on to suggest, impishly, “And they don’t need no friends / As long as they gaze on Waterloo sunset / They are in paradise.”

    Stamp was perhaps, as one wag dubbed him, “the most beautiful man in the world,” just as Christie had fair claim to be the most beautiful woman of her time. Yet while her career prospered and she rose in global acclaim throughout the Sixties, her one-time paramour seemed largely uninterested in fame and celebrity. He turned down the lead role in Alfie, which made his former roommate Caine a superstar, and picked and chose the kind of parts that led to critical acclaim without making him a great deal of money, such as the obsessed lead in the John Fowles adaptation The Collector and Ken Loach’s first foray into cinema, Poor Cow. 

    It was somehow typical of Stamp that, offered the role of James Bond when Sean Connery quit the series, he refused and instead went to Italy to star in Federico Fellini’s Toby Dammit, an Edgar Allan Poe adaptation. Then, tiring of the acting life altogether, he disappeared off to India for the best part of a decade in order to live on an ashram and explore an altogether simpler, meditative existence.

    For largely financial reasons, Stamp was coerced back into acting with the Superman pictures, in which he was amusingly arch as the baddie General Zod, and thereafter found a second career as an elder statesman in often undistinguished projects. If you’d seen the BBC’s recent adaptation of His Dark Materials, there’s Stamp in a small role, just as he popped up as a galactic politician in the deathly dull Star Wars Episode 1I: The Phantom Menace. Yet when he was given a good script and a good director, as he was with Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey and the riotous cross-dressing comedy The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, he was still magnificent, channeling all the energy, gravitas and eccentricity that he had shown from early on in his career.

    Still, it is not for his latter-day work that Stamp will ultimately be remembered, but for his iconic and legendary presence in that most myth-laden and misunderstood of decades. Many of the greatest people in the 20th century did much of their best work throughout the Swinging Sixties, but Terence Stamp, that bloody-minded and deeply individualistic actor, did not so much define the decade as bend it to his will. And that is an accomplishment that you imagine most of his peers would have given up vast amounts of their success to match.