London’s genre-bending punk duo Bob Vylan play the O2 Institute Birmingham on Saturday 18 November with support from Panic Shack and Kid Bookie.
Doors open at 7pm, with tickets priced at £21.85 (stalls standing), promoted by AEG Events. The event is 14+, under 16s will need to be accompanied by an adult over 18.
Award-winning two-piece Bob Vylan (featuring vocalist Bobby and drummer Bobbie) head on tour ahead of their new album Humble as the Sun being released on 5 April 2024, the fourth in the duo’s catalogue of venomous punk with purposeful lyrics.
Bob Vylan catapulted onto the punk scene in 2017 with their first release ‘Vylan’ and since have become a vital voice in music. Bridging subcultures and genres together, the duo never shy away from important conversations of racism, toxic masculinity, and political unrest in the UK.
Bob Vylan are electrifying alternative music, winning ‘Best Alternative Music Act’ at the MOBO awards and ‘Best Album’ at the Kerrang! Awards, both in 2022. Their DIY, self-released titles embrace rock, grime, punk, reggae, and dance, and new single ‘He’s a Man’ follows with a perfect blend of rap over pulsing drum beat before kicking into full-throttle punk riffs.
“Accidentally amazing” support Panic Shack got their own taste of TikTok well-deserved virality with 2022’s track ‘The Ick’. The Cardiff four piece are brash, brazen, and a breath of fresh air in a sometimes-stale punk scene.
Second support Kid Bookie brings sinister rap and trap that changes shape with every turn. They effortlessly play between rap and metal, creating dark and twisted tracks with fast-paced hooks.
This extraordinary new film from Martin Scorsese is a monumental study of the atrocities inflicted on the Osage Nation of Oklahoma throughout the 1920s. It shines a spotlight on a people consigned to the fringes of history who realised their land was built on vast reserves of oil, briefly making them the wealthiest people per capita on the planet and who were slaughtered for their wealth.
Scorsese’s film is based on fact and is adapted by him and Eric Roth from David Grann’s 2017 non-fiction book of the same name. Its opening depicts the discovery of the oil, a kind of miracle. A rumbling in the earth precedes frenzied dancing beneath black rain, captured in striking slow-motion.
From here, we go into a history of the Osage people rendered in the style of a black-and-white newsreel before colour begins to seep into the fringes of the picture. This remarkable opening makes it clear that at 80 years-old, Scorsese has lost none of the fleet-footed playfulness which has defined his previous pictures, but he combines it in Killers of the Flower Moon with a confrontational anguish which pushes the film into the realm of greatness. This is a landmark film, as horrifying as it is vital. Essential cinema.
Leonardo Di Caprio plays Ernest Bruckhart, who has returned from the First World War to stay with his uncle William ‘King’ Hale (Robert De Niro), who also houses Ernest’s brother Byron (Scott Shepherd). Hale poses as a friend of the Osage – and even speaks the language – but secretly plans to murder them so that he can claim their headrights, which entitle the owner to a quarterly share of the Osage Mineral Estate.
As part of Hale’s scheme, Ernest is encouraged to court Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) whose family own a large share of the headrights. Hale has engineered a sequence of deaths which will leave Ernest as the sole inheritor of the Kyle fortune upon Mollie’s death.
That this description still manages to do the nuances and subtleties of the plot a disservice speaks to the awful complexity of the real-life crimes Scorsese excavates here. This is a very long film, but it exerts a vice like intensity over its audience and unfurls via a series of increasingly horrific acts of violence, treated with unsettlingly straightforward bluntness.
Indeed, audiences expecting the stylised thrills of Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street will be sorely disappointed by Killers of the Flower Moon, a picture in which Scorsese is operating on the quieter and more contemplative levels of Silence or The Irishman. The violence here is accompanied not by wisecracks or needle-drops, but by the oppressive silence of injustice.
Not that Killers isn’t astonishingly engaging for almost the entirety its 206-minute runtime, but that it seems Scorsese himself is using it to reflect on the ways he has shown violence in his films, and perhaps the ways they have wound up inadvertently glamorising violence and criminal lifestyles.
Luckily for Scorsese, he has the perfect character to critique these ideas in Ernest, who even by the standards set by the director’s previous works occupies a particularly low rung on the ladder of human decency.
Ernest is a white man, a drunkard and sleaze who by his own admission loves cold, hard cash and has no scruples about how it’s obtained. He acts almost as an inverse of The Wolf of Wall Street’s Jordan Belfort, who knew what he was doing and made no apologies for gaming a system. Here, the system is playing Ernest: while he’s making a fortune, he’s too much of a neanderthal to realise just how ensnared in evil he really is. He’s neither a hero nor a villain. Instead, he is perfectly and stupidly ignorant. It makes him revolting.
At the apex of its intensity Killers ultimately captures a kind of fever-pitch hysteria which will feel bracingly unfamiliar to its many of its white audience members (when was the last time this critic was afraid to leave the house?), and it hurtles along with relentless ferocity. Yet what causes the film to transcend its genre trappings is its vivid depiction of Osage culture and the dignity it affords each of Nation’s people.
Scorsese holds the Osage at a respectful degree of narrative and aesthetic distance, aware that he is fundamentally an outsider to these people. And while Molly gradually comes to signify genuine good tarnished by white greed Scorsese never attempts to depict her psychological interior, aware that to do so would reduce her to yet another commodity. Gladstone’s performance is a miracle in itself: her reservedness, her poise. Her very presence is a force of nature, a reckoning in itself.
Perhaps the film falters in focusing so heavily on Ernest and the conspiracy to obtain the headrights. Some critics may argue that Scorsese is repacking Osage trauma for mass-consumption by mainstream cinemagoers.
But Di Caprio plays Ernest with such a simpering cowardice, and De Niro plays William with such bull-headed greediness that it’s never unclear who the villains are here: they ultimately come to embody the racist capitalism the film so harrowingly condemns. The film’s politics are never up for debate.
There is a roughness to the film, a kind of holed-ness at its centre. Its most radical aspect is that it feels intentionally unfinished to suggest that so long as the Osage are denied justice, the story the film tells is still ongoing.
And with a final, gloriously self-aware flourish Scorsese turns the microscope on both the film and himself, deftly critiquing the ways that the suffering of real people is too often softened by the comfortable distance time – and the cinema screen – can afford us.
Detroit punk rockers Protomartyr are coming to the Hare and Hounds in Kings Heath for a live show on Wednesday 25 October – with support from London’s Es.
Doors open at 7:30pm, with tickets priced at £16 plus booking fee – as promoted by This Is Tmrw. Minimum age of entry is 14 with anyone aged 16 or under needing adult supervision.
In Birmingham and part of their European tour, the band who were once called Butt Babies are on the road touring their sixth studio album, Formal Growth in the Desert.
Released on Domino Records in June this year, the new 12 track LP from Protomartyr features all the blistering guitar riffs and pneumatic drill percussion you’d expect from an outfit who released their first album on (their hometown’s now defunct) Urinal Cake Records.
But the depth of the Detroit punk four piece comes through in the peaks and troughs that pepper their new album, as they have done across their back catalogue, with Casey’s all-to-easy-to-compare-to-so-and-so vocals once again firmly leading the charge. And on that, has anyone said ‘Mike Patton when he’s not screaming’ yet?
(Worth mentioning that the UK support act, Es, are also touring their debut album – the nine track Less of Everything – so everyone’s got a corner to fight for at this gig. And space on the merch desk.)
But enough words… tsk tusk, in this day and age ‘an all… check out the audio and visual from the new album below if you need a bit more convincing.
And with Protomartyr playing one gig in Birmingham and then one more in London, before a series of dates across mainland Europe, this is your ticking clock kick up the arse if you want to catch them on UK soil. And as previously mentioned, tickers are selling like hot (urinal) cakes…
(Although they will be closing off the run with a gig in Benidorm on 18 November, which is almost worth the airfare just to see what happens.)
“Life is like a henhouse ladder,” opines Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), “shitty and short.”
It’s one of many sharply clever – and quotable – moments in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, a gentle and warm-hearted tale of a group of very different people forced together by circumstance. It’s a long film, but it’s told with such depth of feeling that every minute of its runtime feels totally warranted, so when it ends you feel sad to be pulled out of the cozy, nostalgia-tinged world it conjures.
Even its plot, set in 1970’s New England on the grounds of the fictional Barton Academy, recalls classic American campus novels like John Williams’ Stoner or Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe. Take the ‘holdovers’ of the title, these are the people with nowhere to go when the school shutters for Christmas and are left glumly stuck on campus.
Giamatti’s grouchy Paul Hunham teaches ancient history and is widely disliked, while canteen head Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) can’t bring herself to return home after the death of her son in Vietnam. Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) is fiercely intelligent but has a wish to self-destruct; his mum and stepdad have ditched him to honeymoon.
The Holdovers recalls a simpler and less pretentious era of independent filmmaking, even down to the vintage logos and age-rating which precede it. While these would feel like gimmicks in the hands of others, Payne is able to follow it through with his direction. Indeed, there’s something legitimately nostalgic about Payne’s filmmaking in that it appears to be a relic from the very time it depicts.
Besides the vintage logos, Eigil Bryld’s splendid cinematography has a grainy, dusty sheen which evokes the wear and tear physical film accrues. Notice, too, the gentle cross-fades, low-key delivery, and montages set to the music of the era: all wonderfully atmospheric touches that deepen and enrich the film’s setting and characters.
The performances are lovely. Giamatti savours the role of a cantankerous old grouch, but when he lectures on the Peloponnesian War he springs to life, unable to comprehend why his bored-senseless pupils fail to see the profundity of what he teaches. “To understand the present, we have to look towards the past,” he says, but Giamatti’s posture and stare suggest someone refusing to reckon with the unpleasantness of the man he’s turned into. It’s only now he’s beginning to question what his life has really been worth.
This is surely the performance of Giamatti’s career, and his scenes with Sessa’s scrappy Angus Tully are amongst the film’s highlights: “I find the world a bitter and complicated place, and it seems to feel the same way about me,” Hunham tells Angus.
Randolph is exquisite as the underappreciated canteen head Mary, in a role which has all but locked her in for a Best Supporting Actress nomination next year. She does so much with stillness here: she a woman uncared for by most, but who still seeks good in everyone.
In one scene she delicately unpacks her dead son’s baby clothes. In the hands of Randolph, the simple act of placing a pair of pristine, tiny shoes in a drawer becomes an act of real emotional heft.
Giamatti and Sessa steal the show with gusto and their performances are big-hearted and brash but make no mistake, this is Randolph’s film. She is the softly spoken miracle at the heart of this wonderful ode to difference and circumstance.
Words by Jimmy Dougan (follow him on Letterboxd here) / Press images courtesy of BFI London Film Festival
Jodie Comer has a face of steely determination in this in this sensitively acted film from Mahalia Belo, directing her first feature length picture. It’s a tale of a new mother (Jodie Comer) escaping from cataclysmic flooding, trying to forge a future for herself and newborn son.
But it’s hindered by uneven pacing, and as it travels further and further away from civilization the tension all but evaporates and the narrative becomes oddly slack. A shame, The End We Start From feels like a far more disappointing film than it should be.
Belo’s film follows a nameless woman, first seen nude in the bath and watching her bump shift as the child within kicks. It’s a striking image, expressing a kind of quiet purity so lacking from much of the current cinema, but it’s one tinged with irony. A few moments later – rocked by contractions and getting understandably a tad panicked – the woman looks in horror as floodwater begins to seep in under the back door, and before long she’s wading through filth to get to an ambulance.
From here things only get worse; Britain is being rocked by extreme flooding, and what Belo’s film – adapted by Alice Birch from the novel by Megan Hunter – captures so well is how quickly things would go to absolute shit. The internet is down, so the NHS is forced to start keeping manual birth-registers, and the woman and her partner (Joel Fry) are forced to name their newborn son Zeb immediately else he’ll be legally registered as nameless.
Britain quickly becomes a network of what are effectively smaller islands, with villages on higher land refusing entry to non-locals. Fortunately, the woman and man can shelter with his parents (Mark Strong and Nina Sosanya) but when disaster strikes, they are forced to leave this idyll and descend into the real world.
The End We Start From will inevitably draw comparisons to Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men with its depiction of new motherhood in the face of societal collapse. But where Children of Men had a grimly sardonic edge with relentlessly intense action set-pieces, The End We Start From presents a far quieter slide into the end times: no car-chases or explosions, just desperate people slowly turning on each other.
Where the film’s feminism comes to the fore is when emergency shelters begin only allowing women and children, and the woman and her husband are forced to separate. It’s here she meets another new mum, played with droll warmth by Kathryn Waterston, who has a friend staying in a colony for the wealthy off the coast of the Scottish Highlands.
It’s here that the pace begins to meander though, and watching Comer and Waterston trudge across various fields with their babies lacks the momentum and stress of the film’s first half. And it heads towards an ending which feels rushed and contrived, a feeling exacerbated by the film’s short runtime.
It’s very rare for me to say this, but I’d have gladly taken another twenty minutes (let’s face it, Comer is so good that watching her butter toast would be gripping) if it meant Birch could tighten up the script’s pacing.
The End We Start From is a refreshingly feminist spin on genre typically dominated by male chauvinism, and it further affirms Comer as one of our greatest talents. Lovely too to see such a strong supporting cast of wonderful British actors, including the always-brilliant Gina McKee as the head of the island colony.
But make no mistake, this is Comer’s film: her face has the toughness of granite. It’s frustrating that she isn’t better served by the script, and as the film heads towards a weepy and laboured ending you can’t help but feel that The End We Start From is a bit of a damp squib.
