So the film charts, in real time, the journey of 16 blocks that Jack and Eddie must negotiate to get to court and send the bad guys down.And, for about an hour, it’s tremendously exciting; not a word I would previously have associated with a movie – or even a scene – by the Lethal Weapon director Richard Donner. Time was when you’d have felt safe with Bruce as your escort, but one look at his sweaty pallor and heavy gut tells you he’s not the superhero of old. It’s the kind of reverse makeover Sylvester Stallone endured a few years back for CopLand, playing the tubby, half-deaf but decent lawman who finally stands up to his corrupt colleagues at the station.
And that’s exactly what Jack has to do here, because young Eddie is giving evidence that will bring down a whole bunch of cops on murder and extortion charges. A cakewalk, you might think, only Jack decides to stop for breakfast at the liquor store en route and emerges to find his prisoner about to have a great big hole blown through his head.

He plays Jack Mosley, an NYPD detective whose gammy leg and drink problem make him an instant candidate for the boring jobs nobody else wants to do, like delivering petty crook Eddie Bunker (Mos Def) from lock-up to courthouse, 16 blocks away. Bruce Willis has portrayed his share of desperate cops, but I can’t recall any of them being quite the stumblebum he is in 16 Blocks. Its victims end up either zombies or so outlandishly grotesque you can’t help cackling, and that goes too for the decidedly unheroic characters of the police chief (Nathan Fillion) and sleazeball mayor (Gregg Henry).. Director James Gunn has evidently watched a lot of early Cronenberg, John Carpenter and cult-rubbish Troma movies in preparation for his debut feature, which centres upon the invasion of a small North Carolina town by a repulsive mutant slug plague.

So it’s good to have someone to bounce off of.”Only Wenders will let him work this way, he insists. “The great thing with Wim is you can go down many different tracks with a screenplay and he will question it: ‘Why do we want to go there? Why do we want to do that?’ On my own I probably wouldn’t question it as deeply. He’s very open to trying things.” Shepard also gave Lange a great emotional outburst to essay, during which she goes through a whole range of different emotions.Shepard considers playwrighting to be a “particularly solo pursuit”, and says he prefers to work with Wenders on screenplays. Shepard, however, did not like the Howard-Hughes-type figure. “I said, ‘I don’t relate to the big business thing, the city thing”, and he said, ‘Well, what about this character seen in that light but a different person?’ So I suggested a different character, retaining the name Howard, because it’s sort of weak, and he went with it That’s the beautiful thing about him. In the case of Don’t Come Knocking, it was Wenders who originally came up with a character.

Rather than following a rigid plot, Shepard creates a character and then lets him go where he may. (He also has a son from his marriage to O-Lan Jones.)As for his creative partnership with Wenders, he says it works because the director understands and accommodates his writing process. His men characters are often lost and searching – for what is not always clear – or escaping. In his own life, though, he has found a kind of peace and stability with Lange, whom he met making the film Frances (1982), and with whom he has two children, Hanna and Walker. It doesn’t come from the clouds.”Shepard ran away from home and joined a theatre company. I’ve been doing it for, I don’t know, 40 years.” But why this particular theme? “It’s part of my life,” he says impatiently “It’s what I grew up with It’s my father in me It was part of my existence. “They say that writers are always turning over the same thing, and that’s the material of my life: the thing of the father, the family and the son.

Strangely, David Straithairn (who played legendary broadcaster Ed Murrow in Clooney’s movie) is cast here on the opposite side of the congressional fence as the moralistic Senator Estes Kefauver, one of the politicians who interrogate Page and her colleagues, the photographers Irving and Paula Klaw.Mol argues that Page wasn’t as naive as some of her detractors have suggested. She saw Page’s turbulent and colourful biography as being akin to that of country divas like Patsy Cline or Loretta Lynn.The Notorious Bettie Page makes an intriguing counterpart to George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck Both films are set in the same period Both feature congressional hearings. Nor, until recently, was she any more forthcoming about her childhood, during which she has now acknowledged that she and her sisters were abused by their father.Harron, a country music enthusiast, suggests that one of the main reasons she was drawn to Page was the model’s Nashville background. This was an incident that the model only revealed when she was in her seventies.

At the time it happened, she simply refused to talk about it. It’s a world where people dealt with things like sexual abuse and rape by never talking about it.”Just occasionally, Harron’s film touches on the dark underside of Page’s life There is one grim scene in which she is sexually assaulted. You were having fun dressing up, you were making people happy.”Bettie didn’t want to think about it any more than that. And it is important to see her as a woman of the Fifties, before ‘therapy’ culture.

She isn’t part of a world where everyone is confessing things or examining their emotions or looking at their childhood traumas. So when Bettie was doing these [bondage] photographs, the one thing you didn’t think about was what these photos were used for and who they were for. She was, she says, simply trying to capture the spirit of the times. “For women in the Fifties, a lot of the way they dealt with things was to pretend it wasn’t there – that there was no elephant in the room. These were the 1950s, after all, the Eisenhower era, a lost age of (relative) innocence when the great American pornography industry was still in its infancy.Harron remains unapologetic about not having made an overtly polemical, feminist film. Even in the bondage pictures, some of which are deeply degrading, she somehow retains her cheery demeanour.Harron’s film suggests that both Page and the photographers she worked for regarded their work as a bit of a lark. They didn’t understand why certain customers wanted pictures of Page trussed up, but if the demand was there, they had no qualms about trying to satisfy it.

You want them to be proud of you.”Thompson insists he simply hopes for enough success to keep him touring and recording. But he allows himself a bigger dream: “I like to think that, if I do something well, at least better than most pop musicians,” he says, “it’s that I can write good songs. When my singing voice is gone, I’d like to be remembered for my songs.”He allows himself a weary but proud smile “Yeah. I’d like to be thought of as a really good songwriter.”The single ‘I Should Get Up’ is out on Verve on 8 May Teddy Thompson is touring to 14 May. Coming from the family I do, that would not be a good thing: I don’t think my parents would be particularly impressed if I was in a boy band.

I’d rather hold up my Mojo review and sell two records, than sell a million records and have terrible reviews. “I know it doesn’t mean much in the whole scheme of things, but getting good reviews on something that you’ve worked really hard on means the world to me And I feel already genuinely successful because of that. “Sometimes the situations I write about are just so ridiculous,” he laughs “Like in ‘I Wish It Was Over’, for example. If you’re with someone you don’t want to be with, in the end whose fault is that? Like most things, it’s all mine.”He has been bowled over by the glowing reviews his new album has received in the UK “People really like it here,” he says, a little overwhelmed.

When I’m home I do it most days, but when I’m on the road I do it on the phone.” The band – all from Chicago – formed in 2001, taking their name from Bart Simpson’s favourite superhero, Radioactive Man’s sidekick. He says the depression wasn’t caused by any particular trauma in his childhood, which was “pretty mundane – the mundane and the ordinary can be very depressing Very, very depressing,” he says “I find that writing songs is cathartic. He has admitted to a fascination with the suicides of Elliott Smith and Joy Division’s Ian Curtis. But there is nothing fake about this dark period of his life, just stark honesty. Mom’s [a school administrator] in the kitchen baking stuff, and dad’s [a lawyer] off at work. It’s very non-exceptional.” Wentz says that sleeping in the bedroom that he grew up in made him “more sensitive to adolescent angst”. He withdrew from the rest of the band, only appearing to hand them his lyrics.

But after the near-death episode – he had his stomach pumped – Wentz moved back into his parents’ house in the posh Chicago suburb of Wilmette (“A place straight out of one of those Eighties movies like The Breakfast Club,” he says), leaving the rest of the band to tour the UK in February 2005 without him “It’s really boring there Not a whole lot going on. I was racked with self-doubt.” He had been obsessed for a while with the tsunami and his own mortality. It is particularly overwhelming when you are on the cusp of doing something very big and thinking that it will be a big flop. I didn’t really think about whether I slept or died.” About this dark time in his life, he says: “It was overwhelming I was either totally anxious or totally depressed. In the Best Buy parking lot in Chicago, full of pain – “my head was racing with self doubt and negative thoughts” – he swallowed a handful of Ativan anxiety pills in an act that he calls “hypermedicating” He recalls: “I just wanted to have my head shut up. “In an age when people can so easily click a button and download it’s not good enough to just give somebody a song,” says Wentz.

Suffering from depression – “black clouds” – he has described his moods as “oil and water and they never mix together right”. In February last year, just as the band were recording their breakthrough album, Wentz went into emotional meltdown. “It’s a bit like [Nikolai Gogol's] Diary Of a Madman,” Wentz says. “My inspiration and my ideas don’t begin and end at the beginning and the ending of a song. It is too limiting.” It is no wonder that the singer, Stump, said of Wentz: “It scares me sometimes, watching him. The two seconds you’re not with that dude he’s made 30 decisions that are going to affect us for the rest of the year.” Then there is the band’s MySpace page, buzzing with more than 750,000 ” friends” living in the band’s online, virtual community.

Even Argentina embraced this reworking of the tango sound, coining the phrase “electro-tango”.In a way, the format of the first album was a straightforward one: construct a dubbed-up cover of Piazzolla’s tango classic “Vuelvo al Sur”, add film-noir references with a cheeky lounge version of Gato Barbieri’s theme from Last Tango in Paris, and gain a couple of alt-rock cred points with a reworking of Frank Zappa’s “Chunga’s Revenge”.After moving to Paris (“it’s the second capital of tango music”), Makaroff became the conductor of the Club Tango Orchestra at La Coupole, the legendary brasserie. “In Argentina, the visual side of it had become clich? Even the dancers and bandoneons (the tango accordion) had taken on a corny image. We tried to avoid that, even though, musically, we immediately saw that Argentinian tango isn’t corny at all. Not only because of guys like Astor Piazzolla, but going much further back than that.” They released the album La Revancha Del Tango in 2001 and, much to their surprise, it was an international success. People thought it was music for old people – boring and rather corny.”They turned this outmoded perception on its head by adding beats and visuals to coincide with the highly charged, sensual nature of tango dance steps. Of these creative projects, the one they thought would have least success was Gotan Project: a collaboration with the Argentine guitarist Eduardo Makaroff that attempted to update the tango sound.”We were doing Brazilian hybrids and other bits and pieces where there was more opportunity to expand,” says M?r “But with Gotan Project there was no flexibility Tango had a bad image at that point.

A number of side projects emerged such as Boyz from Brazil, Stereo Action Unlimited, and Fruit of the Loop. The unifying factor was the duo’s love of Latin music and various styles of left-field electronica. He contributed to the first French Touch compilation in 1991, and worked with French electro pioneer Pierre Henry.
M?r was a well-known figure on the Swiss electro scene before moving to Paris where he met Cohen Solal (in 1995) and formed the dance imprint ¡Ya Basta!. The French producer Philippe Cohen Solal started out as a music consultant for leading European film directors such as Lars von Trier and Bertrand Tavernier in the Nineties. The horse is Lun?co and, according to Christophe H M?r, the Swiss producer, the album is named because “the mood changes from one track to another in a slightly deranged way, and because great horses belong to the tango code”

The rise of Gotan Project is a remarkable one. Gotan Project’s new album is named afterthe beloved racehorse of the Argentine cancion (a form of tango) maestro Carlos Gardel. People are going to listen to this and think: ‘Wow! I didn’t know gospel music could sound like this!’”‘The New Sound of Gospel’ is out now on Sony BMG/ Integrity Europe.

“It’s going to show there’s a united message coming from around the world. It’s going to show that the format of gospel music is ever evolving and ever changing. “It’s going to show that there’s a very small gap between America and the UK in terms of gospel music,” says Dyer. “In America, they are light years ahead of us,” says Deji, the group’s lead singer “In the UK, we’re catching on slowly.

For every additional 19 tons of steel produced during the Stalinist period, one Soviet citizen perished. During the Second World War four Western soldiers were captured for every one killed in the Pacific; one Japanese was captured to 40 killed. During a conventional bombing raid on 9 March 1945 almost 100,000 citizens of Tokyo were, in General Curtis LeMay’s words, “scorched and boiled and baked to death”. After all, as Stalin discovered, the F?r could not be trusted.Ferguson’s statistics are copious and telling. Unlike other right-wing historians, he censures Chamberlain’s attempts to appease Hitler. Ferguson maintains convincingly that Britain and France should have gone to war in 1938, when Germany was weak and Russia might have joined Czechoslovakia to form a strong eastern front. Similarly, he dismisses the notion that Churchill might have saved the British Empire by negotiating a separate peace with Hitler.

And his account of the internecine struggles between and among the great powers, mainly from the Boer War to the Korean War, reveals him at his best. His descriptions of atrocities will purge readers with pity and terror. He fixes on compelling details: no sooner had the Soviets seized Buchenwald than they used it to house their own prisoners.His judgements are usually incisive. Its further unique feature is that “the leaders of apparently civilised societies were able to unleash the most primitive instincts of their fellow citizens”.Here he is on more solid, if less original, ground. Instead of asserting that the last century saw the world’s bloodiest organised slaughter, he says “it witnessed a transformation in the kind of war waged by developed Western societies against one another”. The Second World War killed 59 million, 2.6 per cent of the world’s population; Genghis Khan, who killed 37 million, reduced it by a tenth.

He habitually butchered all the inhabitants of cities in his path – 1.6 million in Herat, about six times the number massacred during the Japanese “Rape of Nanking”.So in the last pages, Ferguson revises his grand claim. Pol Pot was responsible for two million deaths in Cambodia, but at least seven million died in King Leopold’s Belgian Congo. China’s Taiping rebellion alone annihilated more people than the First World War. Yet not only does he fail to substantiate it, but he adds a late appendix conceding that the last century was “not so uniquely bloody” after all.
As he shows in this inconsistent postscript, even with superior technology modern mass murderers could hardly match the achievements of barbarians, crusaders, colonialists and civil warriors. Most dramatically, Ferguson sets out a thesis: that the 20th century, the “age of hatred”, was “far more violent in relative as well as absolute terms than any previous era”. He makes eye-catching pronouncements but all too often they don’t bear scrutiny: he credits Mussolini, a weak dictator, with establishing “the first truly totalitarian regime”. He surveys immense swathes of territory, but his coverage is more episodic than panoramic.

This is the book of a six-part television series for Channel 4, and it has both virtues and vices of its genre. Niall Ferguson benefited from the research of many assistants, as he acknowledges; but apart from a short list of archives and a long bibliography, he provides no references. Williams’s book is a tribute not only to a remarkable couple, but to a people whose grace under pressure is hard to match anywhere in the world.Stephen Howe is a professor of history at Bristol University. Even if such an image serves only to offset the fear many feel for the rest of the continent, the Tswana have earned it. There is sadness that Seretse lived only to 59, but the wider story remains upbeat.Ruth remained beloved by and devoted to her adopted people. Botswana has prospered, with high rates of economic growth and one of Africa’s few genuine democracies. Alexander McCall Smith’s Botswanan detective stories are the latest indication that Botswanans are Britain’s favourite Africans.

It was John Cullen, who presided over the Methuen list for 30 years, who forged its connection to the theatre, beginning with Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, which he’d seen in newly liberated Paris. The list was launched by Algernon Methuen in 1908 with Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. An era of publishing history has come to an end with the sale by Methuen of its drama list to Bloomsbury’s A&C Black division for £2.35m. Making his escape, Yoemon runs in a high-kicking stamp, faster and faster The crescendo isn’t quite smooth, but it makes an impact. The role is played emphatically , with broad, strong gestures.Ebizo XI is less persuasive as the Wisteria Maiden of Fuji Musume. He’s carefully demure, his movements are exact, and he moves his neck and shoulders elegantly in swaying turns.

But the images don’t become vivid.It’s only with Kasane that this performance crosses the cultural barriers.To 11 June (0870 737 7737). Having held his shoulders and torso in a feminine droop, Kamejiro now allows his body to relax and straighten, taking up more space as he rises. The vengeful Kasane seems to grow taller as we watch.Ebizo Ichikawa XI is a forceful Yoemon, though he lacks Kamejiro’s extraordinary flow of movement. Wounded, Kasane slides down a bank, landing on her knees with her back to the audience, falling back into a despairing back-bend. Kamejiro II builds this into a single, sweeping step, the movement huge and soft. Then, as Kasane reproaching Yoemon, he loosens his hair and pulls himself upright. The voiceover for the other show, Fuji Musume (The Wisteria Maiden), explains that the accompanying song is full of witty puns: a useful footnote, but it won’t actually make you laugh.

Explanations of Kasane’s contemporary social detail don’t actually draw you into the plot. And it’s hard to get past lines such as: “Remember your adopted father, now being punished for the loss of a treasured tea canister.”Yet Kasane is gripping. The lovers meet at night, in a highly decorative landscape, with reeds and paper flowers growing by a river. Dawn arrives with the fall of a curtain, showing the river winding through fields. Kasane (Kamejiro II) and Yoemon (Ebizo XI), unable to love each other openly, plan to kill themselves.

Then a skull floats down the stream, with a sickle and a grave-marker.Yoemon recoils when he reads the marker: this was a man he killed, after having seduced his wife Worse, the victim was Kasane’s natural father. The dead man’s ghost now possesses Kasane, the wounds of his eye and leg appearing on her body. In horror, Yoemon tries to kill her.The fight and death are long, gruesome and pictorially beautiful. At moments of high drama, the musicians sing for the actors, who are free to express their emotions in dance, in grand poses and intricate gestures. A fan will outline a landscape, a sleeve suggest a pillow or a cup.

Mrs Furtw?ler says that after the war he finally recognised everything that had happened, and said to her, ‘Germans did this! Happiness is no longer possible in our life.’ That’s incredibly moving.”Furtw?ler was not the only conductor caught in the Nazi stranglehold. Controversy was especially rife over why Furtw?ler did not leave. Palmer interviewed Furtw?ler’s nonagenarian widow Elisabeth, who reveals how her husband was coerced into staying in Germany.”By 1938, Furtw?ler had had enough and he let the Berlin Philharmonic know that he intended to leave,” Palmer explains “This got back to the authorities. Fortunately those plans came to nothing, although Palmer has unearthed for the first time the actual architectural drawings.

Still, the effects of the power vice in which the Nazis soon held the festival were far-reaching, for the musicians responded to them in ways that affected their reputations for the rest of their lives and have continued to dog them after death.Toscanini, among others, refused to perform under the regime But for some, that was not the case. Within a week of the Anschluss, there was a plebiscite and 97 per cent of the population voted in favour. I interviewed many eye-witnesses of the time, including Maria von Trapp of Sound of Music fame.”The invaders had big plans for Salzburg. They intended to build a monstrous new festival theatre on the hillside across the river – “the brief was that it must be higher than the castle,” says Palmer – and a parallel building on the opposite hill as the Wehrmacht headquarters for “Ostmark”, as the Nazis * * euphemistically called Austria. But calamity was not far away.”Even English history books talk of the Nazis ‘invading’ Austria,” Palmer says “Actually, they were welcomed. Musically, it attracted the finest performers of the day, notably the Vienna Philharmonic and conductors such as Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtw?ler and Strauss himself conducting his own operas. It’s a work of genius, and it’s no accident that it’s still there.”The festival quickly became a magnet to the intellectual elite of Europe, besides the high society that still frequents it.

It really isn’t up to me to forgive or not forgive, is it?” Remarkably, in such a small city as Manhattan, Farrow says that she hasn’t once run into Allen – or his bride – since their rancorous split “It’s incredible, I know. Only you can give it up.”That said, things can be taken away and that can be painful Loss is painful,” concedes Farrow. Asked whether she has since forgiven Allen, she says: “In an instant I can’t carry any of that That’s too heavy for me. It made me understand what it is by that which cannot be taken away. The essential self that is yours and yours alone cannot be taken away. I’ve accepted that fact about myself so there are certain things – like my lost saint – that sometimes are not so lost.”And if ever anyone was in need of help, perpetual or otherwise, it was Farrow 14 years ago when faced with the devastating news that her then partner Woody Allen had fallen for her teenage adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, who would later become his wife.
“My faith has helped me through many difficult times. Mia Farrow tugs at the gold chain around her neck, revealing a pendant of Our Lady of Perpetual Help.

“My father gave it to me when I was 12 and I never take it off He died five years later,” she says. “If you’re brought up a Catholic and you’ve had 13 years of convent education with nuns, there’s no way you ever get out from under that. In the First, there was an eery luminosity in the soft string passages that frame the “Land of Gloom” second movement, while the Scherzo chattered happily on.Noseda, who must have heard many Italian street-singers in his time, added an irresistible sparkle to the lyrical Italianate third-movement waltz of the Fifth, and its jubilant march theme of the finale crackled with energy.After an unsettlingly long pause between the maniacally exhilarating ending of the third movement of the Sixth and its finale, the music died away into an eternity not of serenity but of grave emptiness.”To live is not now possible,” the listener might conclude, although it is now commonly agreed that, whatever the symphony might appear to be saying, suicide was far from the composer’s mind And yet, within days of the premiere, he was dead.. We have become used to orchestras that engage with the audience, but the Mariinsky musicians looked as if they couldn’t wait to crawl back into the anonymity of the pit.In its two concerts, featuring symphonies Nos 1 and 5 and Nos 2 and 6, respectively, the BBC Philharmonic made a strong case even for the earlier works, particularly the folk-inspired Second, Little Russian. The players of the Mariinsky Orchestra, which opened the cycle, may have been tired after their short but packed British residency in Gateshead and Birmingham. Or maybe Manchester was treated to the deputies who form part of the Mariinsky package, because although the strings still had a disciplined, silky sheen, the winds sounded jaded, and the oboe melody in the second movement of the Fourth Symphony was distorted as the player pointed the bell of his instrument upwards.
The Third Symphony has plenty of slack episodes and a bombastic finale that not even Noseda could quite disguise. But the Fourth was a different matter, evolving with poetry as well as power from the despair of the ominous opening brass fanfares to its frenzied, triumphant ending.However, the orchestra seems old-fashioned in the most negative sense, some of the players glumly packing away their instruments as the conductor was still acknowledging applause.

The six symphonies are mixed in mood – from the relative calm of the first, Winter Daydreams, to the bleak desolation of the sixth, the Path?que – and the first three, while lacking neither verve nor melodies, contain less of the psychological baggage, and momentum, of the later works. Tchaikovsky was the hero of a special series of concerts given by the Mariinsky (Kirov) Theatre Orchestra and the BBC Philharmonic in the Bridgewater Hall. The dynamic Italian Gianandrea Noseda is both principal guest conductor of the Russian orchestra and principal conductor of the BBC PO, and his recent Queen of Spades in Manchester had already proved him an accomplished interpreter of Tchaikovsky’s music. But as he observes in “Road to No Regret”, “If you never play your cards, you’ll never lose the bet” – and occasionally, as in the gorgeous, fluid jazz guitar of “Locked”, he comes up trumps

DOWNLOAD THIS: ‘Locked’, ‘Snow in Sun’, ‘No Fine Lines’. Several tracks betray the whimsical experimentalism of the home-studio dilettante, notably “Snow In Sun” and “Mrs Hughes”, both of which slip from multi-tracked Wilsonian vocal sections into funky, Sly Stoney grooves that don’t quite fit comfortably together. Seven years on, the hip-hop influence that drove Anomie & Bonhomie has largely disappeared from Green Gartside’s latest Scritti Politti set, reduced to token mentions of “dollar dollar bill” in “Boom Boom Bap”.

But without their guiding spirit, White Bread, Black Beer lacks focus, ranging across a breadth of styles from the languid agnostic boogie of “After Six” – sort of a negative image of “Spirit In The Sky” – and the psychedelic stomp of “Dr Abernathy”, to the Eno-esque minimal keyboard progression of “No Fine Lines”, in which Gartside perhaps offers a rationale of sorts for his various diversions: “There are no fine lines/ Or there are more than I can draw”. DOWNLOAD THIS: ‘I Count the Tears’, ‘In the Middle of It All’, ‘Another Man Done Gone’, ‘Soul of a Man’. Producer Scott Billington’s part in the album should be acknowledged: apart from the shlocky version of Stevie Wonder’s “Shelter in the Rain”, his arrangements and song selection are perfectly devised to bring out the best qualities of Thomas’s voice, which is every bit as moving here as it was 40 years ago: truly, time is on her side. It’s all a matter of character rather than technique, Thomas’s faith in her own abilities enabling her to effortlessly convey the sincerity so lacking in most modern “soul” music.