FILM EVENT
The best scares on screens this Halloween
Film-plus-live-music events are this season’s must-have, it seems. The perennial Chills In The Chapel, at Islington’s Union Chapel, has been doing this for a while. This year it brings electronic composer and John Carpenter collaborator Alan Howarth to preside over doomful synth accompaniment to Escape From New York (Friday), and a medley of clips from the Halloween franchise (31 October). Claudio Simonetti’s Goblin perform their score to a screening of giallo classic Profondo Rosso live for the climax of Sheffield’s gruesomely varied Celluloid Screams horror festival this Sunday. Goblin are also backing Profondo Rosso in Manchester (1 November), as well as Dawn Of The Dead in Cardiff (Wednesday) and Birmingham (Thursday). Inverness’s Eden Court will be live-scoring Häxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages as part of its Screamathon.
If horror marathons are more your thing, there are options for that, too. Frightfest has that rarest of things, a Halloween daytime event at the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square, with six new titles, including 1970s-set comedy Lazer Team (from the people who brought you Turbo Kid) and the world premiere of Belly Of The Bulldog, from Nick Gillespie. The PCC also has an all-nighter of horror classics on Halloween proper, as does Notting Hill’s Electric Cinema. On Halloween night, Barrow’s Signal Cinema has a double bill of John Carpenter’s 70s classic Halloween and the supremely scary It Follows in the abandoned building next door. SR
The rest of this fortnight’s Halloween film events
MUSIC
Randy Newman
(London, Dublin, Glasgow)
Clearly not a man with a fragile ego, Randy Newman seems as happy out of the spotlight as under it. In the 1960s, he developed a reputation for writing many-layered but strangely accessible songs for others (a high point is 1970’s terrific album with Harry Nilsson, Nilsson Sings Newman). Later in the 70s, he joined that decade’s movement towards writer-performers, fronting his own wry and melodic compositions and becoming the Elton John for people who like to read. These days, Newman manages both positions in tandem, not only making his customarily succinct LPs for a grateful but selective audience, but also operating as a film soundtrack artist, most successfully for the Toy Story franchise. Satisfying both Newman’s urge to experiment and his benign classicism, his situation is a lesson in having the best of both worlds. JR
The rest of this week’s best live music
COMEDY
Harry Enfield & Paul Whitehouse
(Plymouth, Oxford, Cardiff, Bournemouth, Sheffield, Bristol)
It’s an odd position that Harry and Paul have found themselves in: too unorthodox for the comfy status of BBC family favourites, but too familiar to be championed by the alternative crowd. Nevertheless, it’s time to applaud their 30-year commitment to creating top-quality character comedy. The fact that some disdain them for “catchphrase humour” is a testament to how durable their ideas are. Furthermore, where many of their 1980s peers have gone on to rake in the cash from documentaries and “proper acting”, these two continue to bash out awkwardly, sometimes ornery, un-PC but constantly fresh and funny sketch comedy. This highly unexpected live tour allows us all to pay tribute. JK
The rest of this week’s best live comedy
FILM
Listen To Me Marlon
The fact that Marlon Brando left hundreds of hours of candid audio recordings is revelation enough, but they’re set to images from his movies and public appearances with such skill and care here it’s as if we’re inside Brando’s head. And the Brando that’s revealed is equally surprising: lyrical, humble, insightful, conflicted. It’s as close to any movie star you’ll get – especially a dead one. SR
The rest of this week’s film releases
CLUBS
The Great British Trance Off
(Liverpool, London)
The madeleines of jungle and UK garage have been scoffed, and millennials are turning to another sound for a nostalgia rush: trance. It was as suburban white as UKG was urban black, and no Breezer-stained Saxo in Hemel Hempstead went unmolested by its charms. Now it’s due a revival, though it never really went away; its pleasures were mashed into bass wobble to create EDM, with cannier stars, including Armin van Buuren, going along for the ride. Its latest proponent is Evian Christ, who’s reclaiming it as the weird, unprecedentedly euphoric sound that it is (tongue somewhat lodged in cheek). He has brought together fellow trance fashionistas Venus X, Total Freedom and Lorenzo Senni (who picked out some of his favourite tracks for us this week) for this brief jaunt, reminding us that Paul van Dyk’s chart-topper For An Angel still works. BBT
The rest of the week’s best clubs
TV
Jekyll And Hyde
(Sunday, 6.30pm, ITV)
If you’re too young for Sherlock, then this reboot of another Victorian classic will serve you well. Robert Jekyll, a young doctor who resides with his adoptive family in India, is capable of nasty mood swings, and great strength, if his “condition” is untended. News reaches London of this remarkable creature, and Robert finds himself in the middle of a supernatural war between the Tenebrae (led by the magnificently crackers Captain Dance) and government official Mr Bulstrode (Richard E Grant). Good fun. JR
EXHIBITIONS
Margaret Harrison
(Middlesbrough MIMA, to 24 January)
Margaret Harrison pulls no punches but packs a disarming laugh. She attained notoriety in 1971 when her Motif Editions gallery show (recognised at the time as London’s first one-woman feminist art exhibition) was closed down after just one day by police whose sensitive sensibilities were offended by her drawing of Hugh Hefner dolled up as a bunny girl. Harrison has been up to subversive and far from subtle mischief ever since. Here’s Captain America with his bulging bits crammed uncomfortably into Wonder Woman’s knee-high boots. A pair of scissors, a hammer and an electric kettle are painted as evidences of domestic violence. Also, Harrison brings home the history of women’s political protest, as her sculptural reproduction of a Greenham Common fence features corrugated iron, barbed wire, a frying pan, family snaps and a teddy bear. RC
The rest of this week’s best exhibitions
THEATRE
Husbands & Sons
(National Theatre:, London, Tuesday to 10 February)
A welcome return to the stage for Anne-Marie Duff – currently in the BBC crime drama From Darkness and the film Suffragette – for a bit of earthy, working-class DH Lawrence. Husbands & Sons may sound like an existing Lawrence novel but is an amalgamation of three of his best plays: The Daughter-In-Law, A Collier’s Friday Night and The Widowing Of Mrs Holroyd. Adapted by the National’s deputy artistic director Ben Power, it will play in three separate houses on stage, and during the interval the audience will move seats to see the action from another perspective. It’s directed by Marianne Elliott (The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time), who also directed Duff in the award-winning National Theatre production of Saint Joan. MC
The rest of this week’s best new theatre
DANCE
Hussein Chalayan: Gravity Fatigue
(Sadler’s Wells, London, Wednesday to 31 October)
Celebrated fashion designer Hussein Chalayan has already had some connection with the world of dance, creating costumes for Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Faun and Michael Clark’s current/SEE. Now he is appearing in the Wells’s new season as author of his own work. While Damien Jalet is credited as the choreographer, Chalayan initiated the concept, narrative and movement style, as well as its visual imagery and themes of migration, displacement and freedom, in a production made up of 13 dancers, witty set design and a wardrobe of more than 100 costumes. Judith Mackrell
The rest of this week’s best dance
TALKS
Patti Smith
(Emmanuel Centre, London, Wednesay)
An evening with Patti Smith is likely to be unpredictable. At a recent reading in Illinois, she cried when an audience member returned a bag of keepsakes that were stolen from her tour van 40 years ago; she presented a birthday cake to the Dalai Lama at this year’s Glastonbury; and she regularly yells onstage about freeing the world. Time hasn’t softened the punk poet’s radical spirit, but her writing reveals a more reflective, impressionistic side. Her award-winning 2010 memoir Just Kids detailed how she and her photographer companion Robert Mapplethorpe found their way to fame in 1970s New York, its depiction of bohemia idealistically underpinned by bittersweet loss. Tonight she will be talking about its follow-up M Train, this time heavy with solitude as she charts her artistic discovery across various continents, visiting the graves of her heroes, such as Rimbaud and Plath, and peppered with memories of her late husband Fred “Sonic” Smith. She is in conversation with novelist Andrew O’Hagan for this Guardian Live event, who will hopefully have the tissues on hand. KH
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