Sonic Highways (album) **

In an interview with Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, he said ‘after being in a band for 20 years, the most important thing is that you continue to challenge yourself and make the process different…’ Sonic Highways consists of eight tracks recorded in eight cities with a documentary series looking into the process that leads to the creation of the new material, but it's surprising just how ordinary and familiar the new album sounds. Despite the fact we're told that there is a rich musical and historical subtext behind these songs, it appears that none of the cultural sense of place has rubbed off on the music.  Opener, ‘Something for Nothing’,  is indicative of the album’s problem; it's a loud, brash, distinctively Foo Fighters sounding song, demonstrating none of the reinvention the band claim to be striving for.

Although ‘Congregation’ has a kind-of country inspired lead guitar part and the riffing of ‘In the Clear’ has some brass band inflected ideas so we know that "this one’s the New Orleans song!” – the band simply cannot convey their inspiration in a creatively interesting way. However, the album is not entirely without moments of intrigue; ‘Outside’ - which features playing from Eagles’ guitarist Joe Walsh - has an atmospheric sense of space  and sparseness amidst the walls of guitar and drums and the same can be said of the tough, broken up and lacerating, ‘The Feast and the Famine.’

Although the concept of ‘Sonic Highways’ should have led Foo Fighters to different places, their previous effort, ‘Wasting Light’, achieved far greater results from recording in the seclusion of Dave Grohl’s garage. 

Gangster Squad ***

Set in late 1940s LA and apparently “inspired by a true story”, Gangster Squad is about an undercover team of police officers conducting an off-the-record operation to take down crime overlord Mickey Cohen. Josh Brolin plays straight-arrow Sergeant O’Mara, assigned the job of assembling a group of cops daring enough to take on Cohen - played in scenery chewing fashion by Sean Penn.

Crime literature at its best has substance; whether it’s in thematic ideas such as deception and moral duplicity, corruption in police departments or within Raymond Chandler’s introspective and alienated protagonist Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep .The tough, often convoluted ambiguity of the crime genre can be enticing. The problem with Gangster Squad is that it doesn't resemble either a generic thriller or a crime drama because there is no real suspense or substance.  It is, for all intents and purposes, a pretty efficient beating-up-the-bad-guys movie. There is something slickly enjoyable and totally empty about Ruben Fleischer’s ostentatiously designed picture which shares far more with Ocean’s Eleven than it does with L.A. Confidential.

Within the pulchritude of its glistening all-star cast and the intervals of explosive violence – which are someway between a live-action Tom & Jerry and Itchy & Scratchy – Giovanni Ribisi’s character hints speciously at a possible subtext; ‘can you remind me of the difference between us and them? Because at this point I can’t tell anymore…’ I believed Gangster Squad when it was a daft, flashy action movie – less so when it was pretending to have anything below its shimmering surface.

Shame Steve McQueen’s second picture is a brutally compelling insight into sex addiction and depersonalisation, foregrounded by an extraordinary performance from Michael Fassbender. *****

Michael Fassbender plays Brandon, an attractive thirty-something executive living in New York, who is established from the outset as suffering from sex addiction. In the beginning Brandon confines his compulsions to porn, one-night stands and prostitution within a prison of routines – although his boss may  be starting to see into his insalubrious lifestyle declaring that his computer ‘hard-drive is filthy’. Everything begins to change when Brandon’s estranged and dysfunctional sister Sissy(Carey Mulligan) turns up at his flat to stay and causes his destructive lifestyle to unravel.

Although Shame deals with a central character who is addicted to sex, this is not an ‘issues’ movie; sex addiction is not the subject matter of the film – Shame is more a bleak insight into a dehumanised modern world.  With thematic links to his first picture, Hunger(2008), Steve McQueen again focuses on the pain, suffering, incarceration and endurance of the human body, but despite the amount of flesh on show, Shame’s  tortured antihero is tormented far more by what resides beneath the surface. Brandon appears to be following a path reminiscent of Freud’s “death drive” where his addiction to sex is paving the way closer and closer towards the death and destruction of the organic self in favour of something completely inorganic and inhuman. Conflating sex and death also invokes la petite mort or "the little death", an idea describing a post-orgasmic death-like torpor that seems to be reflected in the central character's complete physical and mental lassitude and apathy towards his hollowed out environment. Ultimately this loss of humanity is expressed through the loss of intimacy that is explored devastatingly as Brandon’s porn addiction numbs away his ability to interact with the real world. One particularly effective thread sees Brandon attempting to form a relationship with a woman he seems to be developing genuine feelings for, but one with whom he is unable to perform with sexually because his emotions and sex are so far removed from one another. McQueen masterfully conveys Brandon’s shame and embarrassment through shooting  bleakly detached and clinically lit environments where the central character is often stooped in a thanatosis-like state.

Shame is comprised of an effervescent dialogue of images where speech is often substituted for raw expression. Brandon catches the eye of a young woman in the carriage of the New York subway and their sexual attraction is played out as a conversation of gestures and minute facial expressions that, as an audience member, is both an intensely voyeuristic experience and perversely intoxicating to watch. The same can be said of a scene where Sissy sings New York, New York at a bar in its entirety which causes Brandon to be moved in a way that seems so genuine, personal and private that it's almost too powerful to watch; but it is the extraordinarily understated nature of Fassbender’s riveting performance that always draws you in to the fractured disposition of his character, despite how alienated he often seems to be.

Runner Runner **

This empty-headed gambling thriller stars Justin Timberlake as Richie Furst, a student at Princeton funding his master’s degree  by promoting an online gambling site to students. However, after losing all his money playing online poker, Richie attempts to track down Ivan Block(Ben Affleck) who owns the lucrative gambling  empire  in Costa Rica, but Furst is quickly becomes seduced into Block’s decadent lifestyle. It aspires to be Wall Street except its ‘money corrupts’ subject matter is so vague and limp that all it ends up saying is that online gambling is ‘really contemporary’ .  Furthermore it seems to be a rip off of the similarly dumb, but far more entertaining film  21, which starred Jim Sturgess as a College student trying to pay off his tuition by counting cards in casinos. Whereas that film had Kevin Spacey as the slimy antihero, Runner Runner gives us a soggy Ben Affleck performance and an utterly ludicrous - but sometimes watchable - generic thriller narrative.