Arts Reviews

How do you measure a truly awful movie? Joe Queenan explains: To qualify as one of the worst films of all time, several strict requirements must be met. For starters, a truly awful movie must have started out with some expectation of not being awful. That is why making a horrific, cheapo motion picture that stars Hilton or Jessica Simpson is not really much of an accomplishment. Did anyone seriously expect a film called The Hottie and The Nottie not to suck? Two, an authentically bad movie has to be famous; it can’t simply be an obscure student film about a boy who eats live rodents to impress dead girls.

Susan Moore on how the Americans have become net sellers of works of art Junius Spencer Morgan caused a sensation in 1876 when he paid the staggering sum of £10,100 — more than the National Gallery of London’s annual purchase grant — for Gainsborough’s celebrated portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Since then a seemingly interminable line of nouveaux-riches American ‘Despoilers’ has relieved the impecunious (and often only too willing) European aristocracy of the art treasures their ancestors had amassed over the centuries. The phenomenon prompted the foundation of the National Art Collections Fund in Britain in 1903 to help save such treasures for the nation, and was subtly dissected

The ten worst Irish accents in cinema history? Check ’em out here. Amazingly, Tom Cruise doesn’t take the top spot… So, yeah, Happy St Patrick’s Day. Time then, to dust off this unnecessarily dyspeptic take from a few years ago: When I was a student in Dublin we scoffed at the American celebration of St. Patrick, finding something preposterous in the green beer, the search for any connection, no matter how tenuous, to Ireland, the misty sentiment of it all that seemed so at odds with the Ireland we knew and actually lived in. Who were these people dressed as Leprechauns and why were they dressed that way? This Hibernian

Falstaff WNO Paradise Moscow Royal Academy of Music Verdi’s last opera Falstaff is also for many people his greatest. I went to see it in Cardiff this week, having heard Radio Three’s broadcast of his previous opera Otello from the New York Met a couple of evenings before. Otello I found, as I always do in a good performance, and that was, thanks to Semyon Bychkov’s conducting, an outstanding one, a work which puts me into a greater state of agony about the limitless human capacity for self-torment than almost any other. Falstaff, also admirably performed, left me, as again it nearly always does, impressed by its brilliance but otherwise

I’m indebted to an old college buddy for alerting me to this description of David Irving’s recent appearance on Irish TV’s venerable The Late, Late Show. As the programme’s website put it (emphasis added): In 2006 David Irving was jailed for denying the holocaust ever happened. Despite being branded an anti-semitic, active holocaust denier in a court of law Irving continues to offer his own unique perspective on history, particularly the history of the Second World War. Well, yes, particularly the Second World War indeed. I can understand why undergraduate debating societies would – mistakenly in my view – chase public attention by inviting Irving to appear, but why should