‘It needs to be loud’: Jozef Van Wissem’s one-man mission to make the lute rock again

The Dutch ex-punk and Jim Jarmusch bandmate talks about his passion to free up a hidebound repertoire and make its strings ‘a real pop instrument’ Nobody can accuse Jozef Van Wissem of doing things by halves. The musician, very likely the world’s most notorious contemporary lutenist, owns a sonic arsenal of eight of the string instruments: some bespoke, and all boasting remarkable features. With them he has created a huge body of work, nearly 50 titles to date. Another album, This Is My Blood is released this May. Each Easter, Van Wissem settles down to compose a new record. He finds the peace of Warsaw, where everyone has “gone away for the holidays”, more amenable for work than “noisy” Rotterdam, where he also has a flat. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/lIktvjD via IFTTT

Streaming: Roald Dahls Matilda the Musical and the best adaptations of classic childrens books

The latest all-singing version of Matilda, now on Netflix, joins an impressive library of thoughtful film versions of seminal kids’ books, from Paddington to Kes

The common wisdom that “the book is usually better than the film” is as true of children’s literature as of its adult counterpart: cinema is stacked with adaptations of children’s classics that may be perfectly proficient, but haven’t the inspired individuality of the works at their source.

Devotees of Roald Dahl have learned this a lot over the years. His offbeat humour and offhand storytelling style, so irresistible to kids, rarely translates all the way to screen — it’s thwarted such titans as Steven Spielberg, who whiffed with The BFG (Netflix), though Wes Anderson’s droll Fantastic Mr Fox succeeded by inventing eccentricities of its own. Best of all, Nicolas Roeg’s very adult sense of the macabre proved a delicious fit for The Witches (Amazon Prime), notwithstanding a simplified, studio-mandated happy ending.

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