Srinavasa Ramanujan, whose ideas underpin the internet revolution, was a poor Indian college dropout who nearly starved to death before he ended up at Cambridge in the early 1900s. The real Dallas, of course, is mortified.”The thought of Dallas being made in Toronto is not a good idea,” said Dallas’s Mayor, Laura Miller, last week. But Luketic is being tempted by financial breaks in places other than Dallas, including Canada, Florida and Louisiana. It was much the same story in Britain.
The show, which offered addicts a weekly fix of the back-biting shenanigans of the Ewing oil clan, headed by JR and his booze-soaked wife, Sue-Ellen, is also remembered as the first soap opera to make it in to the primetime schedules.But Hollywood has now overcome its shyness in remaking the iconic soap, it would seem.
According to Daily Variety, work is almost complete on finding a cast, although no contracts are yet signed Jennifer Lopez is apparently on tap to play Sue-Ellen. Before you declare the project doomed, consider the other star names that have also allegedly been lined up: John Travolta, Luke Wilson and Shirley MacLaine.Travolta will be our new JR. MacLaine will be the matriarch of the family, Miss Ellie Ewing, while Wilson has been asked to step up as JR’s slightly dim brother, Bobby. And remember the scheming daughter, Lucy? It seems they want Lindsay Lohan for that part.Responsible for all of this is 20th Century Fox and the Australian director Robert Luketic, who brought us the Legally Blonde films He wants to start shooting this October. The episode remains the second most-watched television event ever in the US after the last broadcast of Mash. That shadow on the horizon? It’s JR Ewing in his Texas-sized, 10-gallon-hat. The wonder, really, is that Dallas, which held millions of us hostage in our living rooms one night a week from 1978 until 1991, has never made it to the cineplex before Dallas was no ordinary soap.
On 21 March 1980, 82 million Americans tuned in to find out who had fired a gun at JR the season before.”Who Shot JR?” became a pop slogan of its time. DOWNLOAD THIS: ‘Stops’, ‘The Sky Was Pink’, ‘You Are Here’. If you can still hum the theme music to Dallas, then prepare for thrilling news. Long-gestating plans to turn the iconic 1980s television soap into a full-screen blockbuster are close to becoming a reality.
In general, Fake’s melodic narratives are as flat and unchanging as his native Norfolk landscape, their simple figures repeated over and over with no real development, occasionally fattened with overlaid harmony lines, but never really shifting from their starting point. Some are certainly pleasant – “Stops” employs engaging loops of breathy white noise and thumb-piano keyboard tones, and “The Sky Was Pink” sounds like Can at their most expansive, its keening melody line soaring and dipping over melancholy chords – but others are sabotaged by the tinny, primitive drum-machine sounds and lo-fi recording. The overall mood is one of aimless meandering leading nowhere in particular, a sort of casual musical daydream in need of a little discipline, or at least more melodic development. The closest he comes is probably “You Are Here”, which has the dainty touch of the latter, but without the wordless vocals or the symphonic tendencies. Already garlanded with somewhat intemperate praise by club-scene critics lacking a proper sense of perspective, laptop synthesist Nathan Fake’s debut has a certain fuzzy charm, but lacks the depth to bear out comparisons to the likes of Boards Of Canada and Sigur Ros. Alongside these weepies and warnings is a strain of more carefree, up-tempo country-rock, from the perky polka “Years Pass By” to the Burrito-esque hillbilly rocker “Sweetest Love”. DOWNLOAD THIS: ‘Heart Like Mine’, ‘She Left Love’, ‘Boy Got Killed in Town’, ‘Sweetest Love’.
They have an instinctive grasp of the haunted, yearning quality and lonesome-hearted melodies that animate sad songs such as “Never The Same” and “She Left Love”, while “Boy Got Killed in Town” has a whiskery, ominous feel akin to one of The Handsome Family’s parables Tragic, but catchy. The jokey self-deprecation of the cover photo of kids playing at cowboys, and the suburban sunset on the reverse, actually sells the band’s music short: there’s plenty of true country soul in a song such as “Heart Like Mine”, where the bluegrass fiddle, mandolin and banjo plunk with the sad amiability of authentic mountain music, while the brothers’ husky, enervated harmonies work their enigmatic charm. Virtually full-time residents at London’s Borderline club, this west-London combo, fronted by twins Sam and Jake Barker, may be if not the most accomplished then surely the most evocative British exponent of neo-traditionalist Americana. Here, the subtly inflected vivacity of Marianne Thorsen’s violin, the husky humour and warmth of Lawrence Power’s viola, and the dramatic definition of Kate Gould’s cello, their perfection of intonation and ensemble, and a continuing sense of unexpectedness in a score they must, by now, have played a hundred times, were a joy.. Sounding much of the time like the next step on from late Shostakovich, its sustained gravity is impressive, though not even the intense concentration of the Leopolds could quite preclude the suspicion that it would be stronger still for the loss of five or 10 minutes.But these players went on to surpass themselves in Beethoven’s String Trio in G.