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Showing posts from November, 2018

The Weeknd kicks off first Asia tour in Hong Kong with seamless set

Leading Canadian R&B artist The Weeknd kicked off his first Asia tour on Friday with a live show in Hong Kong, showing off his amazing vocal skills before an enthusiastic but often lacklustre crowd. Born Abel Tesfaye, the singer-songwriter performed a polished set of just under 90 minutes made up of numbers from three of his award-winning albums: Starboy, My Dear Melancholy and Beauty Behind the Madness. He moved seamlessly from one song to the other, cramming in as many as possible,... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2ACORO8

Revisiting Bernardo Bertolucci’s Artistic Ambitions, and Abuses, in “Last Tango in Paris”

Richard Brody on Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris,” in which the director, who died this week, asked more of his actors, especially of Maria Schneider, than any filmmaker should ever expect or even want them to give. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2Q3cN7H

Minister blocks export of £3.4m JMW Turner painting

Walton Bridges, thought to be from 1806, at risk of leaving UK unless a buyer can be found The government has temporarily blocked the export of a JMW Turner painting while a buyer is sought to keep it in the UK. Walton Bridges, an oil on canvas thought to have been painted in 1806, was sold at auction in July for £3.4m. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2FQ98pe

Robert Morris, pioneering minimalist sculptor, dies aged 87

The radical, whose work exhilarated – and injured – the public, was a transformative figure in modern art The sculptor Robert Morris , one of the founders of minimalism, has died at the age of 87. Known for his controversial works, Morris was a key figure in the radical simplification of art that emerged in the 1960s alongside artists such as Donald Judd , Anne Truitt and Dan Flavin . Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2DUGlNL

Peanut butter on toast and digital installations in Chernobyl – the week in art

The V&A reopens its Cast Courts, Turner prize nominees are considered and Theseus slays the Minotaur – all in our weekly dispatch Martin Creed: Toast Toast and peanut butter are among the elements in Creed’s latest proof of his equation that the whole world + the work = the whole world. • Hauser and Wirth, London , from 30 November until 9 February. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2SohmGx

Meet Joe Alwyn: Taylor Swift’s boyfriend, face of Prada, and Oscar hopeful

Merely Taylor Swift’s hot new boyfriend, he is not. British actor Joe Alwyn, 27, has been trending upwards in Hollywood of late, and is set to break out in a big way this Oscar season with several pivotal new roles. So what should you know about the English star? We’ve got you covered. Film review: Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk The currently bearded, London-born actor is the son of a documentary filmmaker father and a psychotherapist mother. Soon after graduating from the... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2SjImXy

Haruki Murakami and James Frey lead all-male shortlist for bad sex award

Annual prize intended to show up the worst sexual description in fiction singles out some famous names for a second time – but no women Bad sex award 2018: the contenders in quotes Female authors have managed to avoid including bad sex scenes in their novels this year – at least according to the Literary Review, which has announced an all-male shortlist for that least-coveted of literary prizes, the Bad sex in fiction award. Haruki Murakami, often named as a contender for the Nobel prize, makes the cut for passages from his latest novel Killing Commendatore in which impossible amounts of semen are ejaculated by the protagonist. The controversial US novelist James Frey, who was exposed for inventing parts of his memoir A Million Little Pieces, was selected for a scene in his novel Katerina described by judges as “almost like wish fulfilment”. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2SjVU5h

How free is free love? How polyamory lost its allure

Why do we embrace monogamy over sexual experimentation? Artists and writers who tried more radical arrangements have a lot to teach us, writes Lara Feigel In 1919 the German Dada artist Raoul Hausmann dismissed marriage as “the projection of rape into law”. It’s a statement that relishes its own violence: he is limbering up to fight marriage to the death. A strange mixture of dandy, wild man, provocateur and social engineer, Hausmann believed that the socialist revolution the Dadaists sought couldn’t be attained without a corresponding sexual revolution. And he lived as he preached. He was married, but was also in a four-year relationship with fellow artist Hannah Höch . Hausmann and Höch form one of the couples in the Barbican’s Modern Couples exhibition, which shows the freewheeling experimentation of interwar art to be inseparable from even more extravagant experiments in sexuality and coupledom. The exhibition includes several of the partly whimsical, partly grim collages Höch m

Martin Creed: Toast review – plenty to chew on in show of surprises

Hauser & Wirth, London From singers accompanied by dancing socks to filmed vignettes of people opening their mouths to reveal masticated food, Creed’s exhibition is absorbing, moving and funny Lily Cole looks straight at the camera as it homes in. Parting her lips as if to speak, she opens her mouth, in close-up. I hope that isn’t her tongue in there. The colour is worrying. I think it is masticated fruit, orange perhaps. When the forensic psychiatrist Estela Welldon opens her mouth, there’s some other kind of goo in there – gum or marshmallow or maybe toffee. Everyone in these filmed vignettes, including the artist’s mother and his partner and various friends,­ has been chewing on something. But not on the slice of peanut butter on toast that revolves seductively on a turntable elsewhere on the room, and which gives Martin Creed’s latest exhibition its title, Toast. The toast is patinated bronze, the topping a generous slather of gold. Related: Martin Creed: 'I keep hair

The six best new Christmas albums, from Eric Clapton to John Legend

The spirit of inspiration runs stronger than usual through this year’s batch of Christmas albums, with fresh melodies and lyrics in some of the best. Everyone from former Beach Boy Mike Love to Star Trek actor William Shatner is getting into the festive spirit. Here’s why Melania Trump’s blood-red Christmas trees are creeping you out Here are six of the best new Christmas albums to give a spin this season. Eric Clapton – Happy Xmas For “Happy Xmas” of course... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2FLdk9A

Margaret Atwood is right to have the last word on The Handmaid’s Tale | Stephanie Merritt

News of a sequel has divided fans, but better this than letting the TV adaptation decide Offred’s fate Praise be! The news that Margaret Atwood is to write a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale has been greeted enthusiastically by fans, to judge by the response on Twitter, where the prize for most obvious gag must go to Stephen Colbert , who said: “Margaret Atwood is writing a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, and Donald Trump is almost finished with the prequel.” Related: Margaret Atwood announces The Handmaid's Tale sequel, The Testaments Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Q95KdW

This week’s best home entertainment: from The Marvelous Mrs Maisel to Fortitude

Rachel Brosnahan’s 1950s standup decamps to Paris, while Sky Atlantic’s savage Scandi-crime drama returns for a final run After hoovering up every award going with its first series, this Rachel Brosnahan-starring comedy-drama about a 1950s housewife-turned-fledgling standup returns with lofty expectations to meet. Thankfully, advance word suggests it’s as funny and pointed as ever, as Midge Maisel decamps to Paris looking to succeed in an overwhelmingly blokey industry. From Wednesday 5 December, Amazon Prime Video Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2BGMlI7

As much about eating as cooking: Anna Jones on Laurie Colwin | The Cook’s Cook

Laurie Colwin liberated home cooks with stories and recipes full of wit, warmth, humour and a love of good food I came to American food writer Laurie Colwin’s book Home Cooking quite late on. She wrote it in 1987, but her I only heard about as recently as five years ago. A group of friends were getting together to cook a dinner, each making a dish from one of her cookbooks. I felt a bit embarrassed: these weren’t for the most part “food friends”, and I thought, “Hold on a second, I’m a cookbook writer and I’ve never heard of her”. The friend who had arranged the dinner was American, and I think her mother had had Laurie’s books kicking about at home, and in the end she ended up cooking most of the dinner and asked us just to bring salads. So having ordered the books and hurriedly read the introduction to Home Cooking, I decided to go with something very, very simple – a little gem salad with soft herbs and vinaigrette. That’s what Laurie is all about. She celebrates the simple, whic

Starbucks blocks access to porn websites from 2019

Starbucks blocks access to porn websites from 2019 Making coffee shops safer, or too little too latte? 30 Nov 2018 News from Life & Culture https://ift.tt/2BKdydf

The most wonderful slime of the year: Tate Britain's giant Christmas slugs

London gallery to light up season with anarchic artist’s Attenborough-inspired work It’s time to start thinking of your Christmas decorations and how it might finally be time to celebrate the slimy mating ritual of a leopard slug. No? Then Tate Britain hopes you might visit its gallery instead after unveiling its annual commission to mark the season. In previous years that has involved Christmas trees by artists including Tracey Emin and Cornelia Parker. Last year, Alan Kane festooned the front of the building with Christmas lights involving Santa and reindeer. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2BH7ySq

Fish and chips: You can now get Alexa in a wall-mounted Big Mouth Billy Bass

You can now get Alexa in a wall-mounted Big Mouth Billy Bass Drop the bass 30 Nov 2018 News from Life & Culture https://ift.tt/2AKFkoj

'The safe word is unicorn': can you stomach Magic Mike Live?

Channing Tatum brings his strip show and self-help rally to London, offering consumerist feminism of the purest form Magic Mike is a 2012 film about male strippers, based on the early life of its star Channing Tatum . It is a tale of loss, directed by Steven Soderbergh, and now, as if to entirely miss the point of itself, it is a live strip show in Las Vegas and London. There is nothing about loss here. I waited for it, but it didn’t come. Perhaps stripping, by itself, is the wrong form to describe loss of soul? There is opportunity here for women and they know it. Groups of women, some old but mostly young, sit waiting with cocktails the size of cauldrons. Their screams are barely suppressed. Because it’s their turn now – this is a form of revenge. There is opportunity too for men, but of a different kind. Tickets are selling on resale websites for £675, but I don’t know what the dancers are paid. You’re worth what you can prise out of their purses, Tatum is told in the film by Mat

Goldilocks and the Three Bears review – a turbocharged panto with pizzazz

Theatre Royal, Newcastle Placing the story in the context of two rival circuses, Michael Harrison’s show boasts jugglers, skaters and motorcyclists If you want the secret behind the UK’s fastest-selling panto, look no further than Danny Adams. For the past 14 years, the rubber-legged entertainer has worked tirelessly with his father, Clive Webb, to generate a phenomenal north-east success . As Danny the Clown in this year’s turbocharged offering, he hits the stage with a determination to give every last person a good time and manages to make a big room feel small. His appeal is not so much in being witty or cute as in his tornado-like energy. Sure, he can handle a gag and his cheeky-chappy grin is infectious, but it’s his athletic level of commitment that wins you over. No routine is complete without him bounding into the auditorium or legging it across the stage, coyly pirouetting en route. Even when his schoolboy humour teeters towards the smutty, he has too much charm and hyperact

Wilco's Jeff Tweedy on addiction, obsession and politics: 'White men are very fragile'

Over 30 years, Tweedy has battled drugs, alcohol and in-fighting to become one of the US’s most revered musicians. Now he has turned his experiences into a memoir and a solo album The Wilco loft is situated in a broad, pale-bricked warehouse, repurposed into offices for tech companies and counselling services in a quiet corner of Chicago. The band that lends its name to the site occupy two floors, their vast space housing a recording studio and a rehearsal area, filled with all the paraphernalia and kitsch that accompany a career spanning nearly 25 years. It is dark, curious and smells of wood and cleaning fluid. There are instruments everywhere: rack upon rack of guitars and pianos that face each other as if in consultation. Jeff Tweedy sits in the kitchen. Despite being the lead singer of one of the US’s most revered bands, there is little grandiosity to him this lunchtime: the 51-year-old is a touch dishevelled, wearing a beanie and a large coat as if hunkering against the midwest

Cowboy Bebop remake: please Netflix, keep the anime classic wild and raw

A live-action remake of the sci-fi series feels like a disaster waiting to happen unless the streaming service can harness the madness of the original bounty hunting epic Imagine a dystopian far-future where a faceless megacorp harvests and replicates everything in its path, until every frazzled citizen drowns in content. Here’s the Black Mirror twist: that’s actually the present, as Netflix strives to either acquire or remake everything you ever loved (including Black Mirror). This week, the streaming behemoth announced plans for a live-action remake of Cowboy Bebop , the eccentric 1998 sci-fi anime series about sarcastic bounty hunters scratching a living on the fringes of society. Shinichirō Watanabe’s creation was cancelled midway through its first and only 26-episode season, but has enjoyed a cult-like afterlife, developing a cross-cultural following in Japan and the US. The remake reveal is presumably intended as a 20th anniversary present to long-standing acolytes around the

Shazam music app co-founder warns budding entrepreneurs to ‘not do ridiculous things like we did’

It might come as a surprise to hear that Dhiraj Mukherjee, co-founder of the hugely successful song-identification app Shazam, is not technical nor does he have a background in music. He simply got caught up in the internet wave of the late 1990s with an idea that came during a brainstorming session in a London pub. Mukherjee had just graduated from Stanford University with a business degree in 1997, the early days of the internet. “It was boom time back then, full of dreamers and new... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2zy9F9H

How Gordon Matta-Clark took a chainsaw to 70s New York

Sledgehammer in hand, the intrepid artist and ‘anarchitect’ embarked on a perilous odyssey of urban deconstruction – clearing a path for generations to come before his death aged 35 Bare-chested and swinging high on a suspended platform in the vast interior space of a derelict steel-trussed warehouse on a New York pier, Gordon Matta-Clark , acetylene torch in hand, cut into the walls, the floors and the roof, letting the light in. Along with the sparks raining from his torch, the light cascaded from the sky through the building’s empty void to the water beneath. Arcs of light moved with the sun’s passage through the day. The camera filming all this is alternately dazzled and consumed by mysterious gloom. Hidden then exposed, Matta-Clark is glimpsed hard at work, oblivious to the height and the danger, swaying on his little platform. For three months in 1975 the artist worked, unseen and illegally, in the warehouse. Used by the homeless and by junkies, it was best known for its gay ba

Sarah Waters: ‘Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber was like nothing I’d read before’

The author on discovering Carter’s fairytales as a teenager, enjoying Proust, and her introduction to kinky historical fiction The book I am currently reading I’ve just reread, with enormous pleasure, Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ; a great companion to it has been Richard Vinen’s study of postwar British conscription, National Service . And I’m about to start Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City . The book that changed my life Angela Carter ’s collection of rewritten fairytales, The Bloody Chamber . I read it when I was 17, and its mix of feminism, sex and literary fireworks – the sheer lusciousness of it – was like nothing I’d ever encountered before. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2DUH2Xo

Roma star Yalitza Aparicio: 'I don’t think I am an actor'

The 24-year-old primary schoolteacher lives in one room with her family in rural Mexico. Now, as the star of Alfonso Cuarón’s new film, she’s being tipped for an Oscar Read Peter Bradshaw’s five-star review Yalitza Aparicio only auditioned for Roma because her sister was heavily pregnant and in no fit state to. Neither had acted before. But her older sister was desperate to know what the audition would be like, so she sent Aparicio along as a proxy. “I didn’t want to do the casting,” she says. “My sister pushed me because, in our community, they have never come before to ask us to be in films.” Aparicio got through the first audition, then the second and, finally, months later, the third. Now there is talk of her winning an Oscar. If she does, it will be deserved. Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma is a masterpiece, and Aparicio’s performance is astonishing. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2DT1veQ

Big Joanie: Sistahs review – fearlessly discordant punk debut

(Ecstatic Peace Library) Adding a recorder solo to any song is a bold move outside Renaissance faire circles. That is precisely what happens halfway through Big Joanie’s debut full album, and it’s indicative of the London punk trio’s fearless approach to discordance: the wind instrument pierces the relentless rumble of Eyes, which suddenly lurches into a sour waltz. Big Joanie were born at DIY Space for London’s First Timers festival , in which new bands form, write and perform over a weekend. They built a reputation by supporting bands including Parquet Courts and Downtown Boys and making a stand for the recognition of black punks in British music’s past and present . Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2DU1p73

Jeff Tweedy: Warm review – frayed and intimate autobiography

(dBm Records) This is the 18th album Jeff Tweedy has made as a principal player – with Uncle Tupelo , with Wilco , with his elder son (as Tweedy) and solo . It is a testament to his restless creativity that he’s still making worthwhile music, still twisting familiar elements into appealing shapes. The perfectionism and obsession of the middle Wilco years are a thing of the past. These days, Tweedy simply turns up to shows with his acoustic guitar and plays songs. Warm takes the same model, adding only drums, bass and electric guitar (usually to shade in the songs, rather than carry them). In a new autobiography , Tweedy writes about how uncertain he was about his voice in the early days of Uncle Tupelo, in comparison to his bandmate Jay Farrar’s, but that voice is at one with the music he’s making: a little ragged and frayed and – per the album’s title – warm. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2FOK4id

Moonlight Benjamin: Siltane review – no-nonsense Haitian blues-rock

(Ma Case Records) M oonlight Benjamin describes her music as a blend of voodoo and rock’n’roll. Born in Haiti and living in France, she is both a voodoo priestess and a powerful singer-songwriter with an impressive vocal range. Benjamin sounds thrilling, thoughtful and, at times, downright spooky. Title track Siltane is one of the songs of the year. It starts as a brooding, bluesy Haitian rock ballad and slowly builds, with a controlled power and sense of danger and theatricality that makes her sound like a Caribbean Patti Smith. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Rk3v3D

Alessia Cara: The Pains of Growing review – unsteady steps to maturity

(Virgin EMI) This Canadian pop-R&B star was in her teens when she broke through in 2015 and, per the title of her second album, has had to do some growing up in public, winning best new artist at this year’s Grammys then being castigated online for not being new enough. But while the constant emotional drama sketched out here suggests her innocence is long gone, there is still plenty of maturing left to do. Very few artists are so conspicuously signed to a major label: the professionalism and market-readiness of this product are extremely high. This means the songwriting is often strong: Growing Pains gets two great chorus melodies, while I Don’t Want To resolves very satisfyingly. But there is some production that sounds suspiciously like focus-grouping, from post-Winehouse soul to xx guitars, and the ersatz digital instrumentation is as featureless as an overly filtered Instagram post. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Pf321a

Matthew McConaughey: ‘I’ve never done a film that’s lived up to what I imagined’

The actor’s McConaissance, his rebirth as a grizzled character actor, has won him widespread acclaim. He talks about career wobbles, his work with young offenders – and why he’s never truly satisfied with his work At this point, the sight of Matthew McConaughey scuffed up and scuzzy, without a tan but with a shirt, is no longer a shock. It has been seven years since the McConaissance that saw the actor stop (or, at least, curb) toplessness to be conciously reborn as a grizzled character actor. But what remains surprising is just how low – or rather high – he is now willing to go. Previous roles of the McConaissance (“I don’t mind the word,” he grins. “It’s got a good metre”) have seen him embrace fried-chicken greased vileness (trailer-trash thriller Killer Joe ), pot-bellied greed (mining saga Gold ) and life as an emaciated rodeo redneck (Aids drama Dallas Buyers Club ). But they have still always been heroes on some level, even if there are a lot of caveats. Underneath it all, the

Buggin' Out: Surviving Y2k's Dan Taberski on 'the disaster that never happened'

The host of Missing Richard Simmons talks about his new podcast which examines the millennium bug and the people who took Y2K seriously When Dan Taberski began putting together Surviving Y2K , his new podcast about the millennium bug , he ran into a problem. “I was trying to get some of the bigger players to talk to me, to do due diligence,” he explains over the phone. “People who worked for years and years on the Y2K bug, heads of committees and so on. Those people are really reluctant to talk, because they feel really burned. They feel like they spent years of their lives to try to solve a problem that everybody said after it was over: ‘Oh you just made it up.’ It’s a thing that people think is kind of a joke now: the disaster that never happened.” While it might seem a source of embarrassment 18 years later, at the time the millennium bug was an emergency that consumed the globe . A minor glitch relating to the way microchips processed dates ending in the digits “00”, it was predi

Pulling back the curtain: Wizard of Oz named most influential film

Researchers in Italy analyse 47,000 films to come up with list of those most referenced When a tornado carried Dorothy off to a land of witches and talking scarecrows it was not only Oz that she and her companions ended up taking by storm: new research suggests the world of movies was never the same again either. Researchers in Italy have declared the Wizard of Oz the most influential film ever made, outstripping others in how much it has inspired and been referenced in the film industry. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Rq3Z8A

Clean Bandit: What Is Love? review – underwhelming chart catnip

(Atlantic) Clean Bandit began with an undeniable aura of nerdiness. They met at Cambridge, where two members of the original lineup led a string quartet; their first hit was called Mozart’s House and merged the composer’s work with a squelchy dance beat. However, the studious trio soon garnered a reputation for being boffins of a different variety: as the Top 10 hits and online streams racked up (to date: nine and 4bn, respectively), it became clear they had masterminded a failsafe formula for churning out chart catnip. In fact, these pop poindexters are so adept at producing standalone hits that releasing an album feels like a formality. This second album has already spawned five singles, including three No 1s. Still, hearing these songs side by side does helpfully expose some of Clean Bandit’s methods. While their 2014 debut, New Eyes , was built around pop-house and string-section flourishes, What Is Love? draws opportunistically on more recent chart trends, namely Latin pop and d

Unknown John Donne manuscript discovered in Suffolk

Found in a box, the 400-year-old volume is one of the largest handwritten collections of the poet’s verse and is expected to sell for more than £200,000 A previously unrecorded handwritten manuscript of John Donne’s poetry has been found in a box at an English country house in Suffolk. Dating back 400 years, the bound collection was kept for at least the last two centuries at Melford Hall in Suffolk. Sotheby’s expert Dr Gabriel Heaton was on a “standard checking visit” to the property when he found it in a box with other papers. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Rl2nwM

Kidding review – Jim Carrey’s schmaltzy vehicle made me reach for the sick bag

The comedian plays the grieving presenter of a children’s show for its full sickly-sweet potential. If you could stomach it, there were a few scabrously funny moments as reward Apart from our common language, there has always been one other thing that separates us from America, and that is our tolerance of schmaltz. The theory goes that what passes for gritty realism in the US has us reaching for the sick bag and sitcoms that make us laugh like drains baffle US natives from sea to shining sea. Seinfeld’s “no hugging, no learning” promise was its unique selling point – for us it is a way of life. All of which makes Jim Carrey’s new vehicle Kidding (Sky Atlantic) – his first regular TV role since he came to fame 25 years ago in In Living Color – a doubly discommoding watch for viewers from the wrong side of the pond. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Smn0sr

Breaking technology's hold on teenagers – podcasts of the week

New series Their Own Devices investigates the online pressures on young people. Plus, the best film podcasts The creators of the enormously popular series My Favourite Murder are launching a new podcast network. Exactly Right will be made up of a number of true crime-related podcasts, including The Fall Line, which tells stories of cold cases in the south-east of the US; This Podcast Will Kill You, about deadly diseases; and Do You Need a Ride?, which sees MFM co-host Karen Kilgariff and comedian Chris Fairbanks interview guests while ferrying them to or from LAX airport. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2E5niBa

Night of Camp David: the return of a 1965 book about an insane president

Referenced by Rachel Maddow and Bob Woodward, a pulpy thriller about a commander-in-chief losing command of reality is receiving a timely rerelease “Nobody in this country can tell a president of the United States that his mind is sick.” That’s the blunt assessment of the defense secretary in Night of Camp David, a political thriller from 1965 that stands to be rescued from an undeserved obscurity by its republication this month. The coal-black front cover of the new edition is unadorned apart from one line, in white block letters: “What would happen if the president of the USA went stark-raving mad?” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2U154Fo

Doll's house by architect of MI6 HQ up for auction

Sir Terry Farrell’s son, who inspired design when he was eight, says he may bid for item A doll’s house designed in 1981 by Sir Terry Farrell, the architect of the MI6 headquarters, partly to send up the hi-tech architectural style employed by his rivals Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, is to be auctioned. The 176cm-tall structure is made up of angular platforms, escape hatches and landing pads and features space toys and figures. It was inspired by a sketch by Farrell’s son Max, then eight, who suggested a “space city”. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2E5gkfl

Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle review – a stunningly strange beast

Mowgli, Baloo and co get a visually dazzling upgrade, but there’s too much animal trauma to make this child-friendly Originally slated for release in 2016, this Andy Serkis-directed Kipling adaptation was shelved and finally sold to Netflix – it’s getting a limited cinema release just before its launch on the streaming platform – partly to avoid competing with Disney’s live-action remake of The Jungle Book . But I can’t help but suspect that there are other issues at play here, not least the fact that it’s hard to pin down just who its audience is meant to be. There’s rather too much peril and bleeding animal trauma for it to work for a family audience without horrifying younger members. But the association with The Jungle Book means that I can’t imagine adult audiences flocking to see it. It’s a pity, because this is a visually striking, technologically impressive picture. The jungle is a richly realised backdrop, dense with lurking dangers and creeping, crawling biomass. The sligh

Amá review – shocking story of Native Americans' mass sterilisation

The 1960s and 70s US government drive led to the eradication of a tribe – as revealed in Lorna Tucker’s moving follow-up to her Vivienne Westwood film Having made a splashy debut with Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist , a portrait of the flamboyant designer and salonista Vivienne Westwood, documentarian Lorna Tucker ’s follow-up feature tacks in a much grittier, less glamorous direction, eschewing the high fashion boutiques of London and Paris for the flat plains and humble homes of some the western world’s poorest, most oppressed denizens. The multi-stranded story examines how the systematic programme of sterilisation of Native Americans in the 1960s and 70s, a policy that resulted in the eradication of a whole tribe – has affected several people’s lives. Front and centre is Jean Whitehorse, a Navaho woman whose gentle eyes belie the streak of strength that’s help her to survive a lifetime of poverty, abuse at the hands of several partners, dependency issues and, of especial interest h

Can’t get enough of Awkwafina? Comedy Central has given her a show about her life

Capping off a banner year that included a role in the all-female heist sequel Ocean’s 8 and a scene-stealing turn in Crazy Rich Asians, rapper-comedian-actress Awkwafina is now slated to star in a Comedy Central show based on her life. The network announced this week that it has ordered 10 episodes of the 29-year-old’s eponymous scripted series. The half-hour comedy will focus on her early twenties when she lived in Queens, New York, with her father and grandmother while dreaming of... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2zxnjK0

The Model Apartment review – Diana Quick lifts up tale of broken American dreams

Ustinov, Bath Donald Margulies’ exploration of a couple living with the lingering trauma of the Holocaust is profoundly touching Max and Lola reckon they deserve a nice retirement. Both survived the Holocaust – Max hid in woodlands and Lola was in Bergen-Belsen. They’ve made good in New York, even if Max wonders whether selling sportswear in Flatbush constitutes a meaningful life. Now the couple have bought a condo in sunny Florida. But the apartment they purchased is late on construction, forcing them to spend their first night in the apartment block’s showroom. Worse, their troubled daughter Debby has followed them from Brooklyn. Can Max and Lola run away from the dependent adult that their own trauma has irreparably wrecked? Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2ABrjcn

Amy Lowell: Ted Hughes and DH Lawrence 'owe unacknowledged debt' to 'uncelebrated' poet

Paper claims Lowell’s earlier writings can be seen in Hughes’s poem Pike and Lawrence’s The Rainbow, but her gender and sexuality made her unpopular Ted Hughes’s poem Pike is one of the late poet laureate’s best-known works, taught in schools across the UK and endlessly anthologised. But Hughes’s image of a fish with “green tigering the gold” has an unacknowledged debt to a forgotten poem by the American poet Amy Lowell, according to an English academic who claims that Hughes “confidently fished out the most appealing imagery from the earlier work” in a new paper. According to Dr Hannah Roche, a lecturer in English at the University of York, it is “nothing short of incredible” that Hughes’s 1959 poem Pike “has not been considered in its close relation” to Lowell’s 1914 work The Pike. In her paper Myths, Legends, and Apparitional Lesbians , which has just been published in the academic journal Modernist Cultures , Roche pinpoints similarities between the poems. Continue reading...

First world war paintings go on show for first time since 1919

Alfred Munnings’ 41 works regarded as one of the most important collections of war art anywhere Paintings regarded as one of the most important collections of war art anywhere have gone on display together for the first time since they were exhibited to acclaim in 1919. Alfred Munnings ’ 41 paintings of soldiers, horses, battles and ruined landscapes were made during his spell, in the final year of the first world war, as an embedded artist with the Canadian Expeditionary Force on the Western Front. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2KFwHQp

The best X Factor finalists – ranked!

With the TV talent show’s final taking place this weekend, we have crunched the numbers and counted the votes to put the 45 best top-three finishers in order By series 10 in 2013, the once star-making talent show had started to eat itself, with man-child Nicholas McDonald being primed as the next Olly Murs. His earnest, screw-faced mugging on the show was followed by his woeful debut single, Answerphone, in which a prospective date correctly ignores the call. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2rkpWe1

The greatest showman? Hugh Jackman announces world tour

Actor to perform hits from musicals including The Greatest Showman and Les Misérables across Europe and North America Hugh Jackman has announced a live tour that will see him perform songs from hit musicals in arenas across the world. The tour, titled The Man. The Music. The Show., will see Jackman perform four dates in the UK in spring 2019, as well as eight further dates across Europe and 22 in North America, closing with two concerts at the Hollywood Bowl. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2BGI9IA

Blue-eyed boy in famous photo is not Vincent van Gogh

Portrait believed for 50 years to be of the artist aged 13 is of his brother Theo, says museum A photograph believed for more than 50 years to have been a portrait of a 13-year-old Vincent van Gogh is actually one of his brother Theo, aged 15. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam on Thursday revealed the results of research into a photograph that has appeared in countless books and catalogues, always billed as the earliest known photograph of Van Gogh. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2P74Adm

Die Hard review – Bruce Willis Christmas classic is still a blast

The deafening shootouts, the uproarious explosions and the killer catchphrase remain gloriously intact as the festive face-off gets a 30th anniversary rerelease Only the hardest of hearts could fail to enjoy the great 80s action classic, rereleased for its 30th anniversary: with uproarious explosions, deafening shootouts and smart-alec tag lines following the bad guys getting shot. It’s the film that wrested the catchphrase “Yippee-ki-ay” away from Roy Rogers, with a certain vulgar addition. Every pub quizzer knows it’s a Christmas movie, but not many know of its unexpected cinematic use of the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth – the terrorists whistle it as they get closer to the target. Bruce Willis plays New York police detective John McLean, in Los Angeles for an uneasy reunion with his semi-estranged wife, having failed to support her career move out there. While at her office building, owned by a Japanese corporation, the whole place is taken over by fanatically armed German e

Dead Souls review – monumental study of China's political brutality

Wang Bing’s shocking eight-hour oral history of the Jiabiangou ‘re-education’ camp is a gruelling – and necessary – account Cooking was evidently a key skill for postwar China’s political dissenters – a good proportion of the interviewees in Wang Bing’s monumental oral history of Jiabiangou “re-education” camp survived only because of the extra scraps they scrounged working in the kitchens. They had been sent to the Chinese equivalent of Siberia as part of the 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign tabled by Mao Zedong to purge the country of Kuomintang influences, but which soon ended up sweeping up property owners, Christians, anyone who enjoyed exercising their critical faculties and, in one case here, a boy who drew tears on a portrait of the great leader. Between 500,000 and 1.3 million were caught in this ideological dragnet, 3,000 of whom found themselves doing hard labour and starving on the blasted plains at Jiabiangou, in Gansu province. Just 500 came back. Continue reading... from

'It was like working in a mill, but with drugs': how indie labels reinvented British music

It’s 40 years since Rough Trade, Mute and Factory Records used an anti-industry attitude to give a voice to the likes of Joy Division and Depeche Mode. The labels’ founders recall why they had to rip things up and start again ‘We did have a minor armed robbery, but nobody got killed,” recalls Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis, looking back on a shaky moment for the west London record shop in 1978. Staff lay on the floor at gunpoint as the till was emptied along with their wallets, although one employee was shown some mercy and allowed to keep the gram of speed that was in his. The shop had become a target due to its success. After opening in 1976, Rough Trade was soon more than a retail outlet . It became a cultural hub, a place where people socialised, read fanzines, listened to chest-pounding dub reggae or, increasingly throughout 1978, tried to sell the records they had made. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2r7r3gW

The Best Video Games of 2018

Simon Parkin recommends the best video games of 2018, including Red Dead Redemption 2, Return of the Obra Dinn, Tetris Effect, Into the Breach, and more. from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/2DNYUCW

Phantom Rides Again! review – a grotesque return to the dawn of cinema

Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff Good Cop Bad Cop present a wry, playful and genre-defying show based around the work of an early film director Phantom Rides Again! is the first in what promises to a be a series of retrospective shows by the Cardiff performance company G ood Cop Bad Cop . It is based on the 2008 production Phantom Ride , which in turn was inspired by the mostly lost films of south Wales-based director William Haggar . Here his shorts, made between 1902 and 1908, are episodically and gamely retold in the first person by five darkly eyeshadowed, hammer-wielding performers: Good Cop Bad Cop’s Richard Huw Morgan and John Rowley and three collaborators, Sian Owens, Seren Vickers and Jake Walton. Haggar’s films were popular entertainments from the dawn of the age of mass media, before the establishment of filmic genre. Phantom Rides Again!, like the company’s work in general, occupies similar genre-defying territory. This is wry, smart, performance-making that refuses to be

BFI to refuse funding for films with facially-scarred villains

The institute is backing a campaign which focuses on ending the use of scars on screen as shorthand for villainy The British Film Institute will no longer fund films in which villains appear with facial scarring. As part of a campaign by Changing Faces , a UK charity campaigning to end discrimination against people with visible differences, the BFI has pledged to support their I Am Not Your Villain initiative, which focuses on ending the use of “scars, burns or marks as shorthand for villainy”. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2zvewsg

Nintendo is ending its controversial Creators scheme

Nintendo is ending its controversial Creators scheme From 2019, use of Nintendo gameplay footage for ‘Let’s Play’ videos will match rival’s standards 29 Nov 2018 News from Life & Culture https://ift.tt/2TXzqJg

Last Letter film review: Shunji Iwai’s Chinese-language debut revisits familiar themes of young love and regrets

3/5 stars For his first Chinese-language film, Japanese director Shunji Iwai collaborates with producer Peter Chan Ho-sun to revisit themes from his 1995 hit Love Letter with a film that champions the tactile intimacy of the written word while highlighting its unreliability as a form of communication. A Bride for Rip Van Winkle review: Shunji Iwai returns in fine form Iwai retains his delicate, unhurried style while also shoring up some distinctly Chinese ideals in Last Letter, which, like his... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2Qt271w

Roma review – an epic of tearjerking magnificence

Alfonso Cuarón’s intimate family drama, set in 1970s Mexico, is a triumphant blend of tragedy, comedy and absurdity A lfonso Cuarón ’s new film Roma is thrilling, engrossing, moving – and just entirely amazing, an adjectival pileup of wonder. He has reached back into his own childhood to create an intensely personal story, and this is the second time I have seen it since the premiere at this year’s Venice film festival, hoping to get a clearer view of those later images that on first viewing were made wobbly by tears. Same problem, though. Those coming to see this film had prepare themselves to be emotionally wrung out. Cuarón has an extraordinary way of combining the closeup and the wide shot, the tellingly observed detail – humorous or poignant or just effortlessly authentic – with the big picture and the sense of scale. At times, it feels novelistic in its sense of character development and inner life: a densely realised, intimate drama developing in what feels like real time. In

The 1975: A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships review | Alexis Petridis' album of the week

Matt Healy and friends open up the contents of their record collection on an inventive third album that, like a drunk Facebook rant, veers from the inspired to the faintly regrettable ‘You learn a couple of things when you get to my age,” announces Matt Healy , 29, a few minutes into the 1975 ’s third album. You suspect it is delivered with a wink to the camera. Nevertheless, the two and half years since their previous album, I Like It When You Sleep for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It have been eventful for the band’s frontman, taking in vast commercial success, heroin addiction and a spell in rehab. Healy and the rest of the 1975 have reappeared with an album that clearly wants to be an epochal statement: the presence of a spoken-word track performed by Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant, and the distinctly Radiohead -like song I Always Wanna Die Sometimes implies it wants to be a millennial OK Computer . But behind the handwringing angst and existential despair, OK Comput

Plagi Breslau review – blood-spattered serial-killer thriller

Polish purveyor of graphic screen gore Patryk Vega unleashes another tide of visceral mayhem P atryk Vega is the Polish writer-director whose muscular commercial ventures – spin-offs from TV hit Pitbull , medical procedural Botoks – have become appointment viewing for diaspora audiences and thus regular guests in the UK Top 10. Not for nothing does the logo for his production shingle Vega Investments feature a charging bull. His latest – translating, somewhat ominously, as The Plagues of Breslau – is a flat-out serial-killer thriller, 90 blood-spattered minutes that make those carefully designed Scandi crime dramas seem fussy and wussy. It opens with the graphic autopsy of an abattoir worker who was branded before being sewn alive into suffocating cow hide, the sole visual relief being a cutaway to the morgue’s greasy helix of flypaper. Everything that follows is similarly strong meat. It has, however, been infused with an eccentric-to-distinctive local flavour. Where western varia

Frankie and Benny’s offers free food for turning in smartphones at the door

Frankie and Benny’s offers free food for turning in phones There is such a thing as a (SIM-)free lunch 29 Nov 2018 News from Life & Culture https://ift.tt/2E0qBcE

Love and hisses: Cleopatra star Sophie Okonedo on acting with live snakes

The actor, who is performing in Shakespeare’s tragedy on the Olivier stage, is to make her National Theatre Live debut with one of her real reptile co-stars When the National Theatre’s Antony and Cleopatra is broadcast to cinemas in December, Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo won’t be the only stars getting ready for their close-up. Fiennes is no stranger to NT Live screenings but Okonedo will be making her debut, as will one of four real snakes used in the production. It has not yet been decided which of the snakes, which are used in rotation throughout the play’s run, will appear in the broadcast. It could be Pork Pie, Hondo, Little J or Larry, who had no name when he arrived for the show but has been christened in honour of the National’s first artistic director and the Olivier stage on which he appears. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2QsfeQB

Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons review – farewell tour has crowd beggin' for him to stay

First Direct Arena, Leeds The 84-year-old Jersey Boy delivers a two-hour show stocked with hits and laced with a bone-dry wit The 77-year-old singer-songwriter David Crosby ’s argument that performing keeps musicians youthful certainly applies to Frankie Valli. The legendary New Jersey singer is 84, yet pulls off a two-hour show with more than two dozen songs, many of them standards, delivering a joyous celebration of pop music at its sweetest and purest. Valli doesn’t need new material when his catalogue of smashes ranges from the doo-wop days to the disco era and – with the original Four Seasons long disbanded – a new, youthful band and harmony singers can render them to perfection. The hit Four Seasons musical Jersey Boys has given him a much younger audience, who respond to hits such as Rag Doll , Walk Like a Man , Sherry , Let’s Hang On and the rest with rapturous chants of, “There’s only one Frankie Valli.” This is so true. His piercing falsetto is one of the most extraordi

Yu Hua’s short stories portray disturbing personal and political realities of modern China

The April 3rd Incident by Yu Hua Pantheon The April 3rd Incident collects recent short stories by China’s literary enfant terrible. Yu Hua’s The Seventh Day - grim satire on China’s poor Yu Hua’s reputation owes much to his experiments with avant-garde techniques (sudden leaps in time or perspective, unholy clashes of comedy and tragedy), his relish of violence and the scatological (toilets both sumptuous and rudimentary proliferate in his inter­national... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2ragmdo

Doing time: what I learned from 24 hours watching The Clock

Christian Marclay’s film at Tate Modern knits together thousands of clips in an era-defining artwork. And I viewed the whole thing Anyone who’s ever had a monotonous job will know all about watching the clock. How each minute seems to take hours, moving at a deathly pace – 10.07 … 11.13 … 11.27 … Is it really only 12.01? – until you can finally head home. Clock-watching became a daily endurance for me in the summer of 2018. I would sit under bleaching white lights on the anonymous fourth floor of a tower block on the edge of the City of London, feeling under-utilised and bored to tears, doing little more each day than simply watching the time pass. By the time I resigned, I resolved to do something more productive with my hours. Instead of watching an office clock, I would watch Christian Marclay’s 2010 film The Clock – the 24-hour artwork made of thousands of film clips representing every minute of the day – in its entirety. In doing so, I hoped to reconfigure my relationship with

Spoilt for choice: how anthologies became the 'Tinder of television'

Shows such as Black Mirror have revived the format, which gives us more viewing freedom. But is a lack of consistency the price we pay? One of the most careworn observations of the golden age of TV was that it marked the point where TV became novelistic. After years and years of sitcom-style episodic resets – where Jessica Fletcher never once questioned why such an unthinkable number of people were murdered around her – shows such as The Wire , The Sopranos and Breaking Bad took great delight in telling a single detail-heavy story very slowly. But that was then. Now there’s a case for arguing that television has abandoned the novel to become a short story collection. This week it was announced that Amazon is making a half-hour series based on the New York Times column Modern Love , complete with an enormous cast including Anne Hathaway, Tina Fey, John Slattery, Dev Patel, Catherine Keener, Andy García and Andrew Scott. The catch? It’s an anthology series . Every episode will be sel

Gideon Mendel's best photograph: a mother carries her HIV-infected son

‘Joseph had been sick for 10 years. He said he liked listening to the radio, friends would pass by, his life was rich. He died a few months later’ I shot this image of Dorika Gabriel carrying her son, Joseph, in 1997. I had travelled to their village on the Ugandan border of Tanzania, close to Lake Victoria, to photograph local responses to HIV and Aids . At the end of the day I was taken to meet people who were living with the disease. Joseph was sitting under a shelter outside his home. As I was walking away, I turned back and I saw his mother lift him up and carry him back into the house. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2FZC9ir

Sally Rooney's Normal People named Waterstones book of the year

Bookseller praises word-of-mouth hit as ‘cementing her reputation as the voice of her generation’ In a win for literary fiction amid declining sales, Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People has been named Waterstones book of the year. Rooney’s second novel, which follows two young people falling in love in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, has sold just under 41,000 copies in hardback in the UK since it was released in August – five times the hardback sales of her 2017 debut, Conversations With Friends. At 27, Rooney is the now the youngest winner of the award, which goes to the title staff at the UK’s biggest bookshop chain most enjoy recommending. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2zvkV6w

Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates review – an American nightmare

Fear stalks the veteran writer’s 46th novel – a disturbing love story set in a totalitarian US Joyce Carol Oates’s Hazards of Time Travel is her 46th novel, which is in itself an astonishing achievement (it’s published alongside a reissue of her bestselling novel Blonde ). It is a dystopian narrative in which the indomitable Oates seems to be flexing new muscles. She is an extraordinary veteran of fiction and turns clairvoyant (perhaps drawing on anxiety about the US’s toxic political present) with the same authority she brings to everything she writes. But brace yourself: it is an unrelentingly disturbing read. The time is 20 years from now and the setting the totalitarian North American States, or NAS. People live in fear, their speech anything but free. The punishment for speaking out is likely to be “deletion” (which sounds like a particularly writerly form of doom). Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2ShlLLq

Mahalia, Lewis Capaldi and Sam Fender up for 2019 Brits critics' choice prize

Up and coming artists nominated for award, which is decided by an invited panel of music editors, critics, and radio and TV figures The Brit awards has announced the nominations for its 2019 critics’ choice prize. Leicester R&B singer Mahalia, Scottish singer-songwriter Lewis Capaldi and Newcastle troubadour Sam Fender are up for the prize, which is widely regarded as a self-fulfilling prophecy for industry success. Mahalia Burkmar, 20, signed to Atlantic at age 13. She has sung with Rudimental, supported Ed Sheeran and had a part in Noel Clarke’s 2016 film Brotherhood . In 2016, she released her debut album, Diary of Me; a follow-up is expected in 2019. Her songwriting dwells on relationships and breakups. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2KFNiDz

Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle review – man-cub makes a pointless return

There are no songs and not much fun as director Andy Serkis’s ultra-realistic animation trudges into the uncanny valley Just two years ago, the Walt Disney Company pulled off a very unexpected success – a state-of-the-art digital animated remake of its 1967 masterpiece The Jungle Book, the inspired adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling stories that was famously the last film Disney personally supervised. Against the odds, the new one was a triumph, with just a couple of the original songs, some ingenious new plot quirks and a whole lot of energy and fun. But now – bafflingly, boringly – there is yet another adaptation, by Warner Brothers and Netflix, a heavier and more cumbersome version directed by Andy Serkis , that master of mo-cap. So we trudge back to the uncanny valley for another bout of ultra-realistic animation. No songs at all now, and not much fun. The new idea is a new transgression, a new interpretation of the law of the jungle, a loyalty crisis between Mowgli and the other

Bobby Brown sues BBC over Whitney Houston documentary

US court to hear claim that late singer’s ex-husband did not consent to use of archive footage Whitney Houston’s ex-husband, Bobby Brown, and the estate of their daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, are suing the BBC and Showtime Networks over allegedly unauthorised use of footage in a 2017 documentary about the late singer. Bobby Brown, the R&B singer formerly of New Edition, and the estate of Bobbi Kristina Brown never consented to the airing of footage used in the Nick Broomfield documentary Whitney: Can I Be Me , according to a complaint filed on Wednesday with the US district court in Manhattan. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2zwXkT9

Most expensive West End ticket prices rise as cheapest fall

Top seats up to £117.52 average – Hamilton leading at £250 – while cheapest fall to £19.31 Top end ticket prices for West End shows have risen by 19% to an average of £117.52, with Hamilton seats the most expensive. At the same time the average price for the cheapest tickets has fallen by 9.7% to £19.31, according to an annual survey carried out by the theatre industry newspaper the Stage . Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2QsijjA

Sundance 2019: Ocasio-Cortez doc and Ted Bundy biopic headline festival

Next year’s lineup features a documentary centered on the political star and a drama starring Zac Efron as the serial killer Documentaries on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Roy Cohn and Harvey Weinstein will sit alongside dramatic features starring Zac Efron, Emma Thompson and Jake Gyllenhaal at next year’s Sundance film festival. Related: The Rider is surprise winner at the Gotham awards Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2P50O4l

Death and Nightingales review – chilling viewing for dark winter evenings

This adaptation of Eugene McCabe’s novel parses politics and sectarianism in 19th-century Ireland through a divided family without being heavy-handed Your enjoyment of Death and Nightingales (BBC Two) will stand or fall according to your tolerance of three things: a 19th-century Ireland populated by strikingly beautiful people in unfeasibly well-laundered chemises; DIY cow-bloat remedies; and lines such as: “The heartbreak of this place. Love it, hate it, there’s no place like it on earth. Tomorrow, I leave it for ever.” While my Irish ancestry has been diluted over the past few generations, I can take as much of this stuff as you can throw at me and still wave my shillelagh in the air for more. But I understand the impulse of many to turn and run back across the sea – and time – to a less lyrical place of greater safety. However, if you fight that instinct and try leaning in – hard, deliberately, determinedly – this adaptation of Eugene McCabe’s critically acclaimed 1993 novel shall

Thursday’s best TV: A Hotel for the Super Rich & Famous; Kidding

The first of a two-parter offers a peek inside one of London’s most luxurious hotels, while Jim Carrey and Michel Gondry reunite for a black comedy The first in this two-part profile of the five-star Corinthia hotel in London is worth watching for two reasons. First, for the scale and cost of the luxury involved; second, for the near-religious zeal exhibited by the manager, Thomas Kochs , a man whose passion for detail extends as far as deciding whether or not to include garden peas in the sandwiches for the hotel’s new afternoon tea package. Yes, this feels like an advertisement, but it is also a rare glimpse into a world that is alien to most. Mike Bradley Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Av4xCR