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Showing posts from February, 2020

In new Netflix K-drama, My Holo Love, romance isn’t all that’s needed

The old aphorism “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” receives an upgrade in My Holo Love, another soul-gladdening South Korean caper with an unshakeably romantic core, now showing on Netflix. Hang on – fingers off that mouse. My Holo Love has its dollops of undeniably soppy mush, it’s true, but it also weaves a tangled web of action, industrial espionage and science fiction, as though the scriptwriters realised that love actually isn’t all you need. Consequently, beauty is in the eyes of… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2vs9YE8
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Hong Kong martial arts cinema: why King Boxer (1972), aka Five Fingers of Death, remains a fan favourite

The main claim to fame of King Boxer – also known as Five Fingers of Death – is that it launched the wave of martial arts films in the US that took place in the early 1970s. Picked up for US distribution by Warner Brothers, who were seeing success with the television series Kung Fu , King Boxer surprised everybody by topping the US box office charts for a week at the time.The movie was released in the US in March in 1973, around a year after its Hong Kong debut. That was a few months before… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2wdHa2n
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BTS new album Map of the Soul: 7 is all about conquering their doubts and fears, say superstars in reflective YouTube interview

The young stars in South Korean boy band BTS say the theme of their new album deals with how they overcame doubts and fears encountered since they burst on the K-pop scene seven years ago.Having performed at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles last month, BTS are at the forefront of South Korean pop music and have helped gather an international audience for the genre. Last week, the band released Map of the Soul: 7, their fourth album. The 20 tracks include collaborations with international pop… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2TmvToa
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Lena Dunham: ‘Caroline Flack’s death hit me with a sickening power’

I adored the former Love Island host, and wish we could have shown her a more hopeful reality: that women who err and fail are worthy of love My adoration for Caroline Flack bordered on teenage. As an American abroad in the UK last summer, managing the vague, inchoate loneliness of time spent in a country not my own, the hours I watched her, six nights a week from roughly 9pm to 10.30pm, became a benchmark of cosy normalcy, a point of connection in an often cruel and unfamiliar world. She was, in the way that is specific to pop figures we engage with daily, a friend, albeit one I had never met. That raspy voice, her surprised guffaw, her dresses (pretty, bordering on wacky, like early Cher ) and the empathy she brought to a bloodless and occasionally unkind television format lent her an air of approachable glamour, a local-girl-done-good sheen, aspirational but earthy. Not since I saw Sarah Jessica Parker on Broadway in 1996, belting her heart out with a childlike vibrato, had I hu...
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‘His inner circle knew about the abuse': Daniela Soleri on her architect father Paolo

Fifty years ago, his utopian desert city attracted acolytes from around the world. Can his legacy survive allegations of sexual abuse? Arcosanti looks much as it did when I visited in 2008 : curving vaults, apses and amphitheatres with patterns inscribed in the concrete; circular windows, winding little paths, cypress trees, wind chimes tinkling in the breeze. This experimental city in the Arizona desert, founded in 1970, is like a set from a sci-fi movie for an alien civilisation more enlightened than ours. And in some ways, Arcosanti is more enlightened. Its utopian community was the brainchild of Paolo Soleri, an outsider architect who looked at America’s unfolding future of consumerism, urban sprawl and environmental destruction, and decided there had to be something better. Arcosanti was a showcase for his concept of “arcology” (architecture plus ecology), which argued that cities should be compact, car-free, low-impact, civic-minded. Planned as a city of 5,000, its population ...
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The Trip to Greece: like watching the most entertaining people you know dominate a dinner party

Coogan and Brydon continue to aggressively impersonate Michael Caine over risotto – and yet, within that, there is art Ludicrous to think that it has been 10 years since The Trip first aired, a movie-in-the-shape-of-a-TV-show where Rob Brydon annoyed Steve Coogan around the Pennines, for no reason, while they slowly ate food. There is no way of describing The Trip without it sounding featherlight and pointless – “Two men approach their 50s by aggressively impersonating Michael Caine ” – but to love The Trip, as I unashamedly do, is to watch it first-hand, to consume it, to let it wash over you like a wave. Yes: a vast percentage of the show’s four episodic series is just Rob Brydon licking his lips and shouting: “WHATTYA GOT?” at a succession of politely smiling waitresses. But somehow within that there is art. The Trip to Greece (Tuesday, 10pm, Sky One) is just every other series of The Trip, then, though this time in Greece. Brydon again plays an amped-up version of himself, clan...
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George MacKay: ‘Playing Ned Kelly was exhausting – I felt very vulnerable’

Fresh from the Oscar-winning 1917, the actor is taking on his most challenging role yet “There’ll be no more of this shit,” snarls George MacKay, eyes bulging like a young Iggy Pop. “I’ll give you the full 11 inches of my dick, just so you can know how it feels to get shaaafted !” His temple throbs. His mouth froths. He gets so excited that he spills some of his lemon and ginger tea on the floor of the photo studio we’re sitting in. “Oh dear,” he says, Iggy Pop transforming rapidly into an extremely apologetic, polite young man. “I’m just going to wipe that up with my bum.” And so he does – sliding across the floor while his black trousers soak up the drink. A polite young man George MacKay might be, but at just 27 he’s had plenty of practice trying on other personas: a closeted gay activist in Pride, a singing Scottish squaddie in Sunshine On Leith and – most recently – Lance Corporal Will Schofield in Sam Mendes’ first world war smash, 1917. He is soon to play the notorious Austra...
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Mark Thomas: 50 Things About Us review – an inventory of Britishness

Radlett Centre, Hertfordshire This grab-bag show sheds little light on our political travails but it’s stuffed with funny caricatures and plenty of myth-busting How did we get here? asks Mark Thomas . His new show, 50 Things About Us, promises little-known facts about the UK to explain our current predicament. Six per cent of UK land mass is grouse moor, he claims – while there are only 22 countries that we haven’t invaded (yet). It’s a compelling conceit, even if Thomas’s inventory of Britishness – demanding that, for a change, we see ourselves as others see us – sheds little new light on Brexit, Boris and our political travails. That is partly because our host doesn’t stay on topic, as he ties up loose ends from previous shows and teases new material (about displaced Chagos Islanders and their fledgling football team) from his next. His thesis that our EU exit is the last spasm of the British empire has been widely aired elsewhere. But it needs restating, and Thomas gives it a...
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When up means down: why do so many video game players invert their controls?

This is a genuinely fraught topic: is it generational, habitual, or explained by neuroscience? I asked the experts Imagine you are playing a video game where you’re looking out over an explorable world. You have a controller in your hand and you want your character to look or move upwards: in what direction do you push the joystick? If the answer is “up”, you’re in the majority – most players push up on a stick, or slide a mouse upwards, to instigate upward motion in a game. Most, but not all. A significant minority of players start every new game they play by going into the options and selecting “Invert Y axis”, which means when they push up on the stick, their onscreen avatar looks or moves downwards. To both sets of players, their own choice is logical and natural, and discussions about the subject can get quite fraught – as I found when I tweeted about it a few weeks ago . But why the perceptual difference? Is there anything definite that neuroscientists or psychologists can tell...
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Harvey Weinstein starts work on appeal from New York hospital

Disgraced movie mogul’s legal team is discussing appeal against his convictions for rape and a criminal sex act Days after he was convicted of rape and a criminal sex act , Harvey Weinstein is working on his appeal while he remains in Bellevue hospital in New York awaiting a probable transfer to Rikers Island jail complex before his sentencing. Weinstein was admitted to Bellevue on Monday after concerns were expressed about high blood pressure and heart palpitations. During his trial Donna Rotunno, one of his lawyers, told the judge that he has back injuries stemming from a car crash last summer and a condition that requires shots in his eyes, so he does not go blind. Another of his lawyers, Arthur Aidala, told the Hollywood Reporter that neither Weinstein nor his legal team had requested the admission, and that it was a decision by the New York City Department of Corrections. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Vvtj1G
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Adam Lazarus: 'If you don't teach your son about sex, porn will'

The Canadian performer’s controversial show Daughter is coming to London. Its brutal gut-punch experience is not for everyone When Adam Lazarus complained about a seven-year-old boy putting his hands on his daughter at school, he was told not to cry sexual assault. “They don’t think like that,” the teachers said, “not at that age.” “But it’s power,” Lazarus seethes, recounting the incident. “It’s gendered power, and if you excuse it this kid thinks it’s OK.” The Canadian performer made waves at the Edinburgh festival in 2018 with his controversial, gut-punch solo Daughter, which he is now bringing to Battersea Arts Centre in London. The show is told from the perspective of a young girl’s father and what starts as a charming and funny quasi-standup set quickly turns into something acidic. Over the course of an increasingly intense hour, Lazarus – dressed in fairy wings, dancing adorably to his daughter’s favourite song – unspools a brutal thread of toxic masculinity. First it’s shrugg...
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Anne Enright: ‘A lot of bad things happen to women in books. Really a lot’

She began a novel about the dark side of Hollywood – and then the Weinstein scandal broke. The Booker-winner on mothers, marriage and misogyny When Anne Enright began writing her latest novel Actress in 2016, a story of the dark side of showbusiness with a full cast of sleazebags and sexual predators, she felt that she “was breaking some kind of news”. Then came the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Ever since her 2007 Booker-winning novel The Gathering , which touched on sexual abuse in Ireland, she “has been interested in things that are barely spoken or taboo”. But now, “what went on in Hollywood” was finally being talked about. “It is really interesting how the tide rises,” she says. “I was one of the many boats on this rising tide.” In Katherine O’Dell, her fictional fallen star of stage and screen, all “mad green eyes”, cigarettes and secret shame, Enright has created a heroine as irresistible to the reader as to her audiences and hangers-on, “a great Irish Disaster”. Narrated by O’D...
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An Evening With Whitney review – Houston hologram is ghoulish cash-in

M&S Bank Arena, Liverpool If you close your eyes you can bask in the late star’s magnificent voice, but open them and this jerky simulacrum is unsettling ‘Welcome to Whitney Houston, very much alive,” says the star of the show, except she isn’t Houston. The American singer died aged 48 in 2012, yet has been recreated by a touring hologram . The music business has form in this area. Elvis died in 1977 and has been “in concert, on screen”, for years, backed by original musicians. However, holo-Whitney is something else. It is eerily realistic, give or take its unusually floppy arms, occasionally jerky movements and the fact that it barely moves a foot each way from centre stage. The mouth doesn’t always seem quite in sync with the vocals. Holo-Whitney certainly doesn’t appear to open its mouth wide enough to emit the gigantic whoa-oh-ohs that are supposedly coming out of it. Related: 'It's ghost slavery': the troubling world of pop holograms Continue reading... from...
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Week in Review: France's former PM goes on trial, Earth's changing pole and the Paris Agriculture Fair

This week FRANCE 24 visited the Paris Agriculture Fair (Salon de l'agriculture) – a must-do for French politicians from across the spectrum – as a former prime minister went on trial over hiring his relatives. We also take a look at Al Pacino's small-screen debut as a Nazi hunter and learn how the magnetic north pole is moving faster than ever before, potentially affecting GPS systems. from https://ift.tt/2I40nWO
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Marian Keyes: 'I'm giving every woman I've met Three Women by Lisa Taddeo'

The author on Naomi Wolf, Nora Ephron and why she finds comfort in reading crime novels The book I am currently reading I’m the chair of the 2020 Comedy Women in Print prize so I’m reading my way through dozens of submissions. The book that changed my life The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf . I came of age in the so-called “post-feminist” era when feminism felt like a dirty word. Obviously, the world was still wildly unequal but I didn’t have the language to articulate my feelings. This book opened my eyes to the countless insidious ways that women are undermined by comparison with some unachievable physical ideal. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/38dh50I
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Peter Bogdanovich: 'I missed my chance to tell Buster Keaton he was a genius – now I'm telling the world'

The Hollywood director has made a documentary about the silent-era legend, who he rates even above Charlie Chaplin. He explains why it was a project that came from the heart I must have been six or seven when I first saw Buster Keaton. We were living in New York, and my father took me to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where I saw some Keaton and some Chaplin pictures. I was just a kid, but I loved him right away, and that was the start of the great affection I have for silent comedy. Somebody once said to Chaplin: “Your camerawork is not very interesting,” and he replied: “It doesn’t have to be. I’m interesting.” But Keaton was great with the camera, and great with the acting as well. While directing the documentary The Great Buster: A Celebration, I came to care for him even more because he is so precise and the timing of the jokes is just flawless. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2I3fY95
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Parisian Lives by Deidre Bair review – deliciously indiscreet about Beckett and De Beauvoir

Buying drinks and rebuffing sexual advances ... the literary biographer reveals all about the process of writing two acclaimed lives When Samuel Beckett agreed to let Deirdre Bair write his biography, everyone assumed it was because he was sleeping with her. The year was 1971 and there could be no other explanation as to why the reclusive Grand Old Man of Irish and European letters should bestow a pearl of such great price on a young American with no more than a recent PhD to her name. Evil-minded gossip flew around the obstreperous ragtag of ivy league professors, Irish poets, Parisian intellectuals and New York critics who had appointed themselves gate-keepers of the Beckett universe. If anyone was going to write about the author of Waiting for Godot , Molloy and Krapp’s Last Tape , they had always imagined it would be them. Now, it transpired, this American had pillow-talked her way into the literary gig of the century while they had been busy going to international Beckett confe...
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Vladislav Delay: Rakka review – techno from the end of the world

(Cosmo Rhythmatic) Inspired by the arctic tundra and the climate crisis, the Finnish producer’s angriest work to date is a mix of unstable, deconstructed beats and bludgeoning noise Most people tend to start out angry at injustice in the world, and then have that anger pared down by the passage of time until they’re playing golf and voting Conservative. Vladislav Delay, AKA Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti, has done the reverse. As Luomo in the mid-00s, he evolved the elegant minimal house that plays in cocktail bars into its ideal form. Sensual and subtly detailed, his tracks had a quiet toughness, but all certainly felt well with the world. His Vladislav Delay moniker was for even more beatific ambient techno. But by the time of his 2012 masterpiece Kuopio, its equally strong sister EP Espoo and the skittish jazz-techno fusion group Vladislav Delay Quartet, disquiet had crept in. The beats drummed like quick, nervous fingers on a tabletop, or a steady fist at a door. Continue reading...
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'She exists out of time': Umm Kulthum, Arab music's eternal star

With a voice adored by Bob Dylan, Robert Plant and millions across the Arab world, Umm Kulthum rejected gender norms with her powerful, political music. But can her 90-minute songs work in a new stage musical? You hear the Umm Kulthum cafe before you see it. Violins swoon and a monumental voice surges from a doorway in Cairo’s Tawfiqia neighbourhood. Outside, couples smoke shisha on plastic chairs, dwarfed by two immense golden busts depicting the singer known variously as “the star of the east”, “mother of the Arabs” and “Egypt’s fourth pyramid”. Umm Kulthum recorded about 300 songs over a 60-year career and her words of love, loss and longing drift reliably from taxis, radios and cafes across the Arab world today, 45 years after her death. Despite singing complex Arabic poetry, she influenced some of the west’s greatest singers. Bob Dylan said: “She’s great. She really is.” Shakira and Beyoncé have performed dance routines to her music. Maria Callas called her “the incomparable voi...
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Hidden figure: how The Invisible Man preys on real-world female fears

While the new interpretation of HG Wells’s novel might lean into Hollywood silliness, its portrayal of a woman being surveilled is scarily real There’s a scene in the first half of The Invisible Man, a psychological horror film that reinvents the HG Wells character as an abusive ex-turned-stalker , when the protagonist, Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss), realizes she’s not alone in her room. She can’t be sure she hears breathing, or the slight brush of footfalls; she definitely can’t see anyone. But she can feel something is wrong – the gut-level sense one gets from having another heartbeat in the room draws her from bed. She checks the living room, the kitchen, the porch outside – there’s no one she can see, only an invisible person’s cold exhale on her shoulder. The scene is played for suspense – it’s the first introduction to the movie’s villain as invisible tormenter – but it also, for me, conjures a more relatable fear. The Invisible Man (her ex-husband, Adrian) paws through her room and...
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Crystal Palace's lifesize dinosaurs added to heritage at risk register

Historic England concerned that 166-year-old statues are cracking and losing toes Dinosaurs are once again facing an extinction threat. Not a giant meteor this time but changing water levels threatening a Victorian Jurassic park that has fascinated and thrilled generations of visitors for 166 years. Historic England is announcing on Friday that it is adding the Crystal Palace dinosaurs to its heritage at risk register, worried by large cracks appearing in some of the 30 lifesize statues that were part of a pioneering project to educate and entertain people about natural science. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2uBTxoh
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10 Years Younger in 10 Days review – the Botoxed makeover show is back ... and it's uglier than ever

The series where ‘dowdy’ participants are remedied with fillers and expensive clothes returns to our screens. But, a decade on, the cracks are showing It is 11 years since the show formerly known simply as 10 Years Younger last aired. Back then it was on Channel 4 and briefly hosted by Myleene Klass, but for ever associated with her predecessor, the specs-ellent Nicky Hambleton-Jones. These were the days of Trinny and Susannah’s boob squeezes and “Dr” Gillian McKeith’s miracle mung beans, when looking good meant submitting to the bullying instruction of a questionably qualified TV presenter. Whether audiences were browbeaten or merely bored, makeover shows fell out of favour until Queer Eye’s surprisingly sensitive reboot on Netflix. Now BBC One is launching its first one for 15 years – You Are What You Wear, with Rylan Clark-Neal – and 10 Years Younger is back, too, this time on Channel 5 and under a new guise as 10 Years Younger in 10 Days . But has the scruffy old bag let herself ...
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Art and commerce: a history of the art of advertising – in pictures

A new book examines the artistic development of advertising and the innovative ways that ads combined images, text and product to communicate and attract potential customers. Drawing on the John Johnson Collection held at the Bodleian Library, The Art of Advertising is published on 2 March with an accompanying exhibition at the Bodleian from 5 March to 31 August Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/397I7aX
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Halsey, pop's new firebrand: 'Nobody wants to be my friend. I'm drama by association'

The chart-topping singer has put out her most versatile and emotionally raw album yet. She talks about feeling used in relationships, the pain of miscarriage and facing death There are two security gates protecting Halsey’s home in the winding hills of Los Angeles. You clear the first, then you wait as the next is released by her team. Halsey is sitting at the kitchen table, dousing a burrito and waffles in hot sauce in front of a towering image of Kurt Cobain playing the Reading festival. It is the day after she put out her third album, Manic, her most exposed and versatile yet. “I was petrified to release it,” she says. Now 24, she began releasing music on Tumblr when she wast 17. Then, she expressed her pain through dystopian metaphors; now, she is specific and literal. On Manic, she discusses her father (929), her breakup from rapper G-Eazy (Without Me) and her reproductive health (More). Musically, Manic takes in minimal electronica (Ashley), countryfied pop (You Should Be Sad)...
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BTS cancel Seoul concerts as South Korea coronavirus cases pass 2,000

K-pop megastars BTS today cancelled four Seoul concerts due in April as the number of novel coronavirus cases in South Korea passed 2,000.The seven-piece boy band – currently one of the biggest acts in the world – had scheduled four gigs at the capital’s Olympic Stadium to promote their new album, Map of the Soul: 7.More than 200,000 fans were expected to attend, their agency Big Hit Entertainment said, with “a number of global production companies and a large group of expert international crew… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/3cdDq1b
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Berlin 2020: Days film review – Tsai Ming-liang’s meditative drama offers another dialogue-free experience from the director

3.5/5 stars“This film is intentionally unsubtitled,” announces a caption, amusingly, at the beginning of veteran Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang’s new film Days. This two-hour odyssey barely has any need of subtitles.Playing in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, the film’s catalogue claims that it is “without dialogue”, though in truth there are some brief exchanges – as promised, not translated with the help of subtitles. Largely, though, this is a dialogue-free experience, as Tsai… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2wP7cck
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Roman Polanski pulls out of Cesar awards fearing 'lynching'

The director, whose film An Officer and a Spy has 12 nominations in the French ‘Oscars’, will miss Paris ceremony after alleging threats by activists The controversial film director Roman Polanski has said he will not attend the French “Oscars” because he fears a “public lynching” by feminist activists. The veteran is at the centre of a storm of protest after his new film about the Dreyfus affair, An Officer and a Spy , topped the list of nominations for the Cesar awards, which will be presented in Paris on Friday night. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2PsEowX
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Sleater-Kinney review – versatile guitar heroes reach perfection

Brixton Academy, London They still do punk rock better than anyone, but the veteran US band have ably stepped into icy electronics, disco and offbeat pop The creative reinvention Sleater-Kinney undertook when joining forces with producer Annie Clark (AKA high conceptualist St Vincent ) for their ninth album, The Center Won’t Hold , came at a cost. Longstanding drummer Janet Weiss announced her exit last summer, saying: “The band is headed in a new direction and it is time for me to move on.” But while the album’s wonky electronics and darkly offbeat pop sensibility marked an emphatic shift from their original minimalist punk aesthetic, it is still unmistakably the work of Sleater-Kinney – as tonight’s show attests. Their ranks expanded by new drummer Angie Boylan and multi-instrumentalists Katie Harkin and Toko Yasuda, the band draw much of their electricity from the tension between the icy electronic elements and the furious punk essence. The ominous simmer of the latest album’s t...
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Jay-Z files second lawsuit against 'barbaric' Mississippi prison

Acting on behalf of 152 inmates, the rapper and mogul argues prisoners’ constitutional rights are being violated Jay-Z has filed a civil lawsuit against the Mississippi Department of Corrections on behalf of 152 inmates at a state prison, alleging “barbaric” conditions. Parchman prison is accused of “abhorrent conditions, abuse and constant violence, inadequate health care and mental health care, and overuse of isolation … the people confined at Parchman live a miserable and hopeless existence confronted daily by imminent risk of substantial harm in violation of their rights under the US Constitution”. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2wRRKfG
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Love and Leopoldstadt: don't be surprised if Tom Stoppard gets emotional

The playwright’s new work has been seen as a departure from his intellectual stock-in-trade. But look deeper, and passion has always been present What kind of writer is Tom Stoppard? In countless profiles and reviews he has been characterised as an intellectual gymnast, a dazzling wordsmith, a glamoriser of thought: a man who can take such subjects as linguistic philosophy, Latin love poetry and quantum mechanics and turn them into the stuff of drama. If anything has been missing, it is implied, it is self-revelation and strong emotion – both of which are evident in Leopoldstadt , Stoppard’s latest, and possibly last , play. I would argue, however, that there has always been a fierce, if largely unacknowledged, emotional ground-base to Stoppard’s work. What is new about Leopoldstadt is its element of autobiography. Stoppard once told an interviewer, in an uncharacteristically clumsy phrase: “I don’t think of my life as a well into which I drop my bucket with a sense of going deeply i...
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James Newman: My Last Breath – UK Eurovision 2020 entry is serviceably bland

With his unremarkable blend of Lewis Capaldi, Mumford & Sons and Coldplay, Newman is unlikely to trouble the Republic of Macedonia on the leaderboard Only a demented optimist doesn’t feel a sense of hopelessness overwhelm them as the UK’s entry for Eurovision 2020 appears. In fairness to James Newman, the feeling overwhelms you before you actually hear My Last Breath. Eurovision was never exactly a source of national pride – not even the most swivel-eyed, sunlit-uplands jingoist would attempt to elicit a surge of nostalgic patriotism by mentioning the Brotherhood of Man wowing the foreigners with Save All Your Kisses for Me – but it’s turned into an annual national humiliation. There’s no point blaming resentment about Brexit: we last won 23 years ago. We haven’t even made the Top 10 since 2009, a minor success that was wiped out the following year when nobody at all voted for the UK’s entry. Our latter-day lot at Eurovision is to end up in the chastening low 20s. Continue read...
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Vault festival 2020: all of the latest reviews

Keep track of the shows at the sprawling arts extravaganza beneath Waterloo station in London. This page will be updated throughout the festival Until 1 March Funny, tragic and full of hope, Dumbledore Is So Gay blends a charming nerdiness with an earnest desire to make the world easier for young gay kids. Jack, a gay Hufflepuff (played by an affable Alex Britt), has grown up with homophobic slurs chucked around the classroom and mumbled disdain at gay celebrities at home. When devastation strikes, he uses Hermione’s time-turner to try to fix the past. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/36DaX0S
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Small presses loom large on International Booker prize longlist

Nine of 13 nominated titles for this year’s £50,000 award for the best translated fiction come from indie publishers Some of the smallest publishers in the UK are doing the heaviest lifting seeking out the best translated fiction, with the longlist for this year’s International Booker prize dominated by tiny presses at the expense of their wealthier rivals. The £50,000 award, which is split evenly between writer and translator, is for the finest translated fiction from around the world, with previous winners including Korean bestseller Han Kang and Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. Settings for the 13 novels up for this year’s prize range from Iran – in Shokoofeh Azar’s The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, narrated by the ghost of a 13-year-old girl fleeing her home after the 1979 revolution – to South Africa, in Willem Anker’s Red Dog, described by judges as “a novel of serpentine, swashbuckling sentences that capture the mounting cruelty of the colonial project”. Continue ...
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Berlin 2020: The Roads Not Taken film review – Javier Bardem, Elle Fanning in time-shifting dementia drama

3.5/5 stars “Everything is open,” croaks Javier Bardem’s Leo at the very beginning of Sally Potter’s latest film The Roads Not Taken. This is one of the few coherent things that he says, at least for a while, in a story that explores trauma, mental illness and immigration, among other things. Playing in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, with Elle Fanning, Salma Hayek and Laura Linney co-starring, this is arguably Potter’s starriest vehicle since The Man Who Cried with Johnny Depp and… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2VCtQ2f
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David Cronenberg: 'Movies were made for sex'

The acclaimed film-maker goes in front of the camera for a new thriller and talks about age, sex and how difficult he finds it to get funding for a new project Walter, the character played by David Cronenberg in Aaron Shin’s new horror-thriller Disappearance at Clifton Hill, gets an introduction befitting the film-maker’s legendary stature. He emerges from a small-town river where he’s been trawling for sunken treasures in scuba gear, lumbering out of the water like a less intimidating cousin of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. As a local-lore podcaster and avid conspiracy theorist, Walter feels perfectly comfortable with such an air of the weird about him, and audiences familiar with Cronenberg’s extensive work in the stranger corners of cult cinema probably presume that he does, too. But in the moment, as per usual, he was just thinking about his body. Related: Todd Haynes: 'People who say Trump is bound to win are letting it happen' Continue reading... from Culture ...
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Color Out of Space review – Nicolas Cage goes cosmic in freaky sci-fi horror

A repulsive alien organism is unleashed on Earth in Richard Stanley’s scary, hokey – and often funny – extravaganza In the bonkers 2018 thriller Mandy , Nicolas Cage gave one of his Cage-iest performances yet, face splattered in blood as he pursued a cult leader who’d tortured his girlfriend. If you thought that was trippy, wait till you see Color Out of Space, in which Cage’s mug is once again sprayed with blood ... alpaca blood. Adapted from a story by HP Lovecraft, this is a freaky-deaky, retro-cosmic science-fiction horror about a meteor that slams into Earth unleashing an extraterrestrial organism. The whole thing looks as if it was dreamed up under the influence of a quality batch of LSD. I laughed out loud at the hokiest bits. But I’ve got to admit I was sucked in and genuinely scared, too. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2I1L80p
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How Spotify had a hand in K-pop’s meteoric rise: BTS, Blackpink and Exo among app’s top streamed bands

K-pop is at an all-time high and the genre owes a great deal of its international success to Spotify, the global audio streaming subscription service which is now dominated by the infectious sound from South Korea.In 2014, Spotify launched its K-pop flagship playlist K-pop Daebak, which now has more than 2.4 million followers. Between January 2014 and January this year, K-pop streams increased more than 1,800 per cent and during the same period users listened to more than 134 billion minutes of… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/397yitq
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Free Solo star Alex Honnold falls off a mountain: Keith Ladzinski's best photo

‘Alex was on vacation in Greece – but even on vacation, he still climbs. Fortunately, unlike in the film Free Solo, he’s on a rope here’ When you’re climbing, things can go from fun to serious pretty quick. The worst fall I ever had happened while I was in Aspen, Colorado , in 2002. I broke my neck, my pelvic bone and four ribs. I collapsed my right lung, too, and had kidney and liver damage. I didn’t think about anything as I fell. I was just waiting for my equipment to catch me, but it didn’t. It all came away from the wall and I hit the ground 11 metres below. I don’t remember the impact so there was no trauma associated with that. I just remember waking up pretty disorientated, with about eight heads looking down at me. “Oh my God, you just fell,” I thought. It shook me up and I swore I was finished with climbing. But I was 22 and my photography career was just starting to be a thing. So three months later, when a magazine asked me to go on a rock shoot, I agreed and I’ve been cl...
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The Invisible Man film review: Elisabeth Moss shines as abuse victim in effective sci-fi thriller

3.5/5 stars Transforming author H.G. Wells’ mad scientist into the controlling force in an abusive relationship, writer-director Leigh Whannell reinvents The Invisible Man as a rallying cry for the #MeToo era. In the film, Elisabeth Moss plays a young woman fleeing from her violent, controlling lover, who struggles to convince those around her that she is in danger from an unseen tormentor. After the failure of 2017’s reboot of The Mummy , and the subsequent collapse of Universal’s proposed… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2Ptld6e
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'I have nothing to lose': forgotten survivors of the new Wild West

Photographer Frank Blazquez tells the stories of young New Mexicans living on what feels like borrowed time Inhaling precious breaths with a hole in his chest, a young University of New Mexico baseball player, Jackson Weller, lay on the street bleeding. He was shot to death after a night out with friends. Two weeks prior a beloved postal worker, Jose Hernandez, was delivering on an Albuquerque route when a 17-year-old allegedly shot him following an altercation. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Psw5ku
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The Tin Drum review – Günter Grass's spectacular study of German trauma

Coronet theatre, London Nico Holonics is in resoundingly offbeat form as as a stunted child in a solo show that delights in making its audience squirm ‘How shall I begin?” asks Nico Holonics in this surreal adaptation of Günter Grass’s sweeping story about nazism, post war guilt and the German psyche . Produced by the Berliner Ensemble and directed by Oliver Reese, this drama is as much concerned with storytelling as it is with the life of its central stunted character, Oskar Matzerath. It is solely performed by Holonics as Oskar, the child who refuses to grow beyond the age of three, is cast as a freak in society and who tells us of the deaths of his mother and the two men he calls his “presumptive fathers”. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2TlreCO
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Kwame Dawes Reads Derek Walcott

On The New Yorker’s “Poetry Podcast,” Kwame Dawes joins Kevin Young to discuss “The Season of Phantasmal Peace,” by Derek Walcott, and his own poem “Before Winter.” from Culture: TV, Movies, Music, Art, and Theatre News and Reviews https://ift.tt/3a7q0SB
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Tekken: the fighting game that takes women's stories seriously

Filled with intrigue and drama, the Tekken games are like violent soap operas in which women are the complex stars A young woman stands at the grave of her recently departed father, her blond hair in a ponytail. After a quiet moment, she places flowers on the ground, then hears the crunch of gravel behind her. She whips around, pulls out her gun and finds a brunette woman of roughly her own age. The brunette smiles faintly and reassures the blonde that she’s not here to fight. She, too, is here to pay her respects. They walk past one another, visibly tense in blocky 1996 animation, and decide to let the feud rest. For today. This is one of the more conservative story endings for Nina Williams, a much-beloved combatant in the Tekken series of fighting games . In conversations around classic female video games characters, she often gets overlooked. Street Fighter’s Chung-Li is the first lady of the fighting genre (the Princess Leia buns, the thighs that launched a thousand “crushed to ...
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'People think I bathe in asses' milk': how Towie's Gemma Collins became a podcast hit

She went from selling cars to starring on reality TV – and now fronts a smash-hit podcast. But 10 years in the tabloid firing line hasn’t been easy ‘You get the wig on, you put the lipstick on, you get the big eyelashes on and that’s the GC,” says Gemma Collins, explaining her alter ego. “It’s like Paul O’Grady when he does Lily Savage ... But when I’m not working, I don’t wear a scrap of makeup.” It is hard to imagine that today, as the GC strikes a pose in a photo studio laden with rails of clothes. A makeup artist, a hairdresser, a photographer and multiple agents fan around her. “Pull down my sleeve, Jeff!” she calls out to her stylist. The room buzzes with chatter, as Collins – who says she has been awake and working since 5.30am, when she fashioned a makeshift eye mask out of her dressing gown cord and got into a taxi – summons various members of her team. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2uursiE
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Singaporean singer Kelly Poon in surprise Instagram marriage announcement, with big diamond ring

Singaporean Mando-pop singer Kelly Poon has announced her marriage to a Taiwanese music producer. The 36-year-old, who was the first runner-up on singing competition Project SuperStar in 2005, posted a photo on Instagram showing a diamond ring on her ring finger.Netizens initially thought the singer was announcing an engagement, but it was later revealed that she and her partner had tied the knot. Poon had previously not revealed she was in a relationship, but had posted snippets of their… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/3818NJ4
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Theft by Luke Brown review – black comedy of sexualised class war

A enigmatic chancer worms his way into a world of privilege and power in this pithy satirical novel The narrator of Luke Brown’s second novel is “a white male from the north of England, small town, moribund, working class-cum-middle-class … a reader, an autodidact, a would-be escapee”. Paul is a bookseller and occasional hack; he writes two columns – one about books, the other about haircuts – for a fashion magazine. With his beard, thick-rimmed glasses and garish bicycle, he could be your typical hipster. But he feels like an impostor in his east London milieu. When he meets a mercurial novelist called Emily, he believes he has found a kindred spirit: “Her Glaswegian accent was carefully enunciated … she might have planed the edges off it herself, like I had done with mine, sliver by sliver, to wedge between where we had been and where we now wanted admittance.” Emily lives in an affluent part of town with her much older partner, Andrew, a distinguished conservative public intellectu...
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African-Mexican carnival of Coyolillo – in pictures

The carnival in Coyolillo, a town in the coastal state of Veracruz in Mexico, dates back over 100 years. This non-religious festival includes parades, dances, music and feasting and is the heritage of sugar cane workers and slaves of African origin freed from farms. The event is known for the colourful robes, capes and animal masks – of bulls, deer, goats and cows – worn by participants. As such, the carnival is a unique expression of African-Mexican folk art Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2I2okgZ
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David Roback, Mazzy Star co-founder, dies aged 61

Roback, a producer, guitarist and keyboardist, played a leading role in the neo-psychedelic revival of the 1980s and ’90s The Mazzy Star co-founder and multi-instrumentalist David Roback has died, a representative for the band announced Tuesday. He was 61. A cause of death has not yet been released. A producer, guitarist and keyboardist, Roback formed Mazzy Star alongside Hope Sandoval. The pair would go on to write all of the group’s songs. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Pp8e5n
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Disney chief executive Bob Iger announces surprise exit

Iger, who became chief executive in 2005, is stepping down immediately, to be replaced by Bob Chapek Disney’s chief executive, Bob Iger, who steered the company through successful purchases of Star Wars, Marvel and Fox’s entertainment businesses, is stepping down immediately, the company said in a surprise announcement on Tuesday. The Walt Disney Company named as his replacement Bob Chapek, most recently chairman of Disney Parks, Experiences and Products. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2HSPYNp
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Singer Duffy says she was raped, drugged and held captive

Welsh singer made statement on Instagram saying she was held captive for several days Aimee Duffy, the Welsh pop singer known as Duffy who retreated from the public eye following her hugely successful debut album Rockferry, has said she was drugged, held captive and raped by an unidentified person. In a statement on her official Instagram account she said: “The truth is, and please trust me I am OK and safe now, I was raped and drugged and held captive over some days. Of course I survived. The recovery took time. There’s no light way to say it. But I can tell you in the last decade, the thousands and thousands of days I committed to wanting to feel the sunshine in my heart again, the sun does now shine.” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2HX5196
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Our Bodies, Their Battlefield by Christina Lamb review – groundbreaking on women and war

Rape is as much a weapon of war as a Kalashnikov ... the acclaimed foreign correspondent has written a harrowing but vital book As a junior researcher on a TV documentary in Uganda in 1986, I was told to ask a question that was the dark cliche of war reporting: “Anyone here been raped and speak English?” To my horror, a teenage girl stepped shyly forward, eyes cast downwards. Since then, I have come across hundreds of women raped in wars around the world – and I have found kinder ways of establishing if they want to tell their story. In her harrowing new book, foreign correspondent Christina Lamb explains that rape in conflict is often seen as a “private crime”, an incidental atrocity, when it is “as much of a weapon of war as the machete, club or Kalashnikov”. She gives priority to the stories of individual women, many of whom feel validated by speaking out, but understands why other victims remain silent. Often they feel ashamed, or fear ostracism from their own communities. “You w...
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Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears review – Essie Davis delights in hokey, lustreless film

The cult hit show’s first big-screen foray rarely conjures a cinematic feel, bogged down by dialogue, schlock and flavourless scenes For those unacquainted with ABC’s hit whodunnit series Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, based on author Kerry Greenwood’s detective novels and set in 1920s Melbourne, each episode begins with somebody carking it. The show’s three seasons (there’s also a spin-off called Ms Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries) depicts a variety of, shall we say, not ideal ways of exiting the mortal coil – from shootings and stabbings to poisonings, hangings and even beheadings. The fashionista-detective Phryne Fisher (Essie Davis) inevitably solves each case and reveals the killer in a succinctly worded monologue towards the end. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2utCEMr
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Where women rule: the last matriarchy in Europe – in pictures

Big Heart, Strong Hands is the story of the women who live on the isolated Estonian islands of Kihnu and Manija in the Baltic Sea. Often viewed as the last matriarchal society in Europe, the older women here take care of almost everything on land as their husbands travel the seas. Anne Helene Gjelstad’s Big Heart, Strong Hands is published by Dewi Lewis Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/386fjOU
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'I can hear them three floors away!' The theatres where you don't have to behave

You’re meant to shut up, keep still and pay attention at the theatre – but what if that’s a problem? We examine the rise of ‘relaxed’ spaces where anything goes It started with the toes. Someone slipped off their shoes at a West End show, propping up their bare feet; their neighbour tweeted a photo in disgust. Joe Douglas , artistic director of Live theatre in Newcastle, popped up to say that he wasn’t bothered. “Our theatre IS your house,” he tweeted. “If your feet smell or the actors are pissed off with your feet being on the stage, we might have words. Otherwise, crack on. #makeyourselfathome” What does make a theatre feel like home? Negotiating mobile phones, sweet wrappers and chatty Kathys is a well-documented headache for theatre staff and spectators alike. The academic Kirsty Sedgman , in her book The Reasonable Audience, notes: “We may say we want audiences to feel at home in the theatre, but we are still not willing to go so far as to let them act like they are at home.” ...
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Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada on working with Johnny Depp and teaching Japanese culture to Hollywood

Hiroyuki Sanada is a Japanese powerhouse and the 59 year-old, who has been based in Los Angeles for 20 years, doesn’t mind playing second fiddle to Hollywood superstars. In fact, he makes them look great, whether it be alongside Hugh Jackman in The Wolverine or Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai – and now Johnny Depp in the Berlin Film Festival stand-out Minamata. Sanada works behind the scenes too, as a kind of cultural adviser ensuring that the various productions in which he appears get the… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2Pkqm0f
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Wealth inequality, corruption: Malaysian rock band’s debut album strikes out at the country’s political system

Tension spread across Malaysia on the night of May 9, 2018, as the nation waited for results of the general election.Rumours of phantom voters and power outages in some polling stations were rife on Twitter and speculation focused on the possibility that the opposition coalition would finally seize power from the National Front, which had ruled the country since 1957.It was not until well after midnight that the Election Commission finally announced that the former ruling party had lost to the… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/3a5RiZq
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Josie Lawrence: ‘Of course I don’t think I’m sexy!’

Whose Line Is It Anyway? made her a household name. But, more than 30 years on, does the queen of improv also think it held her back? She talks about ambition, sexism and her lucky escape from the trolls Josie Lawrence is supposed to be talking about her new play, Our Lady of Blundellsands, by Jonathan Harvey, who is probably best known for Gimme, Gimme, Gimme. But she gets there by way of a thousand detours, from her first gig in a working men’s club, which she took in order to get an Equity card, through the late 80s, her reign as queen of improv, to Oklahoma!, which she did recently in Chichester . “It was an uber-talented company – young people who could do everything: dancing, singing, acting. It was joyous. I was Mama Josie and they treated me just lovely. I did everything with them. Bowling, parties, days at the beach, karaoke.” There’s something in this litany of wholesome pursuits that distils the way she talks about her career: an ongoing sense of wonder at how great everyon...
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Coronavirus outbreak in Italy causes Mission Impossible VII filming to halt

Production of the latest film in the Mission: Impossible series starring Tom Cruise has been stopped in Italy following the coronavirus outbreak, American film studio Paramount Pictures said on Monday.The seventh instalment of the franchise was scheduled to shoot in Venice for three weeks, the first location for production.“Out of an abundance of caution for the safety and well-being of our cast and crew, and efforts of the local Venetian government to halt public gatherings in response to the… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/3a3DrCU
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Director Richard Stanley: 'A coven of witches was using my house.'

His new movie stars Nicolas Cage as an alien-fighting alpaca farmer. But the maverick film-maker’s life story might be even trippier Extraordinary stories tumble out of Richard Stanley’s mouth – absurdist adventures from far-off lands, anecdotes involving ghosts and warlocks – all delivered with a mischievous matter-of-factness. One minute, he is talking about a short film he directed after a glow-in-the-dark Ouija board from Toys “R” Us dictated the plot to him; the next, he is remembering a friend who died after doing a ritual to placate “a seemingly fictional deity”. We are ostensibly discussing his new film, Color Out of Space, but it is understandable that he might head off on the odd extended detour; it has, after all, been 28 years since he directed a feature. His last attempt was his 1996 adaptation of HG Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau: a dream project for Stanley that turned into a disaster. The daughter of its star, Marlon Brando , killed herself the day before the Austral...
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House of Glass by Hadley Freeman review – flight and fight of a Jewish family

Hadley Freeman’s gripping family biography of persecution and escape offers lessons for our own time Deep inside her paternal grandmother’s closet, behind the leather handbags, the elegant dresses wrapped in dry-cleaner plastic, all giving off a whiff of Guerlain face powder mixed with Chanel perfume, the Guardian writer Hadley Freeman discovered a shoebox covered in years of dust. Its contents deflected her from the fashion piece she had been intending to write about her unsettling, melancholic French grandmother, now dead for some 10 years, and ever out of place in the America where they all lived. Instead, the photos, documents and mysterious fragments the shoebox contained set her off on a quest. It grew into a capacious family story that moves from Poland to France to America and brings to vivid life some of the worst, and perhaps also finest, moments of the 20th century. Freeman is a determined and eloquent detective. She sifts records, has translations of documents done and ...
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‘My gift’: Chinese director Jia Zhangke on using China’s most influential writers to paint a subtle portrait of country’s history since 1949

Sitting quietly in Berlin’s Hyatt Hotel for this interview, Jia Zhangke is a long way from home – a subject that must be on his mind right now. One of the pre-eminent figures in China’s so-called “sixth generation” of filmmakers, famed for such films as A Touch of Sin, the Venice-winning Still Life and Ash Is Purest White , he is here at the Berlinale to present Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue. Jia’s first documentary since 2011’s I Wish I Knew, this non-fiction odyssey also takes him… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/2Vj2Ggn
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Nigel Godrich webchat – post your questions now!

The Ultraísta member and Radiohead producer will be answering your questions at Guardian HQ from 2pm GMT on Tuesday 25 February 4.35pm GMT It’s been eight years since Nigel Godrich’s band Ultraísta released their debut album ( we called it “a producer’s album, but not without the benefits that come from stepping out from behind the desk”), and now the trio are back with Sister, out on 13 March. Multi-instrumentalist Godrich joins frontwoman Laura Bettinson and drummer/producer Joey Waronker for what they’ve described as a “cinematic sci-fi soundscape that’s both exhilarating and laser-focused” and a “celebration of our friendship”, which is a strong Venn diagram if ever there was one. Godrich is heading to the Guardian offices at 2pm on 25 February to answer your questions about Ultraísta – and of course his most famous gig as Radiohead ’s long-term producer (not to mention a fixture of their various side projects, including Atoms for Peace , and Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood’s re...
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Xbox Series X console features 12 teraflops graphics processor

Microsoft confirms key specs of games console plus new ‘Smart Delivery’ feature allowing one-size-fits-all game purchases Microsoft has confirmed that its next games console, the Xbox Series X, will feature a 12 teraflops graphics processor, eight times more powerful than the Xbox One graphics chipset. The announcement, made by the Xbox chief, Phil Spencer, via Microsoft’s Wire news site , confirmed recent rumours about the machine, which is launching this winter. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3c3haad
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Hockney muse Celia Birtwell: 'Nobody else has ever asked to draw me'

The textile designer is the artist’s most famous muse, posing for him since the 1960s in paintings that have become iconic. Ahead of a major Hockney show, she talks about the joy and sadness behind their creation The first time textile designer Celia Birtwell modelled for David Hockney, she was, she says, terrified. “Look, that’s a very nervous me,” she says, pointing to a 1969 ink drawing titled, simply, Celia in Paris. “We were in an apartment in Paris – I think it belonged to Tony Richardson. It was so tranquil but I was terrified of doing something wrong.” Given this was to be the first of hundreds of portraits he made of her, she obviously did something right. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/37TOj52
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The surprising history of astrology – books podcast

On this week’s show, data scientist Alexander Boxer looks back over the history of astrology and reveals what it tells us about the past – and the future – of science. She tells Richard about the surprising history and science of astrology in his book A Scheme of Heaven: The History of Astrology and the Search for our Destiny in Data. And at the trial of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, his lawyer complained that a juror was reading “books on predatory older men” and reviewing them online on Goodreads during the proceedings. Claire and Sian talk about the ways our reading choices can signal who we are as people. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3a3Adzu
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Harvey Weinstein to face charges in Los Angeles after guilty verdict in New York

LA case, announced before Manhattan trial began, focuses on charges for two alleged attacks over two days The verdict in the New York case against Harvey Weinstein is only the beginning of the movie mogul’s prosecution, with separate charges against the disgraced producer ahead in Los Angeles. In the most high-profile trial of the #MeToo movement yet, a New York jury on Monday found Weinstein guilty of third-degree rape for an attack in a New York hotel and guilty of a criminal sex act for forcing oral sex on a former television production assistant. The fallen titan of Hollywood , who was taken away in handcuffs, could face 25 years in prison and will have to register as a sex offender. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2w7h8NV
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BBC to film series based on Sally Rooney's hit debut novel

Conversation with Friends will follow Rooney’s Normal People that will air in April The BBC has commissioned a 12-part series based on Sally Rooney’s hit debut novel Conversations with Friends in the hope that fans of the young Irish author will bring in younger audiences. The BBC is to show its forthcoming adaptation of Rooney’s second novel, Normal People , suggesting the corporation is already banking on the series being a hit when it is released by the online-only BBC Three service in April. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Pm9k1z
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'Taika Naptiti': director Waititi endorses Twitter thread paying homage to his snoozing

Friends and colleagues have submitted photos of the New Zealand director asleep at work and play The New Zealand director Taika Waititi has made one superfan’s day after personally endorsing a Twitter account that collects pictures of him napping. Waititi is the focus of an extensive thread known as “Taika Naptiti”, created by fan account @mcuwaititi, that shows the Oscar-winning film-maker in a variety of slumbering and mid-sleeping poses: from directors chairs to award shows. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2PiOH6w
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'This is just the beginning': Hollywood reacts to Harvey Weinstein's conviction

Stars from Julianne Moore and Rosie Perez to Weinstein accuser Ashley Judd respond to the movie mogul’s guilty verdict Harvey Weinstein’s conviction on two charges on Monday – rape in the third degree and criminal sexual acts in the first degree – drew swift cheers from many in the entertainment industry, seeing it as an incomplete yet important step for criminal justice in the #MeToo era. Related: Harvey Weinstein found guilty of rape at New York trial Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/37UMyV2
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Opera about Alexander Litvinenko murder to premiere in UK in July

‘For me is about justice,’ says widow explaining why she is happy to see operatic retelling It is a tragic story of love, power and loss, but Marina Litvinenko hopes an opera based on her husband’s murder will also help bring about something far more important to her: justice. Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian secret service officer, died after being poisoned with the radioactive isotope polonium-210 in London in 2006. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2Te4VPl
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Fluid and fashionable: V&A shakes up image of 'traditional' kimono

Exhibition shows off rich history of Japanese garment in all its three-dimensional glory More than 100 kimonos, from Freddie Mercury’s favourite cherry-blossom-pink lounging robe to gold-embroidered ceremonial silks worn by Japanese samurai, are to go on display this Saturday in a major exhibition entitled Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk at the V&A in London. The exhibition, which also includes original Star Wars film costumes and designs by Yves Saint Laurent, John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, begins in Edo-period Japan: walls are painted in a shade called “green tea” and fluttering white noren , the traditional fabric room-dividers that hang in the doorways of shops and restaurants in Japan, hover above the 400-year-old antique kimonos. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3c611B1
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Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor review – intense and inventive

A murder mystery set in horror and squalor, this English-language debut signals the rise of a Mexican star A structurally inventive murder mystery set in a lawless Mexican village rife with superstition, Fernanda Melchor’s formidable English-language debut takes the form of eight torrential paragraphs ranging from one to 64 pages long. It opens in a blizzard of gossip related to the discovery of the corpse of a notorious local woman known as the Witch, who provided abortions for sex workers serving the nearby oil industry and whose rundown mansion – a venue for raucous parties – was said to hold a stash of gold eyed up by everyone from down-at-heel gigolos to venal cops on the take. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3c7vDC8
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The Invisible Man review – Elisabeth Moss brings murky thriller to life

A reliably committed lead performance ignites a mostly enjoyable, often timely, take on the HG Wells story that falls apart in the final act While some would argue that the worst thing to have spawned from Marvel’s extended cinematic universe is an overreliance on the superhero genre in general, there’s been something arguably more damaging at play. The unprecedented commercial success of the interconnected, multi-branched nature of the MCEU caused other studios to crave similar long-term profits and so franchises suddenly grew exponentially, in every possible direction, whether they needed to or not. The most disastrous example of this came from Universal who saw the trend as a way of relaunching and combining their many monster movies as part of the newly coined Dark Universe . A logo was released along with a promotional image of cast members from films that hadn’t yet started production, an ambitious yet ultimately foolish gamble given that the first of these, 2017’s The Mummy, wa...
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Flesh and Blood review – gorge on this deliciously dread-filled thriller

Envy, turmoil and resentment make for the perfect recipe in this Imelda Staunton-led drama, which takes in a widow’s new romance, a mountain of family secrets – and a dead body What do you want to see you through the last dark, dismal days of winter? A rattling good yarn by the fireside, that’s what. A rich, meaty plot stew to go with the one warming your lap of an evening. And ITV has provided one, in the form of toothsome new drama Flesh and Blood, served up in deeply satisfying portions across four consecutive nights this week. Grab a spoon and hunker down. In a beautifully appointed home on the picturesque Sussex coast where she has lived for 40 years, dwells glamorous Vivien (Francesca Annis, so things are already BRILLIANT), a mother of three adult children who was widowed 18 months ago after an apparently happy marriage for nearly half a century to their father, Terry. Next door, in a slightly less well-appointed house in which she has lived for even longer, is unglamorous Mar...
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The Translators film review: French whodunit thriller a gripping experience despite unlikely subject matter

3.5/5 stars Translation is often considered a mundane and tedious job, so a whodunit thriller revolving around a group of professional translators at work sounds about as plausible as the plot of a Fast and Furious movie. But credit to French filmmaker Régis Roinsard (Populaire), because The Translators manages to intrigue and entertain throughout its 100-minute run-time despite perhaps one twist too many in the third act. The mystery here isn’t who’s the killer – though people do die in… from South China Morning Post https://ift.tt/3c8jJYv
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'This is the new standard for spectacle': fans react to the Back to the Future musical

Audience members give their verdict on the musical version of the 1985 hit movie, which has premiered in Manchester ahead of a West End transfer Fans of 1985 pop culture phenomenon Back to the Future strapped themselves in for one of the first performances of the new musical version in Manchester this week. Brought to the stage by the film’s original creative team of Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis, and directed by Tony award-winner John Rando, the musical features a new score from combined eight-time Grammy-winning duo Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard, alongside the movie’s original soundtrack hits. Standing in the queue that stretched all the way up to Deansgate was Back to the Future superfan Steve Foster, 52, who said that he didn’t care how true it was to the film, he would probably cry regardless. Having grown up with the film and watched it “hundreds” of times, to the point where he knew all the words, this proud owner of Back to the Future memorabilia including lego and a holog...
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'We were all a little bit punk': Haring, Basquiat and the art that defined 80s New York

New York critic and curator Carlo McCormick picks the 10 pieces that cemented the radical legacy of a game-changing art scene New York curator and cultural critic Carlo McCormick is proud and serene as he describes the National Gallery of Victoria’s blockbuster 2020 exhibition, Crossing Lines , as a “celebration”. He’s also quick to note that this is not just a celebration of the men whose names are on the door. “Keith [Haring] and Jean-Michel [Basquiat] are really ciphers that signify a whole group of artists and community,” says McCormick, who guest curated the show. “Every bit of modernism was actually a gang of friends getting together.” And there’s no arguing that this gang – “a bunch of bratty kids” – defined an era. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2T87eUn
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'It sounded like the future': behind Miles Davis's greatest album

On the 50th anniversary of Bitches Brew, one of the contributing musicians and the director of a new documentary share their thoughts on the record Guitarist John McLaughlin, who helped electrify Miles Davis’s music, describes Bitches Brew as “Picasso in sound”. Stanley Nelson, who directed a new documentary on Davis, calls it “an all-out assault”, while Davis’s official biographer, Quincy Troupe, labels it “a cultural breakthrough: it sounded like the future”. Related: Miles Davis's 20 greatest albums – ranked! Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/38TzReH
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Oscar-bait no more: why serious-issue dramas are floundering

Worthy movies such as Dark Waters used to be the toast of Hollywood. But is the audience for them drying up? Dark Waters must be the least Todd Haynes film Todd Haynes has ever made. Based on the true story of a corporate lawyer (played by Mark Ruffalo) who switches sides to expose pollution by the DuPont chemical company, it is powerful and creditable, but does not feel like the work of the man who gave us the lush, stylised likes of Carol and Far from Heaven. It feels more like an Oscar-bait issue movie in the mould of Erin Brockovich. Except with Dark Waters, the awards panels didn’t bite and neither, going by US box-office numbers, have the public. The formula has stopped working, but the films keep coming. Which is why we need to talk about Participant Media. Participant was founded in 2004 by eBay billionaire Jeff Skoll with the noble intention of producing movies with “socially relevant themes”. By many measures, it has succeeded. Participant has received 74 Oscar nominations...
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