Category Archives: Culture

‘I grew up with Branagh in Belfast: our childhoods haunt his new film’

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The director’s first cousin Martin Hamilton tells of family and the Troubles that went on to inspire an acclaimed memoir

There is one man with very personal reasons for finding the scenes of sectarian intimidation in Sir Kenneth Branagh’s film homage to his home city particularly haunting – his first cousin, Martin Hamilton.

Hamilton, who grew up with Branagh and his family in inner-city north Belfast, says the images of Catholic families being forced out of the mainly Protestant district brought back painful memories of his own fractured friendships that were lost in the Troubles.

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‘I’ve moved on, and then some’: singer George Ezra on fame, friendship and finding new inspiration

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His upbeat songs have won him legions of fans, but beneath his sunny lyrics George Ezra has a nihilistic streak that nearly ended his career. He talks about coping with OCD, walking the length of Britain – and his hopes of one day being a dad

George Ezra walks into the Old Barge, the Hertford pub that’s been his lifelong local, and within three minutes his song, Budapest is on the stereo. “They’re so supportive here,” he says, with shy gratitude, as he stoops under a curtain into a back room. Ezra first came here after school, searching for a loo. At 16, he started working behind the bar. When friends come home for Christmas, this is where they meet, “and where we would have always met”. It still smells the same. (Currently: of yesterday’s log fire, a comforting contrast to the January damp.) Over the next few hours, locals stick their heads in to wave hello to their friendly neighbourhood pop star, drinking lime cordial and soda in crisp double denim, and he greets them all back by name.

This is the approachable figure Ezra, who is 28, cuts in most settings, whether playing a radiant set at Glastonbury or warmly chatting about mental health on his podcast. A music college dropout born George Ezra Barnett, he emerged in 2014 as part of a cohort of middle-class British boys with acoustic guitars. Unlike most of them, he wasn’t lachrymose or ambition-crazed. Instead he had a good-weird sense of humour and a big voice, cultivated after this ardent blues fan became obsessed with the US blues singer Lead Belly.

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‘The outrage had been percolating…’ The winner of our graphic short story prize 2021

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A funeral in Germany provides the setting for our winning story in this year’s Cape/Observer/Comica award for emerging cartoonists. It was a year of fierce competition – and much pandemic-fuelled anxiety

There can’t be many things more cheering on a dark January night than having to tell someone they’ve won a prize, and when I telephone Astrid Goldsmith to give her just such a bit of good news, her reaction is everything I hoped it would be. For a while, Goldsmith, an animator who lives in Folkestone where she makes stop-motion films in her garage, struggles to speak in full sentences. She is just so thrilled. “That is the greatest compliment,” she says, when I tell her that her story, A Funeral in Freiburg, the winner of this year’s Observer/Jonathan Cape graphic short story prize, brings to mind the work of that genius Posy Simmonds. “I love her tone. I always have.”

Goldsmith’s entry is based on a real event: the funeral of her paternal grandmother in Germany in 2015. “The outrage had been percolating for a while,” she says, with a laugh. “But I only came to write it after my first baby was born, while I was breastfeeding: I drew it all on one of those trays with arms that invalids use in bed.” Her story revolves around the difficulties involved in organising a Jewish funeral service in a place – Freiburg, in the Black Forest – where the rabbi has been imprisoned for embezzlement, and the Jewish cemetery is full. The woman in charge is, very difficult, refusing even to believe that Gisela Goldschmidt was really Jewish (at the age of 18, Astrid’s grandmother fled Germany for Zimbabwe, only returning after the war was over). Her rules and regulations, not to mention her insistence on the performance of certain rituals, infuriate the Goldsmith family. But what choice do they have? It is a case of her way, or no proper funeral at all.

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‘More than wonderful’ … Gaza bookshop to reopen after unexpectedly successful global campaign

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After it was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, Samir Mansour’s beloved book store has been rebuilt and restocked, as tens of thousands of books flood in from around the world

Tens of thousands of donated books have started to arrive at the new location of a Gaza bookshop that was destroyed by Israeli air strikes last year, and owner Samir Mansour now plans to reopen its doors next month.

The two-storey Samir Mansour bookshop, which was reduced to rubble last May, had been founded by the Palestinian Mansour 22 years ago and was a beloved part of the local community. Its destruction during the 11-day conflict, which killed more than 250 people in Gaza and 13 in Israel, prompted a campaign that raised $250,000 (£187,000) to help rebuild it, plus donations of 150,000 books. The Israeli military has said that the store was not its target, claiming that the building that housed it also contained a Hamas facility for producing weapons and intelligence-gathering.

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‘Our managers were like: it’s going to be a dud’: how Glass Animals became the biggest British band in the world

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The Oxford quartet’s song Heat Waves is the most played globally on Spotify this week, and a curveball amid pop’s solo artists. Frontman Dave Bayley explains how it happened

With solo artists currently dominating the charts and the zeitgeist, now is not the ideal time to be in a band – unless it’s Glass Animals. This week, the Oxford quartet became the first British group to top Spotify’s global songs chart with their synthpop single Heat Waves, racking up 4.26m plays per day on the streaming platform. It was a feat their fans saw coming: last year, Heat Waves was the fourth most-streamed song in the US and the most-streamed in Australia, having been played more than 1bn times worldwide.

This is a remarkable achievement for an act with no previous big hits – but that’s not the only strange thing about their success. A sultry, wistful number with an extremely catchy chorus, Heat Waves has had an unusually slow rise to prominence: it was released in June 2020 and for months it failed to break into the UK Top 40 or US Billboard Hot 100. Its subsequent ascent up the charts – peaking at No 5 in the UK, No 1 in Australia and No 3 in the US, where it currently stands – was unprecedented in its leisurely nature; it now holds the record for the longest climb to the Top 5 in the US chart’s history.

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The return of Jackass: ‘It’s never not funny to see someone get hit in the nuts’

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Paramedics at the ready! Ten years after their last bone-crunching outing, the juvenile daredevils are at it again

The first episode of Jackass is a seminal work of the 21st century. It is titled Poo Cocktail, and features in quick succession the early stunts, pranks and goofs that make up Jackass’s enduring DNA: the show’s breakout star Johnny Knoxville flies out of a cannon into a net; another of its regulars, Bam Margera, roly-polys down a hill through a group of nonplussed golfers while a cameraman giggles from inside a nearby bush; Ehren McGhehey, the most viscerally headlockable man ever committed to film, intercepts someone’s drive-thru order and throws it for a touchdown. Jason “Wee Man” Acuña, painted orange and dressed as an Oompa Loompa, skates down Venice Beach in a way that astonishes a bystander in wraparound shades.

When Jackass first launched on MTV in October 2000, I was 13 and it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. Now I’m 34 and, well, there’s a bit in the first episode of Jackass where Knoxville knocks over someone’s drinking water with a fake erection while politely asking: “Where do you get sodas around here?” and it’s still the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Its cast of daredevil idiots took vomiting, falling off things, and brief-but-agonising pain and made it into high art.

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Neil Young’s battle with Spotify is principled – and comfortable

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In pulling his music from Spotify in protest at Joe Rogan’s Covid misinformation, the singer continues a life of political action – but unlike others, he doesn’t need to please the streaming giant

If you had been forced to predict which blue-chip American rock legend was going to suddenly pull their music off Spotify in protest at the streaming site hosting a far-right-friendly podcast that spreads medical misinformation, Neil Young would have been a very safe bet.

He is famously among the most ornery, uncompromising and capricious of said blue-chip legends. The years that produced his most famous work also played host to Young wilfully sabotaging his own commercial prospects in order to follow his muse (or, as he memorably put it, “heading for the ditch”); suddenly abandoning tours midway by directing his tour bus to pull off the motorway en route to the next show; whimsically declining to release a succession of completed albums; and incurring the wrath of his partners in Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY) by removing their contributions from the master tapes of his songs before releasing them. He spent a substantial chunk of the 1980s making wildly uncommercial albums, apparently with the specific intention of annoying his record label, which ended up suing him for being unpredictable – it lost, perhaps because, as his labelmate Elton John put it, its lawsuit “felt a bit like suing Neil Young for being Neil Young”.

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Kiefer Sutherland: ‘I said: I can do a really good Donald Sutherland for half the money’

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Answering readers’ questions, the actor and musician talks about how he tried stealing a job off his father, his favourite item from Greggs and his Mickey Mouse tattoo

Hi, Keith … What’s your favourite English expression? ClassicMacGruber

I’m sure they meant to say Kief? Or maybe not? I get called Kief in England more than any other place. I met some young parents in about 2001 who had named their son Kiefer, but I’ve never met anyone called Kiefer that is my age. As for my favourite British expression, there’s “bit and bobs”, which is really sweet and reminds me of my grandma, and “Oi!” which is not technically British, but any time I go “Oi!” it stops the room.

Does your twin sister have as many middle names as you? emzsam

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The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas ‘may fuel dangerous Holocaust fallacies’

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John Boyne’s story is used by more than a third of teachers in England in lessons on the Nazi genocide, a study found

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas may “perpetuate a number of dangerous inaccuracies and fallacies” when used in teaching young people about the Holocaust, an academic report has said.

According to research by the Centre for Holocaust Education at University College London, more than a third of teachers in England use the bestselling book and film adaptation in lessons on the Nazi genocide.

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Parallel Mothers review | Peter Bradshaw’s film of the week

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Pedro Almodóvar’s poetic conviction and creative fluidity flow through this moving baby-swap drama about two single mothers and buried secrets from the Spanish civil war

Not parallel actually: that would mean they don’t touch. Here we have convergent mothers; intersecting mothers whose lives come together with a spark that ignites this moving melodrama, which audaciously draws a line between love, sex, the passionate courage of single mothers, the meaning of Lorca’s Doña Rosita the Spinster and the unhealed wound of Spain’s fascist past. Pedro Almodóvar’s new movie has the warmth and the grandiloquent flair of a picture from Hollywood’s golden age (something starring Bette Davis and Joan Fontaine maybe, with music by Max Steiner) and the whiplash twists and addictive sugar rush bumps of daytime soap.

As ever with Almodóvar, there are gorgeously designed interiors with fierce, thick blocks of Mondrian colour, huge closeups of the female leads and overhead shots of food preparation. It’s impossible to watch this film without just feeling grateful that its director is still so fluent, so creative, still making us a gift of these films. There is a lot going on here, and perhaps the emotions and thoughts spill over the edges of its narrative form. But it would be obtuse not to let yourself travel downstream on this film’s emotional surge.

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Global SinoPhoto awards – Chinese culture in pictures

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An image titled The Dancing Dreams of a Mountain Girl, depicting a young mountain girl dancing for her grandmother in a village in China, is the overall winner of an international photo competition celebrating Chinese culture. The Global SinoPhoto awards invited photographers to tell Chinese stories, imagining, interpreting and inspiring connections between Chinese culture and the rest of the world. The awards covered four categories: water (as 2022 is the year of the water tiger), home, work and play, and environment.

The Museum of East Asian Art (MEAA) in Bath is to exhibit the winning entries from 16 February until 14 May 2022

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‘The godfather of alternative comedy’: Eddie Izzard, Paul Merton and more on Spike Milligan

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He was the shellshocked genius who channelled his anarchic brilliance into The Goon Show. Ian Hislop and Nick Newman explain why they’ve written a play about Spike Milligan – while comedians remember a legend

The tortured lives of comedians form a biographical genre all of their own; there’s always an audience for the tears of a clown. No wonder Nick Newman and Ian Hislop chose Spike Milligan as the subject of their new play. Milligan, who died 20 years ago next month, is the troubled comedy genius to end them all. Shellshocked in the second world war, repeatedly admitted to hospital for mental ill health, subjected to electroconvulsive therapy, and increasingly embittered as his career failed to deliver on early promise – the Spike Milligan sad-clown drama writes itself.

“But we didn’t want to do that,” says Newman. “We wanted to ask: how did he come to create these brilliant things?” Their play – a cheerful act of ancestor-worship by by Private Eye’s editor and its eminent cartoonist – is about the first three years (1951-54) of The Goon Show, as its chief writer Milligan battles the BBC to get his vision on air. “It’s: will he survive the fallout from the war?,” says Newman, “and will he crack radio?” And, “spoiler alert!,” chimes in Hislop. “Milligan wins! We just wanted to have a play where he wins.”

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Spotify removes Neil Young music in feud over Joe Rogan’s false Covid claims

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Musician condemned spread of misinformation on platform’s top podcast: ‘They can have Rogan or Young’

The music streaming platform Spotify is in the process of removing Neil Young’s music after the company refused to take down Joe Rogan’s podcast amid the musician’s objections that it spread vaccine misinformation.

Rogan has been described by the New York Times as “one of the most consumed media products on the planet”. His podcast, the Joe Rogan Experience, is Spotify’s most popular. In 2020, Rogan signed a $100m deal that gave the streaming giant exclusive rights to his show.

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Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection review – victory tour for feelgood blockbusters

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PlayStation 5, PC (forthcoming); Naughty Dog/Sony
Uncharted 4 and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy get a joint re-release reminding us of the greatness of these bombastic action adventures

It’s been long enough since 2016’s Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End came out that I kind of miss Nathan Drake, the breezy, globetrotting, treasure-hunting star of the Uncharted series. In contrast to developer Naughty Dog’s other PlayStation series The Last of Us, a rather harrowing post-apocalyptic meditation on human darkness, Uncharted is a straightforwardly fun and light-hearted action-movie story. You never have to think too hard about what you’re doing or why, and as long as you can surrender your will to the game – for there is little room for improvisation in these climbing puzzles, shootouts and well-acted story scenes – you’ll have a good time.

Back then I was ready to see the back of Nathan Drake. His quips had started to feel predictable, the Indiana Jones setpieces of his global adventures – collapsing ledges, trap-filled tombs, cursed treasure – even more so. This game is a farewell to him, wringing a surprising amount of pathos from the cast and their relationships to each other (particularly Nathan and his wife, Elena, who share an adorable scene in front of a PlayStation in their front room in the opening hours that still hits just as well now). This series had run out of road, with no further far-flung corners of the world or secret character backstories to explore, and in retrospect it is easier to appreciate this as a victory tour for a developer that really mastered the blockbuster cinematic action game.

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South review – startling filmed record of Shackleton’s gruelling Antarctic odyssey

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Frank Hurley’s 1919 silent footage turns Sir Ernest Shackleton’s gruelling expedition into a travelogue with cute penguins

Pioneering Australian photographer and film-maker Frank Hurley was the official witness to Sir Ernest Shackleton’s gruelling expedition attempting to cross the Antarctic landmass, which lasted three years from 1914 to 1917. For most of the time the crew were utterly cut off from news of the outside world and the expedition became an epic ordeal when, on the way there, their ship (aptly named Endurance) was crushed and sunk by pack ice. Shackleton and his men were forced to journey onwards in a lifeboat in the desolate cold, finally to South Georgia, then rescued and brought by a Chilean vessel to the harbour in Valparaíso where they were accorded a hero’s welcome.

This 1919 silent movie is Hurley’s filmed record of Shackleton’s voyage and what is startling about it is its weird tonal obtuseness: so often it feels like a home-movie travelogue in which the mood is bafflingly jaunty. Towards the end of the film, just at the point when their lives have been saved and disaster averted, the film spends about 10 minutes on the adorable behaviour of the penguins. This is at the moment when Shackleton’s victory was said to consist simply in his heroic survival, the expedition itself having, of course, been a failure, but the film simply sets aside the obvious poignant or tragic dimension.

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‘I got 12 years and 74 lashes’: Confess, the band jailed for playing metal in Iran

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After their songs were deemed blasphemous propaganda, the duo were forced to flee to Norway and claim asylum. Now a band, they are writing angrily about what they faced

For almost as long as it’s existed, heavy metal has been used as protest music. On Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, the first thing you’re barraged with is War Pigs: a seven-minute savaging of the politicians who instigated the Vietnam war. Iron Maiden once had their mascot, Eddie, murder Margaret Thatcher on a single’s artwork; Metallica and Megadeth spent the 1980s lambasting cold war superpowers that didn’t know whether to shake hands or nuke each other.

Nikan Khosravi, singer and guitarist of Iranian/Norwegian thrashers Confess, views his band as another protest act in the metal lineage. “I’m the kid who told the emperor: ‘You’re naked!’” he exclaims with pride and excitement on a call from Norway. However, the five-piece don’t write their brutish tracks about some faraway conflict, or satirise a government certain to ignore them.

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‘Her thunder would not be stolen’: Damian Lewis speaks about loss of Helen McCrory

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Actor uses National Theatre tribute event to talk publicly for first time about wife, who died of cancer

Damian Lewis has spoken publicly for the first time about the loss of his wife, Helen McCrory, who died last year from breast cancer aged 52.

During an evening of poetry dedicated to McCrory at the National Theatre, Lewis paid tribute to the “one person whose thunder would absolutely not be stolen”.

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China’s go-to English bad guy Kevin Lee: ‘I’m happy to play a villain’

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The English actor, who has worked with Chinese directors from Jackie Chan to Zhang Yimou, reveals how a chance meeting at the visa office in Beijing changed his life

If the Chinese film industry needs a stock foreign villain, I’m their first port of call. I was a Gatling gun-wielding mercenary in 2015’s Wolf Warrior, one of the first of the new wave of military blockbusters, and a hitman in Jackie Chan’s Kung Fu Yoga in 2017, among many others. And I recently played an American colonel in the Korean war in The Battle at Lake Changjin, the most expensive and successful Chinese film ever: it made $909m (£675m) last year.

It’s surreal – coming from humble beginnings in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire – to find myself in the middle of a massive field in Hubei province filming the likes of The Battle at Lake Changjin. You’d think you were in a real-life warzone – there were hundreds of tanks supplied by the government. I grew up watching Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee and Jet Li movies, which kickstarted my passion for China. I originally came here to study martial arts in 2004. Then I came back 10 years later to work as a financial consultant, which I didn’t really enjoy.

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Emily the Criminal review – Aubrey Plaza charges taut thriller

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A gig worker turns to credit card fraud in a tense debut feature with an electrifying central performance

It’s hard to really blame Emily (Aubrey Plaza) for choosing a life of crime. A low-paid service gig brings nothing but stress. A seemingly inescapable student loan is gathering interest by the day. A couple of minor, years-back criminal charges have closed off a world of employment. It’s a familiar predicament that plagues many in America and even though first-time writer-director John Patton Ford might only show it in the broadest of strokes, it’s an effectively infuriating set-up.

When Emily is offered an opportunity for an extra income, she nervously inches down the rabbit hole. It starts off simple. She’s given a cloned credit card and has to buy a TV. She then takes it to her new bosses and gets paid $200. It’s easier than she anticipated and soon she’s doing it on the regular, edging closer to taskmaster Youcef (Theo Rossi) who slowly becomes more than her mentor. But how far is she willing to go?

Emily the Criminal is showing at the Sundance film festival with a release date to be announced

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