Artists in the favela are starting to compete again after the Covid-19 pandemic curtailed public gatherings, a show that signals a return to normality for music lovers
Continue reading...Category Archives: Culture
Abandoned former USSR sites – in pictures
In post-USSR Russia and neighbouring states, places now abandoned offer reminders of the region’s turbulent history, from the grandeur of a ruined Orthodox church, to the frescos that still adorn the crumbling walls of former barracks, schools and factories
Continue reading...Who ya gonna call? Ivan and Jason Reitman on resurrecting Ghostbusters together
Tears were inevitable when Hadley Freeman finally met the man behind her favourite film, and his son, who has made a belated second sequel. But few expected them to flow quite so freely
It’s not always easy for a famous parent to pass the baton to the next generation. Kirk Douglas bristled when he realised the young women approaching him no longer wanted to flirt with him, but to ask for his son Michael’s phone number. When her daughter Christina was cast in a soap opera but then hospitalised for an ovarian cyst, Joan Crawford snatched the role for herself. The narcissism that underlies the need for fame is not usually conducive to happy parenting.
Ivan Reitman – director and producer of many of the most beloved mainstream comedies of the 70s, 80s and 90s, including Animal House, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Twins and Dave – is a different kind of famous parent.
Continue reading...What can we learn from the Janet Jackson Super Bowl documentary?
The New York Times and FX special Malfunction revisits the ‘Nipplegate’ scandal of 2004 but adds little new understanding
In January, the New York Times documentary team released Framing Britney Spears, a succinct and bruising retrospective on the pop star’s career and the shadowy legal arrangement that governed her affairs. The 75-minute documentary, which included virtually no new information but offered a cohesive, damning portrait of her treatment by the press, launched a grenade in pop culture. It triggered widespread calls to end her conservatorship, which Spears, 39, later championed (a judge terminated the 13-year arrangement last week); as well as meditations on punishing cultural commentary, callous treatment of mental health, or the hollow, deceptive empowerment proffered by Spears’s sexy teenage image; and a queasy wave of Britney Spears content (including an NYT follow-up, Controlling Britney Spears, that was part retrospective and part, uncomfortably, true crime.
Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson, the latest New York Times documentary for FX on Hulu, aims for the same type of cathartic reframing through an infamous episode of early 2000s pop culture: the baring of Janet Jackson’s breast for nine-sixteenths of a second at the 2004 Super Bowl, and the subsequent cultural firestorm. The 70-minute film follows a similar format to its predecessors – archival footage (including plenty of gag-worthy early 2000s fashion) synthesized with first-person interviews and commentary from cultural critics.
Continue reading...‘It’s like a cemetery’: the trend turning San Francisco’s colorful houses ‘gentrification gray’
More and more, the pastels and gold-leaf embellishments have given way to the contemporary, but unimaginative, tungsten hue
Richard Segovia’s house is as loud as the Latin rock music he teaches children to play in his basement studio. With colors ranging from jungle green and royal blue at the pavement to a red and yellow sunburst at the ridge, the otherwise modest Spanish-style home is essentially one enormous mural, a crowded portrait of long-gone musicians, Segovia’s family members, social activists, various psychedelia, and the odd jungle animal.
Segovia has lived in San Francisco’s Mission district since 1963, and he sees himself as a custodian of the neighborhood’s culture, specifically as the birthplace of Latin rock. (Carlos Santana, a family friend, grew up nearby.) But increasingly the 68-year old “Mayor of the Mission” finds himself face to face with a stark representation of all the color that has been bled out of the city over successive waves of tech-fueled gentrification.
Continue reading...Kodi Smit-McPhee: ‘You can still be strong, no matter how you look and carry yourself’
Despite the presence of an unusually menacing Benedict Cumberbatch unnerving all on set, it’s this young Australian actor’s otherworldly stillness that lights up Jane Campion’s western psychodrama
Jane Campion’s psycho-sexual western The Power of the Dog is a tremendous film but it is the power of Kodi Smit-McPhee that really adds bite to its bark. The 25-year-old Australian actor has been a fragile, hypnotic presence, with an eerie knack for stillness and intensity, ever since his earliest performances. At the age of 10, he played a boy coping with the desertion of one parent and the breakdown of the other in Romulus, My Father. At 12, he trudged through a post-apocalyptic hell-scape in The Road, then fell in love with a vampire at 13 in Let Me In, the US remake of the Swedish horror hit Let the Right One In. Even his multiplex movies, such as the X-Men outings (Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix) in which he played the blue-skinned Nightcrawler, have felt that bit stranger thanks to his delicate, androgynous features and those pool-sized anime eyes set far apart on his face.
His uncanny quality is crucial to Campion’s movie, which is set in early 2oth-century Montana. Smit-McPhee plays the gangly, effeminate Peter, who spends his days crafting intricate paper flowers and sketching dead animals. His life is destabilised when his mother (Kirsten Dunst), a widowed innkeeper, takes up with a new partner. It is not this stepfather (Jesse Plemons) who poses a threat so much as his sadistic, bullying brother Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch), who taunts Peter and mocks the way he “creeps all over the place, big eyes goggling”.
Continue reading...Jazz star Charles Lloyd: ‘Miles Davis wanted all the girls and money’
He played gigs to a young Elvis, got high with the Grateful Dead and made an enemy in Miles Davis. And, at 83, the saxophonist who collided jazz and rock still has his spirit of adventure
“We played the Royal Albert Hall in 1964,” says Charles Lloyd, recollecting his first ever UK performance. “Packed it to the rafters.” He was 26, playing tenor saxophone in Cannonball Adderley’s majestic band and getting his first taste of a world beyond US jazz and blues clubs. “I’m looking forward to returning,” says Lloyd of this weekend’s appearance at the EFG London jazz festival.
Now 83, he speaks in a drawl that mixes jazz argot and spiritual entreaties – he says he spent the pandemic “building steps”, meaning to a higher plane rather than a DIY project – and is raring to re-engage with an audience. “I’ve been playing in front of audiences since I was nine. Been a professional musician since I was 12. It’s what I do.”
Continue reading...Rod Stewart: ‘I got Elton a fridge for Christmas. He got me a Rembrandt’
Answering Guardian readers’ questions, the singer discusses his epic railway modelling, his admiration of the Sex Pistols and the secrets of his hair regime
Did you have any heroes in the beginning of your career that you wanted to move or look like? JoeHill
I didn’t look at singers and think: “That’s how I want to move,” but I sorta wanted to sound like ’em. I started off with Eddie Cochran – that rough-edged voice – and moved on to Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Bobby Womack and David Ruffin. I went from being a beatnik to a mod with long hair.
Continue reading...Meg Ryan films – ranked!
As the great romcom queen turns 60, we select her best roles from the low-budget indies to the Tom Hanks big-hitters
By 2007, Meg Ryan was already well into a wilderness period that still hasn’t ended. Indeed, it has been more than five years since she was in a film at all (Ithaca, her harmless but forgettable directorial debut). If highlights of this era have been few, her restrained, affecting turn as an unhappily married, cancer-stricken housewife in this uneven indie soap opera was a reminder that the industry did her dirty. At the very least, more little films like this could use her wattage.
Continue reading...Greek prime minister to appeal to British public for return of Parthenon marbles
Kyriakos Mitsotakis undeterred in Athens’ quest for classical sculptures after Johnson refuses to negotiate
Athens has vowed to use “every means” in its quest to persuade London to relinquish the Parthenon sculptures, with a campaign that will focus on winning over the hearts and minds of Britons.
Far from being discouraged by Boris Johnson’s refusal on Tuesday to engage in intergovernmental talks over the demand for the return of the 5th century BC artwork, the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, appeared to be buoyed by his visit to the UK.
Continue reading...Quentin Tarantino is selling Pulp Fiction all over again – this time as art
The director is being sued by the film production company, Miramax, for planning to sell ‘non-fungible tokens’ of the film he wrote and directed
Name: Pulp Fiction.
Age: 27.
Continue reading...‘I thought I’d never hear applause again’: Brazilian sambistas rejoice at the return of music
Renowned singer Zeca Pagodinho is back performing after Covid-stricken nation carries out one of world’s largest vaccination drives
“If I want to smoke, I’ll smoke. If I want to drink, I’ll drink,” the legendary Brazilian singer Zeca Pagodinho proclaims in one of his best-known sambas.
Coronavirus robbed Zeca of an even greater pleasure: performing the songs that have made him one of Brazil’s most successful and universally adored stars.
Continue reading...Adele: 30 review – the defining voice of heartbreak returns
(Columbia)
While the topic of her divorce is all-consuming, the singer seems to be pushing gently at the boundaries of what people expect of her
There is a sense in which 2021’s biggest single – 84.9m streams in a week on one platform alone; straight to No 1 in 25 countries; a song that received more first-week plays on US radio than any other song ever – wasn’t so much a comeback as an act of global reassurance. The world may recently have lurched from one unimaginable crisis to another, but Adele’s Easy on Me brought with it the message that at least one thing hasn’t changed: Adele Adkins is still heartbroken and belting it out over a gentle piano and tasteful orchestration.
Romantic despair became her global brand from the moment she stopped the show at the 2011 Brit awards with her tearful performance of Someone Like You. It catapulted her from the massed ranks of soul-influenced singers filling a gap created by Amy Winehouse’s inability to follow up Back to Black, to mind-boggling levels of success. There’s always the chance that millions of people might flock to an upbeat Adele album that depicts her full of the joys of spring, but clearly she wasn’t taking any chances last time around: for want of new unhappiness, 2015’s 25 returned to the same failed relationships that inspired its record-breaking predecessor 21. No matter – it sold 22m copies.
Continue reading...Too much bosom: why The Wheel of Time is far from ‘great for women’
Rosamund Pike, who stars in Amazon Prime’s forthcoming take on Robert Jordan’s fantasy series, says his female characters are role models. Really?
What is going on with Amazon Prime’s characterisation of The Wheel of Time? I ask this as a fantasy fan, someone who not only adores the classy stuff (NK Jemisin, Guy Gavriel Kay etc) but has also devotedly ploughed her way through The Belgariad, most of Terry Goodkind (until it got too crazy even for me) and Simon R Green. And how many people involved with the forthcoming adaptation have actually marathoned their way through all of the books?
My eyebrows were first raised back when the deal to adapt Robert Jordan’s extremely long series was announced in 2018, when head of Amazon Studios Jennifer Salke praised its “timely narrative featuring powerful women at the core”. Now, I read these books in my late teens, but my resounding memory of them was not of “powerful women”. In fact, I remember thinking Jordan’s depiction of women was pretty dismal – he might have packed in far more female characters than Tolkien ever did, but they’re constantly objectified, forever hoisting their bosoms around, adjusting their skirts – even getting spanked as punishment.
Continue reading...Nazis based their elite schools on top British private schools
Eton and Harrow among those whose ‘character-building’ qualities were admired by German educators in 1930s and 1940s
Nazi Germany’s elite schools, which were set up to train future leaders of the Third Reich, used British private schools such as Eton and Harrow as their models, a new book reveals.
The historian Helen Roche has written the first comprehensive history of Nazi elite schools, known as Napolas. Drawing on research undertaken in 80 archives in six countries as well as testimonies from more than 100 former pupils, Roche discovered just how keen the Nazis were to learn from the “character-forming” example of the British system.
Continue reading...Gaga, Gucci and prison ferrets: how true crime conquered the world
Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci stars Lady Gaga in a tale of fashion and murder. But is true crime – once the soul of cinema, from thrillers and horrors to westerns – now outgrowing the big screen?
What took you so long, House of Gucci? This story was destined to become a movie from the moment the bullet left fashion heir Maurizio Gucci dead outside his Milan office in March 1995 – shot, a witness said, by a hitman with a “beautiful, clean hand”. The film by Ridley Scott now finally arrives dripping with star power, and Lady Gaga as Gucci’s ex-wife Patrizia Reggiani. But the story alone was enough: a glittering tickbox of money, revenge and a villainess kept company in jail by an illicit pet ferret called Bambi.
True crime gold. So why, now that the film is actually here, does the Gucci case feel a strange fit for a movie after all? Put it down to timing. The film’s development began in entertainment prehistory: 2006. Back then, a lavish movie was still the grand prize for any news story, and true crime – that trashbag genre – would simply be glad of the association. Now though, film and true crime have the air of an estranged couple. Had Maurizio Gucci been gunned down on Via Palestro last week, Netflix would already have the rights and the podcast would be on Spotify.
Continue reading...Harry Potter cast return to Hogwarts to mark 20th anniversary of first film
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone stars Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson discuss ‘where the magic started’ in HBO Max special
The original cast of the Harry Potter series will be reunited 20 years after the first film was released.
An HBO Max special titled Return to Hogwarts will be released on 1 January 2022, the network has said.
Continue reading...This is Pleasing: Harry Styles sets out to ‘dispel the myth of a binary existence’
The musician’s newly launched beauty brand is an extension of his trailblazing look
With Lady Gaga, Pharell Williams, and Selena Gomez all in on the act, the marker of success in 2021 is not a star on Hollywood Boulevard, it’s the launch of a beauty line. Trust Harry Styles to blow the rest out of the water.
Yesterday, the boyband star turned cultural and style juggernaut announced the launch of Pleasing – described as a “life brand”. Styles’s first business venture includes a range of nail polishes, an illuminating primer serum, and a dual-purpose eye and lip oil.
Continue reading...The Six review – the Chinese survivors who were written out of the Titanic narrative
Arthur Jones’s film seeks the stories of six Chinese men who survived the 1912 tragedy and finds undisguised western racism
What’s in a name? That evergreen question is complicated even further in Arthur Jones’s fascinating documentary, executive produced by James Cameron and informed by the research of marine historian Steven Schwankert. Following the Titanic sinking in 1912, the identities of the 700-odd survivors have been mostly claimed, except for those of six Chinese men – out of eight who boarded – who remained bizarrely neglected. This film chronicles Schwankert’s quest to unravel the mystery, as his arduous journey across the US, the UK, Canada, and China takes the shape of a detective story, where each revelation exposes the blatant racism of early 20th-century western politics.
Armed with a dock slip listing the names of the Titanic’s eight Chinese passengers, Schwankert and peers’ attempt to trace their origins runs into immediate difficulties, as most of their subjects changed their identities in order to sidestep cruel and discriminatory immigration regulations. These Titanic survivors arrived in the US looking to work as labourers, and under the provisions of the Chinese Exclusion Act they were shipped to other countries immediately after the sinking. Some disappeared without a trace. The only survivor whom the researchers were able to build a coherent narrative around was Fang Lang, who founded a business in the US by changing his name and working as a merchant, shielding himself from the Exclusion Act, which targeted manual labourers.
Continue reading...‘She has invaded all our lives’ – Tong Yang-tze, the artist making calligraphy cool
From railway signs to perfume bottles to Taiwan’s official passport stamp, the artist is giving ancient lettering a modern twist. How will her work go down at Hong Kong’s controversial new M+ gallery?
The most striking thing about Tong Yang-tze, sitting inside her modest Taipei studio residence, is her confidence, and the sense that she’s had it all along. Now in her late 70s and considered one of Taiwan’s foremost calligraphers and artists, Tong grins and jokes over cups of green tea and local sweets, belying her fame and cultural significance. “Of course I’m good!” she laughs at one point, recalling an offer early in her career from her former university to teach. “I said no, I don’t want a teaching job. At that time, everybody needed a job but I wanted to be an artist. No regrets.”
Last week Tong’s calligraphy with a modern art twist greeted visitors to the hotly anticipated M+ museum in Hong Kong, an ambitious decade-long project to create what has been dubbed Asia’s Tate Modern. The 33-gallery space, in a harbourside building designed by “starchitects” Herzog & de Meuron in collaboration with TFP Farrells and Arup, opened last week.
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