Category Archives: Culture

Billie Eilish: I would have died from Covid-19 if I hadn’t been vaccinated

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The pop star told Howard Stern that she had the virus in August: ‘I want it to be clear that it is because of the vaccine I’m fine’

Billie Eilish has revealed that she had Covid-19 in August, and said that she felt sure she “would have died” had she not been vaccinated.

Appearing on Howard Stern’s US radio show on Monday, Eilish said: “The vaccine is fucking amazing and it also saved [her brother/musical collaborator] Finneas from getting it; it saved my parents from getting it; it saved my friends from getting it.”

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Colm Tóibín: ‘Boris Johnson would be a blood clot … Angela Merkel the cancer’

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The acclaimed novelist on chemotherapy, growing up gay in Ireland and writing his first poetry collection at the age of 66

In June 2018, Colm Tóibín was four chapters into writing his most recent novel The Magician, an epic fictional biography of Thomas Mann that he had put off for decades, when he was diagnosed with cancer. “It all started with my balls,” he begins a blisteringly witty essay about his months in hospital; cancer of the testicles had spread to his lungs and liver. In bed he amuses himself by identifying the difference between blood clots (a new emergency) and cancer: “Boris Johnson would be a blood clot … Angela Merkel the cancer.”

He has seen off both Johnson and Merkel. In the month when he hopes he will have a final scan, he has just been awarded the David Cohen prize (dubbed “the UK Nobel”) for a lifetime achievement in literature. The author of 10 novels, two short story collections, three plays, several nonfiction books and countless essays, Tóibín has been shortlisted for the Booker prize three times and won the Costa novel award in 2009 for Brooklyn, about a young Irish woman who emigrates to New York in the 1950s, made into an award-winning film in 2015. He is surely Ireland’s most prolific and prestigious living writer.

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A look at the Irish: photography in Ireland from 1839 to now – in pictures

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In Our Own Image: Photography in Ireland, 1839 to the Present is the first in a series of exhibitions forming the first comprehensive historical and critical survey of photography from across the island of Ireland. Coinciding with the centenary of the establishment of modern Ireland, In Our Own Image draws on material from from archives, private collections and contemporary commissions, charting how the medium has both reflected and shaped Irish cultural identity.

In Our Own Image: photography in Ireland, 1839 to the present curated by Gallery of Photography Ireland in partnership with Dublin Castle / OPW is at The Printworks, Dublin Castle until 6 February

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Succession creator Jesse Armstrong on its thunderous finale: ‘That might be as good as I’ve got’

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Season three of the hit show has made even more headlines than usual. We ask its British creator if he’s had enough yet, if actor Jeremy Strong is doing OK – and if his character Kendall is actually Jesus

• Warning: contains spoilers

Yesterday, like much of the rest of the world, I watched the finale of the third season of Succession. And, like much of the rest of the world, I found myself buffeted by one astonishing twist after another – and a gasp-inducing climax that outdid even those of series one and two. Unlike my fellow viewers, however, pretty much the first thing I see after the end credits roll is the face of Jesse Armstrong, the show’s creator, popping up over Zoom and politely attempting to dissuade me from discussing the episode.

Unlike other big TV showrunners – who will happily explain, and sometimes over-explain, every single second – Armstrong prefers to remain hands off. He tries not to read the acres of theorising that Succession inspires. Such post-match analyses, he says, can often feel like a tightrope walk. “There’s a bit of me that just wants to find out what the fuck everyone is saying about the show,” he says from his book-lined study in London. “But you can’t. It wouldn’t be good for me psychologically – and it wouldn’t be good for the creative process of doing the show.”

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Mexicans pay tribute to Vicente Fernández, icon of ranchera music

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Family, friends and fellow musicians pay their final respects to the man known as ‘El Rey’ (the King) following his death at age 81

Mexicans are in mourning for Vicente Fernández, the elaborately mustachioed icon of ranchera music, whose ballads of love and loss, golden baritones and singular stage presence captured the raw emotions of a nation.

Fans flocked to his ranch in western Jalisco state, where family, friends and fellow crooners paid their final respects to the man known as “El Rey” (the King) – and often just by the diminutive “Chente.”

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Golden Globes 2022 tries to do better as Lady Gaga brings the outrage

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After a year of criticism over diversity, the Golden Globes have come up with a decent slate of nominees, with Gaga surely the favourite for best actress

• Full list of 2020 nominations

The Golden Globes nomination list has been announced with a solemn introduction from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s president Helen Hoehne, to the effect that the Globes’ much-criticised controlling body was “trying to be better” and that its constituent membership was more diverse than at any other time in its history. Which is better, I suppose, than being less diverse than at any time in its history.

At any rate, leading the pack are Belfast, Kenneth Branagh’s unashamed heartwarmer about the home town of his early childhood, with seven nominations and Jane Campion’s stark, twisty western-Gothic psychodrama The Power of the Dog, set in 1920s Montana with Benedict Cumberbatch as the troubled, angry cattleman who begins a toxic duel with his new sister-in-law played by Kirsten Dunst and her sensitive teenage son, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee.

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Those we lost in 2021: Janet Malcolm remembered by Michael W Miller

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8 July 1934 – 16 June 2021
The US journalist on his aunt, whose exacting vision – from her writing to her elegant dinner parties – was an expression of love and generosity

“Hypocrisy is the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way, by allowing for human fallibility and reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable human needs for order and pleasure.”

Those are the words, unmistakable for their wit and moral clarity, of Janet Malcolm, from her most famous book, The Journalist and the Murderer. They’re not words she lived by personally, however. She was uncompromising in her own response to fallibilities large and small, cheerfully sending back wine at restaurants, rejecting all offers to bring contributions to dinner parties, and chiding anyone who read a certain dire translation of Anna Karenina. I remember on more than one occasion giving her a holiday present, and then watching her unwrap it, look it over, and hand it back to me, explaining that she thought I would enjoy it more than she would.

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Why it’s time to say goodbye to Tiger King

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Netflix’s continued obsession with the pandemic hit has brought a follow-up special, a second season and now a spin-off but enough is enough

To think of Tiger King is to immediately transport yourself to the heady days of lockdown 2020. Remember it? Remember how filled with artificial purpose we all were? We did Zoom quizzes with all our friends! We made banana bread! We clapped for frontline workers!

Looking back, it seems relatively clear that all those things were stupid. Nobody wants to spend more time on Zoom than they have to. Nobody likes banana bread. The clapping didn’t change anything. And as for Tiger King? With the benefit of hindsight, Christ, we chose the wrong show to obsess over. Looking back, Tiger King was grubby and exploitative. Once you’d crossed the “Are these people for real?” hurdle, you found yourself sitting through a carnival of monstrous behaviour. Tiger King was the documentary equivalent of that old Black Mirror episode: as fun as it sounds to watch someone have sex with a pig, at the end of the day you actually have to watch someone have sex with a pig.

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‘I never worked in a cocktail bar’: How the Human League made Don’t You Want Me

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‘Philip turned up to meet my parents fully made up, with red lipstick and high heels. My dad locked himself in the bedroom and refused to come out’

I had intended to recruit just one female backing singer but when I walked into the Crazy Daisy nightclub in Sheffield, the first thing I saw was Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley dancing. They somehow looked like a unit while being clearly different individuals. I knew they were right.

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Adam McKay: ‘Leo sees Meryl as film royalty – he didn’t like seeing her with a lower back tattoo’

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After politics in Vice and finance in The Big Short, director McKay is taking on the climate crisis in his star-studded ‘freakout’ satire Don’t Look Up

Adam McKay calls it his “freakout trilogy”. Having tackled the 2008 financial crash and warmongering US vice president Dick Cheney in his previous two movies, The Big Short and Vice, McKay goes even bigger and bleaker with his latest, Don’t Look Up, in which two astronomers (Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio) discover a giant comet headed for Earth, but struggle to get anyone to listen. It is an absurd but depressingly plausible disaster satire, somewhere between Dr Strangelove, Network, Deep Impact and Idiocracy, with an unbelievably stellar cast; also on board are Meryl Streep (as the US president), Cate Blanchett, Timothée Chalamet, Tyler Perry, Mark Rylance, Jonah Hill and Ariana Grande. It has been quite the career trajectory for McKay, who started out in live improv and writing for Saturday Night Live, followed by a run of hit Will Ferrell comedies such as Anchorman, Step Brothers and The Other Guys. “The goal was to capture this moment,” says McKay of Don’t Look Up. “And this moment is a lot.”

Was there a particular event that inspired Don’t Look Up?
Somewhere in between The Big Short and Vice, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] panel and a bunch of other studies came out that just were so stark and so terrifying that I realised: “I have to do something addressing this.” So I wrote five different premises for movies, trying to find the best one. I had one that was a big, epic, kind of dystopian drama. I had another one that was a Twilight Zone/M Night [Shyamalan] sort of twisty thriller. I had a small character piece. And I was just trying to find a way into: how do we communicate how insane this moment is? So finally, I was having a conversation with my friend [journalist and Bernie Sanders adviser] David Sirota, and he offhandedly said something to the effect of: “It’s like the comet’s coming and no one cares.” And I thought: “Oh. I think that’s it.” I loved how simple it was. It’s not some layered, tricky Gordian knot of a premise. It’s a nice, big, wide open door we can all relate to.

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How Maradona inspired Paolo Sorrentino’s film about Naples, Hand of God – and inadvertently saved his life

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The Italian director’s new, semi-autobiographical film reveals a charming and rarely seen side of his home city

‘This, for me, is the most beautiful place on Earth,” Paolo Sorrentino told Filippo Scotti, the actor playing the director’s younger self in his latest film, as their 1980s Riva speedboat chopped the waves of the Bay of Naples. Their view stretched from the precipitous peninsula of Sorrento all the way west towards Posillipo. The two promontories flank the sprawling port city, offering a warm embrace to all those who disembark there. Sorrentino’s new film, the Hand of God, opens with that same view: the sun-mottled bay, whose peace is disturbed by the sound of four Rivas as they speed towards the shore. The film is both a love letter to, and a portal into, Paolo Sorrentino’s Naples.

In cinemas now and on Netflix this week, The Hand of God sees the Academy award-winning director return to his home city for the first time since One Man Up, his 2001 debut. Sorrentino tells the story of his own coming of age, up to the moment when his life is shattered by the death of his parents in a tragic accident. Sorrentino’s story is a tale of great grief, loss and perseverance, set in a middle-class part of Naples, a far cry from the impoverished neighbourhoods shown in the city’s other recent portraits: Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend or the mafia-focused Gomorrah series.

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Rhik Samadder tries … fencing: ‘Now I’m ready for the zombie apocalypse’

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I get to wear a natty white jacket, insectoid mask and hold an épée like a pistol – my inner child could not be happier. En garde!

Ever since childhood, I have wanted to be trained in the sword. But I have always believed one had to be born a musketeer for this to happen, or have a death to avenge, plus access to castle steps. But here I am at the London Fencing Club in Old Street, which is easier.

It’s a few weeks before omicron takes off, and the government is pooh-poohing any talk of tightening Covid restrictions. I’m learning épée, the thin, pointy blade that most resembles a classic swashbuckling sword. My Russian-born coach, Anna Anstal, loves fencing épée. The opponent’s entire body is a target, and there are no “right of way” rules governing who can score at a given moment. “You must think about the zombie apocalypse,” she says. “Rules are no use with a zombie. The ability to strike first is all that matters.” It’s unexpected advice, her heavy accent giving it even more edge. I’m quite scared.

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Anne Rice, author of Interview With the Vampire, dies aged 80

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Horror writers pay tribute after bestselling gothic novelist dies of complications from stroke

Anne Rice, the bestselling author of Interview With the Vampire, has died at the age of 80.

The gothic novelist’s son Christopher Rice said in a statement on Sunday morning that Rice had “passed away due to complications resulting from a stroke”, adding: “The immensity of our family’s grief cannot be overstated.”

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Those we lost in 2021: Roger Michell remembered by Kate Winslet

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5 June 1956 – 22 September 2021
The actor, who worked with the Notting Hill director on 2019’s Blackbird, recalls a warm and egoless man who always knew how to get the best out of his cast

Being a director was so secondary to who Roger was as a man in the world. He was just such a grounding, warm, extraordinary presence. I say this with affection, but some directors make it known that they’ve just walked into the room. Roger wasn’t like that. He didn’t need to be needed. He didn’t have an ego. He just wanted to be part of a team – creating little families, little families of people working together.

I had known Roger for a long time before we worked together on a film – Blackbird, in 2019. We’d worked together once before, in 2005, on an American Express commercial. A few years prior to that, The Mother [his 2003 film with Daniel Craig and Anne Reid] had completely taken my breath away. It was so natural, so crushingly real. It felt like the first time in a long time that any of us had seen actors in a film appearing not be “acting” at all. That was one of Roger’s most impressive skills: his capacity to get actors to just be. To just be and not act.

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Don’t Look Up review – an A-list apocalyptic mess

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Adam McKay’s star-studded climate change satire with Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence et al lands its gags with all the aplomb of a giant comet

A comet is on a collision course with Earth. The targets in this shrill, desperately unfunny climate change satire directed by Adam McKay are more scattershot. According to stoner PhD student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her professor, Dr Randall Mindy (a self-consciously tic-y Leonardo DiCaprio), the asteroid is the size of Mount Everest and due to hit in six months.

The pair try to warn Meryl Streep’s President Orlean about the impending “extinction-level event”, only to find her preoccupied by the midterm elections. They attempt to raise awareness on breakfast TV, but anchors Jack and Brie (Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett) can’t help but give their bad news a positive spin. The only person with enough money to intervene is tech entrepreneur Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), who wants to mine the comet for its “$140tn worth of assets”. Party politics, celebrity gossip and social media memes are swiped at too. It feels cynical, then, when Timothée Chalamet shows up with no real narrative purpose other than to snog Lawrence.

In cinemas now and on Netflix from 24 December

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Maggie Gyllenhaal: from ‘difficult’ roles to lauded Hollywood director

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With a string of plaudits for portraying complex characters, the actor is now focusing her ‘quiet fire’ behind the cameras with a stunning debut film

From her breakthrough role in Secretary, wearing stilettos, a pencil skirt and manacles and attempting to operate a stapler with her chin, to her directorial debut which digs into the messy truths about motherhood, Maggie Gyllenhaal has always been attracted to what she has described as “troubled women. The ones that are a real challenge. They really need me.”

It’s a quote that really gets to the heart of what distinguishes Gyllenhaal. An Oscar-nominated actor, and now– with her Elena Ferrante adaptation The Lost Daughter – an award-winning screenwriter and director, she is drawn to the kind of women whose stories don’t usually get told. She delves into the uncomfortable angles and sharp edges of her characters and found her niche by not quite fitting into the mould.

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‘There’s always been an affinity between Christmas and ghosts’: Mark Gatiss on the joy of festive frights

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The writer and actor puts the ghoul into yule with screen and stage roles reprising haunting classics from Charles Dickens and MR James

Close the curtains. Light the fire. Then prepare to be terrified; it’s Christmas. For although the word “cosy” may be closely tied to festivities at this time of year, so it seems is the word “ghost”.

In northern Europe people understandably cope with the shorter days and darker evenings by drawing in around a roaring hearth, metaphorical or otherwise. Light and warmth: it makes sense. But what kind of stories are told while friends and families gather together? The answer, of course, is the spookier, the better.

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Charlie Watts remembered by Dave Green

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2 June 1941 – 24 August 2021
The Rolling Stones drummer’s childhood friend and fellow musician recalls a home-loving connoisseur and collector of ephemera

I first met Charlie Watts in 1946, when I was four and he was five. We moved into new prefabs built after the war in Wembley Park – we were number 22, he was number 23 – and our mums hit it off pretty much straight away. We were very close, Charlie and me, throughout our lives. There was one point after he joined the Stones when we didn’t see each other for years, but when we did eventually reconnect, we picked up where we left off. Our relationship never really changed.

From an early age we were both interested in jazz. It was a mutual thing. I used to listen to records in Charlie’s bedroom, discovering musicians such as Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton. Later, when his dad bought him a drum kit and I got a double bass, we’d only been playing for a few months when we heard that a jazz band was doing auditions for a drummer and bass player. We did the audition and as we were the only ones that turned up we got the gig with the Jo Jones Seven and started doing weekly sessions at the Masons Arms pub in Edgware.

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David Baddiel and his daughter on his social media addiction: ‘it can reward and punish you’

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Despite the abuse and anger, the comedian spent hours a day online. But then his daughter Dolly became dangerously drawn in. Was it time for a rethink?

Over the past 30 years, I have read and heard David Baddiel’s thoughts on many subjects, including sex, masturbation, religion, antisemitism, football fandom, football hooliganism, his mother’s sex life and his father’s dementia. “I am quite unfiltered,” he agrees, “mainly because I am almost psychotically comfortable in my own skin.” But today I have found the one subject that makes him squirm.

How much time does he spend on social media a day? “Oh, um, too much,” he says, his usual candour suddenly gone. What’s his daily screen time according to his phone? “It says four hours, which is a bit frightening.”

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Carrie-Anne Moss: ‘There was a scene in the first Matrix with me in stilettos. I could barely stand straight’

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Twenty years after first playing kick-ass hacker Trinity in The Matrix, Moss is returning to the role in The Matrix: Resurrections. Thankfully, she wasn’t asked to wear heels this time …

When The Matrix asks us all to take the red pill again on 22 December, Carrie-Anne Moss, 54, will return to the role that made her famous. Moss first played Trinity, a motorbike-riding, badass, PVC-clad hacker, in 1999, and despite the character not surviving the original trilogy, she is back, along with her co-star Keanu Reeves, for the fourth instalment, The Matrix Resurrections, directed by Lana Wachowski, this time without her sister Lilly. Moss, who was born in Canada, started her career as a model and had several small parts on television and in films before The Matrix struck gold. She played Marvel’s first on-screen lesbian character, Jeri Hogarth, in the Netflix series Jessica Jones, and away from the acting world, she runs a “labour of love” lifestyle site called Annapurna Living. She lives with her husband and three children in the countryside in California, which means she does not see the current trend for Matrix-inspired fashion such as big stompy boots and tiny sunglasses out on the streets.

Was returning to the world of The Matrix a tough decision?
Oh, no. I was absolutely over-the-moon excited about the prospect. It was something that I never imagined happening. People had mentioned it to me in passing, and I was always thinking: ‘No way. Never gonna happen.’

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