Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins airlifted to hospital, where she died, while director Joel Souza also injured
Alec Baldwin fired a prop gun on a movie set in an accident that killed the film’s director of photography and injured its director, authorities in New Mexico have said.
A statement from the Santa Fe Sheriff’s office said Baldwin, who is acting in and producing the film Rust, had fired the prop gun in an incident on Thursday.
Continue reading...Jon Hopkins timed his upcoming album to the length of a ketamine high, while apps are using AI music to tailor drug experiences. Welcome to a techno-chemical new frontier
Two hundred psychedelic enthusiasts have converged in Austin, Texas for a “ceremonial concert” on the autumn equinox. People sprawl on yoga mats around a circular stage as staffers pace the candlelit warehouse, jingling bells and spritzing essential oils. While psychedelic drugs are prohibited, some attenders seem in an altered state, lying on their backs and breathing heavily as rumbles of bass from Jon Hopkins’ upcoming album, Music for Psychedelic Therapy, shakes the hushed space.
This is the first time Hopkins – known for acclaimed solo electronic albums as well as production for Coldplay and Brian Eno – has played his new record in public, and the crowd is visibly moved. As recordings of spiritual guru Ram Dass’s teachings fill the room on the final song, the woman next to me begins silently weeping.
Continue reading...Despite a dodgy hip, the superstar remains youthful thanks to pop star friends like Dua Lipa – but is still struggling with anger and childhood trauma. He explains how fatherhood is making him a better man
A good illustration of Elton John in 2021 is how, last week, he scored the eighth UK No 1 single of his career and also had his right hip replaced. The 74-year-old certainly has his frailties – “my left hip is the hip of a two-year-old, and my right hip is the hip of a 92-year-old” – but is youthful in other ways. His enormously enjoyable and varied new album, The Lockdown Sessions, may feature a range of boomer-pleasing names, such as Eddie Vedder, Glen Campbell and two A-list Stevies (Wonder and Nicks), but there are also plenty of pop artists that could feasibly incite a TikTok dance craze: Dua Lipa, Lil Nas X, Rina Sawayama. One song pairs John with country singer Jimmie Allen over a drum’n’bass beat; another is interspersed with raps from Young Thug and Nicki Minaj.
“Watching Young Thug freestyle was just amazing!” he enthuses over a video call, self-isolating the day before his operation, dressed in collared, lapelled pyjamas over a rugby top. Oil paintings of 19th-century figures flank him in the background. “I hate it when people knock rap and hip-hop – when you actually go in the studio and watch Young Thug in front of a microphone, it’s an incredible thing.” He’d had dinner with Lipa, who duets with him on their No 1 single Cold Heart, a few nights before; he rings up Olly Alexander of Years & Years, who covered Pet Shop Boys’ It’s a Sin with him, “a couple of times a fortnight. I feel an empathy with these people. I’ve got the enthusiasm of an 18-year-old, and enthusiasm keeps me going.”
Continue reading...The artist and film-maker remembers the pioneering documentary producer behind films such as RBG, The Square and An Inconvenient Truth, who has died aged 66
Diane has left. When someone close passes away, we feel that a part of ourselves left together with them. A part of our understanding of the world, a link in our interpersonal network, our previous value judgment and actions in the past have all been misplaced because of the passing of a close friend.
This sense of misplacement is sometimes very strong and clear, almost like the lack of a lit candle on the shore of a river or a pile of extinguished charcoal in cold weather. We cannot envisage it before people disappear from our life. When they do disappear, we suddenly become aware of the fact that the light and warmth, which vanished with their passing, are lost for ever. They are irreplaceable and will never return. No matter what happens in the future, whatever is lost is lost for ever.
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The sound of an artist coming into her own, Rebecca Taylor’s remarkable second album as Self Esteem mixes the intimate and conversational with the unabashedly dramatic
Throughout Prioritise Pleasure, her second album as Self Esteem, Rebecca Taylor searches for a feeling she can rely on. Her stomach and heart seldom align. A callous lover makes her doubt herself. “Casual” texts from an ex evidently conceal ulterior motives. She has to check out emotionally in order to climax from a zipless fuck. Marriage and babies don’t appeal, yet other people’s still make her insecure. Even the nostalgia induced by a warm summer’s day can trick her into self-sabotage.
Pacing these shifting sands is exhausting. But simply by defining them, and acknowledging how normal it is for these contradictory states to coexist (especially in the lives of women, contorted by diet culture and dating), Taylor establishes a sturdy sense of common ground – one on which the makings of a stellar pop second act are taking shape.
Continue reading...The Depeche Mode frontman answers your questions, on his new covers album, taking early dance lessons from Mick Jagger and the right way to load a dishwasher
Did you accomplish everything you set out to on [forthcoming album] Impostor? MrBeelzebub
I was really burned out after the last Depeche Mode tour, then Rich [Machin, long-time musical partner in Soulsavers] and I started talking about songs and artists who had influenced us. Before we knew it, we were making a Soulsavers record with me as frontman that paid homage to those songs, but was almost a new piece of work. I realised that the choices were songs that put me where I am, suggested where I have been and where I might be. They are songs [such as Dan Penn/James Carr’s Dark End of the Street or Bob Dylan’s Not Dark Yet] that reflect on lives lived. I would not have known how to sing these songs when I was 18.
Continue reading...Tired of Tinseltown, the pair have turned instead to shilling for the UAE. Oddly, their YouTube advertorial micro-features are actually really good
If you’ve been paying attention, you will have noticed that neither Jessica Alba or Zac Efron are very good at hiding their disdain for Hollywood. It has been a decade since Alba has acted in anything approaching a high-profile role, preferring instead to concentrate on her consumer goods company. Efron, meanwhile, made a Netflix documentary last year in which he repeatedly slated Hollywood and its practices.
However, despite this they are both attractive, well-known actors. And this means, if they’re tired of Hollywood, plenty of other outlets are available to them. And by “plenty of other outlets”, I mean “the Dubai tourist board”’.
Continue reading...Slew of walkouts by tech workers, unthinkable mere years ago, shows workers ‘now understand their labor power’, expert says
Employees at Netflix halted work on Wednesday and staged a protest outside the company’s Los Gatos, California, headquarters to condemn the streaming platform’s handling of complaints against Dave Chappelle’s new special.
The actions – which hundreds participated in – are the latest in a string of highly visible organizing efforts in the tech sector, as workers increasingly take their grievances about company policies and decisions public.
Continue reading...Sculpture and its futuristic creator held for 10 days, possibly in fear she is part of spying plot
She has been described as “a vision of the future” who is every bit as good as other abstract artists today, but Ai-Da – the world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist – hit a temporary snag before her latest exhibition when Egyptian security forces detained her at customs.
Ai-Da is due to open and present her work at the Great Pyramid of Giza on Thursday, the first time contemporary art has been allowed next to the pyramid in thousands of years.
Continue reading...Villeneuve’s take on the sci-fi classic starring Timothée Chalamet, Oscar Isaac and Zendaya has been given room to breathe, creating a colossal spectacle
If there can ever be a moment of triumph for a director, when the anxiety of influence is vanquished – for a bit, anyway – then Denis Villeneuve might have achieved it. This eerily vast and awe-inspiring epic, a cathedral of interplanetary strangeness, is better than the attempt a generation ago by an acknowledged master.
David Lynch’s Dune from 1984 was an interesting, rackety, flawed movie that attempted to cram the entirety of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel into its running time – the result was like Flash Gordon without the laughs. Villeneuve, with his co-writers Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth, has used less than half the book (with a second episode to come) and allowed it room to grow: to breathe and drift through unimaginably vast reaches of fictional galaxies, with images of architecturally enormous spacecraft moving into view, or delicately lowering themselves on to alien landscapes of parched and austere beauty, particularly the ravishingly pure desert landmass of “Dune”, the contested planet itself. Star Wars’ debt to Dune, and now Dune’s debt to Star Wars, has been extensively discussed (amusingly, Dune gives us moving holograms rather like the one in which Princess Leia first begged Obi-Wan Kenobi for help). But this blockpulverising film feels more like TE Lawrence’s imperious version of The Phantom Menace. This is how it ought to have been.
Continue reading...In her 50-year career, Baca has been a singer, ethnomusicologist and Peru’s minister of culture. As she releases her 16th album, she reveals why her work is as vital as it has ever been
Susana Baca has lived multiple lives in her 77 years. She is one of Peru’s most celebrated singers, and a champion of Afro-Peruvian music, amplified by a partnership with David Byrne’s Luaka Bop record label. She is trained as an ethnomusicologist and manages a cultural centre in Peru, and she was only the second Afro-Peruvian minister in the history of independent Peruvian government, serving as minister of culture in 2011.
“It was not an easy path to achieve all that I have,” Baca says, speaking over video call. She is draped in a black shawl, speaking via an interpreter, from her home in Cañete. “My parents used to play music all the time when I was a child – my earliest memories are of my father singing and my mother dancing – but when I decided that I wanted to be a singer, my mother was horrified. We were very poor and all the musicians she had heard of had died from tuberculosis. It was an extreme life.”
Continue reading...Four hundred items of clothing and accessories which belonged to García Márquez and his wife, Mercedes Barcha, go on sale this Wednesday to raise funds for a charity helping children of indigenous communities in Mexico
Continue reading...The comic has come blazing out of lockdown fearless and on full throttle, buying a motorbike for her 50th birthday and turning the menopause – along with an incident in a park – into comedy gold
‘I must tell you how old I’m going to be when I die,” says Bridget Christie, whipping out her phone to show me a small cartoon gravestone bearing the date of her demise. Fittingly, we’re sitting in a churchyard near her home in London, not far from some actual gravestones. According to the app, Christie, who recently turned 50, has 34 years left. As one of the many people who lost loved ones to Covid-19, death has been on her mind during the pandemic, and her thoughts on ageing have been exacerbated by the arrival of the menopause. In lockdown, preoccupied by the passage of time, she decided to look at the moon every night: “I thought about how many moons I’ve got left to see. I was like, ‘We’re not here for very long – what are you going to leave behind?’”
Her thoughts coalesced into her BBC Radio 4 series Mortal, which tackled birth, life, death and the afterlife. Working with BBC Radio Theatre, where she’d previously recorded standup, she decided to try something different. Whispered monologues, surreal characters (Zeus, the Grim Reaper and dead Bridget among them) and real telephone conversations are stitched together into something quite intimate. Although she got their permission, she didn’t tell her dad, sister Eileen and friend Ashley exactly when she’d be recording their phone calls, lending a naturalness to the chats.
Continue reading...Starring Sarah Paulson and Beanie Feldstein, Ryan Murphy’s 10-part series on the infamous White House affair is propulsive, addictive and shot through with comedy
There is nothing stranger than the recent past. For that reason, it can be a goldmine for writers, and none has extracted more from it in the past few years than Ryan Murphy. The late 90s is his most fertile seam, furnishing all three parts of his American Crime Story anthology. The opening season gave him his first – and unexpected – post-Glee hit in the glorious The People v OJ Simpson, which retold the story of the 1994 killing of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman and the most infamous murder trial of modern (media) times that followed. Then came The Assassination of Gianni Versace, about the death of the designer at the hands of Andrew Cunanan in 1997. Now we have Impeachment (BBC Two), which focuses on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal that occupied minds, headlines and the House of Representatives for much of 1998.
This new 10-part instalment, written mainly by Sarah Burgess, puts the bureaucrat Linda Tripp – played by the most revered of his repertory company, Sarah Paulson – rather than the US president or his intern front and centre. The drama opens in 1998 with her leading the FBI to Monica (Beanie Feldstein) and leading her away to a hotel for questioning (“It’s for your own good,” Tripp assures her) as part of the Paula Jones investigation and pending lawsuit. We then move back to 1993, the suicide of Vince Foster and the Whitewater investigation, presented as the beginning of Tripp’s move from loyal (if abrasive and self-aggrandising) White House civil servant to embittered employee ready to put a metaphorical bomb under the place.
Continue reading...The New Yorker writer’s book Major Labels examines why we tag music with a genre, be it for commerce or community. He explains why people still argue over great songs – and why they can thrive on cultural appropriation
When Nik Cohn wrote Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock in 1969, he only had 15 years of the rock’n’roll era to process. Five decades later, telling the story so far is such a daunting prospect that, while writing Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, New Yorker staff writer Kelefa Sanneh’s trick was denial.
“I figured if I thought too much about the span of it, I would go insane,” he says cheerfully. “The idea of sitting down to write the history of music is horrifying. It feels more fun if I’m telling seven overlapping stories.”
Continue reading...The K-drama is the hottest show in the world – so why do its English speakers sound like they’re reading off Google Translate? We meet the men accused of dire, stilted acting to see how they’ve found being catapulted to fame
Squid Game is a sensation. A violent Korean drama that mixes childhood nostalgia with vast amounts of death, the series has surpassed all expectations to become the most successful show in Netflix history. It has made global stars of its main cast overnight. That is, with a few notable exceptions.
‘Why is Squid Game’s English-Language Acting So Bad?’ demanded one recent headline, echoing the sentiment of hundreds of tweets and memes. The culprits are the “VIPs” – four English-speaking, mask-wearing billionaires who watch the action from afar, placing bets on the outcome of the carnage. To the naysayers, the VIP acting in Squid Game is stilted and mannered, and pulls them out of the show. But who are the people behind the masks?
Continue reading...Fans of the YA After series should find something amid the tangled mess of plot, daytime-soap acting and inanimate passion – everyone else should look away
If you don’t identify as an Afternator or recognise the hashtag #Hessa, a short explanation is necessary. After is a clutch of bestselling YA romance novels once described as “Fifty Shades of Grey for teens”. US author Anna Todd started writing stories as fan fiction for the boyband One Direction and Harry Styles is the inspiration for broody-eyed bad-boy Hardin Scott; he’s the on-off boyfriend of bookish virginal college student Tessa Young. This film is the stupendously wooden and humourless third in the series. It’s heading straight to Amazon and should come with a warning to viewers: contains extremely boring sex.
If you’re new to the franchise, don’t even bother trying. The script works on the basis that everyone watching has read the books, seen the previous movies and bought the T-shirt (sloganned versions available on Etsy: “Mentally dating Hardin Scott”). No attempt whatsoever is made to introduce us to the tedious tangle of relationships. That said, all you need to know about Tessa and Hardin is that they can’t live without each other.
Continue reading...With Steven Spielberg’s remake almost out, the 1961 original still feels thrillingly contemporary, a tough act to follow
It’s the opening credits that do it right away. Following three eerie whistles over a black screen, West Side Story explodes into a full screen of poster-paint colour – shifting from orange to red to magenta to royal blue – as Leonard Bernstein’s four-minute overture brassily clatters into action. Over the colour, a stark design flourish: seemingly random brigades of parallel vertical black lines, only coalescing at the overture’s end into the tip of Manhattan, viewed from the air, cuing a vertiginous bird’s-eye montage of New York City in motion. That chipper yet chillingly disembodied whistle returns; by the time we finally see a human face, six coolly riveting minutes has passed.
This whole title sequence – from the graphics to the aerial photography – was visualised by Saul Bass, the distinctive graphic designer then favoured by such aggressive stylists as Alfred Hitchcock and Otto Preminger. It still seems, perhaps even more than anything that follows in West Side Story, sleekly and breath-catchingly modern: a coup of expensive minimalism at the outset of a splashy Hollywood production. That was no accident: in 1961, United Artists set out for the film to be something bracing and new in the movie musical, an industry staple that was looking increasingly out of step with a youth culture turning toward rock’n’roll.
Continue reading...From being pelted with stones in Greece to receiving a papal welcome in Rome, the giant girl’s migrant trek from Syria to Manchester provoked powerful responses
In Greece, far-right protesters threw things at her as she walked through the streets, local councillors voted to ban her from visiting a village of Orthodox monasteries, and protests in Athens meant her route had to be diverted. In France, the mayor of Calais raised objections to her presence.
At times, the 8,000km journey across Europe of a 3.5m-tall puppet child refugee highlighted the hostility experienced by refugees who have been travelling along the same route from the Syrian border to the UK for years. Elsewhere, this ambitious theatrical project has triggered the scenes of welcome its artistic directors hoped to inspire when they embarked on this walk in July.
Continue reading...The giant Italian pie was the centrepiece of the star’s Big Night film. Now he’s invited me round to his house to make it
• Now try cooking Tucci’s timpano yourself
Getting your homework marked by Stanley Tucci is terrifying. Not because he is scary. On the contrary. He has impeccable, courtly manners. It’s terrifying because of what is at stake. I prise off the lid to the plastic box and turn its contents towards him, shyly. Tucci plucks a single chilled meatball from the one kilo throng, each the size of a large marble, and pops it into his mouth. He nods slowly, then smiles. “Perfetto,” he says, simply. Thank Christ for that. The meatballs, made to his own detailed recipe, are a key part of a grandiose cooking adventure we are embarking upon today, here in his kitchen. They need to be right.
In 1996, Tucci introduced the world to one of his family’s great culinary traditions, courtesy of the movie Big Night, which he starred in, co-wrote and co-directed. In the film, set in 1950s America, Tucci plays a recent Italian immigrant who, along with his chef brother, runs a struggling Italian restaurant on the shore not far from New York City. To raise its profile, they decide to stage a special dinner which, they have been told, will be attended by the great American-Italian singing star Louis Prima. The centrepiece of this magnificent, delirious feast will be a timpano.
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