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Islander review – change and contradictions on Robinson Crusoe island
Stéphane Goël’s documentary merges the past and present of this small island off the coast of Chile
In an age of overconsumption and technological saturation, many yearn for an abstract “simpler” time in the past. Opening on a vessel bobbing on the ocean waves, Stéphane Goël’s Islander takes us on a journey that transcends both the past and the present, effectively dissecting and uncovering many contradictions and preoccupations dormant under this utopian ideal.
At the centre of the documentary is Robinson Crusoe island, west of Chile, and one of the inspirations for Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel. Booming over the magnificent landscape of volcanic mountains is Mathieu Amalric’s evocative narration, as he takes on the role of Swiss aristocrat Alfred von Rodt who bought the island in 1877. Juxtaposed with these ghostly recollections are intimate interviews with Von Rodt’s descendants who are still living there. Also carefully observed are the inhabitants’ daily routines; at one point, a young boy is taught how to shoot a rabbit.
Continue reading...‘Sex isn’t difficult any more’: the men who are quitting watching porn
Addiction to pornography has been blamed for erectile dysfunction, relationship issues and depression, yet problematic use is rising. Now therapists and tech companies are offering new solutions
Thomas discovered pornography in the traditional way: at school. He remembers classmates talking about it in the playground and showing each other videos on their phones during sleepovers. He was 13 and thought it was “a laugh”. Then he began watching pornography alone on his tablet in his room. What started as occasional use, at the beginning of puberty, became a daily habit.
Thomas (not his real name), who is in his early 20s, lived with one of his parents, who he says did not care what he was doing online. “At the time, it felt normal, but looking back I can see that it got out of hand quite quickly,” Thomas says. When he got a girlfriend at 16, he started having sex and watched less pornography. But the addiction was just waiting to resurface, he says.
Continue reading...From Mansfield Park to Mojo: why Harold Pinter’s acting deserves to be celebrated
With the Pinter-penned 1963 classic The Servant back in cinemas, there’s a chance to reflect on the playwright’s less-acknowledged acting performances
Like an unhurried but dependable butler, The Servant is here again. It was only nine years ago that Joseph Losey’s crackling psychological drama, about the shifting power games between a toff (James Fox) and his manservant (Dirk Bogarde), was last doing the rounds in cinemas. But this is not a film that ever gets old.
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Continue reading...Australian music legends join forces in ‘vax the nation’ campaign
An industry brought to its knees by Covid-19 lockdowns calls on Australians to help bring back live performance in a national advertising campaign
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Dozens of the biggest names in the Australian music industry have joined forces for a pro-vaccination advertising campaign launched on Monday.
Tim Minchin, Jimmy Barnes, Amy Shark, Paul Kelly and the Hilltop Hoods are just some of the more than 200 acts who have joined forces with major Australian record labels, ticketing agencies, tour promoters and festival organisers for the #Vaxthenation campaign.
Continue reading...‘I went to school drunk in a bikini’: how Sophie Willan turned her chaotic life into sitcom gold
She won a Bafta for Alma’s Not Normal – and that was just the pilot episode. As the full series launches, the ex-standup talks about growing up in care, getting the comedy bug in Ibiza and finally hitting the big time
Earlier this year, Sophie Willan went through an extraordinary run of extreme highs and lows. She was filming her sitcom Alma’s Not Normal, a project she started working on years ago, when her grandmother died. She had brought Willan up for part of her childhood and inspired a character in the show. The day after, Willan found out she had been Bafta nominated for comedy writing.
A few weeks later, while she watched the ceremony on a laptop on a picnic bench outside the converted barn she was staying in, Willan was named the winner. Her response, posted on Instagram by castmate Jayde Adams, is the most joyous thing you may see all year: Willan takes off on a victory lap, magnificent red sequinned dress matching a tractor in the background, sprinting and shouting “What the fuck?” over and over. “I woke up all the kids that had been put to bed in the house next door,” says Willan, laughing. “It was fabulous. It was surreal.”
Continue reading...Sarah Harding, singer with Girls Aloud, dies aged 39 from breast cancer
Fans and figures from show business pay tribute to pop star who was diagnosed in August 2020 and wrote memoir during her illness
The pop singer and TV personality Sarah Harding, who had 21 UK Top 10 singles as a member of Girls Aloud, has died aged 39 from breast cancer.
Her mother, Marie, announced her death on Instagram, prompting a flood of tributes from fans and figures from show business. Geri Horner, the Spice Girls singer and a judge on the TV talent show that created Girls Aloud, wrote: “Rest in peace, Sarah Harding. You’ll be remembered for the light and joy you brought to the world. X”
Continue reading...Life being put on hold was just the spur this writer needed to fulfil her youthful ambition
Charlotte Northedge wrote a new novel in lockdown. She considers others who have realised the dreams of their youth
I wrote a novel in the last lockdown. To be clear, it wasn’t one of those creative outpourings some people had in between yoga with Adriene and baking banana bread. I had a deadline. Some days, I thought I’d never cut through the brain fog brought about by living through a pandemic. But gradually, as the initial panic subsided and the usual distractions of daily life fell away, I found the words did start to come, and the process of writing my second book was much more fluid and focused than my first.
Which is hardly surprising. I started my debut while on maternity leave with my second baby. I had dreamed of writing a novel since I was a child. I was one of those bookish kids whose weekly highlight was a visit to the library and who spent the best part of my teens squirrelling away short stories and beginnings of novels that never seemed to go anywhere. When I moved to London after my English degree, I joined a writing group and started a thriller.
Continue reading...Two pints of lager and a view of St Paul’s: the secret life of London’s most thrilling boozers
What makes a pub special? From the perfect place to flog atomic secrets to the official strictly protected viewpoint for St Paul’s, a new book tells the amazing stories behind the city’s greatest bars
When you stumble out of the medieval warren of Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub on Fleet Street, it’s easy to think you’ve had one too many. As you gaze east towards the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, the skyscrapers of the Square Mile appear to lean back in a woozy limbo, as if lurching to get out of the way.
It’s not the effect of the real ale, but the result of a curious planning rule. The City of London’s policies have long specified the pavement outside this particular pub as the hallowed spot from which Wren’s dome must be perfectly visible against the sky. Even the towers that stand behind it to the east, like the Cheesegrater and the Scalpel, derive their strange chamfered forms from having to preserve a sacred gap behind the cathedral’s silhouette, when seen from outside the pub.
Trace the lines of London’s historic protected views, and you’ll find that many of them end up outside pubs. It reflects not just the fact that the surveyors enjoyed a pint or two, but the central importance of the public house in shaping the history of the city – a phenomenon that is celebrated in a new book.
“There are already so many books about pubs,” says David Knight, co-author of Public House with Cristina Monteiro. “We wanted this one to be different. It’s not a guide to the best places to have a pint but a collection of social and cultural histories, trying to bring together a more diverse range of voices to explore the value of pubs to the city and society.” While the majority of pub literature may be of the stale white male genre, this compendium includes South Asian Desi pubs, African-Caribbean pubs, and a range of pubs that have played a role in LGBTQ+ history.
‘Images were suddenly powerless’: how the arts responded to 9/11
On the 20th anniversary of the attack on New York’s Twin Towers, we consider how artists, writers, film-makers and comedians have attempted to grasp that momentous day and it’s legacy
As the world clustered, transfixed, around television screens, watching and rewatching footage of a plane gliding into the top of New York’s twin towers and a tiny, anonymous man plummeting to earth, another scene was unfolding on the ground, as panic-stricken families stumbled through the smoke and rubble to gather up their children from schools and kindergartens.
Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly stood four blocks away with their daughter, watching the second tower fall “in excruciatingly slow motion”. As art director of the New Yorker magazine, Mouly knew that she would have to come up with a rapid response. “I felt that images were suddenly powerless to help us understand what had happened. The only appropriate solution seemed to be to publish no cover image at all – an all-black cover. Then Art suggested adding the outlines of the two towers, black on black. So from no cover came a perfect image, which conveyed something about the unbearable loss of life, the sudden absence in our skyline, the abrupt tear in the fabric of reality,” she later recalled.
Continue reading...Afghan musicians silently await their fate as Taliban’s ban looms
Amid upheaval across the country, it remains unclear whether a new government will forbid music as it did 25 years ago
The shutters have been down all along Kharabat Street, the storied heart of Afghan musical life, since the Taliban swept into Kabul in mid-August.
Musicians have taken their instruments home, or crammed them into store rooms, waiting to see if the group will do the unthinkable again, and ban music as they did 25 years ago.
Continue reading...Last Night in Soho review – a gaudy romp that’s stupidly enjoyable
Edgar Wright’s time-travel film plays like a 60s pop song building towards a big climax
The nostalgia gauge is code-red on Last Night in Soho, a gaudy time-travel romp that whisks its modern-day heroine to a bygone London that probably never existed outside our fevered cultural imagination. It’s the era of Dusty Springfield and Biba; great music, cool threads. British writer-director Edgar Wright takes a grab-bag of 1960s ingredients, paints them up and makes them dance to his tune. His film is thoroughly silly and stupidly enjoyable. To misquote William Faulkner, the past isn’t dead, it’s propping up the bar at the Café de Paris.
“You like that retro style, huh?” a classmate remarks to Eloise Turner, a 21st-century design student – and you can bet your house she does. Eloise is up from deepest Cornwall to attend the London College of Fashion, still haunted by her mother’s suicide and struggling to find her feet in a city that’s not like the one she expected. Thomasin McKenzie plays her as your classic fairytale ingenue, guileless and wide-eyed, entirely out of her depth. She’s eyeing the future but her feet are stuck in the past.
Continue reading...Damon Galgut: ‘The Booker pulls a nasty little trick on you’
The South African novelist on making a pilgrimage to Cormac McCarthy’s home, his youth in apartheid-era Pretoria and being shortlisted twice for the Booker prize
Novelist and playwright Damon Galgut, 57, grew up in Pretoria, South Africa, at the height of the apartheid era. He wrote his first novel aged 17 and has twice been shortlisted for the Booker prize. His latest, The Promise, spans four tumultuous decades as it traces the afterlife of a white matriarch’s dying wish to bequeath property to her black servant. The novel is heavily tipped to land him a place on this year’s shortlist when it’s announced on 14 September. He lives in Cape Town.
How did The Promise originate?
Books tend to build up out of clusters of ideas or themes that you carry around for a while and worry at. The specific form of this book crystallised around a series of anecdotes that a friend told me when we had a semi-drunken lunch, about four family funerals he’d attended. It occurred to me that would be quite an interesting way to tell the story of one particular family. The promise itself also arrived from a friend, who was telling me how his mother had asked the family to give a certain piece of land to the black woman who had looked after her through her last illness, as it happens in the book.
Amyl and the Sniffers’ Amy Taylor: ‘I wanna punch stuff and yell … but not all the time’
Having blazed a trail with raucous gigs, the Melbourne punk band’s singer deepens her oft-caricatured image on their new album
There is a moment at the end of Amyl and the Sniffers’ music video for Guided by Angels that sees frontwoman Amy Taylor quiet and alone, for once. After ripping down freeways and tunnels in the back of a Mitsubishi Lancer, her tiny body hanging halfway out of the back window, diving into the sea and dancing between the stationary Sniffers – drummer Bryce Wilson, guitarist Dec Martens and bassist Gus Romer – Taylor walks down a dark footpath, sits in the car’s front seat, laughs briefly and is suddenly still.
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Continue reading...Angelina Jolie: ‘I just want my family to heal’
The actor opens up about why her divorce from Brad Pitt is a human rights issue, escaping Harvey Weinstein and what young activists have taught her
• ‘People try to stop us speaking up’ – Jolie meets inspirational young campaigners
Angelina Jolie sits at a desk, back straight as a rule and rather regal. Her features are cartoonishly beautiful – straight black hair, vertiginous cheekbones, huge blue eyes and lips like a plumped red sofa. She is talking on Zoom to four young activists. It is a horribly apt day to be discussing human rights – the Taliban has just captured Ghazni city on its approach to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.
If this were a movie, you might suspect Jolie was playing a divine leader addressing the fortunate few. Yet it soon becomes apparent that things aren’t quite as they seem. The actor and film director is the one in awe, not the activists. The young people talk about the work they have done raising awareness of the carnage in Syria, the environmental crisis, trans rights and food poverty. Jolie hangs on their every word. She tells them they have inspired her children who follow their work, warns them against burnout, apologises for the failings of her generation and says how honoured she is to meet them.
Continue reading...Life, death and gabagool: how The Sopranos explains everything
Ahead of the release of prequel The Many Saints of Newark, a look at how David Chase’s classic mob drama saw the world in a grain of parmigiano
In 1999, a 40-year old Italian-American man started a course of therapy and created a new template for prestige television. The Sopranos, David Chase’s smash-hit TV series, was about the nasty inner workings of the DiMeo crime family. It was also about a mafioso’s midlife crisis, his children and his marriage, his debilitating anxiety and lurid nightmares.
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Continue reading...Venice film festival 2021 week one roundup – serious firepower
With big-hitters from returning heroes Jane Campion, Pedro Almodóvar and Paolo Sorrentino, plus an electrifying return from maverick Paul Schrader, it’s a heck of a starting bill at the Lido
This time last year, the film world raised a collective glass of prosecco to Venice. It was the first film festival to happen during that brief, sweet interlude between European lockdowns, and the organisation pulled off the Covid protocols magnificently – spaced seating, strict mask wearing, online ticketing. All that is still in place, and the gardens of the Casino compound remain a leafy oasis of calm.
But this year things aren’t quite so simple. For a start there are many more people attending, and the booking system has been unpredictable. Tickets for each screening become available exactly 74 hours in advance, some selling out within minutes, which means people are waking to book tickets at 6.30am, then spending the day anxiously trying to think ahead in three-day cycles. Add to this frustratingly long queues to get into the Casino area via temperature checks and bag checks, and only two days in – at time of writing – nerves are beginning to fray.
Continue reading...Legends of the fall: the 50 biggest books of autumn 2021
From new novels by Sally Rooney and Colson Whitehead to Michel Barnier’s take on Brexit, Bernardine Evaristo’s manifesto and diaries from David Sedaris – all the releases to look out for
Continue reading...Cuba review: American history of island neighbor is telling and timely
As Ada Ferrer writes, ‘Cuba – its sugar, its slavery, its slave trade – is part of the history of American capitalism’
In July, the eruption of unexpected protests in Cuba, sparked by food shortages and growing frustration with the government, unsurprisingly met with a corresponding flood of commentary from its opinionated neighbour.
Related: Forget the Alamo review: dark truths of the US south and its ‘secular Mecca’
Continue reading...Hilary Mantel: I am ashamed to live in nation that elected this government
Double Booker prize winner tells La Repubblica she may take Irish citizenship to feel European again
Hilary Mantel has said she feels “ashamed” by the UK government’s treatment of migrants and asylum seekers and is intending to become an Irish citizen to “become a European again”.
In a wide-ranging interview with La Repubblica, the twice Booker prize-winning novelist also gave her view on the monarchy, told how endometriosis has “devastated my life”, and how Boris Johnson “should not be in public life”. She also addresses the criticism of JK Rowling and her stance on transgender rights.
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