Category Archives: Culture

Ellen DeGeneres: toxic workplace allegations are ‘misogynistic’

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In her first interview since announcing the end of her talkshow, the daytime star has called reports of behind-the-scenes bullying ‘orchestrated’

In her first on-air appearances since announcing the end of her eponymous daytime talk show, Ellen DeGeneres called the press cycle around allegations of toxicity at her workplace “orchestrated” and “misogynistic”, and elaborated on her reasons for stepping down after 19 years.

Related: The end of Ellen’s show signifies how celebrity culture has shifted | Adrian Horton

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Eid al-Fitr celebrations around the world – in pictures

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Around the world, Eid al-Fitr celebrations have been taking place in another unprecedented year. With the uneven distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, Muslims in countries like the US and UK have been able to gather en masse for the first time in over a year and celebrate the end of Ramadan. Meanwhile, across Asia, some ceremonies have been more muted and somber, as families continue to lose members to the virus.

Adding to the complex emotions amid this year’s celebration, Muslim communities have been demonstrating solidarity with those affected by the crisis in Gaza, where Israeli strikes have killed dozens of people, including many children. As millions share traditional feasts after a month of fasting, Eid will continue through the evening, and often through the week

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The Carpenters’ 20 greatest songs – ranked!

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As their self-titled, third album and biggest hit turns 50, we pick their best work

The Carpenters’ greatest album remains the compilation Singles 1969-1973, on which the duo remixed, re-recorded and segued their hits into one glorious gush of sound, but 1972’s A Song for You runs it close, because the album tracks are as good as the singles, as on this gorgeous portrait of a tour-weary musician.

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‘Stop drinking fake coffee!’ Your most annoying things about TV

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We asked you to name your pet peeves of the small screen. Here are the things that rile you up – from empty cups to far too easy parking

‘Cliffhangers should be illegal!’: the most annoying things about TV

Empty coffee cups. You can tell from the way people hold them that there’s no liquid in them, never mind hot coffee – surely they could at least fill them with water?

Ditto suitcases – how many times do you see a character lifting suitcases with effortless ease, not wincing or bumping them off their leg as they lug it to the taxi. mikebhoy

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Oxygen review – air runs out for claustrophobic survival nightmare

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Mélanie Laurent is excellent as a woman who wakes up in a cryogenic pod with enough oxygen to last the length of the film

Here is a single-location mystery thriller from first-time feature screenwriter Christie LeBlanc which is more than a bit on the preposterous side. It requires some hefty levels of disbelief suspension and plausibility buy-in. But the excellent Mélanie Laurent (from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds) sells it hard, and it’s a rather elegant contrivance, more restrained than usual from this director, the shlock-horror specialist Alexandre Aja.

Laurent plays a woman who wakes up enclosed in a cryogenic hi-tech pod, slightly bigger than a coffin, surrounded by screens and readouts, hooked up to various life-support wires. She can’t remember who she is or why she is there, although she is almost immediately plagued with traumatised flashbacks of being rushed into hospital. Or is she rushing someone else into hospital? She can’t move. She can’t get out. And, increasingly, she can’t breathe. She realises that her oxygen levels will last only around a 100 minutes, the length of the film, in fact, which plays out in real time. And her only friend, the only one who can help her in this claustrophobic nightmare, is the velvety Hal-type voice of the controlling computer, drolly provided by Mathieu Amalric, which in time-honoured style is inscrutable, but with a hint that it knows more and could do more than it is letting on.

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Tracey Emin on beating cancer: ‘You can curl up and die – or you can get on with it’

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As she starts to rebuild her life after surgery, the artist shares her unflinchingly honest cancer self-portraits, talks about seeing dead people in hospital walls, and explains why she’s buying herself a punchbag – and kittens

‘I’m smiling and talking to you,” says Tracey Emin, sitting at her kitchen table. “But it’s not always like this.” We’ve been delaying this conversation until she finally felt well enough. She has been spending a lot of time in bed, just resting. On the phone, she sounded weak, but today she is indeed smiling, getting excited as she speaks – the Tracey who I have been fortunate enough to get to know.

“Now I’ve got a terrible pain in my legs, it’s unbearable. That’s why I’ve been in bed. I’m determined to go for a walk later because I hardly ever go out. I have a urostomy bag, so I have a major disability. The more well I get, the more annoying it is. Previously it was all right because I was on morphine. But now I want to do things and I can’t.”

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The Swordsman review – thrilling fight scenes in spectacular Korean action drama

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An intricate tapestry of 17th-century political intrigue and family feuding is bolstered by fabulous costumes as Chinese invaders are dealt with

The Swordsman, a pacy, crisply choreographed South Korean action film set in the 17th century handicaps itself by opting for such a bland, generic title. It’s like naming a Hollywood action movie The Gunman or The Cop. Debutant writer-director Choi Jae-Hoon could have been a little more specific about the protagonist Tae-yul (played by boy-band-beautiful star and sometime rapper Jang Hyuk) by calling it The Blind Swordsman, given the character’s vision impairment. But then that title has already been used several times. Also, Tae-yul is not quite blind yet, although the threat to his vision and his need to access an expensive medicine hang over the plot throughout.

As it happens, the intricate tapestry of action, family drama, political intrigue and period spectacle is anything but generic. Unfolding during a period when ruling dynasties in China and Korea were in major flux, the story springboards off the fall of the Joseon dynasty’s 15th king; a disgrace in combat sends Tae-yul, one of the finest swordsmen in the country, into exile with his baby daughter.

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‘You’re toxic!’ Can TV shows survive when their star becomes a scandal?

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From Jeffrey Tambor to Joss Whedon, high-profile accusations of improper behaviour are a minefield for TV makers – especially if the A-listers go rogue

In 2018, HBO breathlessly announced a brand-new drama from one of television’s most celebrated auteurs. The network was, it said, “honoured” to be providing a home for The Nevers, Joss Whedon’s long-awaited return to the small screen. A complex Victorian-era fantasy led by tormented female protagonists with supernatural powers, it had the Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator’s fingerprints all over it. Whedon would be writer, director and executive producer, and described his “odd, intimate epic” as “the most ambitious narrative” he had ever created.

Then, in November the same year, Whedon abruptly abandoned his passion project. He attributed his exit to tiredness (“I am genuinely exhausted, and am stepping back to marshal my energy towards my own life”). In a statement, HBO said: “We have parted ways with Joss Whedon. We remain excited about the future of The Nevers and look forward to its premiere.” But behind the scenes, a reputation-destroying storm appeared to be brewing. In July last year, the actor Ray Fisher claimed Whedon had been abusive while directing the blockbuster Justice League. Then he was accused of being “casually cruel” and perpetuating a “toxic” atmosphere on the Buffy set by the actors Charisma Carpenter and Amber Benson. Michelle Trachtenberg, who was 14 when she was cast as Buffy’s younger sister, claimed that Whedon was not allowed to be in a room alone with her. (In February, HBO’s chief content officer Casey Bloys said that the company had received “no complaints or no reports of inappropriate behaviour” against Whedon. Representatives for Whedon did not immediately respond when approached for comment for this piece.)

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The Butchers: novel set in Irish BSE crisis wins Ondaatje prize

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Ruth Gilligan’s thriller about eight men who cull cattle in rural Ireland wins £10,000 for books that ‘best evoke the spirit of a place’

Ruth Gilligan’s literary thriller The Butchers, set in the Irish borderlands during the BSE crisis, has won the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje prize for books that “best evoke the spirit of a place”.

Gilligan’s novel beat titles including James Rebanks’ memoir of his family farm, English Pastoral, and Nina Mingya Powles’ poetry collection Magnolia, 木蘭 to the £10,000 prize. The Butchers opens with an ancient curse that decrees that eight men must touch every cow in Ireland as it dies, and follows a group of eight men as they roam rural Ireland in the 1990s, slaughtering the cows of those who still believe in the old ways. The novel unpicks the mysterious death of one of the Butchers, whose corpse is found suspended from a meat hook.

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Subnautica: Below Zero review — life begins at minus 30

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PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, PC, Mac; Unknown Worlds
Survive under the waves on a frozen planet in this freeform adventure where following the instinct to explore is the real goal

I’m planning a trip. I’m going to load my sea truck with provisions, pick a direction and travel as far as I dare before pitching camp on an iceberg. First up, I need to craft a compass; while I’m doing that, I might as well make a bunch of beacons to mark points of interest for later. I could also do with some sea truck storage compartments (you know, for all the beacons). I pin the recipes to my heads-up display and go for a dive, hoping to pick up some crafting materials, but as I explore deeper, the sentient AI that has taken up residence in spare bits of my cerebral cortex (don’t ask) notifies me that there’s something interesting nearby. Topping up my oxygen regularly to avoid suffocating as I crawl over unexplored parts of the seabed, I stumble upon an abandoned underwater science outpost and start picking through it for salvage and intel. There’s an interesting crafting recipe here… wait, wasn’t I planning a trip?

Subnautica: Below Zero is an underwater survival game where best laid plans, like my theoretical sea truck escapade, are often diverted toward interesting distractions. As scientist Robin Ayou, we descend on planet 4546B to search for her lost sister, Sam, but the more immediate priority is staying warm, fed and hydrated (and making beacons). Starting out from little more than an aquatic linen closet with a fabricator and a tiny storage locker, the early hours are spent scavenging for fish and scraps to stay alive and fashion basic tools. There is no combat, just survival.

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It’s not just racism and sexism. The Golden Globes have been sunk by sheer stupidity

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The preposterous Hollywood Foreign Press Association gravy train might have chugged on for ever if its members had just swallowed their pride and done more for diversity

An investigative report by the Los Angeles Times into the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, that notoriously rackety organisation which administers the Golden Globes, has shown an eminently corruptible body drenched in antediluvian attitudes; this has resulted in NBC cancelling its TV coverage of next year’s ceremony and Tom Cruise handing back the three Globes he has personally won over the years.

Related: Golden Globes backlash: Tom Cruise hands back awards and NBC drops broadcast

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Army of the Dead review – Zack Snyder’s zombie splatterfest is a wit-free zone

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A muscle-bound crew of mercenaries infiltrate a Las Vegas full of zombies in Snyder’s uninspired Netflix horror-thriller

Zombies. They grunt. They lurch inelegantly through dystopian ruined streets, sometimes breaking into an athletic sprint. They stare sightlessly ahead, often with irises that glitter in the post-apocalyptic sunset with some nameless infection. Sometimes they shriek through hideously distorted mouths from which the flesh has already been half-eaten away, as they are blasted with a shotgun. They provide metaphors for consumerism and conformism, and they also furnish a low-budget horror launching pad for ambitious young directors. But zombies are often just boring: yucky and indistinguishable horror-vermin whose gruesome killing, in each case, is a dramatically uninteresting non-moment, and all too often humourless (although an honourable exception is Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead).

And so it proves in this very long, very violent, video-game type horror-thriller from Zack Snyder. The premise is that, in a future-world in which a zombie outbreak has been contained by herding the shambling undead into a wrecked Las Vegas and walling them in, a tough Dirty Dozen-type crew is hired by a shadowy Vegas hotel owner (Hiroyuki Sanada) to bust into the city and retrieve the billions of dollars languishing in his hotel safe. The zombie slayers are led by man-mountain Scott (Dave Bautista), who is quaintly yearning for a non-mercenary retirement selling lobster rolls in his food truck, and include Vanderohe (Omari Hardwick), Cruz (Ana De La Reguera), Lily (Nora Arnezeder) and Scott’s sensitive daughter Kate (Ella Purnell), who is still hurting from a tough decision that Scott had to make when Kate’s mum was bitten by a zombie.

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Puppet of refugee girl to ‘walk’ across Europe along 12-week arts festival trail

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Three teams of four puppeteers will accompany Little Amal from Turkey to Manchester to celebrate refugees

A giant puppet of a nine-year-old Syrian refugee girl is to “walk” from Turkey to the UK through villages, towns and cities for one of the most ambitious and complex public artworks ever attempted.

The Walk project was meant to have taken place between April and July but was delayed by the pandemic. Now the 5,000 mile (8,000km) journey of Little Amal, from Gaziantep, near the Turkish-Syrian border, to Manchester, will take place over 12 weeks from 27 July.

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Juliana Hatfield: ‘Women turn our anger on ourselves’

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The indie-rocker is now a touchstone for a generation of young songwriters – and after learning to channel her pain and frustration, her 18th album is one of her best

Juliana Hatfield speaks with deliberation: her thoughts unfurl after pregnant pauses and are sharpened by astute clarifications. “I’m sorry, I lost my train of thought,” she says at one point, doubling back to ensure her meaning is clear. Such consideration isn’t a surprise, given the rippling effect of an infamous early-career interview.

Nearly 30 years ago, while promoting her debut solo album Hey Babe, 23-year-old Hatfield, who was brand new to interviews, admitted to an inquiring male journalist that she was still a virgin. The casual comment became the focus of his piece, and incited scrutiny that followed the American songwriter throughout her rise. “When I was in the thick of it, it wasn’t really computing for me,” she says on a phone call from her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “It wasn’t until much later that I realised how intense it was, how gross it was, and how it affected my career in negative ways.”

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The Lady in the Portrait review – painterly pageantry in a Chinese royal court

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Fan Bingbing stars as an emperor’s wife having her portrait painted in this artful yet inert period drama

This French-Chinese co-production about an earlier French-Chinese collaboration offers handsome pageantry amid its lavish recreation of 18th-century imperial court life, but it isn’t quite enough to compensate for a puttering narrative motor. Longtime Apichatpong Weerasethakul producer Charles de Meaux has turned director with a far eastern equivalent of Girl With a Pearl Earring – another decorous, ever so slightly sleepy matinee sit.

The film’s subject is Jean-Denis Attiret (played by Melvil Poupaud), a real-life French Jesuit missionary who spent half of his 60-odd years employed as the Chinese court painter. His trickiest commission, recalled here, came from the emperor’s bored wife (Fan Bingbing), thirsting to preserve an image that might turn her indifferent husband’s head.

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Dear Gwyneth Paltrow, welcome to everyone else’s sad-potato life

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As the health guru and actor reveals she went ‘off the rails’ by drinking every day during lockdown, I say those rails are our lives – is this a sales pitch?

In these dark times, it’s nice to be reminded of our worth every now and again. And, with that in mind, perhaps we should all now repeat a quick affirmation: you are more powerful than Gwyneth Paltrow.

Of course you are. In a recent interview, Paltrow revealed that she had gone “totally off the rails” during the Covid pandemic by drinking two alcoholic drinks a night and eating some bread. “I mean, who drinks multiple drinks seven nights a week?” she said. “Like, that’s not healthy.”

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A bad call: why do characters never say bye on the phone?

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Watch any film or TV show and you’ll notice that nobody ever says goodbye. Are they too busy – or just rude?

In the Guide’s weekly Solved! column, we look into a crucial pop-culture question you’ve been burning to know the answer to – and settle it

I absolutely hate talking on the phone. I am one of those infuriating friends who’d rather have a long, winding text conversation than speak on the phone to arrange a simple plan. People under the age of 60 who still leave voicemails? Seek help. And unknown numbers? I follow Dua Lipa’s first rule (don’t pick up the phone!). But it seems as if there’s a group out there who loathe the inconvenience of talking on the phone even more than me: screenwriters.

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Shaun Ryder: ‘I was a heroin addict for 20-odd years, but there’s been no damage off that’

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From ADHD to alopecia and learning the alphabet at 28, the Happy Mondays singer has had a wild, eventful life. He discusses hedonism, parenting – and why he has to spend so much time correcting Bez

Shaun Ryder is being uncharacteristically quiet. That’s because he’s mistakenly stuck himself on mute and can’t work out how to turn on the microphone of the computer he’s on. We spend a rather amusing (and awkward) five minutes mouthing silently at each other, pointing fingers and shrugging shoulders, while Ryder wrestles with his device, occasionally spinning it around so that he appears upside down. Eventually, though, an unmistakable Salford accent comes crackling through my speakers: “Can ya hear me now?”

Loud and clear, Shaun, which is good because I’ve got a burning question that demands answering. Earlier this year, Ryder contracted Covid-19, along with his entire household (Ryder lives with his second wife, Joanne, and their two daughters). He was sick for three weeks, with bouts of fatigue that dragged on after that. But, according to best pal Bez – his partner in crime through the hedonistic days of Happy Mondays and Black Grape, and currently appearing with Ryder in the more family-friendly TV show Celebrity Gogglebox – the virus had a very unusual side-effect: it caused the hair Ryder had lost through alopecia to grow back. We’ve learned to be endlessly surprised by this virus, but is this really true?

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David Hockney on joy, longing and spring light: ‘I’m teaching the French how to paint Normandy!’

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While enjoying an idyllic lockdown in France, the 83-year-old artist has created perhaps his most important exhibition ever – offering hope to an injured world

‘I think it looks terrific,” says David Hockney. “It’s all on one theme, isn’t it? And there’s not many exhibitions like that, really, a show all about the spring.” The 83-year-old artist is taking a look around his new exhibition at the Royal Academy in London for the first time. He seems happy with it – and rightly so, for it is hypnotic and ravishing. But while I am getting a sneak preview in person, Hockney is here only virtually, his face appearing on two screens, one a giant TV, the other a small laptop.

He is at home, at what he calls his “seven dwarves house” in Normandy, wearing a red, black and white check jacket, a checkerboard tie, a blue-green pullover and round, gold-framed glasses. His kaleidoscopic choice of clothing, challenging the very limits of the video call’s bandwidth, is as vibrant and beguiling as the canvases hanging around us. Hockney has not just painted spring; he has come dressed as it.

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Italian public broadcaster asked to stop promoting ‘intolerable’ content

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Activists claim Rai regulary breaks its own code of ethics when it should be setting example to rest of industry

Activists opposed to racism, homophobia, antisemitism and sexism in the Italian media have written to the public broadcaster, Rai, urging it to stop promoting “intolerable” content.

Rai apologised recently for the use of blackface in its shows, and advised editors to stop airing productions in which performers wear makeup to imitate black people, but stopped short of an outright ban.

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