First the Rose family’s former mansion hit the real estate lists – now it’s the 10-room motel they called home
The motel home of the Rose family in the Emmy-sweeping Canadian TV series Schitt’s Creek is up for sale for C$2m.
The Hockley Motel in the Canadian town of Mono, Ontario, was a key filming location throughout the six seasons of the hit CBC sitcom.
Continue reading...Made with the full cooperation of its 81-year-old subject, this one-off about the astonishing life of Tina Turner is not a gritty documentary, but rather a loving swan song
Sky Documentaries’ two-hour film Tina, a retrospective on the now 81-year-old Tina Turner’s career is stuffed full of footage of her performances over the years. Black and white film of Anna Mae Bullock (as she was then) in the late 50s singing with Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm. Then on into the 60s, after he had realised what an asset he had on his hands and married the singer thus known as Tina Turner. Then flowering in the late 60s and early 70s, as the duo rose to greater and greater fame thanks to the Grammy-winning Proud Mary and the multimillion-selling hits River Deep – Mountain High and Nutbush City Limits.
Then come the 80s, when she made an astonishing comeback and dominated every stage she set foot on as a solo performer. And on into the 90s and the new millennium – including performing at the Grammys with Beyoncé and a 50th anniversary tour in 2008 – until she chose to step back. Apart, that is, from a second memoir, a Grammy lifetime achievement award, a musical about her life and a remix of What’s Love Got to Do With It that made her the first artist to have a top 40 hit in seven consecutive decades in the UK
Continue reading...Leave campaigners behind project only won charitable status by vowing it would tell balanced story
Leave campaigners have begun raising funds to open a Museum of Brexit after the long-awaited project was granted charitable status.
The trustees are seeking to generate £400,000 to buy a home for the museum – possibly in a pro-Brexit town such as Dudley in the West Midlands – plus another £250,000 to set up the institution and a strategic financial reserve of £350,000.
Continue reading...Performance at Palau Sant Jordi concert hall in Barcelona on Saturday night recalls pre-pandemic times
If one overlooked the white face masks dotting the tightly packed crowd of music lovers, it was almost like pre-pandemic times in Barcelona’s Palau Sant Jordi concert hall Saturday night.
Five thousand rock fans enjoyed a real-as-can-be concert after passing a same-day coronavirus screening to test its effectiveness in preventing outbreaks of the virus at large cultural events.
Continue reading...With a slew of books to mark the songwriter’s birthday due, we look at the industry that has grown up around the man who forced academia to take pop seriously
“It’s gonna take a hundred years before they understand me!” Bob Dylan once claimed, “they” being the cohorts of fans, critics and Dylanologists who have dogged his tracks ever since Robert Zimmerman, chippy teen of Hibbing, Minnesota, became Bob Dylan, world-famous singer, songwriter, and pop’s most enduring enigma.
“That’s exactly the quote James Joyce made about Ulysses,” points out Sean Latham, professor of English at the University of Tulsa and head of the institute for Bob Dylan Studies recently established there. “Joyce said, ‘I put so many puzzles and enigmas in Ulysses it will take the scholars 100 years to solve them’.”
Continue reading...The Stranger Things star is still in her teens, but has moved beyond new kid on the block to be a Hollywood power broker
It was clearly a moment designed to perplex. Fans of the hit Netflix show Stranger Things were left speculating at the end of season three as to how and why Eleven, played by Millie Bobby Brown, had suddenly lost her supernatural power to move things around with her mind.
Theories have ricocheted across social media during the long wait for the return of the show. But Brown, an English actress who is only 17, has already made such an impact with her Stranger Things role that this spring the question seems something of a side issue, even among her many devotees.
Continue reading...Archaeologists have discovered foundations of the previously unknown structure in the city’s Letná park
The colossal monument to Joseph Stalin that towered over Prague at the height of the cold war stood as a frightening reminder of the Soviet dictator’s tyranny and communism’s seemingly unshakeable grip on the former Czechoslovakia.
Nearly 60 years after its demolition, the brooding 15.5-metre (51ft) shrine retains a hold on the popular imagination, with locals referring to the now popular meeting point where it once stood as “Stalin’s”.
Continue reading...When the pop star Demi Lovato explains that she wants “to set the record straight about what it was that happened”, in her new documentary Dancing with the Devil, she is not messing around. The first two parts of the film, which were released on YouTube last week, tell the story of Lovato’s relapse into drug use and her near-fatal overdose in 2018. This is the era of selfies, of course, with everything documented and preserved, but a selfie captioned “Demi on crack for the first time” shocked me. This is a brutally frank account of her troubles, with seemingly nothing left out. If anyone remains in doubt that fame is a grim pact for most, and particularly for young women, then this puts the case to the jury, again and again.
Dancing with the Devil was the third documentary I had seen in the last month about a famous woman under unimaginable pressure, in unimaginable pain. I watched Framing Britney Spears and saw a charismatic pop star churned up by the spotlight, hounded wherever she went, cracking under the weight of it all. With heavy heart, I watched the difficult, moving Channel 4 film about Caroline Flack, made with the participation of her brave family. It was announced recently that Brittany Murphy, the Clueless star who died at the age of 32 in 2009, will be the subject of a new two-part documentary that promises to “cut through the tabloid noise” and “[craft] a grounded account of Brittany Murphy’s life struggles”.
Continue reading...The actor on her love of dogs, granting wishes and Ryan Gosling
Born in Surrey, Julia Ormond, 56, starred in Peter Greenaway’s 1993 film The Baby Of Mâcon. She went on to appear in Legends Of The Fall, First Knight and The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button; her latest film, Reunion, is available on digital platforms. She has a daughter and lives in Malibu, California.
What is your greatest fear?
Heights.
The Women’s prize winner reflects on the life‑threatening virus that shaped her writing, the superstitions that held her back, and why her prize-winning novel Hamnet speaks to our times
Maggie O’Farrell found the prospect of writing the central scenes of her prize-winning novel Hamnet, in which a mother sits helplessly by the bedside of her dying son, so traumatic that she couldn’t write them in the house. Instead, she had to escape to the shed, and “not a smart writing shed like Philip Pullman’s”, she says, “but a really disgusting, spidery, manky potting shed, which has since blown down in a gale”. And she could only do it in short bursts of 15 or 20 minutes before she would have to take a walk around the garden, and then go back in again.
The novel, a fictionalised account of the death of Shakespeare’s only son from the bubonic plague (his twin sister Judith survived) and an at times almost unbearably tender portrayal of grief, was first published a year ago. An interlude halfway through, which follows the journey of the plague in 1595 from a flea on a monkey in Alexandria to a cabin boy back to London and eventually to Stratford, was referred to by an American journalist as “the contact tracing chapter”. “It certainly wasn’t conceived as that when I wrote it,” the author says of the extraordinary coincidence of her novel, set more than 400 years ago, landing in the middle of the pandemic, not least because she delayed writing it for decades.
Continue reading...Six ways to bring some pizzazz to those first socially distanced interactions as restrictions are lifted
From Monday in England, people will be able to meet outdoors either in a group of six (from any number of households), or in a group of any size from up to two households, including in private gardens.
While this is exciting, it may also be a little daunting – many of us will have forgotten how to socialise normally during the long months of lockdown. Here’s a quick refresher course on the art of making conversation under current guidelines:
Continue reading...Aberdeen says it will repatriate a bust while Cambridge museum has ‘expectation’ its collection could be returned
Regional UK museums could lead a wave of repatriations of disputed Benin bronzes – most of them looted by British forces in 1897 – in defiance of the British government’s stance that institutions should “retain and explain” contested artefacts.
On Thursday, the University of Aberdeen confirmed it would repatriate a bust of an Oba, or king of Benin, which it has had since the 1950s, “within weeks”, a landmark move for a British institution.
Continue reading...Walter’s Arrested Development matriarch was drunk, dismissive, cruel and likable, yet we all envied her freedom. This was her masterstroke
Jessica Walter racked up a reported 161 film and TV credits over her 70-year acting career. If that number had only been 160, she would have still been the best sort of actor: a safe pair of hands who gets consistent work shoring up individual episodes of long-running shows. The spectrum of series that Walter appeared in over the years was impressive: Flipper, Columbo, Hawaii Five-O, Quincy, Knot’s Landing, Magnum, and Law and Order are just a few. She would pop in for a single episode, class it up a little and leave.
However, she will be remembered for one show above all. As Lucille Bluth in Arrested Development, Walter landed the role she was born to play: a beautifully written, brilliantly wicked character that she elevated to icon status.
Continue reading...Original account of discovery is retracted by editors of the scholarly book in which it was published
When two hitherto unknown poems by Sappho were brought to light in early 2014, it was a literary sensation. The sixth-century BC poet is one of the most celebrated writers of Greco-Roman antiquity, a tender chronicler of the agonies of female desire, and a gay icon. But frustratingly few works by her survive, and those that do largely come from ancient papyrus fragments preserved in the dry sands of Egypt.
But now the editors of a scholarly volume in which the circumstances of the discovery were detailed have formally retracted the chapter because the manuscript’s “provenance is tainted,” according to a statement issued through the book’s academic publisher, Brill.
Continue reading...The Emmy-winning actor, who also starred in Play Misty For Me and Grand Prix, died at her home in New York
Actor Jessica Walter has died at the age of 80.
Walter, best known for her Emmy-winning role as Lucille Bluth in Arrested Development, died in her sleep at her New York home.
Continue reading...Slaxx, a new indie horror-satire about a pair of murderous jeans, is the latest film to turn fashion into a baddie. The Guardian’s film critic thinks it is time to change the story
Which professions get a bad press in the movies? TV executives tend to be portrayhed as manipulative and sociopathic. Journalists can be boozy and lazy (although sometimes they’re dishy investigative idealists, like Woodward and Bernstein). Nightclub owners are awful. Dentists are creepy. Hotel receptionists are sinister.
But if there’s one trade that’s somehow perennially getting it in the neck on screen, it’s fashion. The new horror movie from Canadian satirist Elza Kephart – Slaxx – is a case in point, showing a new brand of jeans, unveiled to an elite audience of hipsters at a haughty upmarket store, becoming possessed by the spirits of exploited workers from the developing world who made them. The jeans run violently amok, slaughtering fashion vloggers and Instagram influencers in showers of blood.
Continue reading...Andujar lived with the tribe and fights for them. A timely show of her images comes to London soon
It is more than 50 years since Claudia Andujar began photographing the Yanomami, the people of the Amazon rainforest near Brazil’s border with Venezuela. Now 89, she is using her archive to increase their visibility, at a time when their survival is under renewed threat.
“The question of indigenous people should be more respected, more widely known. This is very important as it’s the only way the present [Brazilian] government will come to recognise their rights as human beings to occupy their land,” says Andujar, speaking from São Paulo. “This government isn’t interested in their rights.”
Continue reading...A documentary series about Demi Lovato shows how brutally controlled the singer’s diet once was, and, as other pop performers attest, it’s control that underpins damaging behaviour
For eight years of her life, Demi Lovato was served a watermelon cake for her birthday. This wasn’t a watermelon-flavoured version of a proper cake with all the good stuff like butter, sugar and flour, but rather an actual watermelon with some icing on top.
The reason for this was that her team at the time were “trying to keep her weight down”, according to Lovato’s best friend Matthew Scott Montgomery, who is interviewed as part of Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil, the YouTube documentary series premiering this week. Her team would police what she ate, he says, and those she was with were also required to eat only when Lovato ate, with no snacking outside of meals, in an attempt to “keep her well” and avoid triggering a relapse into the restrictive eating disorders she struggled with as a teenager.
Continue reading...Country’s oldest autocine is calling for exemption from 10pm rule so it can survive summer’s later sunsets
At 7.30 on Friday evening, Godzilla and King Kong are scheduled to converge on a large lot in eastern Spain to trade blows and bellows, rip fistfuls of fur and scales off each other and generally wreak CGI havoc for an appreciative, car-bound audience.
Their titanic sparring, however, could be short-lived. This weekend, the wading reptilian metaphor for atomic warfare and the conflicted, skyscraper-bothering ape could find themselves cowed by the setting sun, the changing of the clocks and the local coronavirus curfew.
Continue reading...As a new film on 60s and 70s resistance is released, its subjects discuss what progress, if any, has been made
When Zainab Abbas, a renowned activist and former member of the Black Liberation Front, was asked if things had improved for black people in the UK over the past 50 years, she didn’t hesitate with her response.
“I don’t think it’s got better, I really don’t,” she said, pointing to rates of stop and search, black unemployment and rising hate crimes. “It’s important to remember that things haven’t changed because they were able to wipe out our history.”
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