Category Archives: Culture

Hollywood Down Under: stars flock from US to film in Covid-free Australia

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Blessed with sunny weather, diverse locations and a ready-made film industry, Sydney and the Gold Coast have become movie powerhouses

On a warmish Wednesday evening early in the year, Paul Mescal was celebrating his birthday and everybody seemed to know. The Irish actor, famous for his neckchain and his leading role in Normal People, was in Sydney, Australia, for a new film, and the word was spreading. He was photographed running in Centennial Park. He was sighted at Tamarama Beach. He popped into an inner-city pub.

But on the list of stars now working in Australia, Mescal – in Sydney for a musical film adaptation of Carmen – is comfortably mid-level. Thanks to its relative freedom from Covid-19 and associated restrictions, Australia – blessed with diverse locations, sunny weather and a ready-made film infrastructure – has become Hollywood Down Under.

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From Soul Train to Beyonce: the joy of black performance in America

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In A Little Devil in America, Hanif Abdurraqib set out to celebrate black artists across music, dance, comedy and more, who succeeded even when their own country refused to honour them

When I began A Little Devil in America, I was thinking about Josephine Baker. The title of the book comes from Baker, from her speech at the March on Washington in 1963. It is a speech that is often overlooked. The legacy of the march so often centres on its male speakers (Martin Luther King Jr, A Philip Randolph), and Baker was well past her most notable prime. At 57, she chose to return to the US from France and make a small speech – but also to confront the country she’d left and vowed to not return to. The speech is at times tender, at times funny, at times teeming with rage. There was a fullness to it; Baker considering the vastness of her life and the many lives she’d lived. Her speech is defiant and brilliant, punctuated by Baker aligning her experiences with the national plight of black people in America:

You know, friends, that I do not lie to you when I tell you I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out, ’cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world.

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‘Imperially nostalgic racists’ target Empireland author with hate mail

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Sathnam Sanghera speaks out against ‘vicious’ abuse he is receiving over his bestselling book: ‘Empire has been weaponised by the right wing, ever since Black Lives Matter’

Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland, a journey through Britain’s imperial past, has been a bestseller since it was pubished last month, acclaimed by critics as “unflinching … moving and stimulating” (the Guardian), and “excellent” and “balanced” (the Sunday Times). And yet, from the British public the author has received handwritten hate mail, and thousands of abusive tweets from “imperially nostalgic racists”, as he succinctly replied, some of them verging, he says, on death threats.

Related: Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera and Slave Empire by Padraic X Scanlan – review

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Netflix weighs up crackdown on password sharing

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Streaming service tests feature that asks viewers if they share household with subscriber

Netflix has begun testing a feature that asks viewers whether they share a household with a subscriber, in a move that could lead to crackdown on the widespread practice of sharing passwords among friends and family.

Some Netflix users are reported to have received a message asking them to confirm they live with the account owner by entering a code included in a text message or email sent to the subscriber.

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Out of Africa: how Netflix’s ambitions could change the continent’s cinema

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The streaming giant has come knocking, but a lack of infrastructure and government support continues to hinder the continent telling its own stories

It was the sight of donkeys carrying camera equipment that reminded Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese he was shooting in Lesotho. The director was filming This Is Not a Burial, It Is a Resurrection in a remote part of his tiny home nation, which has no cinemas and – unsurprisingly – zero film infrastructure. “It’s a bit daring to take a crew there and shoot because there’s no electricity,” Mosese says from his home in Berlin. “Especially when we go to the mountains – we had to rely on the donkeys because at some point we just couldn’t carry the equipment.”

The shoot ran on petrol-powered generators. Villagers pitched in as ad-hoc crew members. Many fingers were crossed. “We had to build everything from scratch,” he says. That approach didn’t harm the film. Critically lauded, the stylish mood piece about grief, community and egregious land development has been entered in the Oscars as the country’s 2021 candidate.

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From Monument Valley to Minecraft: 10 of the best mobile games

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Revisit tortured first loves, explore a deserted town and make your daily plod around the park more exciting with Pokémon Go

Given that we are all sitting at home staring at our phones anyway, it’s a good time to take a break from the doomscrolling to broaden your phone game palette. Nobody has really bettered this Escher-esque puzzler about guiding a wee girl through levels full of optical illusions and cool perspective changes. The calming colours and minimalist style offset the fiendishness of its architectural conundrums.

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Eddie Izzard: ‘I’m just trying to create a space for myself’

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The actor and comic on making her female pronouns permanent, shouting down abuse, enduring a marathon a day – and running for Labour

Eddie Izzard doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. In December, it was reported that the standup comic/actor/campaigner/endurance runner had adopted the pronouns “she” and “her” and wanted to be “based in girl mode” from now on. Well, it hardly came out of the blue, she says today. Izzard had spent the past 35 years building up to it, and when she did finally make the announcement it happened by chance.

A few months earlier, Izzard had been a guest on the Sky Arts series Portrait Artist Of the Year, and was asked, for the first time, which pronouns she preferred. She replied “she and her” and never gave it another thought. By the time the programme was broadcast, Izzard had forgotten about the conversation. And suddenly she was headline news.

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Gurrumul, Omar Souleyman, 9Bach and DakhaBrakha: the best global artists the Grammys forgot

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From the Godfathers of Arabic rap to the father of Ethio-jazz, Grammy-winning producer Ian Brennan guides a tour through global music’s greatest

This week I wrote about the glaring lack of international inclusivity in the Grammys’ newly redubbed global music (formerly world music) category.

In the category’s 38-year history, almost 80% of African nations have never had an artist nominated; no Middle Eastern or eastern European musician has ever won; every winner in the past eight years has been a repeat winner; and nearly two-thirds of the nominations have come from just six countries (the US, the UK, Brazil, Mali, South Africa, India). The situation shows little signs of improving.

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Sean Paul’s teenage obsessions: ‘My Coventry grandmother cooked me bubble and squeak’

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Ahead of two new albums this spring, the dancehall superstar recalls the poignancy of his first love, and how water polo took his mind off his imprisoned father

When I turned 13 my father had just gone to prison, so without a father figure I looked for heroes in music and sports. Both my parents had been champion swimmers and when I was four or five they would throw me in the water when other kids didn’t want to swim. From the age of 13 to 21 I represented Jamaica in water polo, which my father had played. We trained a lot: 5,000 metres a day, 7,000 to 9,000 metres on Thursdays. It consumed my life but in a good way. It took my mind off my father being in prison.

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The making of a heavyweight: Scorsese and De Niro behind the scenes of Raging Bull – in pictures

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The award-winning biopic of Jake LaMotta was released 40 years ago. With these exclusive images, Jay Glennie, who interviewed the cast and crew for a new book, reveals secrets of the film’s shoot

  • Raging Bull: The Making Of, by Jay Glennie is published on 5 April by Coattail. Use code RBP10 to receive a discount
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Diane Keaton’s 10 best performances – ranked!

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With the Oscar winner’s romcom Love, Weddings & Other Disasters out next month in the UK, we run through her greatest roles

Some of the jokes in Sleeper are as dated as the special effects (and they looked creaky enough nearly 50 years ago). But Keaton is ethereally lovely as Luna, a socialite from the future. As always, there is an intelligence to her performance that lifts her above the weaker material, such as Woody Allen’s character floating around a field in a hydrovac suit.

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‘I learned about storytelling from Final Fantasy’: novelist Raven Leilani on Luster and video games

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Drawing on her own cathartic relationship with role-playing games, Leilani uses gaming as a narrative device and an inspiration in her acclaimed debut

There is an extraordinary and telling moment in Raven Leilani’s acclaimed novel Luster, about a young black woman who has an affair with a middle-aged white man and ends up living with his family. The woman, Edie, is heading back to her lover’s house with his adopted black daughter, Akila, when the pair are stopped and questioned by two police officers. Although Edie is compliant, Akila – younger and much less worldly – challenges the cops and gets thrust to the ground and restrained. The confrontation is rife with fear and tension, and when it’s over (diffused when Akila’s white mother intervenes), the first thing Edie and Akila do is go inside, sit down and play a video game.

Much of the fervid discussion around Luster has focused on Leilani’s astute and witty analysis of sexual politics and racial power structures in the 21st-century US. But a key part of her acutely realised portrayal of a millennial protagonist coping with crappy jobs and crappier love affairs is Edie’s natural relationship with digital culture and technology. At a time in which video game references are still mostly consigned to YA and sci-fi books, Leilani has made them a central component of a literary novel.

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Come True review – blow-out imagery in visionary sleep disorder thriller

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An insomniac student is haunted by a demonic figure in this flamboyant and stylised waking dream of a film

There is something visionary about this near-nonsensical, kitsch but atmospheric techno-thriller from Canadian director Anthony Scott Burns. Drawn along on dark somnambulic rhythms, it incorporates elements of fantasy, horror and 80s synthwave aesthetics without giving itself over completely to any of them.

A wordless first 10 minutes introduces us to Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone), a runaway student apparently unwelcome or unwilling to return home, waking in spectrally lit parks and falling asleep in coffee shops. Dropping suddenly into surrealistic CGI dreams that track inexorably towards a demonic figure who, if approached too closely, wakes her with a start. Sarah decides to try and climb out of this insomniac bath by enrolling in a university sleep study. It is overseen by Dr Meyer, a Cronenbergian academic in big glasses, but run by a trio of researchers who, like the memory technicians in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, have a loose relationship with scientific protocol. Becoming close to Jeremy (Landon Liboiron), she learns that they are using pioneering technology to observe the subjects’ dreams – and that the same shadowy presence manifests in all of them.

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Bronze age burial site in Spain suggests women were among rulers

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Researchers in Murcia find exquisite objects at women’s graves later used as sites for elite warrior burials

A burial site found in Spain – described by archaeologists as one of the most lavish bronze age graves discovered to date in Europe – has sparked speculation that women may have been among the rulers of a highly stratified society that flourished on the Iberian peninsula until 1550BC.

Since 2013, a team of more than a dozen researchers have been investigating the site of La Almoloya in the southern Spanish region of Murcia.

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‘Not suitable’: Catalan translator for Amanda Gorman poem removed

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Victor Obiols told he had wrong ‘profile’, the second case after Dutch writer resigned from same role

The Catalan translator for the poem that American writer Amanda Gorman read at US president Joe Biden’s inauguration has said he has been removed from the job because he had the wrong “profile”.

It was the second such case in Europe after Dutch writer Marieke Lucas Rijneveld resigned from the job of translating Gorman’s work following criticism that a black writer was not chosen.

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‘We know exactly what we want to say’: inside a film that normalizes stuttering

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Stuttering affects one in 20 children, yet is still stigmatized, something the documentary My Beautiful Stutter hopes to correct

One of the most moving scenes in My Beautiful Stutter, a documentary now streaming on Discovery+, involves just a microphone and an open stage. Many of the attendees at Camp Say in Hendersonville, North Carolina, a getaway for youth who stutter hosted by the New York-based organization the Stuttering Association for the Young, grew up feeling broken or confused, ostracized by a neurological disorder that tangles the flow of fluent speech. Some campers recite poetry, others get through just their name before breaking into tears, all afforded the space to speak rarely given in the non-stuttering world (what can take a non-stutterer a minute to read or say could take a person who stutters 10 times as long). Tears abound; the scene hums with the bottomless human desire, felt most acutely as a teenager, to be seen, heard, loved, accepted.

Related: 'They become dangerous tools': the dark side of personality tests

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Cocaine Bear: the must-see and must-avoid movie of 2022

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Elizabeth Banks’s new film, about the aftermath of a narcotics drop in a Georgia national park, may be less hilarious than it first sounds

There is a school of thought that Elizabeth Banks’s version of Charlie’s Angels flopped because it was too familiar; it was in effect a reboot of a reboot of an iconic television series that had long wrung itself dry. People knew exactly what to expect from it, so they stayed away. That’s unlikely to happen with her next film, though, because her next film is going to be called Cocaine Bear.

And, I mean, you’re in, right? You’d watch a film called Cocaine Bear. Regardless of quality or budget or genre, you’d watch Cocaine Bear. You wouldn’t even buy your tickets online, because that would rob you of the opportunity to say out loud to a cinema employee: “I would like to spend my own money to watch a film called Cocaine Bear.”

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Indian theatre festival forced to close after Hindu vigilantes object to satirical plays

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Bajrang Dal hardliners in Madhya Pradesh threaten violence over plays ‘disrespectful to the Indian flag’

Rightwing Hindu vigilante groups in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh have forced the cancellation of an annual theatre festival, after threatening violence over satirical plays they accused of being “anti-national”.

The annual theatre festival organised by the Indian People’s Theatre Association in the small town of Chhatarpur became the object of abuse and violent threats by Bajrang Dal, a hardline Hindu group linked with the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP).

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Australia in Colour: recolourised film ushers into existence a new kind of fiction

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As the new series of SBS’s film revitalisation project airs, Guardian Australia’s film critic considers the consequences of this trend in film-making

Paolo Cherchi Usai – the Italian curator and former head of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) – once put forward an elegant definition of moving image preservation, calling it “the science of gradual loss and the art of coming to terms with its consequences”. Those melancholic words present the dispossession of our celluloid and digital pasts as inevitable, and efforts to maintain them a will-o’-the-wisp exercise: impossible to achieve, like reaching the gold at the end of the rainbow.

But loss is far from the first thing that comes to mind after watching the second season of SBS’s four-part documentary series Australia in Colour. Separated into different themes, the first episode is devoted to family, exploring issues such as changing gender roles, the stolen generations and the arrival of contraceptive pills; the second, about sport, investigates national heroes and drinking culture.

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‘We knew so little’: the young film-makers who captured early quarantine life

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HBO’s Covid Diaries NYC stitches together five documentary shorts by film-makers between 16-22, covering the dizzying, surreal first days of the pandemic

The middle of March 2021 will bring, for most Americans, a strange, surreal anniversary: the year mark of the horrifying realization – be it through a tweet, a cancellation, a diagnosis of a loved one or a celebrity, a lost job or gig – that the coronavirus was a very real threat that would implode the world as we knew it. For Aracelie Colón, then a 16-year-old high school junior in Manhattan, it was the email announcing a two-week closure from school. For fellow high school junior Shane Fleming, it was the positive diagnosis of a classmate and the closure of the Film Forum, where the movie buff caught a final feature showing on 14 March. For Arlet Guallpa, then 22, it was an ambulance outside her building in Washington Heights, fetching the first of many residents who would succumb to the virus.

Related: 'They refused to act': inside a chilling documentary on Trump's bungled Covid-19 response

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