The actor says she feels very uncomfortable trying to portray the male gaze and says she’s ‘too vain’ to shoot intimate scenes
Keira Knightley has expressed her discomfort with shooting intimate scenes, saying that she will no longer do so if the film is directed by a man.
In conversation with director Lulu Wang and writer-producer Diane Solway on the Chanel Connects podcast, Knightley credited the “male gaze” and her own personal vanity with the decision.
Continue reading...Brexit rule changes that make it tricky to tour the EU will hold back UK artists from a fast-growing market
Limiting UK artists from working and touring in the EU post-Brexit will destroy the development of British music, say European industry experts, amid thriving competition from German rap, Spanish pop and more.
British artists now face the need for visas, work permits and equipment carnets when working in the EU, with emerging acts most likely to feel the impact of this costly and time-consuming admin. Over the last month, the UK and the EU have blamed each other for the inability to strike a deal to help the creative industries.
Continue reading...The big hair and bombast have long gone and the thoughtful singer-songwriter remains. He talks about politics, pain and meeting his wife of 40 years in history class
Jon Bon Jovi is singing Livin’ on a Prayer to me. No, this is not another crazy lockdown dream; it is actually happening.
“Tommy used to work on the docks …” he begins, strumming a guitar he produces out of nowhere, his still impressive bouffant (“I’m the only man in my field brave enough to let it go grey!”) bouncing in time to the music.
Continue reading...Since 2019, Lucienne Rickard has been drawing detailed sketches of lost species in a Hobart gallery. On Sunday she erased the final one
The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart is filled with people waiting for the swift parrot to disappear.
Hobart artist Lucienne Rickard has spent five weeks drawing a large-scale pencil sketch of the critically endangered bird. Picking up her eraser, she tells her audience, “If we don’t do something soon, this is what will happen.”
Continue reading...Our fashion editor on a year in which sweatpants soared, masks went designer, Topshop tumbled – and a pause fuelled hopes of a reset
I was on the Eurostar, somewhere between St Pancras and Paris, when a senior member of the Guardian team called and suggested that it might be a good idea for me to turn around at Gare du Nord and return to London.
It was 3 March 2020. This was not the plan. The plan had been to go to the Chanel show and report for the news pages. Instead, it was the beginning of all plans – work and otherwise – disintegrating.
Continue reading...Thousands join events in Scotland and far afield, and post-a-haggis service is in high demand
It’s the night when Scots emerge from mid-winter hibernation, says the Burns scholar Pauline Mackay. On the poet’s birthday, 25 January, or thereabouts, thousands of societies, clubs and groups of friends across Scotland and around the world gather to celebrate the life and work of the national bard Robert Burns.
The ritual elements of a Burns supper – addressing those gathered with his poem To a Haggis, completing several rounds of toasts and reading from the funny, sexy, radical diversity of his work – have remained constant since the first event was held by nine friends in 1801, five years after his death.
Continue reading...Experts agree the great days of US news broadcasting are long gone, but this week still brought poignant reminders
As Tennyson – and Withnail’s Uncle Monty – had it, the old order changeth, yielding place to new. Larry King, whose death was announced on Saturday, was not the only giant of US TV news to leave the scene this week.
Related: Larry King, talk-show titan who lit up worlds of politics and showbiz
Continue reading...Weird and wonderful buildings are springing up in China and elsewhere, driven by cities’ desire to make a mark in a world full of eye-popping imagery
An image opens on my screen: a 2,000-seat theatre on the edge lands of Guangzhou, a territory of raw new towers and just-departed rural ghosts, designed to look like a swirl of red silk, imprinted with “tattoos” of phoenixes, cranes and other ornithology. It refers, goes the explanatory text, to Guangzhou’s historic role as “the birthplace of the silk road on the sea”. It is a declaration of something where there was formerly nothing, a three-dimensional advertisement for the colossal Sunac Wanda cultural tourism city of which it is part. I peer at the image – is it virtual or real? It’s real.
It enters a mental folder already bulging with such projects as a football stadium – reportedly the largest in the world – under construction in the same city in the shape of a giant lotus flower. Also the completed Zendai Himalayas centre in Nanjing, a 560,000 sq metre mixed-use development shaped like a mountain range, which is said to adapt “the traditional Chinese shanshui ethos of spiritual harmony between nature and humanity to the modern urban environment”. Other prodigies demand attention: a pair of super-tall skyscrapers in Shenzhen whose conjoined nether regions melt into tree-filled terraces and undulant glass, a quartet of twisting aluminium-clad towers in Qatar and apartment towers in Vancouver propped like tulip heads on narrow stalks.
Continue reading...Dogged detective work and radar scans of a church wall may help find the last resting place of the great playwright
The death of Pedro Calderón de la Barca – soldier, priest and one of the finest dramatists Spain has produced – continues to prove almost as turbulent and unpredictable as his long and improbable life.
Four centuries after Calderón died in Madrid aged 81, researchers believe they could be close to finding his remains, thanks to the deathbed testament of a priest, a key long guarded by the playwright’s family and the latest in ground-penetrating radar.
Continue reading...The CNN host had a profound effect on American broadcasting – and the heart of the brand was 7,445 editions of Larry King Live over 25 years
A measure of Larry King’s impact on American television journalism was that for three decades, the easiest way of giving fictional cinematic politicians credibility was a scene in which they appeared on King’s CNN show.
His peak year was 1998, in which King, who has died aged 87, shared the big screen with John Travolta as a minimally disguised Bill Clinton in Primary Colors, Warren Beatty as a maverick Democrat senator in Bulworth, and Will Smith in the conspiracy surveillance thriller Enemy of the State.
Continue reading...Broadcaster and celebrity interviewer had been hospitalized in Los Angeles with symptoms of coronavirus
Larry King, the American broadcaster and cable news interviewer of celebrities and public figures, has died. He was 87 and had been hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai medical center in Los Angeles with symptoms of the coronavirus.
Related: Larry King: 'The secret of my success? I'm dumb'
Continue reading...Her recital at Joe Biden’s inauguration electrified viewers and sent the hitherto little known poet’s work to the top of the charts
On Wednesday in Washington DC, a striking young woman stood at a podium on the steps of the US Capitol, surrounded by the country’s leaders, who were masked against the pandemic. She was unmasked, at a safe distance, so she could speak with resonance and force, spreading her enthusiastic vision without danger. She radiated joy, conviction and purpose as she declaimed the poem she had written to mark the inauguration of Joe Biden as 46th president of the US: The Hill We Climb. Tears sprang from the eyes of many listeners, those weary and wary from four years of domestic discord, whether they sat on folding chairs at the Capitol, or on easy chairs in their homes. Hearing her words, they felt hope for the future.
That woman’s name is Amanda Gorman. She is America’s first national youth poet laureate and, at 22, she also is the youngest poet accorded the honour of delivering the presidential inaugural poem. But despite her youth, Gorman’s assurance and bearing made her seem to stand outside time. Erect as a statue, her skin gleaming as if burnished, her hair cornrowed, banded with gold and drawn tightly back into a red satin Prada headband, worn high like a tiara, she evoked what poet Kae Tempest calls the “Brand New Ancients”: the divinity that walks among us in the present day. According to Greek mythology, nine muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, inspire creative endeavour, with five devoted to different kinds of poetry – epic, romantic, lyric, comic or pastoral and sacred. Gorman suggested a new poetic muse – one to inspire the poetry of democracy.
Continue reading...Nubian ibex have been roaming the empty streets of Mitzpe Ramon as Israel’s coronavirus lockdown extends to the end of the month
Continue reading...The costume designer from the hit French show on how the clothes make the characters – and how you can channel their effortless chic
In France, the hit Netflix series Call My Agent! is called Dix Pour Cent in reference to the fee charged by French cinema agents. For those in the know, the name says it all. For others, like me, the reference was opaque at first, but it sent the message that this is a show – unlike others representing a cliched take on French life, such as Emily in Paris – that positions itself as an insider’s peek into the capital and its movie business.
The many cameos from A-list actors playing themselves – with Charlotte Gainsbourg and Sigourney Weaver lined up to appear in season four; Weaver called the series “a love letter to the business” – similarly underlines the show’s proximity to the authentic professional world, something that is subtly shown, too, through its clothes.
Continue reading...Daniel Craig’s final outing as 007 hit by coronavirus disruption, along with Ghostbusters sequel and Cinderella
James Bond film No Time To Die has been delayed again as Hollywood grapples with the continued disruption caused by the pandemic.
Daniel Craig’s final outing as 007 will now arrive on 8 October, the official Bond Twitter account announced. It had been set to be released in April following multiple pandemic-enforced delays.
Continue reading...The groundbreaking work of the acclaimed photographer is being celebrated at a new two-part exhibition showcasing black American life
“Gordon Parks’s photographs are timeless,” said Peter W Kunhardt Jr, executive director of the Gordon Parks Foundation. “As we reflect on what has happened in recent months, his photographs remind us to stand up, speak out and demand justice. This exhibition does just that, highlighting images that inspire resilience and empathy that the photographer made over many years.”
The two-part exhibition, on view at both Jack Shainman Gallery locations in New York, is called Gordon Parks: Half and the Whole and until 20 February, photos from Parks taken between 1942 and 1970 will be showcased.
Continue reading...Artist painted pet as present for Marguerite Lathuille, whose family has owned picture for last 140 years
A previously unseen painting of a pet dog by Édouard Manet will be sold for the first time at an auction in Paris next month.
The French modernist artist dashed off the small work in 1879 as a present for Marguerite Lathuille, the daughter of a Paris innkeeper whose portrait he painted around the same time.
Continue reading...The devastating drama Quo Vadis, Aida? explores the run-up to the 1995 genocide. Actor Jasna Đuričić hopes the film will accelerate the healing process
In July 1995, the Serbian actor Jasna Đuričić was 29 and juggling a theatre career in Novi Sad with the demands of her new baby daughter. Just over 100 miles away in the UN-declared safe area of Srebrenica, more than 8,000 men and boys were being slaughtered by Bosnian Serb death squads, right under the noses of the Dutch military peacekeepers assigned to protect them. It was the culmination of a sustained and brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing.
“We didn’t know anything then about what was happening in Srebrenica,” Đuričić says. “It was around five years later that there were rumours emerging about the mass graves, but we were a country isolated from the media. Everything was state-controlled. You couldn’t hear or see anything outside what they wanted you to see.”
Continue reading...With a member diagnosed with cancer and their politics deepened by BLM, the south London indie quartet have reassessed their priorities ahead of their excellent second album
South London quartet Goat Girl were deep into making their second album when it became clear that something was very wrong with their youngest member, guitarist-vocalist Ellie Rose Davies. At the end of 2019, she had had lumps on her neck for some time, which eventually spread to both armpits. It wasn’t until the 23-year-old’s “fourth or fifth” trip to the doctors that she was finally referred for a blood test, then a biopsy. “By which time the cancer was at stage four,” she says.
Davies had Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer of the blood, and had to start a six-month course of chemotherapy immediately. “We were pretty worried because we knew it was getting worse,” says their bassist, Holly Mullineaux. They had been mixing the record with their producer, Dan Carey, when Davies got her results, “and we all just started crying”.
Continue reading...Italy’s Superstudio collective warned against rampant development by imagining one continuous structure stretching around Earth. But did their warning actually inspire new Saudi plans for a 100-mile linear city?
There was a sense of deja vu last week when Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, unveiled his plans for a futuristic 100-mile-long linear city, momentously titled The Line. The dramatic promotional video showed aerial views of a glowing urban ribbon cutting right across the country, forming a “belt of hyperconnected future communities” from sea to sea. It will be free from cars, he declared, powered by renewable energy and run by artificial intelligence, slicing straight through the Arabian desert in one continuous strip. As part of the country’s $500bn Neom development, the plan was trumpeted as a “civilisational revolution that puts humans first”; but it had inescapable echoes of another project with a very different purpose.
Three thousand miles away, in a gallery in Brussels, hangs a 1960s photomontage of an eerily similar vision, part of a new exhibition about the radical Italian architecture collective Superstudio. A great white oblong is depicted cutting through a desert, slicing through sand dunes and marching past palm trees in an unbroken urban block, its surface inscribed with an endless square grid.
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