Category Archives: Culture

When every set looks like Contagion: inside Hollywood’s pandemic year

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Actors are slowly returning to work after a long shutdown caused vast economic damage: ‘How many people gave up their dreams?’

For decades, the sound stages of Hollywood have built alternate universes in the middle of Los Angeles – fictional courtrooms, hospitals, homes and offices. Today, they all resemble the set of Contagion.

Make-up artists walk around in astronaut helmets. Actors take breaks inside plastic bubbles. And healthcare professionals swab everyone’s nose to test for a deadly infection before they’re allowed inside.

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Sisters in Hate review: tough but vital read on the rise of racist America

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After black women helped push Trump from office, Seyward Darby’s work on white extremists is more resonant than ever

It’s not Proust, Nietzsche or even Toni Morrison when it comes to difficult reading, but some are sure to find Seyward Darby’s book even more arduous to wade through.

Related: From A Very Stable Genius to After Trump: 2020 in US politics books

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Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch: ‘No memorial can come anywhere near what happened’

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The cellist believes that plans for a UK Holocaust memorial are ‘counter-productive’. What matters most, she argues, is education

Have you, I ask the cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, ever seen a memorial to the Holocaust – or to any atrocity – that was effective?

“It’s difficult to say how effective it is on the person who looks at it,” she says. “I mean I was in it, after all, I’m a survivor of it. Nothing really can come anywhere near what actually happened, you know.”

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Future shock: how will Covid change the course of business?

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The crisis poses a deadly threat to some sectors and creates opportunities for others. We examine how they will fare in 2021

Coronavirus has changed lives and industries across the UK, accelerating fundamental shifts in behaviour and consumption that were already on their way. Debates about home working, preserving local high streets and the ethics of air travel were bubbling away before coronavirus rampaged across the world, but the consequences of the worst pandemic in more than a century have either settled those arguments or boosted the momentum behind certain lifestyle changes. Here we look at how those debates have been changed – or resolved – by Covid-19.

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Blueprint for Biden? How a struggling Irish town gambled on its links to JFK

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New Ross reinvented itself as a shrine to the Kennedy clan. Can towns linked to Biden, the most Irish American president since JFK, do the same?

After its factories died and its port withered, New Ross, a town perched by the River Barrow in south-east Ireland, decided in the 1990s to tap a unique asset: John F Kennedy.

The US president’s great-grandfather had sailed from the quays of New Ross to America during the 1840s famine, leaving behind a modest homestead that JFK twice visited, including a few months before his assassination in 1963. Like many Americans, not least the current US president-elect, Joe Biden, Kennedy was proud of his Irish connections and keen to re-emphasise the links.

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Charlie Brooker: ‘There’s a certain release in laughing into the abyss’

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Black Mirror co-creators Brooker and Annabel Jones discuss new comedy special Death to 2020, and the importance of being silly in the face of disaster

I have been uncharacteristically optimistic this year,” Charlie Brooker says cheerfully from his west London living room, a prop sign from Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch episode behind him. “Partly because I’ve always been a pessimist and feared the worst. Suddenly, I don’t have to worry about the worst happening, because it’s happening. I think being a neurotic, worrisome person has slightly prepared me for it. After swine flu, I wouldn’t touch a door handle for about a year.”

There are other reasons for his unusual levels of cheer. Considering that a global pandemic has resided for years in Brooker’s buzzing mental database of potential catastrophes, he has not had a bad 2020. In May, he hosted the BBC’s Antiviral Wipe, the first network comedy show to be made about (and under) lockdown. In July, Broke and Bones, the new production company launched by Brooker and his long-time creative partner Annabel Jones, announced a Netflix deal that extends far beyond its breakthrough hit Black Mirror. The pair are opening their account with Death to 2020, a one-off (obviously) about the rotten year that was. As Leslie Jones, one of several A-list guests, says in the trailer: “I’d say it was a trainwreck and a shitshow but that would be unfair to trains and shit.”

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Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal: ‘It’s been a wild few months for us’

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The stars of the BBC’s hit Sally Rooney adaptation on their quarantine viewing, and how their lives have changed since playing Marianne and Connell

Was there a show this year that everyone else loved but you just couldn’t get on with?
Daisy: That’s a hard one. I honestly think I watched every show that’s aired on TV in the last few months. I have watched, and enjoyed every one. I’m trying to think. The news?

Paul: What was the one you tried to get me to watch, Daisy? I can’t remember the name of it. I think it was Selling Sunset? The one with the realtors in LA. I couldn’t get into it.

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The film quiz of the year: do you know the Queen’s favourite or which one inspired John Lennon?

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From producers’ faux pas to an actor’s accident with a chainsaw, check out your knowledge of the movie world

Which James Bond film had its release postponed twice this year due to Covid-19?

Die Another Day

No Time to Die

Live and Let Die

Tomorrow Never Dies

Which actor was picked by Pablo Larraín to play Princess Diana in his upcoming film about the end of her married life?

Lily James

Millie Bobby Brown

Kristen Stewart

Vanessa Kirby

Which prominent couple signed a lucrative deal this year with Netflix to make TV drama, films and children’s shows?

Prince Albert and Princess Charlene of Monaco

Danny Dyer and Joanne Mas

Elton John and David Furnish

Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex

In August, Brian Blessed revealed that the Queen told him her favourite film is one of his. Was it?

Santa’s Blotto (Blessed played Santa)

Henry VIII and His Six Wives (Blessed played the Earl of Suffolk)

Flash Gordon (Blessed played Prince Vultan)

Much Ado About Nothing (Blessed played Antonio)

In the autumn, it was revealed that a baseball film inspired John Lennon to record the song Grow Old With Me a month before he was shot dead in December 1980. Was it?

A Love Affair: The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Story (1978), with Blythe Danner as Eleanor and Edward Herrmann as her husband, Lou, stricken with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Angels in the Outfield (1951), starring Paul Douglas as the Pittsburgh Pirates’ tough-talking manager Guffy McGovern, who is soothed by love

The Stratton Story (1949), starring James Stewart as Monty Stratton of the Chicago White Sox

The Bad News Bears (1976), with Walter Matthau as the grumpy old coach

This summer, which film festival moved to gender-neutral acting awards?

Cannes

Venice

Sundance

Berlin

In September, US congressman Ken Buck called for an investigation into what?

The Netflix movie Cuties

The Capitol Hill security administration’s decision in April 2015 to allow Buck to bring an AR-15 assault rifle into the building for a photo opportunity in a year in which one child had already been killed and eight injured during school shootings

Twitter allowing Buck in March 2020 to post a video online boasting about the AR-15 assault rifle in his office, challenging Joe Biden to take it from him, in a year in which two children had already been killed and one injured during school shootings

The NRA spending $829,377 on Buck’s congressional campaign in 2010, a year in which three children were killed and five injured during school shootings

This year, Matt Hancock incorrectly referred to “Daniel Rashford” when he meant Marcus Rashford, the footballer whose school meals campaign had just shamed the government into submission. Hancock later said he had been thinking of a famous movie personality. Who was it?

Daniel Radcliffe


Daniel Craig


Daniel Day-Lewis


Daniel who’s travelling tonight on a plane

Which movie star suffered a chainsaw accident at home during lockdown?


 Judi Dench

Maggie Smith


Cate Blanchett

Sylvester Stallone

At the beginning of the year, producers of the period drama Little Women were embarrassed when an eagle-eyed fan spotted two modern items in the background of one shot, just behind Timothée Chalamet. Were they?

A green-tea menthol e-cigarette and a tablet

A portable Blu-ray player and an ultrasonic humidifier

A Fitbit and a pair of Apple glasses

A Hydro Flask and a plastic Poland Spring water bottle

10 and above.

Cut! What a glorious take, carissimo. Practise your Zoom acceptance speech my darling because we're talking silverware.

7 and above.

Cut! Whoah! Not bad my love. I was really feeling it that time.

0 and above.

Cut! With a performance this bad, I regret casting you. The security guard will escort you out of the studio.

4 and above.

Cut! Mmm. Try that scene again darling, but do try to say the lines as if you haven't got a head injury.

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Maradonaland: Naples plans statues and museum to honour ‘Saint Diego’

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City’s murals of Maradona have become pilgrimage sites since footballer’s death in November

A month since the death of Diego Armando Maradona and the southern Italian city of Naples is looking more like a Maradonaland each day.

After renaming Napoli football club’s San Paolo Stadium and a train station in his honour this month, local authorities are planning a large museum, commissioning statues and dedicating an entire square to the Argentinian who took the city’s football team to glory and is regarded as one of the greatest players of all time.

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Coolie No 1 review – David Dhawan’s comedy remake is bigger but not better

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Dhawan casts his son Varun in the role made famous in 1995 by Govinda, but little effort has been made to acknowledge the quarter-century since

It’s a tale of two Bollywoods this Christmas. Over at Netflix, Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane, representing Indian film’s modernising wing, have engineered the sharp and knowing meta-thriller AK vs AK. Here on Amazon Prime Video meanwhile, you can watch veteran comedy director David Dhawan renew his IP rights on Coolie No 1, previously a hit 1995 vehicle for the Sandwell-born funnyman Govinda. Even the latter’s most devout fans would probably concede the original left room for improvements, but that’s something Dhawan appears unfussed about. This Coolie updates a few reference points and replaces Govinda with latter-day hunk Varun Dhawan – the director’s son – then surrounds him with antiquated players and playing, part of a frenetic attempt to pretend the last 30 years never happened.

The plot – lowly railway porter (Dhawan) is hired to woo a society belle (Sara Ali Khan) as part of a conspiracy to disgrace her family – remains familiar and predictable. The most immediate contrast with the original is a result of the casting. Rather too obviously a handsome, cardio-trained leading man schlubbing down for (not many) easy laughs, Dhawan Jr bounds onscreen with boyish enthusiasm, but trails a lingering note of condescension – and Dhawan Sr was evidently too busy remembering how best to smash his supporting actors in the gonads to direct anyone. Khan, sadly, is stranded on balconies looking fetchingly concerned while the men below determine her character’s destiny. In this, Coolie 2020 really does seem so last century.

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Why is Pixar so brilliant at death?

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From Up’s moving life story to the father-son parting of Onward, the animation powerhouse has never shirked from profound contemplation

There comes a time in the life of a writer, director and, perhaps, a company when the days shorten, the shadows lengthen and contemplating the inevitable must begin. The guy in the cloak with the retro lawn equipment can’t be ignored any longer: Death. In Pixar’s latest film, Soul, mortality springs itself with supreme bad timing on protagonist Joe Gardner, a New York jazzman about to play the gig of his life when he falls down a manhole. After 2017’s Coco and this year’s Onward, this is Pixar’s third film about death in as many years. Is this fixation the Californian animation giant’s midlife crisis in multimillion-dollar CGI form?

Soul, directed by Pete Docter, is a classy offering with smart colouring-book metaphysics in the vein of his 2015 film Inside Out, as Joe attempts to escape the “Great Beyond” and return to his body, via the “Great Before”. This is the realm where nascent souls must find their spark – their animating passion in life – and are then dispatched to Earth. Visually drawing on Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, broaching the dark subject for children with life-affirming insouciance, and – featuring the company’s first black lead character – a big diversity coup, it’s a typically slick, four-quadrant-pleasing, stock price-boosting entertainment package. This is what Pixar do.

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‘This has never happened before!’ Bernardine Evaristo and Reni Eddo-Lodge on their history-making year

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The novelist, playwright and poet talks to the writer about what their spectacular success has meant for them – and for the hopes of black female writers in future

This year, in twin firsts, black British women topped both the fiction and nonfiction charts. Both successes were a long time coming, but sparked a ray of hope that the Black Lives Matter movement may be creating space for new voices and stories. The novelist, playwright and poet Bernardine Evaristo, who made history with Girl, Woman, Other, and Reni Eddo-Lodge, the groundbreaking author of Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, talk about this unprecedented moment.

Bernardine Evaristo: This year, everything came to me. Absolutely everything. At times, it was quite overwhelming but I also welcomed it. Because I have been in this game for 40 years now. So to suddenly break through has been a great opportunity to use my platform in all the ways that one can. And then, of course, we had Black Lives Matter and the murder of George Floyd. Attention had been on my book anyway, because it had been doing really well. But the Black Lives Matter movement encouraged people to start reading books by writers of colour. You had all these book lists circulating on social media. Black authors were topping the charts. That’s never happened before.

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Dan Levy on Schitt’s Creek: ‘Winning nine Emmys was surreal’

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The writer and star of the dysfunctional-family sitcom on his top shows of 2020 and the touching legacy of his hit series

Was there a show that everyone else loved this year that you just couldn’t get on with?
Tiger King. I couldn’t do it. Something about it felt a little too exploitative for me. I never felt OK when I was watching it. Maybe that’s the main thing. There was a full month when everybody was watching it, when I desperately tried to stay part of the conversation. But I just could not invest. And I don’t know, there is something kind of icky about what was going on there. But this is one man’s opinion in a sea of other people.

Conversely, were there are any shows you enjoyed over lockdown that you didn’t expect to?
The Real Housewives of Atlanta. I feel like the characters on that show are so strong and opinionated and have a sense of humour and self-awareness. It’s an incredible alchemy. It’s a great social group that they’ve put together to film. I was surprised to enjoy it, because I worked in reality television for a long time. I hosted the aftershow for The Hills before my career started. And I think that when you work in reality TV, it kind of pulls back the curtain in a way that doesn’t necessarily make you want to watch more of it. So this was the first reality show that I had watched for a really long time.

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I May Destroy You’s Weruche Opia: ‘Michaela Coel showed our flaws and complexities’

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The breakout star of the Guardian’s show of the year on her small-screen picks of 2020, and how her role as Terry divided viewers

What shows did you get into this year, over our various lockdowns?
I watched a lot of stuff. That’s all we could do really, apart from eat – I worked out a lot, too. I fell in love with 90 Day Fiancé, which I think is the most brilliant reality show on TV right now. I loved the latest series of Insecure, and Gangs of London with Paapa [Essiedu, Opia’s I May Destroy You co-star]. I loved I Hate Suzie, and Adult Material – Hayley Squires did a fantastic job. That was a brilliant little find, and it was so interesting to learn about the porn industry and the human side of it.

And were there any series you got into that you might not have ordinarily watched?
I couldn’t stop watching Ted Lasso on Apple TV+. I was like, what is this actually about? An American who coaches American football comes to the UK to a weird team and is … teaching them football? But it was just nice, simple and uplifting – it was a little treat to forget about the world and just watch something wholesome.

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The roles I’ve played brought home to me the scourge of violence against women | Nicole Kidman

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There is a pandemic of violence against women and girls – and we can all act as the vaccine

• Nicole Kidman is an Oscar-winning actor, who played a lead role in 2020 drama The Undoing

We have been through the unimaginable this year. Separated from family and people we love, our dreams put on pause, while fearing for our health and our very lives.

In addition to Covid-19, a shadow pandemic has been unfolding: violence against women. Calls to helplines increased up to fivefold in the first few weeks of the pandemic. And an issue that was already pervasive before Covid-19 hit – evident on the streets, in the tube or a hotel room, on the news, in a conversation with a friend, in the scripts I read and the roles I played – became even more pressing.

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Listen up: making music from the northern lights

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A biologist and composer have turned the aurora borealis into sound to create a magic melding of art and nature

There’s a hypnotic crackle before a whoosh of sound flies from ear to ear. It’s followed by a heavenly chorus that might be whales whistling, frogs calling or the chirping of an alien bird. It sounds celestial because that’s what it is. The noise is the aurora borealis: the northern lights.

The vivid green lights that trace across the Arctic sky emit electromagnetic waves when the solar shower meets the Earth’s magnetic field, and these can be translated into sounds that are made audible to human ears by a small machine.

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T’Nia Miller: ‘I never saw a queer person on TV when I was growing up’

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The star of Years and Years and The Haunting of Bly Manor reflects on coming out as lesbian to her mum, facing racism at drama school and the progress – or not – of the Black Lives Movement

When T’Nia Miller first told her mother that she was dating a woman, she explained to her mum that she wasn’t there to see her have sex with men, so this was no different. “It’s just about me having really good friendships and beauty in my life,” she recalls saying. “That was it. We never had more of a conversation than that. If she had any issues, they were hers to deal with, not mine. She knew that. She’s a very educated, very well-read woman. For her, coming to terms with it was easy.”

The east-London born actor is telling me this story over the phone as she walks her dog (she forgot about the interview and her seven-month-old pomeranian, Dilhi, needed his daily steps) because she’s taking part in the #YoungerMe campaign, an initiative by the LGBTQ+ young persons organisation Just Like Us, which asks how LGBTQ+ inclusive education would have helped older queer people when they were in school.

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‘It speaks to an ancient history’: why South Africa has the world’s most exciting dance music

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Styles like afrohouse, gqom and amapiano are thriving – but with ‘half-baked white kids getting a lot more airplay’, South Africa’s inequalities still hold the dance scene back

Many people got their first taste of South African dance music this year via six Angolans dancing in their backyard, dinner plates in hand. Their viral video, with casual but masterful moves set to Jerusalema by South African producer Master KG, created a global dance craze; the track ended up all over Radio 1 this autumn and topped streaming charts across Europe.

Jerusalema is just one track amid what has now become arguably the most vibrant and innovative dance music culture on the planet. In South Africa, dance music is pop music, from townships like Soweto and KwaDabeka to cities like Durban and Cape Town. The country has 11 official languages, each with their own cultural practices, and even the national anthem of the so-called Rainbow Nation is comprised of the country’s five most commonly spoken: Xhosa, Zulu, Sesotho, Afrikaans and English. Out of this rich cultural heritage, and in a country that has long had distinct dance styles like jaiva, marabi, kwela and mbaqanga, has come wave after wave of astonishing work.

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