Category Archives: Culture

Cyberpunk 2077 review – could it ever live up to the hype?

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PC (version tested), Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, PS5, PS4; CD Projekt
Blade Runner meets Grand Theft Auto in this sprawling hellscape of a role-playing game, which is extraordinarily immersive but let down by misogyny and xenophobia

So here we finally are, in Night City. Almost a decade after it was first announced, CD Projekt’s massively ambitious role-playing game has launched into a swirling maelstrom of hype and controversy that befits its salacious, histrionic setting. Like the technological MacGuffin at the centre of the plot, Cyberpunk 2077 is highly advanced and ingenious, but also bug-ridden and irresponsible.

You play as V, a cybernetically enhanced street hustler looking to make their name on these squalid, vicious streets, taking infiltration and assassination jobs for the gangs who’ve carved up the criminal underworld. While attempting to steal a cutting-edge biochip from a powerful corporation, you implant it in your own head, unknowingly infecting yourself with the digital ghost of dead rocker and anarchist Johnny Silverhand (Keanu Reeves, essentially playing Theodore “Ted” Logan’s asshole brother). If you don’t get him out of your brain, you’ll both die.

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Wonder Woman 1984 review – queenly Gal Gadot disarms the competition

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Gadot is terrifically imposing, while Kristen Wiig is the scene-stealing antagonist in Patty Jenkins’ epically brash sequel

Here is an enjoyable Amazonian incursion into Reagan’s America – but the real wonder is Kristen Wiig, playing the warrior queen’s resentful and emotionally wounded antagonist, Barbara Minerva.

It is 1984, that pre-Covid utopian era of big hair, rolled-up jacket sleeves and imminent nuclear war, and Diana of Themyscira is getting her second superheroic adventure in a world dominated by over-promoted mortal males. The first time we saw this mythical warrior queen, played as here by Gal Gadot, and with outrageously gorgeous outfits, she had just surreally shown up in the middle of the first world war. Now Diana Prince (she is never called Wonder Woman, even obliquely) is living discreetly as a civilian in the Washington of Ronald Reagan – or as discreetly as someone so resplendent can.

Prince works as a demure archaeologist at the Smithsonian museum, and it is here that Diana examines an ancient stone that has the magical power to grant any person one wish. Poor, lonely Diana silently wishes to be reunited with Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) the dashing airman with whom she was once very much in love. But her nerdy colleague, maladroit gemologist Minerva, who has a beta-stalkerish fascination with the impossibly gorgeous Diana, wishes to be every bit as strong as her. And there is a third wisher: megalomaniac oil entrepreneur and museum donor Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal), who wants more than one wish, so he sneakily wishes to be turned into the stone, to become a human wishing stone, so that he can persuade any individual he meets to wish for something beneficial to his interests. Could it be that Maxwell Lord is a version of Norman Vincent Peale, the positive-thinking guru who was such an influence on presidents Nixon and Trump?

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Top bun: Tom Cruise’s cake-mailing habit proves he’s a real Christmas miracle | Stuart Heritage

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Rosie O’Donnell, Jimmy Fallon and Graham Norton are just a few of the famous recipients of the ‘Cruise cake’, a white chocolate coconut ring which might as well be a halo

Tom Cruise follows me on Twitter. Until now, I have been relatively proud of this fact, even though he follows tens of thousands of people, and only tweets three times a year, and his account is probably run by his staff, and he wouldn’t actually be able to tell you what Twitter was if you held a gun to his head. Regardless, I was proud.

But now I feel like a failure, because Tom Cruise has never sent me a cake. And it turns out that all Tom Cruise does is send cakes to people. According to Yahoo, every year he orders more than 100 white chocolate coconut bundt cakes from Doan’s Bakery in Woodland Hills, California, and sends them to his famous friends. Rosie O’Donnell gets one. Kirsten Dunst gets one. Jimmy Fallon gets one. James Corden gets one. Graham Norton gets one, and his staff eat it without telling him. Henry Cavill called it “the most decadent, the most amazing cake”. Barbara Walters once ate hers live on television, in a power move as yet unmatched by any mortal human.

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Cher at 74: ‘There are 20-year-old girls who can’t do what I do’

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Her $60m annual Las Vegas residency was off the cards this year, but the singer still has lots to say about animal rights, Trump’s ‘toxic’ politics, cosmetic surgery and the men in her life

The Goddess of Pop is in town. And what an entrance she makes. Two-tone black-and-white beret, matching jacket, skinny jeans, black boots, black mask, and an elephant-shaped knuckle-duster. She looks the ultimate in revolutionary chic – Cher Guevara. She is not in London to promote a record (100m sold and counting) or a film (she won the best actress Oscar in 1988 for Moonstruck); she is here to talk about rescuing the world’s loneliest elephant from a zoo in Pakistan and flying him to a sanctuary in Cambodia. Cherilyn Sarkisian, aged 74, has never been predictable.

We meet in a London hotel, close to the BBC’s Broadcasting House, where she has been eulogising elephants. She is masked, I am masked, and we sit at opposite ends of the room. It’s such a strange world we’re living in, I say – how are you coping? And she is straight off into a turbo-charged rant. “How am I taking it? There are no words that describe it. And in my country the president doesn’t believe it has anything to do with him. He doesn’t think he has any responsibility to help us.”

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Good riddance 2020: vote now for the ultimate New Year’s Eve songs to end a very bad year

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The year that lasted centuries is finally coming to a close – and we need some music to bid good riddance to the horrors of 2020.

Last week Guardian Australia asked our readers what song they’d add to the ultimate New Year’s Eve playlist: one that represents the year we’ve had, the year we’re hoping for, or just the way we’ll feel (and the words we’ll be screaming) at midnight.

Below are all the songs that were nominated, and now we need you to vote so we can build the perfect soundtrack for your night. Voting closes on Wednesday 16 December – and we’ll launch the playlist of the top 20 songs on Friday

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Olivia Colman on acting: ‘Take your job seriously and not yourself’

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Star of The Crown and Peep Show opens up on her career, revealing she is plagued by self-doubt

She won an Oscar for her performance as Queen Anne in The Favourite, and is a household name thanks to roles as wide-ranging as Sophie in Peep Show and Queen Elizabeth in The Crown. But, despite such success, Olivia Colman has revealed she is plagued by self-doubt and a fear of unemployment, having never forgotten the pain of repeated rejection at the start of her career.

Colman, 46, graduated from the Bristol Old Vic theatre school more than two decades ago, but still recalls her early struggles and “the horrible feeling” of no one calling after she went up for acting jobs. “All those hundreds of auditions I did in the first two years. They don’t just say ‘sorry, no thank you’. You don’t hear anything. That’s heartbreaking.”

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Sean Connery remembered by Jackie Stewart

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25 August 1930 – 31 October 2020

The former F1 racing driver on the iconic James Bond star and advocate for all things Scottish who was his friend for 50 years

When people think of Sean of course they think of James Bond, but he wasn’t really acting when he was playing that part. In real life, when he walked into a room, he walked like James Bond and he talked like James Bond, which people could find disconcerting. That was because he didn’t change anything about himself, including his Scottish accent, which tells you a lot about the man.

Sean was a very tough man in some ways, but very sensitive in others. I first met him in 1971 when he was setting up a charity to help young Scots [the Scottish International Education Trust], wanting me to get involved – he liked how I projected Scotland to the world as a racing driver. He loved his country but realised it had its limitations – even though Glasgow’s fine art is renowned, he knew there weren’t similar opportunities elsewhere in the arts. He understood why people moved away for new opportunities, given he had come from a very ordinary background himself and done that, but he wanted Scotland to thrive from within.

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Fit for a king: true glory of 1,000-year-old cross buried in Scottish field is revealed at last

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Part of the Galloway Hoard, found in 2014, the piece is so spectacular it may have belonged to a monarch

A spectacular Anglo-Saxon silver cross has emerged from beneath 1,000 years of encrusted dirt following painstaking conservation. Such is its quality that whoever commissioned this treasure may have been a high-standing cleric or even a king.

It was a sorry-looking object when first unearthed in 2014 from a ploughed field in western Scotland as part of the Galloway Hoard, the richest collection of rare and unique Viking-age objects ever found in Britain or Ireland, acquired by the National Museums Scotland (NMS) in 2017.

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Tome raiders: solving the great book heist

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When £2.5m of rare books were stolen in an audacious heist at Feltham in 2017, police wondered, what’s the story?

Everything went exactly to plan. Late on the evening of 29 January 2017, Daniel David and Victor Opariuc parked up and made their way towards the Frontier Forwarding customs warehouse in Feltham, less than a mile from Heathrow. After cutting a hole in the fence, the men made their way to the side of the building and scaled a wall to the roof. There, they cut through a skylight and lowered themselves on to shelving inside the building. The warehouse burglar alarms stayed silent; the men had carefully avoided tripping motion sensors positioned by the doors.

Once inside, with several lookouts posted around the surrounding industrial estate, the men took their time. Over the next five hours and 15 minutes, they broke padlocks off packing cases and placed items inside 16 large holdalls taken from inside the warehouse. The men escaped the same way they had entered: out through the skylight and back into the night.

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David Byrne: ‘Spike Lee and I have a lot in common’

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The former Talking Heads frontman on the importance of performance, covering Janelle Monáe, and his hope for the American experiment

David Byrne is one of popular culture’s great polymaths: a musician, producer, artist, actor, author, record label owner and film-maker. He was a founding member and lead singer of the influential post-punk group Talking Heads and has had a long and varied solo career that has included collaborations with Brian Eno and St Vincent. The film of Byrne’s acclaimed 2019 Broadway stage production of the album American Utopia, directed by Spike Lee, is available on digital download from tomorrow and DVD on 11 January.

How has the lockdown been for you?
When it was warmer, I could go for bike rides around [New York] with friends and band members, so we could at least see each other and explore parts of the city we didn’t know. I still do that occasionally but it’s a little bit harder now it’s getting colder.

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George Clooney: ‘It’s been a crappy year, but we will come out of it better’

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Marriage and fatherhood have given George Clooney a new perspective on life, work and the world we all share. While his young twins play outside, he talks about outsmarting war criminals, battles with Boris and dinnertime debates with Amal

Dad-chat with George Clooney, father of two. While the actor’s twin three-year-olds, Ella and Alexander, are out on the family tennis court, learning to ride their bikes, Clooney sits in a curtained edit suite inside his Los Angeles home, wondering how they’re getting on out there. “They’ve learned how to get going fast,” says the 59-year-old who, unless otherwise specified, speaks at all times in the measured, half-ironic, woodsmoked tones of just about every leading man he’s played in a quarter-century career. “They just haven’t learned to use their brakes yet.”

Clooney rubs at his two-day beard, anxious, fond. He wears a fawn-coloured polo shirt and he has his grey hair cropped short. I think I notice that slightly wild-eyed look of someone still marvelling at the fact of their parenthood, and I ask him, is he a scaredy-cat dad, always trailing behind his children with his arms outstretched in case they fall? Or is he a let-them-fall-to-learn-about-the-hard-truths-of-the-world sort of dad?

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The Maradona and child: Naples honours its hero with nativity figurine

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A new addition to the Christmas scene in artisan shops shows city’s love for footballer

The southern Italian city of Naples usually enjoys a fervent lead-up to Christmas, with one street in particular – Via San Gregorio Armeno – buzzing with people buying handcrafted cribs and terracotta figurines for their nativity scenes at home.

There is also much anticipation each year over which new figurine they can buy. Traditionally, it was a shepherd or an animal that would join baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph, but now it is usually a figurine of a personality of that year. Recently crafted statuettes include tributes to doctors and nurses who have worked throughout the pandemic as well as ones of the US president-elect Joe Biden and his deputy, Kamala Harris.

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George Clooney: Why we owe our domestic bliss to … Boris Johnson

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Row over Parthenon marbles deflected attention from secret courtship with wife Amal, star reveals

George Clooney will not be sending Boris Johnson a Christmas card, but he may send a thank-you note to No 10 – along with a comb, he told the Observer this weekend.

The Hollywood film star and director has recognised he owes part of his current domestic contentment and job satisfaction to a strange run-in he had with the prime minister early in 2014, while Clooney was secretly courting his future wife, Amal.

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David Attenborough: ‘The Earth and its oceans are finite. We need to show mutual restraint’

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At 94, what has the world’s most-travelled naturalist learned? He talks garden birds in lockdown, the eerie silence of Chernobyl – and tackling the climate crisis

Before the stay-at-home orders of 2020 kept him in one place for months on end, David Attenborough had never sat in his garden and listened to the birds. Not properly, he says, not determinedly “swotting up with a notebook and keeping a bird list”. The foremost figure in natural-world broadcasting (so admired by naturalists around the planet, he has three types of plant as well as a spider, snail, grasshopper, frog, lizard, marsupial lion and shark-like fish named after him) hardly paid attention to the wildlife on his doorstep until lockdown forced his hand. From spring through to autumn, he says, he sat outside with a pencil and made a determined effort to identify every species he could hear. Blackbirds. Thrushes. Jays. Blue tits and great tits. Swifts.

“Actually, I couldn’t really hear the swifts,” the 94-year-old admits. Something to do with their pitch, and his failing ears. “My hearing,” Attenborough growls, using the breathy, mournful voice that often accompanies footage of an ageing alpha getting supplanted by a younger fitter animal, “is not what it was.”

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Kim Ki-duk: punk-Buddhist shock, violence – and hypnotic beauty too

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The South Korean director, who has died of Covid, was at the forefront of a new wave of uncompromising cinema

Of all the film-makers of what might loosely be called the new Asian wave of the 21st century, perhaps the most challenging and mysterious – and probably the most garlanded on the European festival circuit – was South Korean director Kim Ki-duk. He made movies which were shocking, scabrous and violent - yet also often hauntingly sad and plangently beautiful and sometimes just plain weird. But they were strangely hypnotic. In 2011, I was on the Cannes Un Certain Regard jury which gave the top prize to his opaque docufictional piece Arirang, and though I struggle a bit now to recapture the mood of certainty that led us to that decision, there is no doubt about that Kim’s work had a commanding effect.

In fact, Kim himself might be a more prominent figure himself were it not that he was involved in the #MeToo controversy – three actors accused him of sexual assault which resulted in a fine for the director and inconclusive recrimination in the civil courts.

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Controversial South Korean director Kim Ki-duk dies of Covid aged 59

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The director, who faced accusations of sexual misconduct, died while being treated in Latvia

Controversial South Korean film-maker Kim Ki-duk has died aged 59 in a Latvian hospital, where he was being treated for Covid-19. The news was initially reported by Vitaly Mansky, director of Latvia’s Artdocfest film festival, though and later confirmed by Kim’s family in the Korean media. Kim was understood to be developing a film project set in the Baltic region when he became ill.

Born in 1960, Kim made his name with a series of violent yet aesthetically challenging features, including The Isle (2000) and Bad Guy (2001) – the former of which was sanctioned by the British Board of Film Classification for animal cruelty. Subsequently he became a fixture on the international festival circuit with films such as Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter ... and Spring (2003) and 3-Iron (2004), and he would go on to win the Golden Lion at Venice with his 2012 film Pieta, which the Guardian described as “bristl[ing] with Kim’s trademark anger and agony”.

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Songs for Europe: what music did Bowie and Iggy listen to in 1970s Berlin?

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A new compilation, named after one of Bowie’s local haunts Cafe Exil, offers a speculative guide to the pair’s soundtrack favourites

David Bowie once described his 1970s Berlin trilogy – Low, “Heroes” and Lodger – as containing “a sense of yearning for a future that we all knew would never come to pass”. It’s that same dislocating retro-futurist vibe that Saint Etienne’s Bob Stanley was looking for when he created his latest compilation, Cafe Exil: New Adventures in European Music 1972-1980.

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