Tristram Shapeero pens public apology to Lukas Gage after commenting on Gage’s ‘tiny apartment’ without realizing actor could hear him
A director who forgot to mute his microphone during a Zoom audition as he criticised an actor’s apartment has apologised and claimed he was just sympathising with the plight of arts workers in the coronavirus pandemic.
Related: Actor calls out director for criticizing his 'tiny' apartment during Zoom audition
Continue reading...The gruesome decline and drugs-related death of the comedy icon has overshadowed his legacy, says his widow Judy, who welcomes a new film showing him as a sensitive star full of doubts
Can you disentangle the life of John Belushi from his tragic death? Has he left a comic legacy – or just a template for living fast and dying young? On the one hand, he spearheaded the pioneering comedy show Saturday Night Live, still running 45 years later, becoming its first breakout star with smash-hit movies Animal House and The Blues Brothers. The poster for the latter has been a fixture on teenagers’ bedroom walls ever since. But is that down to Belushi’s comedy – or because he was dead within two years of the film’s release, a victim of drug addiction and the pressures of extreme success?
This week sees the release of a Showtime documentary, Belushi, made by the team behind the Emmy-nominated Brando documentary Listen to Me, Marlon. It’s the first telling of Belushi’s story, says his widow Judy Belushi Pisano, to apportion “even-handed” attention to her husband’s life and death. Pisano has always regretted how Bob Woodward’s 1984 book Wired, a fix-by-fix account of the star’s gruesome decline, came to define her husband’s memory. “Had John died in his sleep,” she says, speaking to me by phone, “we would view his life much differently. We really would.”
Continue reading...The ugly green coat in the HBO drama The Undoing has usurped a starry cast that includes Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant. But what are the show’s makers trying to say, exactly?
The real star of The Undoing, HBO’s absurd marital melodrama, is not Hugh Grant, the Manhattan skyline or even the pair of David Hockneys hanging inside a vast penthouse in episode one. It’s a coat.
Sludge-green, calf-length, with wide lapels and a hood, this coat is worn again and again by Nicole Kidman’s character, a gnomic therapist called Grace, as she floats down Madison Avenue, through Central Park and even into the prison on Rikers Island, brooding over her marriage to a man who may, or may not, have just murdered his lover with a lump hammer.
Continue reading...The series was cancelled in 2013 but its biggest crime was being born too soon. Now streaming in Australia, here’s hoping it gets the audience it deserves
What happens when an annoying narcissist has a spiritual awakening? Do they become different? Better? Or does real change require much more than learning how to meditate?
Enlightened, starring Laura Dern, aired for two seasons on HBO from 2011 to 2013. Critics loved it, a third season was on the cards – but it never got the mainstream viewership it deserved and was cancelled due to poor ratings.
Continue reading...The film about the Stasi spying on East German lovers was seen as too dark, with one funder even wanting it remade as a comedy. But it went on to win an Oscar
In winter 1997, during my first year at film school in Munich, I was lying on the floor listening to music. I started thinking about how Lenin once told his best friend that he couldn’t listen to his favourite piano sonata as often as he would like, because it made him soft, and might stop him from wanting to hurt the people he needed to hurt. Suddenly, an image came to my mind: a man with headphones, in a bleak and depressing attic, secretly listening to his enemies, but thereby involuntarily hearing the kind of music he has been avoiding his entire life. I opened my laptop, started typing and within about an hour had written the outline of the movie.
Continue reading...Streaming services expect rise in searches for the 70s pop-reggae genre, a staple of the blues parties that shaped UK music
One of the most memorable moments in Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock – the latest film in his five-part anthology series Small Axe – comes when a room full of young revellers sing Janet Kay’s classic Silly Games with their eyes closed, lost in the music, as they imitate her signature falsetto.
A staple of the lovers rock genre, which emerged in the 70s and was a blend of pop, reggae and disco, Kay’s song is the centre piece of McQueen’s film, which is itself an ode to the house parties, or “blues”, that his auntie attended as a young woman.
Continue reading...Changing Rooms’ flamboyant master of maximalism has made a great living out of being himself. But is lockdown altering him? Is he suddenly dressing down, or brooding on the tragedy that marked his childhood? And does he have any decor tips for our interviewer?
If curating your surroundings for a Zoom call is an art, then Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen is its maximalist master. Immersed in the dark colours of his 17th-century manor-house living room, he sits with enviable poise, one arm cocked and propped on his thigh, as though modelling for a portrait. Flanked by a medley of blue velvet and patterned cushions, the latter matching his William Morris-inspired sofa, he is lit by an assortment of lamps.
It is a stark contrast to my more modest framing – a single pine bookshelf and a large houseplant. I show him the rest of my living room: pale blue walls, a navy/charcoal sofa, a single cushion with Julianne Moore’s face, a coffee table, a few more palms and a TV unit. Britain’s best-known interior designer doesn’t spare my feelings.
Continue reading...City angered by apparent theft of bike chained to post near stencil of hula-hooping girl
A bicycle with a missing wheel accompanying a Banksy mural in Nottingham has vanished, prompting sadness and frustration in the city.
The artwork depicts a girl appearing to hula hoop with a tyre from the bike, which was chained to a nearby pole outside a beauty salon.
Continue reading...The wife of Hugh Lindsay, who was killed while skiing with Prince Charles, had asked show not to feature the disaster
The widow of a British army major who died in an avalanche while skiing with Prince Charles has criticised the producers of The Crown as “unkind” for dramatising the disaster against her wishes.
Major Hugh Lindsay, a former Queen’s equerry, was skiing off-piste at the Swiss resort of Klosters in 1988 with a group including senior royals when disaster struck, with his friend the Prince of Wales and others reported to have dug snow with their hands in a vain attempt to save his life.
Continue reading...Ironic take on corporate attire reboots yuppie look in age of The Crown and new Gossip Girl
In the ultimate moment of fashion revival, the 80s yuppie look is back – but with a difference. The “yindies” (young ironic nostalgic dresser), is bringing back the suited, Wall Street look but with a touch of knowing self-reference and elements of preppy style too.
The first cast photograph of the new Gossip Girl reboot, the current season of The Crown, which features Diana Spencer’s 1980s Sloane Ranger chic and the navy suit jacket of Donald Trump impersonator Sarah Cooper, have all riffed on the classic powersuit silhouette.
Continue reading...Pioneering Ndebele artist fears young people are losing a sense of their roots
One of Africa’s best-known artists has made an impassioned appeal for governments and communities across the continent to preserve their traditions and culture in the face of globalisation.
Esther Mahlangu, 85, said that she was worried young people in Africa were losing a sense of their roots.
Continue reading...SNP hopes to emulate Spain’s lucrative paradores in a drive to boost jobs, tourism and heritage preservation
Just outside Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire, on the side of a steep cliff overlooking the North Sea, sits Dunnottar castle. Once a medieval fortress, the picturesque ruins are open to the public for days out but have not boasted overnight visitors since the likes of Mary Queen of Scots and her son James VI in the 16th century. Now, under new proposals to be debated at the Scottish National party conference next weekend, Dunnottar could become one of a number of Scottish castles to be transformed into high-end but affordable hotels.
The plan is based on the model of Spain’s paradores, government-run historically significant buildings such as churches, castles and stately homes, often in areas underserved by tourism. They have existed in Spain since 1928 and include iconic sites such as Parador de Santiago de Compostela, which began life in 1499 as a hospital for pilgrims travelling to Santiago and is considered to be the oldest hotel in the world. Today, Spain has nearly 100 paradores, including fortresses, convents, monasteries and even a former prison and asylum. In 2019, they generated a turnover of €261m (£230m) for the country’s economy.
Continue reading...The acclaimed writer and performer on watching cat videos with ‘hot priest’ Andrew Scott, and why Hamilton reminds him of his own father
Lin-Manuel Miranda created and starred in the musical Hamilton, which premiered on Broadway in 2015. The show, about Alexander Hamilton, an American founding father, draws on hip-hop as well as more traditional musical forms, and won many awards, including 11 Tonys and the 2016 Pulitzer prize for drama. Miranda’s songs appear in the Disney animation Moana, he played Jack in Mary Poppins Returns and the balloonist Lee Scoresby in His Dark Materials, which returned to BBC One earlier this month.
How does Lee Scoresby’s character change in this series of His Dark Materials?
He goes all in on protecting Lyra. And it leads to some pretty wild places: it leads him out of the world in which he exists, to witches’ councils and beyond. In his short time with Lyra, he’s changed. He’s made the tactical decision that “my life is what it is, but this kid’s life could be better. We both were dealt a rotten pack of cards and I’m going to do what I can to make sure she’s got a brighter future.”
Lockdown videos of Sarah Cooper lip-syncing Donald Trump made her a Twitter sensation. Now the comedian is working with the likes of Helen Mirren and Whoopi Goldberg. She reveals how she ditched Silicon Valley to follow her dreams
You might think the only sort of person who gets famous on TikTok is a teenager caked in bronzing makeup busting out robotic dance moves, not a middle-aged married woman with an economics degree, despairing at her government. But 2020 has brought many surprises, and Sarah Cooper is perhaps the most unlikely of all of them: an American comedian who has appeared out of nowhere and made millions of us actually want to listen to Donald Trump. That is, as long as his voice is coming out of her mouth, in the videos where she lip-syncs and mimes along to his rambling speeches.
“I hate him so much,” she says, smiling calmly as she talks to me over video from New York, where she lives, “but he has provided my greatest material.” Such as the time he imagined, out loud, all the lovely health benefits that might come from imbibing disinfectant. Cooper turns her despair into hilarity when she moves her mouth in perfect timing to his words while looking exactly like herself: a black woman who has never voted Republican in her life.
Continue reading...Lukas Gage tweeted clip of director saying ‘these poor people live in these tiny apartments’ without realizing he wasn’t muted
It appears the mute button is becoming harder to find these days.
Hollywood is now rallying its support for an actor who posted a video of an excruciatingly awkward Zoom encounter he had with a director who witheringly criticized his “tiny apartment” without realizing he hadn’t muted his microphone.
Continue reading...Her father’s Christmas Day tradition of showing his old slides to the family inspired Panebianco’s award-winning series, which connects tender memories to the present
When US photographer Catherine Panebianco was a child, her family moved around North America a lot: by the time she entered high school she had had maybe 10 different homes – “in Pennsylvania, Georgia, a couple places in California, two places in New York…”. One constant, though, was a set of photographic slides. Her father, Glenn, a metallurgical engineer, had taken the pictures when he was a young man in Toronto during the 1950s and 60s. On Christmas Day each year, wherever they were, Glenn would lug out a hulking, prewar metal projector and set up an old slide screen. The family would then gather round, the children in pyjamas with a bag of popcorn, and listen to stories they had heard “a bazillion times”.
I wanted my hand to be in there… it links the series and I wanted my past and present to be physically linked
Continue reading...After living with Parkinson’s for 30 years, the actor still counts himself a lucky man. He reflects on what his diagnosis has taught him about hope, acting, family and medical breakthroughs
The last time I spoke to Michael J Fox, in 2013, in his office in New York, he was 90% optimistic and 10% pragmatic. The former I expected; the latter was a shock. Ever since 1998, when Fox went public with his diagnosis of early-onset Parkinson’s disease, he has made optimism his defining public characteristic, because of, rather than despite, his illness. He called his 2002 memoir Lucky Man, and he told interviewers that Parkinson’s is a gift, “albeit one that keeps on taking”.
During our interview, surrounded by the memorabilia (guitars, Golden Globes) he has accrued over the course of his career, he talked about how it had all been for the best. Parkinson’s, he said, had made him quit drinking, which in turn had probably saved his marriage. Being diagnosed at the heartbreakingly young age of 29 had also knocked the ego out of his career ambitions, so he could do smaller things he was proud of – Stuart Little, the TV sitcom Spin City – as opposed to the big 90s comedies, such as Doc Hollywood, that were too often a waste of his talents. To be honest, I didn’t entirely buy his tidy silver linings, but who was I to cast doubt on whatever perspective Fox had developed to make a monstrously unjust situation more bearable? So the sudden dose of pragmatism astonished me. Finding a cure for Parkinson’s, he said, “is not something that I view will happen in my lifetime”. Previously, he had talked about finding “a cure within a decade”. No more. “That’s just the way it goes,” he said quietly. It was like a dark cloud had partly obscured the sun.
Continue reading...Lying, paranoia and conspiracy are defining features of a totalitarian society. What hope is there for a brand new era, in the aftermath of an administration that has relied on all three?
“I WON THE ELECTION!” Donald Trump tweeted in the early hours of 16 November 2020, 10 days after he lost the election. At the same time, Atlantic magazine announced an interview with Barack Obama, in which he warns that the US is “entering into an epistemological crisis” – a crisis of knowing. “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false,” Obama explains, “by definition our democracy doesn’t work.” I saw the two assertions juxtaposed on Twitter as I was finishing writing this essay, and together they demonstrate its proposition: that American democracy is facing not merely a crisis in trust, but in knowledge itself, largely because language has become increasingly untethered from reality, as we find ourselves in a swirling maelstrom of lies, disinformation, paranoia and conspiracy theories.
The problem is exemplified by Trump’s utterance, which bears only the most tenuous relation to reality: Trump participated in an election, giving his declaration some contextual force, but he had not won the election, rendering the claim farcical to those who reject it. The capital letters make it even funnier, a failed tyrant trying to exert mastery through typography. But it stops being funny when we acknowledge that millions of people accept this lie as a decree. Their sheer volume creates a crisis in knowing, because truth-claims largely depend on consensual agreement. This is why the debates about the US’s alarming political situation have orbited so magnetically around language itself. For months, American political and historical commentators have disputed whether the Trump administration can be properly called “fascist”, whether in refusing to concede he is trying to effect a “coup”. Are these the right words to use to describe reality? Not knowing reflects a crisis of knowledge, which derives in part from a crisis in authority.
Continue reading...In this excerpt from A Promised Land, the former president remembers the anxious run-up to the 2008 election. Scroll down to hear a clip of him reading from it
More than anything campaign-related, it was news out of Hawaii that tempered my mood in October’s waning days. My sister Maya called, saying the doctors didn’t think Toot [Obama’s grandmother] would last much longer, perhaps no more than a week. She was now confined to a rented hospital bed in the living room of her apartment, under the care of a hospice nurse and on palliative drugs. Although she had startled my sister with a sudden burst of lucidity the previous evening, asking for the latest campaign news along with a glass of wine and a cigarette, she was now slipping in and out of consciousness.
And so, 12 days before the election, I made a 36-hour trip to Honolulu to say goodbye. Maya was waiting for me when I arrived at Toot’s apartment; I saw that she had been sitting on the couch with a couple of shoeboxes of old photographs and letters. “I thought you might want to take some back with you,” she said. I picked up a few photos from the coffee table. My grandparents and my eight-year-old mother, laughing in a grassy field at Yosemite. Me at the age of four or five, riding on Gramps’s shoulders as waves splashed around us. The four of us with Maya, still a toddler, smiling in front of a Christmas tree.
Continue reading...The former US president recalls the excitement of the 2008 night he was elected, in a passage from A Promised Land
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