Category Archives: Culture

Joker ‘a betrayal’ of mentally ill people, says David Fincher

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Mank director rails at the risk-averse production strategy of major Hollywood studios

Mank director David Fincher has described Todd Phillips’ Oscar-winning Joker as “a betrayal” of mentally ill people.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Fincher was reflecting on Joker’s surprise success at the box office in a wide-ranging attack on the risk-averse production strategy of the major Hollywood studios. Saying that studios “don’t want to make anything that can’t make them a billion dollars”, he also suggested that occasionally “challenging” material can get support, if there is solid previous evidence of commercial potential.

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Rafaella Carrà: the Italian pop star who taught Europe the joy of sex

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A new jukebox musical of Carrà’s songs caps a 60-year career for a cultural icon who revolutionised Italian entertainment – and gave women agency in the bedroom

At the beginning of Explota Explota, a new Spanish-Italian jukebox musical comedy set at the tail end of the Franco dictatorship in 1970s Spain, airport employee Maria is making a delivery at a TV studio when she catches the attention of Chimo, the director of a variety show. When she tells him she’s not a dancer, he replies: “No dancer with blood flowing in their veins can resist this rhythm.”

He plays her Bailo Bailo, a hit by Italian pop star Raffaella Carrà, who, on top of becoming one of the best known personalities in her native Italy, ended up a sensation in the 20th-century Spanish-speaking world. Where Sweden had Abba, Italy had Carrà, who sold millions of records across Europe. Sure enough, Maria can’t resist Bailo Bailo, and Chimo hires her.

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Free willy: are film and TV finally growing up about male nudity?

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Belgian film Patrick showcases the average male form, setting it apart from movies that often present it as comedy or combat

In terms of an attention-grabbing tagline, the Belgian movie Patrick had me at “Naturist campsite handyman loses his hammer”. Don’t expect anything saucy, though: Patrick, out on digital platforms on Friday, is a spare, sombre character study, set in a woodland community where everybody happens to be naked. After a few minutes, you stop noticing, even though the film occasionally embraces the absurdism, especially in a fight scene between two angry naked men in a flimsy mobile home.

Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips

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Video gaming can benefit mental health, find Oxford academics

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Research based on playing time data showed gamers reported greater wellbeing

Playing video games can be good for your mental health, a study from Oxford University has suggested, following a breakthrough collaboration in which academics at the university worked with actual gameplay data for the first time.

The study, which focused on players of Nintendo’s springtime craze Animal Crossing, as well as EA’s shooter Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville, found that people who played more games tended to report greater “wellbeing”, casting further doubt on reports that video gaming can harm mental health.

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Syrian refugees help put centuries-old glassware on show in Paisley

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Thirty-piece collection was bequeathed to museum in 1948 and recently rediscovered

An unusual collection of 2,000-year-old glassware is providing Syrian refugees in the Renfrewshire town of Paisley with a connection to their homeland, five years after they settled in Scotland.

The 30-piece collection, dating back to Roman times, was bequeathed to Paisley Museum in 1948 by Elizabeth Spiers Paterson, the daughter of thread manufacturers, and is believed to have been acquired from antiquities dealers in Syria, known as the birthplace of glass-making.

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Ethan Hawke on regrets, race and surviving Hollywood: ‘River Phoenix was a big lesson to me’

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Hawke could have been a superstar to rival Leonardo DiCaprio or Matt Damon. But, as he turns 50, the actor is thinking more about the dangers he avoided than the opportunities he turned down

“Do you mind if I do something not attractive?” Ethan Hawke asks. In a vintage T-shirt, with his hair in a half-ponytail, he looks every inch the artsy Brooklyn dad that he is. “I’m starving. Would it be very rude if I eat lunch? I’ll try to be neat and orderly about it.” We’re talking by video chat and I tell him I’ll forgive his lunch if he forgives the noise of kids and dogs in my background. “Never apologise for kids. My two younger ones are Zoom schooling now, so I’m hiding in my office where the dogs are, so we’re even,” he says, tucking into his takeaway.

On the day of our interview, Hawke’s 50th birthday is a week away; if that makes those of us who remember him as a smooth-cheeked schoolboy in Dead Poets Society feel old, imagine how Hawke feels. “Forty-nine sounds a lot younger than 50,” he says with self-mocking mournfulness. Will he celebrate? “My older kids are coming over, so I’ll do a dinner with the six of us, which is about as much fun as we can have these days,” he says.

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Steve McQueen: ‘It’s rebel music that moves me’

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The director on the reggae-fuelled house parties he witnessed as a child - lovingly recreated in his new film, Lovers Rock – and how their raw energy shaped his taste in music

Reggae music is the beating heart of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, which traces Black British experience from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. In the 1970s, when the characteristically defiant Bob Marley song that gives the series its title was released, McQueen’s aunt, Molly, used to regularly sneak out of her family house in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, on weekend nights to go to “blues parties” – all-nighters usually held in someone’s house.

Back then, the blues party was a staple of West Indian immigrant life in England, a makeshift club-cum-shebeen, usually held in someone’s front room or basement, where, as the night progressed, the sweet smell of ganja merged with the lingering aromas of West Indian home cooking. As an escape from her strict, religious upbringing, Molly would dance until dawn to roots reggae, sweet-sounding “lovers rock” and floor-shaking dub instrumentals.

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James Blunt: ‘My body has not been a temple. I’ve put it through painful experiences’

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The singer talks about sharing rations with the Russians, after-party toasties and his mum’s signature dish

I was an army brat who lived on army patches – in Cyprus, Hong Kong, Germany and as far afield and exotic as Yorkshire. Every two years we’d move with my father’s helicopter pilot’s job and I’d knock on doors and ask, “Do you have any children of a similar age?”. If so, you’d make a best friend for two years; then never see them again. In Cyprus my best friends were Canadians. In Germany there was lots of bratwurst and chips, but in Cyprus the simple Greek food was fantastic – Mediterranean, delicious and very healthy.

My overwhelming childhood food memories are of my mother cooking liver with fried onions. She was brilliant with liver. If she could cook other things, she kept those up her sleeve.

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‘Treasure trove’ of unseen Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney writing found

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Affectionate friendship between the two poets and artist Barrie Cooke, united by a love of fishing, revealed in a collection of correspondence that was believed lost

A “treasure trove” of unseen poems and letters by Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and the artist Barrie Cooke has revealed the depth of a close three-way friendship that one Cambridge academic has described as a “rough, wild equivalent of the Bloomsbury group”.

Cooke, who died in 2014, was a leading expressionist artist in Ireland, and a passionate fisherman. Fellow fishing enthusiast Mark Wormald, an English fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge, came across his name while reading Hughes’s unpublished fishing diaries at the British Library. He visited Cooke in Ireland, and discovered the close friendship between the three men.

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AC/DC: Power Up review – the last crank up to 11?

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(Columbia)
The band’s first album in six years is a riotous hymn to unreconstructed rock, not to mention something of a medical miracle

In 1980, AC/DC released Back in Black, arguably the loudest wake ever committed to tape. On the one hand, the band were mourning their departed singer, Bon Scott; on the other, they were rebooting with a new frontman, Brian Johnson, whose Muttley chuckle became as much of an AC/DC trademark as the twin-guitar might of Angus and Malcolm Young. Back in Black remains one of the biggest-selling studio albums ever made.

And here they are again: back, metaphorically, in widow’s weeds, staging another resurrection in the wake of events that might have extinguished a punier outfit. Power Up, their 16th international album, is a particular celebration, given that these purveyors of electrical metaphor since 1975’s High Voltage looked like a spent force in 2017.

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New museum in Nigeria raises hopes of resolution to Benin bronzes dispute

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Artefacts held by British Museum and other western institutions were looted by British forces in 1897

A new museum designed by Sir David Adjaye is to be built following the most extensive archaeological excavation ever undertaken in Benin City, Nigeria, raising hopes of a resolution to one of the world’s most controversial debates over looted museum artefacts.

The kingdom of Benin, in what is now southern Nigeria and not to be confused with the modern-day country of Benin, was one of the most important and powerful pre-colonial states of west Africa.

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Matrix party ‘disguised as film shoot’ to bypass German Covid rules

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Keanu Reeves among 200 people at studio party where guests came as extras, says report

German health authorities say they plan to speak to the studio where the latest Matrix film was shot after a party allegedly attended by the Hollywood actor Keanu Reeves was held to mark the end of filming, despite coronavirus restrictions.

About 200 people were at the party disguised as a film shoot, with the guests invited to come as extras in an apparent attempt to bypass health regulations, according to the German tabloid Bild.

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‘Charles is very stylish’: how The Crown’s costume designer brought 1980s to life

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Season 4’s wardrobe includes Diana’s Cinderella dress and Thatcher’s power shoulders

With its power bouffants, sweetie-wrapper party dresses and alarming shoulder pads, some call the 1980s the time that fashion forgot. But in the fourth season of The Crown, which starts on TV tomorrow night, the era’s extraordinary clothing plays a pivotal role in bringing the decade’s stories back to vivid life. Some looks were faithfully recreated, while others were more loosely inspired by the actual wardrobes of the royal family, as the show’s costume designer, Amy Roberts, explains below.

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Viral video of ballerina with Alzheimer’s shows vital role of music in memory

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Music’s primal power for those living with dementia has inspired thousands of YouTube views for a clip of a former dancer

We see a frail and elderly woman in a chair, her eyes downcast. She motions for the music to be turned up, a swelling melody from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, and with a little encouragement her hands begin to flutter. Then suddenly her eyes flash and she’s Odette the swan queen at the misty lakeside, arms raised. She leans forward, wrists crossed in classic swan pose; her chin lifts as if she’s commanding the stage once more, her face lost in reverie.

The woman in the film is Marta Cinta González Saldaña, a former ballet dancer who died in 2019, the year the video was shot. But the clip has gone viral since being posted recently by Spanish organisation Música Para Despertar (Music to Awaken), which promotes the value of music for those living with Alzheimer’s. Many of the details accompanying the video on its journey around the internet have been erroneous. Marta Cinta was not a member of the “New York Ballet” (there’s no such company) or the actual New York City Ballet, but seems to have run her own dance company in the city; the ballerina performing in the intercut video is not her but Ulyana Lopatkina, who is not even dancing Swan Lake but Mikhail Fokine’s The Dying Swan. Yet none of that takes away the impact of watching someone seemingly light up and have their memories unlocked by the power of melody. It’s as if you’re seeing Saldaña inhabit her true self.

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‘It was just a bunch of thugs’: how Collective uncovered a web of state corruption in Romania

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A tenacious team of sports journalists and a persistent whistleblower turn this documentary into a newsroom drama as thrilling as All the President’s Men

Collective begins with profoundly upsetting footage filmed by clubbers on their phones of the fire that broke out in 2015 at a crowded Bucharest nightclub, Colectiv. A Romanian band is singing angrily – “Fuck all your wicked corruption. It’s been there since our inception” – before stopping abruptly to ask if anyone has a fire extinguisher. What appeared to be a striking firework display above the heads of the musicians turns out to be a fire, and within seconds flames have engulfed the building and teenagers are running for their lives.

It is a shocking sequence, but it is not the most disturbing element of an extraordinary documentary that reveals a staggering degree of corruption running through Romania’s health system. The fire left 27 dead and 180 injured, but in the weeks that followed another 37 people died from wounds that should not have been life-threatening, many killed by infections picked up in hospital.

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The impossible return of AC/DC: ‘You could feel the electricity in the air’

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The bassist quit, the singer lost his hearing, the drummer was under house arrest and founder member Malcolm Young died from dementia. But somehow AC/DC are back (in black)

At the end of an AC/DC show, Angus Young has a routine. After a couple of hours of perpetual motion in his schoolboy outfit, he heads straight for the shower and then, because he hasn’t been able to eat since noon – you can’t do an AC/DC show on a full stomach – he looks for food. “The first thing that enters my head is: I’m starving.”

When he left the stage of the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia on 20 September 2016 – the last night of the Rock or Bust tour – he might have been running through that routine for the last time in the band’s then 43-year history. The final 23 shows had been completed with Axl Rose as singer (brilliantly, it must be said), after hearing problems had forced Brian Johnson to retire from the road; he could no longer find his pitch onstage, and every show made his hearing worse. That summer, their bassist Cliff Williams had said he, too, would be leaving the band.

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Madrid surrealism show offers escape from pandemic reality

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Exhibition explores how surrealist movement influenced culture and design in 20th century

Anyone tiring of the many mundane strictures of the new normality can, in Madrid at least, escape temporarily into a world where hands serve as chairs, tables spin on bicycle wheels and horses obligingly proffer lamps from their heads.

An exhibition in the Spanish capital examines the countless ways in which the surrealist movement has influenced culture and design over the past century, from the sofa Salvador Dalí modelled on Mae West’s lips, to the music videos of Björk.

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‘They created a false image’: how the Reagans fooled America

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A new docuseries studies the damaging reign of Ronald and Nancy Reagan and the insidious myth-making that still surrounds their legacy

Ever since Richard Nixon’s sweaty upper lip during a debate with John F Kennedy cost him the election in 1960, television has been the most crucial proving ground for any presidential hopeful. Granting the gift of sight to the general public changed the game, as campaigners and office-holders have been forced to school themselves in careful image management and conscious branding. In American politics, a well-crafted position on foreign policy won’t get a person nearly as far as the easy telegenic charm that makes voters feel comfortable grabbing a pint, a dissonance that’s allowed some dubious characters access to the highest stations of authority.

Related: Ronald Reagan called African UN delegates 'monkeys', recordings reveal

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