GirlsDoPorn was sued by women who claimed they were coerced into making videos without knowing footage would be online
A US judge has awarded $13m in damages to 22 women who were defrauded by the owners of GirlsDoPorn, a website specialising in “amateur”-style pornography.
Related: Group of US women sue 'amateur' porn producer over 'coercion and lies'
Continue reading...Will The Irishman clean up? Or Marriage Story? And how will Once Upon a Time in Hollywood fare? Peter Bradshaw offers a lowdown of the main categories and his predictions and omissions
The best film category is dominated – just like everything else in the cultural conversation around movies – by Netflix, which has the majority of the nominees: Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story and Fernando Meirelles’s The Two Popes.
Continue reading...‘I tried to pretend that my love for you was dead, though I could only do so by pretending myself that my heart was dead,’ the poet wrote to Emily Hale
TS Eliot’s love letters to scholar Emily Hale, the great poet’s muse and source of “supernatural ecstasy” for more than 30 years, were released on Thursday amid fevered speculation and under tight security at an elegant library on the campus of the Ivy League’s Princeton University.
The Nobel laureate’s correspondence to Hale, whom he met when both were studying at Harvard University in 1912, has long been the fascination of Eliot scholars but remained hidden, on both the poet and Hale’s wishes, for 50 years after Hale’s death in 1969.
Continue reading...The queen of pop gets intimate, Taylor Swift feels the sunshine and Stormzy takes on the world … plus, classical celebrations begin for Beethoven’s 250th
Continue reading...All-female Genji Hip Hop collective use rhymes and art to fight cultural stereotypes and gender violence
Aminata Gaye picks up a grey scarf and stretches it into a T shape. She ducks under the fabric, wraps it around her neck and crisscrosses it over the crown of her head.
It is almost dusk outside, but in this windowless room there is no indication of time as Gaye gets dressed for a concert starting at 9pm. Her veil in position, the 27-year-old old is transformed into Mina la voilée (Mina the veiled one), her stage name as a rapper in Dakar, Senegal.
Continue reading...US actor hit by suspected typhoid while filming survival TV series in Papua New Guinea
The American actor Zac Efron has confirmed he recently fell ill while filming a survival reality TV show in Papua New Guinea.
Australian media had reported that Efron, 32, was flown by helicopter for treatment in Australia after contracting a bacterial infection, possibly typhoid, while shooting the Killing Zac Efron series.
Continue reading...Armando Iannucci is not someone you’d describe as having a commanding presence. He doesn’t want to consume all the oxygen in the room or, with a show of bored impatience, imply that it’s your good fortune to share his company. He may be well known, but there’s nothing of the celebrity about him. Short, balding and understated in manner, he could pass for a provincial loss adjuster come to assess your insurance claim. But he is arguably the most influential figure in British comedy of the past three decades, not to mention an accomplished film director.
When I meet him at a London hotel, he is busy promoting his third feature film, The Personal History of David Copperfield, an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s eighth and most autobiographical novel. His first film, In the Loop, grew out of his seminal satirical TV comedy The Thick of It. The second, the highly acclaimed The Death of Stalin, was a darkly comic but historically accurate account of the Soviet dictator’s end and its farcical aftermath.
Continue reading...Fraser, from Canada, gained attention for Inuit-language cover of Rihanna’s Diamonds and advocacy for indigenous culture
Kelly Fraser, a Canadian pop artist who gained attention for an Inuit-language cover of Rihanna’s Diamonds, part of her advocacy efforts for her indigenous culture, has died. She was 26.
Thor Simonsen, Fraser’s friend and producer, said he was told the day after Christmas by the singer-songwriter’s family that she had died. The family declined to release details, including the cause of death, Simonsen said.
Continue reading...The former child star has won rave reviews for the hit Netflix show. So why does he feel ambivalent about acting?
Ah, yes, says Asa Butterfield, the young star of the explicit and brilliant comedy of sex manners, Sex Education. Butterfield is recalling one of the stranger milestones of his acting career, “my first, big, on-camera wank. That was a fun day on set.” With a second series of the hit Netflix show due to debut online soon, the 21-year-old Londoner has come to a diner in King’s Cross to eat an oozing burger and talk with some pride about a show that first set the internet humming back in January 2019. Part hyperactive teen comedy and part public health broadcast, Sex Education, created by British/Australian screenwriter Laurie Nunn, turned out to be that rare cultural thing: a show that filled a hole we didn’t know was there.
“I think it did a great job of normalising young people’s fears, and quirks, and hang-ups around sex,” Butterfield says. He plays Sex Education’s central character, a preternaturally wise teenage boy called Otis, who takes it upon himself to advise his sixth-form peers on the intricacies of sexual contact and sexual politics. “When I first signed up, I knew it would be interesting, risky, that the scripts were treading new ground. I guess I hoped the show would be talked about a bit. But I didn’t expect it to connect so instantly, so overwhelmingly, with so many people.”
Continue reading...As the president completes his first year in power, his opponents are finding their voice and fighting back
Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency was still a week away when Edu Krieger penned his first critique – a ballad lamenting the rise of Brazil’s incoming leader and lampooning him over the corruption allegations that continue to haunt his family.
“It’s important for us to counterattack with our art,” said the 45-year-old singer-songwriter who has since become a specialist in musical parodies of the populist provocateur.
Continue reading...Musician recognised alongside stars of sport, politicians and hundreds of ordinary people
Sir Elton John has received the highest acknowledgement in a new year honours list in which hundreds of ordinary people were recognised alongside household names from sport, the arts, entertainment and politics.
The singer and songwriter was awarded the Companion of Honour for a remarkable career spanning more than five decades, in which he has sold more than 300m records worldwide, and used his fame to promote the work of 23 charities, including his own Aids foundation. He becomes one of only 64 people apart from the monarch who can hold the honour at any one time.
Continue reading...Vanessa Springora describes relationship with Gabriel Matzneff, then 50, in new book
The French literary world is in shock after a leading publishing director, Vanessa Springora, alleged in a new book that she was groomed into a damaging relationship from the age of 14 with an acclaimed author who was 50.
Springora’s book, Le Consentement (Consent), will be published in France in January and has already been met with critical acclaim and sent shockwaves through the close-knit world of Paris intellectuals. It has been described as a #MeToo moment for France’s literary circles.
Continue reading...Death of Melanie Panayiotou not being treated as suspicious, say police
George Michael’s sister Melanie Panayiotou was found dead at her home on Christmas Day, police have said, three years to the day since the singer’s death. The 55-year-old hairdresser was found by her older sister, Yioda, on the evening of 25 December.
The Metropolitan police said they were called by the London ambulance service shortly after 7.30pm on Wednesday to reports of the sudden death of a woman. Her death is not being treated as suspicious.
Continue reading...Local people must ask Underbelly if they want more than six passes to their houses
Edinburgh residents have vented their anger at having to apply to a private company for access to their own homes during this year’s Hogmanay celebrations amid growing concern that the council’s hunger to attract tourism is reducing the Scottish capital to a “theme park”.
People living in some parts of the city centre will also face potential restrictions on the number of guests they can invite if they wish to have parties of their own on New Year’s Eve, when the entertainment giant Underbelly will be running an event expected to attract more than 70,000 people.
Continue reading...The Star Wars fan has been immortalised in a visual dictionary as Ri-Lee Howell, Jedi master and historian
A college student hailed by police as a hero for preventing more injuries and deaths after a gunman opened fire in a classroom has been immortalized as a Jedi by the production company behind the Star Wars franchise.
News outlets report the family of Riley Howell, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte student who is described as a huge Star Wars fan, was tipped off by Lucasfilm in May that it planned to honor him in a forthcoming book, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker - The Visual Dictionary.
Continue reading...If you’ve missed a few instalments or are not sure where to start, here are some staff favourites
Full Story: Guardian Australia’s tri-weekly podcast was launched in October, featuring the best of Guardian Australia’s reporting – and the stories behind the scoops.
If you’re not sure where to start, or if you’ve missed a few, Guardian staff have picked their favourite episodes for your summer road trips.
Continue reading...Netherlands detectives were inspired by Making a Murderer and other true-crime shows
Dutch detectives are chasing 15 new leads on a 30-year-old murder case after being inspired by the current popularity of true crime documentaries to broadcast their own three-part podcast on the original ill-fated police investigation.
Neither the identity of a murdered man found wrapped in an electric blanket by a busy motorway in August 1991 nor that of his killer have emerged in the decades since the discovery of the body despite a nationwide probe.
Continue reading...Brexit, millennials, binge-watching… every word in the English language was coined by someone. What’s it like to be an accidental wordsmith?
Are we living through a golden age of linguistic inventiveness? Buzzwords and neologisms – from office jargon to the lexicons of democratic chaos in Britain and the US, as well as the ever-expanding culture wars – rain down on us every day, and can gain global currency at the speed of fibre-optic cable. Many, of course, fail – like “Brixit”, an early rival to Brexit, or “Generation Me”, one proposed label for what we now call millennials. Others rapidly become part of the modern conversation. Why, for example, do critics call young, supposedly over sensitive and easily triggered people “snowflakes”? Because in Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel Fight Club, Tyler Durden says: “You are not special. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.”
Palahniuk’s contribution, however, was accidental. He later explained: “Back in 1994, when I was writing my book, I wasn’t insulting anyone but myself… My use of the term ‘snowflake’ never had anything to do with fragility or sensitivity.” Instead, he was using it as a means of “deprogramming himself”, so he didn’t believe in his own praise. But the point is that you can’t control what usage will do once it’s out of your hands: a much wider uptake can shift the meaning. The term “woke”, for example, is now used mockingly for a kind of overrighteous liberalism; but its first recorded use, by the African-American novelist William Melvin Kelley, was meant to indicate an awareness of political issues, especially those around race, a positive usage that still also persists.
Continue reading...Willis penned hits for Earth, Wind & Fire, and wrote score for musical The Color Purple
Allee Willis, the US songwriter behind the Friends theme tune as well as hits such as September by Earth, Wind & Fire, has died aged 72.
She had suffered a sudden heart attack and Willis’s partner, Prudence Fenton was described as being “in total shock” over the news.
Continue reading...The Magnum photographer grew up behind the iron curtain. As a documentary charts his journey where Israel and Palestine meet, Koudelka talks about challenging official narratives – and himself
There’s a surreal moment near the start of Koudelka Shooting Holy Land, a documentary about the acclaimed photographer Josef Koudelka. He has pointed his lens at one of the concrete barriers that separate Israel and Palestine but has been stopped by an official and a heavily armed soldier. His local assistant, Gilad Baram, is trying to smooth things over. “It might result in a book,” Baram tells the soldier. “He is a one of the most renowned photographers worldwide. He is a photographer with an agency called Magnum.”
Suddenly the atmosphere changes. “Magnum? Ah, I know it,” says the soldier, his stern face breaking into a smile. A short discussion later, a friendly handshake and all is well.
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