Stand-up comic Red Richardson on his pedigree comedy childhood
Driving Rik Mayall around would be entertaining work for anyone, but for the young Red Richardson, the job he had in his 20s was the continuation of a childhood bond.
Mayall, who died suddenly in 2014 at the age of 56, was a near neighbour in South Devon, but he was also Richardson’s father’s close friend.
Continue reading...Danish director, who won Palme d’Or for Dancer in the Dark, said to be ‘in good spirits’
Lars von Trier, the acclaimed and controversial Danish director, has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, his production company has announced.
In a statement released on Monday, Zentropa – which von Trier co-founded in 1992 with producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen – said the director is in “good spirits and is being treated for his symptoms” while he completes the upcoming final season of his TV trilogy series.
Continue reading...Fergus Linehan calls for visa-free travel for British artists to solve logistical problems of touring
The outgoing director of the Edinburgh festival has called for the UK’s visa and exports rules to be greatly simplified to allow musicians and artists to travel overseas far more smoothly.
Fergus Linehan, who directs his last international festival next month, said the UK’s post-Brexit visa rules had been a “disaster” for the arts and for artists by stifling collaboration and making it harder for British artists to tour abroad.
Continue reading...Politics, electronic music and 25,000 people expected at Rave the Planet Parade this weekend, 12 years after fatal Duisburg crush
Neon bodypaint, string vests and no-nonsense four-to-the-floor beats will return to the streets of Berlin this weekend as the legendary Love Parade techno event makes a comeback in the German capital after a hiatus of more than 15 years.
Saturday’s daytime outdoor event carries a new name – the Rave the Planet Parade – but is being organised by some of the same people who put together the first Love Parade on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Continue reading...Ex-Beatle’s gig seen by many in huge festival crowd as ‘something to tell your grandkids about’
Paul McCartney’s history-making Glastonbury set was hailed as one of the greatest headline performances of this generation as a crowd of more than 100,000 people gathered at the festival’s famous Pyramid stage to watch him play.
He was joined on stage by Bruce Springsteen and Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl – and even sang a duet with his old bandmate John Lennon, using special effects pioneered by the Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson.
Continue reading...Set at Cheese and Grain sold out in under an hour after being announced on Thursday night
Sir Paul McCartney delivered a surprise performance the night before his Glastonbury festival headline set, which had caused traffic congestion as fans tried to buy a coveted ticket.
The impromptu gig at the Cheese and Grain entertainment venue in Frome, Somerset, was announced on Thursday evening and sold out in under an hour.
Continue reading...Grammy-award winning US rapper will no longer headline Strawberries & Creem festival in Cambridge
Lil Wayne will no longer headline at Strawberries & Creem festival in Cambridge after he was banned from entering the UK at the last minute, event organisers have said.
The Grammy-award winning American rapper, 39, will not perform on Saturday in what was believed to be his first UK show in 14 years after he had his visa application refused.
Continue reading...Diversity in book industry must be sustained, and start at the top, Booker prize-winning author tells Hay festival
The Booker prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo says she fears that publishers’ interest in black authors may be only a “trend or fashion” that could wane unless the business becomes more diverse.
Evaristo, who was the first black woman to win the literary prize for her novel Girl, Woman, Other in 2019, said that the Black Lives Matter movement and the murder of George Floyd in 2020 “really did shake the industry to the core” and had marked a turning point in previously “excluded” authors getting book deals.
Continue reading...Children’s author says she told her elderly mother to get rid of it as she was terrified of being mistakenly shot
The children’s author Dame Jacqueline Wilson has said her elderly mother slept with a gun beneath her pillow.
Wilson, creator of the Tracy Beaker series, told an audience at the Hay festival in Wales that she was daughter of a character more colourful than any she had written – and that she was terrified her mother might shoot her by accident, and persuaded her to get rid of it.
Continue reading...Brick Lane author says fear of winning Bad Sex award loomed over writing of latest book, Love Marriage
The Brick Lane author Monica Ali has said she was “terrified” to write the sex scenes in her most recent novel, Love Marriage, with the fear of being nominated for the Bad Sex awards looming over her as she wrote.
In an event at the Hay festival in Wales, the 54-year-old writer told the audience: “There’s all sorts of pitfalls to writing sex scenes – you might end up using words like ‘throbbing’, ‘thrusting’, ‘member’”.
Continue reading...The Canadian director made the comments at a press conference for his latest body horror film Crimes of the Future
David Cronenberg, director of Crash, The Naked Lunch and A History of Violence, has said that “the US is completely insane”.
Speaking to the press at the Cannes film festival premiere of his new film Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg referred specifically to attempts to overturn Roe v Wade. “In Canada … we think everyone in the US is completely insane. I think the US has gone completely bananas, and I can’t believe what the elected officials are saying, not just about Roe v Wade, so it is strange times.”
Continue reading...New movie set in 80s US and starring Succession star Jeremy Strong with Jessica Chastain as Donald Trump’s sister, traces fault lines of political and social division back to Reagan era
A new film set in 1980s New York, in which Donald Trump’s property mogul father, Fred, and high-achieving lawyer sister Maryanne appear as characters is a direct attack on late-stage capitalism, according to its principal cast and director.
Armageddon Time, which is premiering at the Cannes film festival and stars Succession’s Jeremy Strong alongside Oscar-winner Jessica Chastain as Maryanne Trump, in a cameo, is set during the run-up to the election of Ronald Reagan as president and examines the layers of privilege that determine the future of children attending different schools in the same city.
Continue reading...Our Place in Space is part of £120m government-backed Unboxed festival spanning UK over coming months
A glowing silicone sun measuring 2.3 metres in diameter and a pinhead-size Pluto have been brought down to earth in an extraordinary scale model of the solar system aimed at giving the public a true sense of the huge size of space.
The six-mile (10km) riverside sculpture trail opens in Derry on Friday as part of Unboxed, the £120m government-backed celebration of creativity that spans the UK over the coming months.
Continue reading...After a two-year pause, Harry Styles, Billie Eilish and The Weeknd will be headlining at a festival with no Covid-19 restrictions
Harry Styles, Billie Eilish and The Weeknd are headed to Coachella this weekend for the first edition of the mega-festival in three years.
The California-based festival, which takes place over two weekends, is expected to draw more than 125,000 people a day. In February, the festival announced that there would be no rules regarding mask-wearing, testing and vaccination proof “in accordance with local guidelines”.
Continue reading...Director and grand prix winner at last year’s Cannes festival for A Hero was sued by former student for using story from her documentary without credit
Asghar Farhadi, the Oscar winning director of A Separation and The Salesman, has been indicted in a plagiarism case brought by one of his former students, who had claimed he took the idea for his 2021 film A Hero from a documentary she had made for a film class.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Azadeh Masihzadeh brought the case after Farhadi had earlier sued her for defamation; in both cases the courts ruled in Masihzadeh’s favour. The case will now pass to a second judge whose ruling will decide whether or not Farhadi will be convicted. This can then be appealed.
This article was amended on 5 April 2022. It had been originally stated that Asghar Farhadi was convicted of the crime, following widespread misinformation, but has now been changed to reflect that he has been indicted and a trial will decide the outcome.
Continue reading...From Glastonbury to Radio 1’s Big Weekend there are heady expectations of a vintage season
For a while it felt so far away: listening to your favourite artist, pints flying overhead, queueing for portable toilets, losing your friends and finding new ones. But after two years of cancellations and delays, music lovers can once again look forward to an array of festivals and gigs this summer.
From Paul McCartney at Glastonbury and Tyler, the Creator at Parklife, to Adele and Elton John at BST Hyde Park and Liam Gallagher at the Etihad Stadium, there’s something in the music calendar for everyone.
Continue reading...As the festival returns from Covid-enforced hiatus, over half of the acts announced so far feature women
Paul McCartney, Kendrick Lamar and Olivia Rodrigo have been announced as among the stars performing at this summer’s Glastonbury festival.
Out of the 89 names announced so far, 48 are women or acts that include female artists, meeting festival co-organiser Emily Eavis’s previously stated intention for Glastonbury to achieve gender parity on its bill. “Our future has to be 50/50,” she told the BBC in 2020.
Continue reading...Festivals will not require vaccination, testing or masking while Coachella says ‘no guarantee’ attendees won’t be exposed to Covid
In a reversal of its previous policy, the Coachella music festival will not require Covid-19 vaccination, testing or masking when it resumes this April in southern California, the organizers said.
The hugely popular festival saw up to 125,000 attendees leading up to the start of pandemic, during which it was cancelled three times.
Continue reading...The Austrian director torments everyone, including the audience, in this grotesque tale set in the Italian resort out of season
Wretchedness, sadness and confrontational grotesquerie once again come together in a movie by Ulrich Seidl, although it’s leavened by something almost – but not quite – like ordinary human compassion. If you’ve seen Seidl’s other movies you’ll know what to expect and you’ll know to steel yourself for horror. Perhaps this one doesn’t take Seidl’s creative career much further down the road to (or away from) perdition, but it is managed with unflinching conviction, a tremendous compositional sense and an amazing flair for discovering extraordinary locations.
The Italian coastal resort of Rimini in winter is an eerie, melancholy place; Seidl shows it in freezing mist and actual snow. Refugees huddle on the street and some groups of German and Austrian tourists take what must be bargain-basement package vacations at off-season rates in the tackiest hotels. It is here that Ritchie Bravo, played by Seidl regular Michael Thomas, plies his dismal trade. He is an ageing lounge singer with a drinking problem, a cheery, bleary style, an Islamophobic attitude, a bleached-blond hairdo of 80s vintage and a spreading paunch. Ritchie makes a living crooning to his adoring senior-female fanbase, who show up in their coach parties to catch his act. (You could compare him to Nick Apollo Forte in Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose or Gerard Dépardieu in Xavier Giannoli’s The Singer – except much, much more horrible.) He also tops up his income by having sex with some of the fans for money – truly gruesome scenes in the starkly unforgiving Seidl style.
Continue reading...Ryusuke Hamaguchi brings a gentle warmth to this ingenious collection of three stories united by themes of fate and mystery
Ryusuke Hamaguchi is a Japanese film-maker whose work I first encountered in 2018 with his doppelgänger romance Asako I & II and indirectly via last year’s experimental chamber-piece Domains, whose screenwriter Tomoyuki Takahashi has worked with Hamaguchi. Now he has unveiled this ingenious, playful, sparklingly acted and thoroughly entertaining portmanteau collection of three movie tales.
Their themes and ideas are emerging as keynotes for this director: fate and coincidence, identity and role-play, and the mysteries of erotic pleasure and desire. There is a rather European flavour in the mix – one of its characters is a specialist in French literature – and I found myself thinking of Emmanuel Carrère and Milan Kundera. And although there is no formal connection between the stories (other than the thematic echoes) the simple act of juxtaposition creates something pleasingly cohesive.
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