ReportWire

Tag: story

  • Why Sinéad O’Connor refused to be silenced

    Why Sinéad O’Connor refused to be silenced

    [ad_1]

    O’Connor’s values and priorities were formed in childhood, a period when she later said she had suffered abuse at the hands of her devoutly religious mother. She found solace in music – specifically in the Bob Dylan albums her brother shared with her – and in a book of Dylan’s songs given to her by a kindly nun at the Catholic girls’ reform school she attended in her early teens. By 18, O’Connor signed a recording deal with Ensign/Chrysalis, shortly after her mother died in a car accident on the way to Mass.

    Rejecting her path

    These connections were largely unknown by the public, our perceptions about O’Connor filtered through the star-making machinery of the music press. Nevertheless, it was impossible not to grasp that O’Connor wasn’t interested in becoming a typical pop star. Rejecting the marketing advice of her label, she had her hair shaved and wore ripped jeans and combat boots as a protest against what she perceived as the music industry’s sexism, valuing female artists for their looks rather than their music.

    Although there were few precedents for a young woman to express complex emotions in pop music, O’Connor did just that, with an incredible, almost supernatural voice that could swing from whisper to scream. When the producer assigned by the label failed to see her vision for her 1987 debut album, she took the reins herself. Although The Lion and the Cobra wasn’t engineered to chart, O’Connor found a receptive audience thanks to radio airplay on college and alternative stations and on MTV, where her striking appearance matched the intensity of her songs.

    Her 1990 follow-up, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, made O’Connor a global superstar, owing in large part to her cover of the Prince-penned song Nothing Compares 2 U and its instantly iconic music video, where she sheds a single tear as she grieves for her late mother. By the time O’Connor’s album went to number one in multiple countries, she had already had enough of the silence and complicity that fame demanded of her, which was at odds with her desire to use her voice and her growing platform to become a voice for the disempowered.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • The one thing Oppenheimer gets wrong

    The one thing Oppenheimer gets wrong

    [ad_1]

    The future was Oppenheimer’s priority. While the use of the bomb was never his decision, he did seem to believe that, in the long run, it was the lesser of two evils. In 1939, he knew that the achievement of nuclear fission made a bomb inevitable. In 1945, he believed that the bomb made nuclear war inevitable, unless its hideous power could be demonstrated to the world before the current conflict ended. “They won’t fear it until they understand it,” he says in the film, “and they won’t understand it until they’ve used it”. Colleagues including Teller and Niels Bohr (played by Kenneth Branagh) agreed, although for them, this belief that using the bomb could avert future wars did not make it any less terrible.

    Nolan’s decision to tell the story of the bomb through Oppenheimer’s eyes – not just his experiences but also his concerns – gives the film its contemporary urgency. What was done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki is history, but the existential threat of nuclear weapons is still with us, as Oppenheimer knew it would be.

    This awareness is captured in his most famous quotation. The physicist later claimed that at Trinity he had thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita – “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds” – but nobody heard him say it on the day, so Nolan uses voiceover sleight of hand to acknowledge the ambiguity. Perhaps the line was a retrospective bid for gravitas, or a plea for forgiveness, and Oppenheimer was playing screenwriter with his own life. But it carries that deeper truth. Regardless of the globe-of-fire theory, or what Truman decided to do, Oppenheimer knew in that bright white moment that his work had radically changed the world, and might one day end it.

    Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World by Dorian Lynskey will be published in spring 2024.

    Oppenheimer is on general release now

    Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world.

    If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

    And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • What our childhood heroes teach us

    What our childhood heroes teach us

    [ad_1]

    Unsurprisingly this influences the kind of books they want to read. “All the books that are popular in some ways have a conflict whether it’s against society, or adults, or among friends or in a school,” says Stenberg. “And then there is the brave act of standing up to it,” she adds. The children want to see “characters who are not afraid to speak up about injustices, and who have the courage to defend the rights of others.” 

    This of course includes characters such as Anne of Green Gables and Matilda, but Stenberg believes that these classic books “should be complemented by newer books which more accurately can address the topics of today”.

    She says that few of the books in the poll would be chosen by the children themselves. Something that Louis Lareau, managing librarian at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library Children’s Center in New York, agrees with. “Kids (and parents) are now actively looking for characters that reflect themselves – their culture, heritage, language or physical appearance,” she tells BBC Culture.

    According to Marie Moser, owner of The Edinburgh Bookshop in the Edinburgh suburb of Bruntsfield, classic titles are bought by parents or grandparents, who fondly remember the reading experiences of their own childhood. Which is not to say that children don’t still enjoy them. However, when left to their own devices, children will pick books that contain characters they themselves can connect with or identify with, although this doesn’t necessarily mean they will have to be in a contemporary setting.

    “Some of them want to see kids like themselves because that’s how they roll, some of them want fantasy because they find real life too scary,” Moser tells BBC Culture.

    Universal appeal

    Harry Potter seems to be popular with both of these camps. “It’s about the downtrodden rising up, which is a classic theme, and people behaving decently despite the people around you, the adults, not behaving decently,” says Moser when explaining the series’ universal appeal.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • And Just Like That: Are these TV’s ultimate mid-life looks?

    And Just Like That: Are these TV’s ultimate mid-life looks?

    [ad_1]

    Another fashion moment that was established by the writers, rather than by Rogers’ wardrobe department, was the comeback of Carrie’s ill-fated archival Westwood wedding dress from the first movie, when Big jilts her at the altar. In season two, Carrie reclaims the bridal gown in order to “repurpose her pain” as she puts it. Paparazzi shots from the set piqued fans’ interest in just what the gown and accompanying bird fascinator could be doing in the show. A dream sequence? Another trip down the aisle for Carrie, this time with the returning Aidan (John Corbett)? It turned out the occasion was the Met Gala, because apparently these characters are famous enough to warrant an invite – but not famous enough to get a photo with Rihanna on the Met steps, much to the disappointment of Charlotte’s husband Harry (Evan Handler). 

    But as Carrie’s friend, Bitsy von Muffling (Julie Halston), says, “the second year of grief is harder than the first”, which has led to a more sombre, masculine-inflected wardrobe for the character.

    Mid-life moments

    While Carrie is still on her grief journey, Rogers wonders if Miranda is having a mid-life crisis of her own, being newly separated. “She’s living out of a suitcase… It’s kind of whatever she’s grabbed.” Still, Miranda’s looking arguably the best she ever has, in waist-cinching jumpsuits and chunky sweaters, and last season’s grey hair made for an easy canvas, says Rogers. “Silver is a neutral, so you can put any colour with it.” 

    Speaking of neutrals, and despite Rogers’ usual reticence when it comes to the colour brown, she does gravitate towards the hue when it comes to dressing Carrie’s new friend, the luxury real estate broker, Seema, played by Sarita Choudhury. “I want to see brown here, I want to see chocolate, liquid gold, toffee and caramel,” Rogers says. “This is a sophisticated New Yorker who sells multi-million-dollar apartments; she’s matching the furniture in that place. She’s being driven around town by a driver in a chocolate Mercedes… we have to match that car! She’s looking seamless as Seema.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • What does ‘Barbenheimer’ really mean for Hollywood?

    What does ‘Barbenheimer’ really mean for Hollywood?

    [ad_1]

    In that light, the Barbenheimer chatter starts to sound slightly desperate – like an invitation to one last party before fasting begins. It certainly seemed like that when the London premiere of Oppenheimer was brought forward by an hour so that the actors could pose on the red carpet in the final minutes before the SAG-AFRA strike came into effect. Buffeted by the Covid-19 pandemic and by the current writers’ and actors’ strikes, the film industry is in a shaky state. Barbenheimer feels more like a celebration of the past than the dawn of a bright new future. 

    Nolan, after all, is known for championing analogue film and resisting the advance of digital technology, while Barbie relies on the nostalgic appeal of a doll that has been around for decades. The toy company behind the doll, Mattel, is trumpeting a raft of films based on its products, but just this week it was revealed that an eye-watering $30m had been spent on developing Mattel’s Masters of The Universe, only for Netflix to drop the project.

    As for the Barbenheimer phenomenon, all the talk of dressing up and buying cocktails suggests that going to the cinema with friends has become a rare special occasion rather than a regular activity – something you put in the diary and plan ahead for, rather than something you just do. Maybe such gloomy thoughts are prompted because both Barbie and Oppenheimer ponder life and death, but you have to ask: what does it say about the movie business if it takes a meme as unique and absurd as Barbenheimer to get customers into their local multiplex?

    Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world.

    If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

    And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • The joy of Ken: Can Barbie’s Ryan Gosling really win an Oscar?

    The joy of Ken: Can Barbie’s Ryan Gosling really win an Oscar?

    [ad_1]

    Gosling’s other skill is that even in Ken’s most deluded acts, it’s difficult to truly hate him. He’s ultimately a misguided, slightly pathetic and pitiable character, as he peacocks around, trying to work out who he is after years in Barbie’s shadow, before acknowledging his vulnerability. Gerwig told the LA Times that she was taken by Gosling’s open-heartedness in portraying Ken’s journey: “He was freeing masculinity for everyone on set in this extraordinary way. And these men [on set] loved it. I think they felt released.”

    What makes Gosling’s performance feel so revelatory is that he’s an actor so associated with films of a dark or bleaker nature; brooding, troubled characters like in Drive and A Place Beyond the Pines, or men struggling with addiction on the edge of society as in Blue Valentine and Half Nelson. He can do light entertainment, as he so skilfully showed in rom-coms Crazy Stupid Love and the all-singing, all dancing La La Land, as well as underrated comedy-thriller The Nice Guys. But he’s never been quite this much fun.

    Is comedy given its awards due?

    Given that his turn as Ken in Barbie is as close to perfect as you’d want an out-and-out comedy performance to be, some people are already suggesting that this role could take him to Academy Award glory. Jamie Jirak from ComicBook.com was first out of the gate, suggesting on Twitter last week after an early screening: “Give Ryan Gosling an Oscar nomination, I’m dead serious!”, a sentiment echoed this week by Lucy Ford in British GQ, who affirmed “He should honestly be nominated for an Oscar”.

    Is it fanciful thinking to think he could even go ahead and win? History shows that actors in comedies rarely succeed at the Oscars when pitted against those in emotionally wrought dramas and biopics, the likes of Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny and Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets being exceptions. And of the actors who have won for comic roles, few have given performances quite as absurd, exaggerated and plain silly as Gosling. Then again, given the way Barbenheimer – the box-office battle between Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s nuclear bomb epic Oppenheimer – both released tomorrow – has gripped the world, it might be that Academy Awards voters are keen to see this duel play out once again at the podium, with a host of nominations for both. 

    But while film critic Ellen E Jones thought Gosling “smashed it” as Ken, she doesn’t think this will hold much sway with the Academy. “I don’t fancy Ryan’s chances much at the Oscars,” she tells BBC Culture. “Firstly because, even though we’re in this era of Awards show reform, supposedly in line with social changes in the world more generally, I believe the tedious self-seriousness which surrounds these ceremonies will be the last thing to go… and for that reason a brilliantly hilarious performance like Gosling’s will not be rewarded.” She also makes the point that “the optics of giving a man an award for what is so pointedly a feminist film are a bit off”.

    Certainly though, with Ken, Gosling has cemented himself as one of Hollywood’s most versatile actors. Oscar or no Oscar, he can be assured that, to paraphrase the slogan on his pastel-coloured fleece top in Barbie; he’s more than Ken-ough.

    Barbie is released in cinemas internationally on 21 July

    Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world.

    If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

    And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Oppenheimer review: A “magnificent” story of a tragic American genius

    Oppenheimer review: A “magnificent” story of a tragic American genius

    [ad_1]

    The film doesn’t belabour or especially try to explain the science of the bomb, even as research physicists cluster around Oppenheimer to debate it. At Los Alamos, the tension ramps up as the story heads toward the inevitable test in the vast desert. There is a howling rainstorm the night before Trinity. When the explosion happens – Oppenheimer in a shack some distance away, others lying flat on the ground, shielding their eyes – the fire seems to roar at us from the screen, followed by sudden silence as the soundtrack cuts out. That jolting, immersive scene alone justifies shooting in the Imax format Nolan loves so much (and that shows every line and pore in the actors’ faces).

    The physicist Edward Teller (Benny Safdie) charges Oppenheimer with being more politician than physicist. Kitty tells him he plays the martyr. Nolan shows a man who naively believed he could speak honestly, urging President Truman to avoid a nuclear arms race. He also believed that it was necessary to drop the bomb on Hiroshima because, as he says, “Once it’s used, a nuclear war becomes unthinkable”. But he does think about it. Just after Hiroshima we see more images from his mind, including a photo-negative image of a young woman with her skin peeling off. As this inspired film suggests, Oppenheimer’s greatest tragedy was that he wasn’t able to save the future from his own invention.

    ★★★★★

    Oppenheimer is released internationally from 21 July.

    Love film? Join BBC Culture Film Club on Facebook, a community for film fanatics all over the world.

    If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

    And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, WorkLife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Greta Gerwig’s ‘bold, inventive’ Barbie breaks the mould

    Greta Gerwig’s ‘bold, inventive’ Barbie breaks the mould

    [ad_1]

     

    The zany, joke-packed fish-out-of-water farce keeps a grin stuck on your face, almost as if you were a classic Barbie or Ken yourself. Gosling’s clowning is especially enjoyable. As in The Nice Guys, and the Saturday Night Live sketch about Avatar’s logo, he is energetically committed to making a fool of himself. Still, the scenario does seem familiar at first. Essentially, you’ve got the sentient playthings from Toy Story, the relentlessly upbeat figurines from The Lego Movie (Will Ferrell appears as a villainous businessman, just as he did in The Lego Movie) and you’ve got the magical innocent abroad from Enchanted and Elf (yes, Ferrell was in that, too).

    What’s so pleasing about Barbie, though, is that Gerwig and Baumbach waste no time in racing through the scenes you might anticipate and on to scenes you wouldn’t. Their exuberantly eccentric fairy tale has some of the dark, angst-ridden surrealism of Charlie Kaufman (Mattel’s offices are reminiscent of Being John Malkovich) and the meticulous eeriness of Stanley Kubrick. It has a sequence from an epic rock opera, and a dream ballet from a Gene Kelly musical. It’s a subversive history of Mattel’s often questionable product development, and an unbridled satire of sexism and patriarchal oppression. Some younger viewers – ie, those who are still at prime Barbie-buying age – may be puzzled, but Gerwig, with her usual sincerity, ensures that it is always a joyous comedy.

    In fact, she and Baumbach may have tried to cram in too much: most obviously, there are three or four endings too many. But it’s easy to forgive these excesses, because Barbie is one of the few recent Hollywood films to have more to them than is given away in the trailer, and one of the few that come across as complete, self-contained stories, rather than attempts to set up a long-running series of sequels. It may be a comedy about a mass-produced plastic doll, but Barbie breaks the mould.

    ★★★★★

    Barbie is on general release from 21 July.

    Love film? Join BBC Culture Film Club on Facebook, a community for film fanatics all over the world.

    If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

    And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, WorkLife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • The colour pink and how the new Barbie film might subvert our expectations

    The colour pink and how the new Barbie film might subvert our expectations

    [ad_1]

    Does it feel like you’re looking at the world through rose-tinted spectacles right now? You’re not alone. If summer 2023 has a colour, then it is undoubtedly pink, and it’s all down (mostly) to one woman: Barbie.

    The new live-action film about the iconic doll, starring Margot Robbie and directed by Greta Gerwig, has leant right into Barbie’s association with the colour, its set designers working with a palette of 100 different shades, and apparently contributing to a global shortage of pink paint. The movie’s all-conquering marketing campaign has left a sea of pink wherever it goes, from billboards, buses and the cast’s (pink) carpet outfits to a real-life Barbie Dreamhouse on Airbnb, more than 100 brand tie-ins and a Google takeover.

    More like this:
    – The real-life inspiration for Barbie
    – Why adults should read children’s books
    – The shady past of the colour pink

    So ubiquitous is the build-up to Barbie’s release that you could be forgiven for thinking Lionel Messi was on the Mattel payroll when he officially signed for new club Inter Miami at the weekend, revealing his new pink number 10 jersey. The club – co-owned by David Beckham – launched its striking new kit in February and is still only one of a small handful of professional male teams to play in pink – a colour that, despite featuring heavily in recent menswear collections, is still strongly associated with women.

    It wasn’t always the way. As Kassia St Clair, a cultural historian and author of The Secret Lives of Colour, notes, the girl-pink/boy-blue divide didn’t set in until the mid-20th Century. An 1893 article on baby clothes in The New York Times stated that you should “always give pink to a boy and blue to a girl.” Pink was seen as the stronger colour – a relative of the passionate, aggressive red, while blue was the signature hue of the Virgin Mary. “My father was born in 1925, he’s a military man and yet pink is his favourite colour and he doesn’t see anything peculiar about that,” St Clair tells BBC Culture. “But for me, growing up as a child of the 80s and 90s, of course, pink was very much a feminine colour, and I had it shoved down my throat. So for a long time, I completely avoided pink. I was fed up with it. I had a very complicated relationship with it.”

    Pink morphed into something delicate, cutesy and unthreatening after World War Two, when men went back to work, and women were retreating into the home. Two key moments, signifying two different but equally limited versions of womanhood, came in 1953 – Marilyn Monroe’s fuchsia pink gown in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and the soft pink ballgown Mamie Eisenhower wore to her husband’s inauguration. The First Lady was held up as a feminine ideal, and pink was her favourite colour. It kickstarted a trend for pink clothing, interiors and appliances, which soon impacted toys too. “It was fashionable at exactly the same time as there was this absolute explosion of consumer goods and advertising becomes much more sophisticated,” says St Clair. “Pink emerged as the default colour for women and has managed to retain that for an awfully long time.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • How 2013 film The Congress predicted Hollywood’s current AI crisis

    How 2013 film The Congress predicted Hollywood’s current AI crisis

    [ad_1]

    The Congress was partially based on Stanislaw Lem’s 1971 sci-fi novel The Futurological Congress, but the Hollywood AI plot, which takes up roughly the first third of the film, is entirely Folman’s. After Robin is scanned – in a remarkable performance, Wright stands inside a glass globe filled with lights and scanners and goes through emotions from sadness to laughter – the film leaps 20 years ahead and becomes fully animated, with Robin entering a boldly-drawn world of primary colours. The story begins to echo Lem’s vision of a hero who visits a conference where hallucinogenic drugs in the water make him question reality. Here, the animated Robin is set to speak at a conference as a prime example of an AI movie star.

    Even as the film shifts to focus on the broader issue of fantasy vs reality, though, Folman predicts further into Hollywood’s future. Now the animated Green says movies themselves are about to be eliminated, replaced by a chemical that will allow users to experience life as if they were their favourite actors like Robin. The script writers and animators who are creating the very world Robin and Green are in will lose their jobs to AI, he says, reflecting yet another potent, real-life fear.

    The Congress tells us that it was entirely possible to have seen the AI crisis coming. If only both sides on Hollywood’s faultline today had paid more attention to that obscure little film from a decade ago.

    The Congress is available to stream on Peacock, The Roku Channel, Pluto, and Amazon in the US and on Amazon and ITVX in the UK.

    Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world.

    If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

    And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One: Is Tom Cruise the last action hero?

    Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One: Is Tom Cruise the last action hero?

    [ad_1]

    There have been attempts to build non-superhero action franchises around younger actors, especially actors named Chris, eg The Gray Man with Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans, Extraction with Chris Hemsworth, and The Tomorrow War with Chris Pratt. But none of these has taken off, partly because they debuted on streaming services rather than at cinemas. “There’s so much content being pumped out that it’s really hard for one franchise or star to stand out,” De Semlyen says. “In the 80s, a blockbuster could be in the cinema all summer and people would keep talking about it. That’s different from turning on your TV and seeing Chris Hemsworth killing 1,000 people.”

    Still, while we’re feeling sorry for those youthful actors who can’t establish themselves as action superstars, we should spare a thought for those less youthful actors who can’t establish themselves as anything else. As far as mainstream cinema is concerned, they have almost no option but to sign up for action movies, because Hollywood has pretty much abandoned the quieter mid-budget films that might have allowed them to deliver dialogue without throwing bad guys through windows at the same time. The John Wick series, with Keanu Reeves (58), has demonstrated that action movies are currently the only way to revive an ailing career. Just think about Cruise. He can get audiences to watch him sprinting along the top of a train, but could he persuade them to watch him in a gentle romantic comedy or a political drama? That might be a mission impossible, even for him.

    Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is on general release

    Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world.

    If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

    And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • The Birkin bag: Fashion’s ultimate status symbol

    The Birkin bag: Fashion’s ultimate status symbol

    [ad_1]

    A roomy, elegant-yet-sporty bag with handles designed to be carried in the hand or on the wrist, with four studs on the base, the Birkin represented a new, modern statement from a fashion house known for its traditional, classical stance. Up until that point, the Kelly bag – ladylike, stiff and boxy by comparison – epitomised Hermès’ world. The only other Hermès bag to carry a celebrity moniker, their Sac à Dépêches, was renamed in 1956 after Grace Kelly was snapped using it to shield her pregnant belly, having first been introduced to the item on the set of Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief.

    The Birkin arguably played a major role in making Hermès the fashionable house it is today. “It opened Hermès up to new markets and customers, but it also changed the typical Hermès client,” says Jérôme Lalande, an antique dealer specialising in 20th-Century leather goods. “Hundreds and hundreds” of Kellys and Birkins have passed through his hands during his career, as both a long-time collaborator of Hermès, sourcing items for the house’s museums, and the bag-and-luggage expert at second-hand luxury goods specialists Collector Square, an e-boutique with a showroom on Rue Bonaparte in Paris.

    In the bag

    According to Lalande, the Birkin wasn’t an immediate hit: it only really took off in the late ’90s, at the dawn of the It-bag era. Thirty-nine years on from its launch, demand is such that there is no longer a waiting list for the bag, in the classic sense of the term. “It’s a wish list, not an order list. They don’t take orders any more; you just have to hope,” says Lalande, who estimates that there are some 200,000 Birkins in circulation. And the Birkin’s limited availability has undoubtedly helped its success at auction. The most expensive bag ever to go under the hammer, according to WWD, was a red Porosus crocodile Birkin with 18-carat white-gold and diamond ‘hardware’, sold for $203,150 (£129,355) at auction in Dallas in 2011.

    The rarest styles are generally the most expensive, according to a report by Collector Square, with bright colours the least common on the second-hand market. Topping the rank are pink or purple Birkins, which on average sell in leather for between 12,000 and 16,000 euros (£9,000-£12,500).

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • New Bluey episodes are streaming – and leaving fans distraught

    New Bluey episodes are streaming – and leaving fans distraught

    [ad_1]

    Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for season three of Bluey

    We wait for new seasons of Bluey like we wait for Christmas in my house. There’s a breathless anticipation that reaches a fever pitch the closer we get to another fresh batch of bingeable, seven-minute-long episodes. And with the latest released on Wednesday on Disney+, even I was surprised by just how affected I was by one episode that left me in tears, having to explain to a five- and three-year-old why mummy is sobbing at Bluey.

    The animated kids show – which The Guardian has called “arguably the best television series in the world” – is a tender examination of family life as seen through the eyes of six-year-old Bluey, the eldest of two blue heeler pups, living with her younger sister Bingo, dad Bandit and mum Chili. Life amongst this family of dogs revolves around joy, imaginative play and emotional vulnerability. It has tackled everything from sibling rivalry, jealousy, regret and technology addiction to miscarriage. It’s a cartoon that manages to engage children and yes, occasionally devastate their parents, too.

    More like this:
    – Why adults should read children’s books
    – The best TV shows of 2023
    – Why fans of The Bear are obsessed with ‘The Sweater’

    This latest season is no different, with 10 new episodes that have captivated kids and one in particular that is driving countless conversations and arguments among adults online.

    Episode 32 of season three (called Onesies) is, on the surface, a look at Bingo’s raucous imagination gone haywire, as Chili’s estranged sister Brandy finally comes to visit after four years. She arrives with two animal onesies, a cheetah for Bingo and a zebra for Bluey. Bluey is envious of Bingo’s cheetah costume but it doesn’t quite fit and Bingo has taken to her cheetah persona a little too intently. The outfits unleash a wild game of hunter and hunted, but throughout, Brandy seems uncomfortable, on the verge of leaving and seemingly full of unspoken regrets.

    A sad fan theory confirmed

    Eventually Bluey asks Chili why her aunt is so sad and why she’s only come to see them once before. As Brandy wrestles with a feral Bingo outside, we learn that much like Bluey’s desire for the cheetah costume, aunt Brandy had badly wished for something that no one could make fit and was ultimately not meant to be. Viewers extrapolated that Chili was talking about infertility, seeming to confirm fan theories around her own issues with child loss.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Barbie creator Ruth Handler on the real-life inspiration for the doll

    Barbie creator Ruth Handler on the real-life inspiration for the doll

    [ad_1]

    5. The debate over Ken’s genitalia

    In 1961, Ruth and Elliot introduced Ken, named after the couple’s son – but there was a debate about the design.

    RH: It was a conscious decision to make the Ken doll without genitals. That was a discussion between the designers and me, in which I lost. The men of the design group all felt that Ken should not have genitals. I wasn’t sure – I argued for a little bump. And we did get a little bump as time went on.

    6. Despite criticism from some feminists over Barbie’s caricatured vision of womanhood, Handler was a driven career woman

    RH: I felt tremendous guilt about being a mother away from my children, because in those days, there were no career women. Other women didn’t know quite how to treat me. If we did go out to a social occasion, I found myself sitting with the men who were talking business.

    7. Handler didn’t want Barbie to intimidate girls

    RH: We tried not to make her too beautiful. We were not anxious to have a beautiful doll, because we felt if little girls were going to project themselves through this doll, we didn’t want the little girl to be threatened by the beauty of Barbie.

    Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world.

    If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

    And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Sound of Freedom: Is the child trafficking drama a watershed moment for ‘faith-based’ filmmaking?

    Sound of Freedom: Is the child trafficking drama a watershed moment for ‘faith-based’ filmmaking?

    [ad_1]

    For his part, Ballard says that everything he’s seen about the film’s alleged QAnon connections “seems conspiratorial” and is not reflected in the film, which, he emphasises, was “written, produced, and filmed years ago [in 2018] well before anyone [had] heard about QAnon”. Meanwhile Harmon simply says that “Everybody who has seen this film knows that it’s not political, it’s not controversial, it’s just a true story well told.”

    On top of the QAnon allegations, there have also been critical reports calling into question the achievements of Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), an organisation started by Ballard that works against child trafficking. According to its website, OUR has rescued more than 6,000 victims and is responsible for more than 5,000 arrests. In 2020, however, VICE News wrote an investigative report on Ballard’s non-profit, accusing OUR not of “outright falsehoods but a… series of exaggerations that are, in the aggregate, quite misleading.” OUR said at the time that VICE had an “agenda” to present a “negative portrayal of an honourable organisation” and that they had “provided factual information to Vice to disprove the inaccurate contentions raised by them”. On Thursday, OUR told Vice that Ballard had “stepped away” from the organisation prior to the release of the film. 

    There’s no denying that Sound of Freedom is a commercial success. It earned back its budget on opening day, and has garnered around-the-clock media coverage. The film is “a profit machine”, as Dergarabedian calls it, and he believes Hollywood will be taking note. “[Having] all different types of movies for all different types of audiences is a really good thing for the industry – not only to have diverse content out there, but also from a business standpoint, it can make a whole lot of sense.”

    What’s less clear, though, as evidenced by the conversations happening around the film, is what the film’s unique selling point, which has made it the summer’s surprise hit, really is. Is it a truly Christian/faith-based movie or not? Is it a thriller simply highlighting an all-too-important and harrowing global issue, or one implicitly aligning itself with popular conspiracy theories? Its ambiguity in these respects may have worked in its favour at the box office – though what its impact may be on the film industry longer-term is another matter altogether.

    If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

    And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • The 10 best TV shows of 2023 so far

    The 10 best TV shows of 2023 so far

    [ad_1]

    From The Last of Us and The Diplomat to Silo and The Bear

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • From Shakespeare to Harry Styles: Have audiences always been rowdy?

    From Shakespeare to Harry Styles: Have audiences always been rowdy?

    [ad_1]

    So are things really any worse now? “If you’d asked me that before lockdown, I would have said that things have always been thus,” says Sedgman. “As far back as the ancient Greeks people like Plato were complaining about what he called a vicious theatrocracy, where audiences who were previously happy to sit quietly suddenly wanted to use their tongues and start cheering and screaming. And the norm in Shakespeare’s time was to watch performances at the same time as more bodily forms of consumption, such as eating and drinking and talking and socialising.”

    The idea that audiences should sit and listen quietly is a relatively recent expectation. Post-pandemic though, Sedgman does think something has changed. “To some extent we’ve been having these debates about live performance, whether the norm should be more quiet and subdued or more active and exuberant for a very long time, but I work with a lot of people throughout the cultural industries, and the message seems to be pretty much unanimous that since lockdown ended, the situation has fundamentally shifted.”

    That bears out in a report by the UK’s Broadcasting, Entertainment, Communications and Theatre Union (Bectu) which found that 90% of theatre staff had witnessed bad behaviour – and 70% believed things had got worse since the pandemic.

    “It’s not all audiences by any means, but for a lot of people, there’s a growing sense of what I call ‘don’t-tell-me-what-to-do-itis’,” says Sedgman. She believes we’re seeing a breakdown in social contracts – the behavioural norms and rules of engagements that keep us all ticking along together nicely.

    People are thirsty for live entertainment again, but increasingly want it on their terms – especially when ticket prices are soaring. “People are coming with actively competing ideals about what they want that experience to be like,” says Sedgman. “Some people want to not be disturbed by others chatting or eating or drinking, or have phones blocking their way. Other people want to maybe take a step backwards to the time when the arts were a more sociable experience. The difficulty is that those pleasures are irreconcilable.”

    Why though, would a so-called fan of an artist want to risk hurting them by throwing things? One explanation is that social media has fuelled parasocial relationships – in which fans develop a strong but one-sided connection with celebrities. “Live events are one place where you actually come into that same space with your beloved celebrity,” says Sedgman. “So for some people, perhaps there’s a desire to break through that fourth wall separating them from us and to actively insert your presence into their world.” Giving Pink a giant wheel of Brie or – like one fan recently – throwing your mother’s ashes to her, is certainly one way to make her aware of your existence.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Why adults should read children’s books

    Why adults should read children’s books

    [ad_1]

    Children’s books are specifically written to be read by a section of society without political or economic power. People who have no money, no vote, no control over capital or labour or the institutions of state; who navigate the world in their knowledge of their vulnerability. And, by the same measure, by people who are not yet preoccupied by the obligations of labour, not yet skilled in forcing their own prejudices on to other people and chewing at their own hearts. And because at so many times in life, despite what we tell ourselves, adults are powerless too, we as adults must hasten to children’s books to be reminded of what we have left to us, whenever we need to start out all over again.

    Children’s fiction does something else too: it offers to help us refind things we may not even know we have lost. Adult life is full of forgetting; I have forgotten most of the people I have ever met; I’ve forgotten most of the books I’ve read, even the ones that changed me forever; I’ve forgotten most of my epiphanies. And I’ve forgotten, at various times in my life, how to read: how to lay aside scepticism and fashion and trust myself to a book. At the risk of sounding like a mad optimist: children’s fiction can reteach you how to read with an open heart.

    When you read children’s books, you are given the space to read again as a child: to find your way back, back to the time when new discoveries came daily and when the world was colossal, before your imagination was trimmed and neatened, as if it were an optional extra.

    But imagination is not and never has been optional: it is at the heart of everything, the thing that allows us to experience the world from the perspectives of others: the condition precedent of love itself. It was Edmund Burke who first used the term moral imagination in 1790: the ability of ethical perception to step beyond the limits of the fleeting events of each moment and beyond the limits of private experience. For that we need books that are specifically written to feed the imagination, which give the heart and mind a galvanic kick: children’s books. Children’s books can teach us not just what we have forgotten, but what we have forgotten we have forgotten.

    One last thing: I vastly prefer adulthood to childhood – I love voting, and drinking, and working. But there are times in adult life – at least, in mine – when the world has seemed blank and flat and without truth. John Donne wrote about something like it: “The general balm th’hydroptic earth hath drunk,/Whither, as to the bed’s feet, life is shrunk,/Dead and interred.”

    It’s in those moments that children’s books, for me, do that which nothing else can. Children’s books today do still have the ghost of their educative beginnings, but what they are trying to teach us has changed. Children’s novels, to me, spoke, and still speak, of hope. They say: look, this is what bravery looks like. This is what generosity looks like. They tell me, through the medium of wizards and lions and talking spiders, that this world we live in is a world of people who tell jokes and work and endure.

    Children’s books say: the world is huge. They say: hope counts for something. They say: bravery will matter, wit will matter, empathy will matter, love will matter. These things may or may not be true. I do not know. I hope they are. I think it is urgently necessary to hear them and to speak them.

    This is an extract taken from Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You are so Old and Wise by Katherine Rundell.

    If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

    And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • The eight best gothic books of all time

    The eight best gothic books of all time

    [ad_1]

    Where would we be without gothic literature? With its seductive blend of the strange and macabre, gothic literature is one of those few genres that is also a mood: castles, coffins and claustrophobia, yes, but also darkness, secrets and vengeance.

    That flexibility helps the gothic slip in through the cracks, popping up in everything from the dark academia trend to TV’s Stranger Things. I found it sneaking into my second novel, The Birdcage Library, without even trying (though admittedly it is set in a castle).

    More like this:

    –          The stories revealing super-rich lives

    –          Six ancient Norse myths resonating now

    –          A murder mystery that thrills 30 years on

    It’s more than 200 years since Mary Shelley went on holiday with Lord Byron and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and, bored indoors, they challenged each other to write a ghost story. The outcome was pretty productive for the gothic genre by anyone’s standards: Shelley wrote Frankenstein, while Byron’s tale of an aristocratic vampyre laid the foundations for the bloodsucking tradition. 

    Since then, like Dracula himself, the gothic has refused to die – quite the opposite. #gothicliterature and #gothic lit have racked up more than 30 million views on TikTok; its moody sister, dark academia, has ruled the app for some time now.

    That could be because the gothic is a “characteristically modern” genre, writes Professor John Bowen in an article for the British Library: it’s obsessed with technology (all those mad scientists), which helps it stay relevant, but that very newness is held in tension with the archaic, the ancient, and the strange. It teems with delicious darkness – or to put it in the words of the aptly-named critic Terry Castle, an “exorbitant hankering after horror, gloom and supernatural grotesquerie”.

    With that in mind, here are eight gothic must-reads from past and present. The subjects and settings are enormously varied, but they all share this genre’s shadowy nature.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Ansel Adams: Eight of the most iconic photos of the American West

    Ansel Adams: Eight of the most iconic photos of the American West

    [ad_1]

    (Image credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust)

    Ansel Adams’ images of national parks and oil derricks from the 30s and 40s are a powerful reminder of the beauty and fragility of the US’s natural landscapes, writes Cath Pound.

    A

    Ansel Adams is one of the giants of 20th Century photography, esteemed for his lush gelatine silver photographs of the national parks that have become icons of the US wilderness. A passionate champion of photography as a legitimate form of fine art, he referred to his most stunning images as his “Mona Lisas”. But Adams was also a tireless conservationist and wilderness preservationist who understood the power of a strong image to sway public and political opinion.

    His stirring images of US national parks have no doubt always inspired a desire to protect the natural world. But his lesser-known images of oil derricks and the decimated landscapes in California’s Owens Valley have also taken on a renewed relevance in today’s era of climate change.

    Ansel Adams in Our Times at the de Young Museum, San Francisco showcases some of his most celebrated works, as well as those that are less familiar, revealing the ways in which his powerful imagery continues to advocate for the protection of the environment. 

    (Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

    (Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

    1. The Golden Gate Before the Bridge, 1932

    San Francisco, the city of Adams’ birth, is where he first took up the large-format camera. “With images like this, one can sense his excitement with this new tool,” the exhibition’s curator, Karen Haas, tells BBC Culture.

    “This is the strait that lies between San Francisco and the Marin headlands, a view that had been visible from his childhood home. The beach below is one that he regularly combed as a somewhat lonely and awkward only child, reinforcing his connection with nature even while living in the city and not in Yosemite,” says Haas.

    (Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

    (Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

    2. Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, c 1937

    When Adams was invited by US President Gerald Ford to visit the White House in 1975, he took with him a copy of Clearing Winter Storm, one of his most celebrated images. At the time Adams was frustrated with the commercial exploitation and poor management of the country’s parks, and as he presented the print he said “Now, Mr President every time you look at this picture I want you to remember your obligation to the national parks.”

    “It really speaks to the impact of the image. For Adams it was so much about showing the beauty, and through the beauty advocating for, and bringing concern for, the preservation of that beauty,” assistant curator Sarah Mackay tells BBC Culture.

    (Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

    (Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

    3. Rain, Yosemite Valley, California, c 1940

    Yosemite was key to Adams’ development as a photographer and a place for which he felt a great affinity. “It’s where he first took up the camera in 1916. He had been given a Brownie [camera] for a vacation trip when he was just a teenager. He’s one of those young people who really found himself through photography,” says Haas.

    The valley was a place he photographed many times and although this particular image may not be as famous as Clearing Winter Storm, it actually takes in the same view, only with the magnificent mountains obscured by mist, revealing Adams’ appreciation of the natural world in all its infinite varieties.

    (Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

    (Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

    4. The Tetons and Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 1942

    “This is one of his most critically acclaimed works, exemplifying Adams’ ability to capture the rich nuance of the environment around him,” Mackay says.

    The photo was taken as part of the national parks project, instigated by the Department of the Interior. The department was forced to withdraw funding when the US entered World War Two, but Adams, inspired both by the beauty of the parks and a desire to spread awareness of the need to protect them, successfully applied for two Guggenheim Foundation grants in 1946 and 1948, which enabled him to continue photographing the national parks across the country.

    (Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

    (Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

    5. Denali and Wonder Lake, Denali National Park and Preserve, 1948

    Thanks to one of the Guggenheim grants Adams was able to spend a week in Alaska in July 1948. However, the conditions were challenging to say the least. There were only two days without rain and his camera was constantly filled with mosquitos.

    He managed to capture the one, truly striking image of that trip at around 1.30am when the Sun, which had only set two hours earlier, was already starting to rise. “Nothing comes above the mountain because it’s the highest peak in the US,” explains Haas. The snowy expanse of the mountain is lit while everything else remains in shadow. “This is one of his Mona Lisas for certain,” she says.

    (Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

    (Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

    6. Burned Trees, Owens Valley, California, c 1936

    “The national parks are the pictures that everyone wants to see, but I actually think the most compelling environmental messaging can be found in the images around places like Owens Valley,” says Haas.

    While the parks were, and are, protected spaces, Owens Valley had been stripped of much of its natural resources. It had been a centre for silver, lead and zinc mining and the water had been sucked away to serve urban spaces.

    “It’s a devastated landscape but he’s finding the beauty in it. He’s very much wanting to call attention to this space,” says Haas.

    (Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

    (Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

    7. Grass and Burned Stump, Sierra Nevada, California, 1935

    Grass and Burned Stump is an image that has taken on a meaning that Adams, who would have been used to controlled burns, probably didn’t have in mind at the time. “Today when we look at that picture it has an environmentalist bent, but I think when Adams took that picture what he was compelled by was the aesthetic and physical qualities of the tree trump itself,” says Mackay.

    (Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

    (Credit: The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

    8. Cemetery Statue and Oil Derricks, Long Beach, California, 1939

    Twenty-first Century viewers looking at Adams’ striking photograph of a cemetery figure in a mourning pose in front of a sea of oil derricks are undoubtedly going to view it as a comment on the negative impact of oil drilling. Again that may not have been Adams’ original intention, but that certainly does not diminish the contemporary power of the image.

    “What I love about that photo is the way that images are reborn or reinterpreted over time and I think that’s a really important element of Ansel Adams’ photographs when we look at them today,” says Mackay.

    Ansel Adams in Our Times is at the de Young Museum, San Francisco until 23 July.

    If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

    And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

    ;

    [ad_2]

    Source link