Tag: story

Street Fighter II: The 1991 video game that packs a punch

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“SFII stood out visually with huge characters and beautiful animations, but what really grabbed me was the crowd around the machine,” says Killian. “Competing against a live opponent, in front of strangers, to see who kept their quarter, and who went to the back of the line? The experience was intoxicating.”

Like a Hurricane charts the creative storm that inspired SFII, as well as industry battles (particularly involving Capcom and rival company SNK), cultural contrasts, pre-internet communication glitches between Capcom’s Japan and US offices, and what sound like toxic working environments (gruelling hours; alleged bullying “banter”). The game’s predecessor, Street Fighter (1987), had limited reach but bold ambitions, which set the stage for SFII’s ground-breaking incarnation.

“If you pit a boxer, for example, against a kickboxer or someone who knows bojutso… you get all these very interesting combinations,” says SF director Takashi Nishiyama, who conceived the first game with planner Hiroshi Matsumoto. “So Matsumoto and I ended up coming up with these ideas together, to give the game deeper story and character elements.”

Character-driven fighting

For SFII, Capcom’s team had shifted (with Nishiyama and Matsumoto departing for SNK), but the game’s characters and range were enriched by the vivid artwork of Akira Yasuda, and a six-button/joystick control design that (perhaps accidentally) allowed players to deliver swift combo attacks. Shimomura’s poppy melodies and effects – including the cries that heralded different characters’ special moves (“Hadouken!”; “Shoryuken!”; “Yoga fire!”; “Sonic boom!”) – also heightened the sense of personality. You grew familiar with these characters, and genuinely rooted for your favourites; SFII established a kind of rapport that arguably hadn’t existed in gaming before.

“It’s rare that a game makes such big strides forward in so many different ways,” says Leone. “And it all fit together so well — you could look at how Capcom loosened up the control input requirements, which blended well with the game’s animation and made players feel like they were more in control, which fed perfectly into the game’s competitive elements, which fed perfectly into how arcade games made money.”

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February 28, 2023
The original and most iconic male model

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Speaking to BBC Culture, Jason Arkles, a Florence-based sculptor, teacher and art historian, and host of the podcast The Sculptor’s Funeral, is clearly in the second camp. “There is no sexual aspect apart from his genitals are showing,” he says. “Art is nothing without context. If you don’t understand why a sculpture was made then you’re missing most of the story.” Works of art at the time were always commissioned, he stresses. “They’re not just objects of beauty or vehicles of self-expression.”

Much has been made of the sensuous feathers running up David’s inner thigh, but Arkles’s explanation, as a sculptor, is far more pragmatic: “Donatello was building an armature, the likes of which he hadn’t seen. It was bigger and had to be completely hidden within the figure itself.” The wing running up the leg simply strengthens the weakest part of the sculpture. That any artist would risk their livelihood by expressing deeply personal thoughts in a commission is highly unlikely, says Arkles. Donatello was probably just “getting over a couple of technical hurdles”, he says, “rather than deciding, with this one statue out of his entire career, to fly his flag.”

Line of beauty

Sixty years later, Michelangelo would support his nude David in a similar place by sculpting a tree stump behind one leg in an otherwise empty tableau. Goliath has disappeared from the artwork and the boy hero, gathering his courage to do battle, commands all our attention. Where Donatello’s life-sized bronze raised eyebrows, Michelangelo’s super-sized David (1501-4), the most famous David of all, also elicited strong reactions when the marble sculpture took up a prominent position in Florence’s main square.

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February 27, 2023
11 of the best TV shows to watch this March

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3. History of the World, Part II

Four decades after his film History of the World, Part I, Mel Brooks, now 96, returns as writer and narrator with a series of short sketches that offer the same loopy, inaccurate depictions of high points in history. Nick Kroll, Wanda Sykes and Ike Barinholtz all do double duty as actors and writers, along with a sprawling, generation-spanning cast including Jack Black, Danny DeVito, Zazie Beetz and Quinta Brunson. Hulu has insisted on secrecy about some of the historical figures, but there’s plenty to see in the trailer, including Taika Waititi as Sigmund, making a Freudian slip, Seth Rogen as Noah, of Ark fame, and Sykes, whose character confronts Civil War soldiers who think they recognise her. “Harriet Tubman. Inventor of the bathtub?” Brooks’ brand of silliness never gets old.

History of the World Part II premieres on 6 March on Hulu in the US

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February 26, 2023
The 10 most iconic jewels through history

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The Napoleon diamond necklace

The historic Napoleon diamond necklace was gifted in 1811 by the French emperor to his second wife, Marie-Louise, upon the birth of their son, Napoleon II, the Emperor of Rome. The stunning silver and gold design was conceived by Etienne Nitôt and Sons of Paris and, according to the Smithsonian, originally featured 234 diamonds: 28 old mine-cut diamonds, nine pendeloques and 10 briolettes, enhanced by multiple smaller gems. “All of the stones were mined in India or Brazil, where the best diamonds came from at this point,” says Hiscox of the necklace’s mesmeric appeal. “They have this extraordinary limpid, water-like quality.”

Upon Napoleon’s downfall, his Hapsburg wife and her many jewels returned to her native Vienna, and following her death, the necklace passed to her sister-in-law Sophie of Austria. The archduchess resolved to shorten it by removing two stones and turning them into earrings, the whereabouts of which are currently unknown. The necklace, meanwhile, remained in the family until 1948, when it was sold first to a French collector, and eventually to the US businesswoman Marjorie Merriweather Post, who gave it to the Smithsonian in 1962. There, it continues to be revered, says Hiscox, as “one of the most spectacular pieces of [its] period”.

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February 24, 2023
11 of the best films to watch in March

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(Image credit: Lionsgate)

Including Dungeons & Dragons, Creed III and the latest John Wick starring Keanu Reeves – Nicholas Barber lists this month’s unmissable releases.

(Credit: Paramount Pictures)

1. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

Dungeons & Dragons, the hugely influential role-playing game, was made into a film in 2000, but that was Dingy & Dragging. Now comes another attempt to turn the game into a swashbuckling fantasy blockbuster, this time starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez and Regé-Jean Page as its luckless heroes, and Hugh Grant as its sneering villain. As that casting might suggest, the film’s comic tone is a long way from the doom and gloom of The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones: its directors, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, are best known for a beloved comedy, Game Night. “They’re really funny guys,” Pine said to Tamera Jones at Collider. “They have a history of making really great comedy. And their idea for how they wanted to tell the story was exactly what I like about big-budget filmmaking, which is not too cool for school. There’s an earnest, real heart to it with a really sweet message.”

On general release from 31 March

2. Luther: The Fallen Sun

Now that Idris Elba is 50, his fans might have to give up on their dream that he will eventually be cast as James Bond. But they can console themselves with Luther: The Fallen Sun, a Netflix spin-off of the long-running BBC series. Since we last saw John Luther, the disgraced police detective has been in prison, but he breaks out to track down a wealthy serial killer played by Andy Serkis. Can John catch the maniac before another police detective (Cynthia Erivo) catches John? The series’ creator, Neil Cross, promises to answer that question with more locations and elaborate action sequences than the TV series ever had. He told Morgan Jeffery in the Radio Times: “What we’ve been able to do [with the movie] – having delivered every episode of Luther on budgets which are comically small – is to have a wider canvas and a bigger budget to tell the kind of stories that we we’ve always wanted to be able to tell. And we’ve really been given the opportunity – while staying entirely true to Luther.”

Released on 10 March on Netflix

3. Shazam! Fury of the Gods

The brightest and funniest of DC’s superhero blockbusters gets a sequel from the same director, David F Sandberg. Asher Angel is back as Billy Batson, a schoolboy who can turn into a Superman-like demigod, played by Zachary Levi. And now his foster siblings can turn into superheroes, too. “It’s sort of an extension of the first movie,” Sandberg told Devan Coggan at Entertainment Weekly. “He finally found a family in that movie. But now, we see him struggling a bit now that they’re growing up… He doesn’t want everyone to just scatter and go do their own thing.” Billy also has to deal with the fury of the gods – or rather goddesses. Helen Mirren, Lucy Liu and Rachel Zegler play the vengeful Daughters of Atlas, so if you’ve ever wanted to see Dame Helen flying into battle alongside minotaurs, harpies and unicorns, now’s your chance.

On general release from 17 March

4. John Wick: Chapter 4

Keanu Reeves puts his black suit on for a fourth time to play John Wick, a retired hitman who is drawn back into a shadowy assassins’ guild. Since the release of the first film in 2014, the stories have grown more complicated, and the series’ mythology has grown more elaborate. Is John Wick becoming a globe-trotting action franchise to rival James Bond and Mission: Impossible? The new film is two hours and 49 minutes long, with a supporting cast that includes Donnie Yen and Bill Skarsgard, and a plot that takes Wick around the world. “We had an amazing location diversity… from Sacré Coeur, to Arc de Triomphe, to the Louvre, to the Eiffel Tower,” Chad Stahelski, the director, told Vinnie Mancuso at Collider. “I mean we were in Aqaba, Jordan for our opening sequence. Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Osaka. We got around on this one.”

On general release from 22 March

(Credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)

5. Creed III

In the third film in the post-Rocky boxing series, Adonis “Donnie” Creed gets in the ring with an estranged old friend played by the formidable Jonathan Majors, who was the best thing about the recent Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. This is the first Creed film to be directed by its star, Michael B Jordan – but the biggest change is that the franchise’s creator, Sylvester Stallone, won’t appear as Rocky Balboa, having fallen out with its producer, Irwin Winkler. “We wouldn’t have Donnie without Rocky, and he will always be a pillar in Donnie’s life,” Jordan told Matt Maytum at Total Film, “but Creed III is really the dawn of a new era for the franchise and the character. It was really important from a storytelling perspective to get to a pivotal point in Donnie’s career a few years down the line where he has really established himself with his professional career and his family.”

On general release from 3 March

6. Infinity Pool

The latest body-horror chiller from Brandon “son of David” Cronenberg stars Alexander Skarsgård as an author who kills someone in a car crash while he’s on holiday in a tropical resort. The local government sentences him to death – unless, that is, he pays to create a cloned duplicate who will be executed in his place. Last year’s Glass Onion, The Menu and Triangle of Sadness had the super-rich getting their comeuppance in island getaways, but Cronenberg’s film, says Kristy Puchko at Mashable, is darker and more twisted than any of them. “Infinity Pool will make you squirm, but without the release of a climactic punchline. Instead, this satire of wealth and privilege will leave you stranded in its putrid muck, but perhaps smiling at the sheer gall of its horror.”

Released on 24 March in the UK, Norway and Sweden

7. 65

Bryan Woods and Scott Beck wrote the screenplay for A Quiet Place, so they’re past masters at nifty man-vs-monster survival thrillers. Their new film, which they directed as well as scripted, stars Adam Driver as an astronaut who crashlands on what seems at first to be a distant planet, but turns out to be Earth, 65 million years ago. He and the crash’s only other survivor (Ariana Greenblatt) have to trek through the primeval wilderness, but various hungry dinosaurs soon pick up their scent. Jurassic Park meets Predator, then? Or is 65 more original than that? “In the last 10 years, the theatrical landscape has become this place where almost every other movie is a sequel, remake or reboot,” Woods told Chris St Lawrence at Discussing Film. “But the hope for this movie is that there’s an air of mystery about it. And hopefully it’s a little different than people are getting when they show up to the movies more often than not.”

On general release from 10 March

8. Money Shot: The Pornhub Story

Pornhub was recently ranked as the 12th most visited website in the world. Since its launch in 2007, it has become synonymous with pornography on the internet, and with “user-generated” pornography in particular. But there have been numerous reports of videos of child abuse and other forms of nonconsensual sex on the site. A new documentary from Alex Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions explores Pornhub’s complicated history. Money Shot “requires us to grapple with what sexuality and consent means when billion-dollar internet platforms thrive on user-generated content,” says its director, Suzanne Hillinger. “Who has, and who should have, the power in these environments? Our hope is that this film generates important conversations about sex and consent, both on the internet and out in the world.”

Released on 15 March on Netflix

9. Inside

Vasilis Katsoupis’s provocative debut feature stars Willem Dafoe as Nemo, an art thief who is robbing a luxury New York penthouse. When he trips the high-tech alarm system, he expects security guards to come running. But something worse happens: security guards don’t come running, and nor does anyone else. Instead, the faulty system locks Nemo in the apartment with no running water, and no way of communicating with the outside world. And the owner isn’t due to return for weeks or even months. What good are all the apartment’s priceless paintings and sculptures to Nemo now? “This would be a great role for any actor,” says Pete Hammond at Deadline, “but Dafoe seems right on so many levels [in] … a psychological thriller about survival, an art film all about art and its meaning in our lives.”

Released on 15 March in Belgium and 17 March in the US

(Credit: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)

10. A Good Person

Almost 20 years on from Garden State, Zach Braff’s debut as a writer-director, the former Scrubs star has made A Good Person, another indie comedy drama inspired by his own life and his own hometown in New Jersey. “I think both A Good Person and Garden State are authentically me in different times of my life,” he told Nadia Khomami in The Guardian. Florence Pugh (Braff’s ex-girlfriend) plays Allison, a successful and happily engaged young woman. But after she is in a car accident that kills her prospective sister-in-law, she plunges into alcoholism and substance abuse. Could her salvation be her friendship with Daniel (Morgan Freeman), a widowed Vietnam veteran who would have been her father-in-law? “I wanted to write about grief and how people stand up after grief,” said Braff. “I wanted to write something that would feel universal, so it wasn’t necessarily about a horrific car accident, but rather about the audience’s personal low point in their own lives.”

Released on 24 March in the UK, Ireland, the US and Canada

11. Close

Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav De Waele) are as close as brothers, if not closer. They spend every moment together in idyllic rural Belgium, and can’t imagine life being any different. But at the age of 13, the boys enroll in a new school where their casual intimacy prompts questions and rumours that could push them apart. This sensitive peer-pressure drama from Lukas Dhont (Girl) is a “beautiful elegy of lost innocence,” says Phil de Semlyen in Time Out. “Delicately tracing the emotionally deadening but invisible frameworks of conformity that are imposed on young people in their most formative years, it’s a quiet tragedy that’s rendered close to uplifting by its gentle grace and compassion.”

Released on 3 March in the UK, Ireland, Finland and Taiwan, and on 17 March in Sweden

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February 23, 2023
Cocaine Bear review: A B-movie about a drug-crazed bear

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As these characters wander around the park, they are almost funny enough to keep us interested, but their scenes still seem weirdly sluggish and redundant, because they don’t have much to do with the one character we want to know more about: the bear. Given the premise, the film could have made some provocative points about the environment, or cruelty to animals, or America’s war on drugs. Alternatively, it could have made no points whatsoever, and just been a helter-skelter, blood-and-guts exploitation movie in which a bunch of manic misfits are chomped to pieces. But what we actually get is strangely timid for a film called Cocaine Bear. Ironically, it doesn’t have much bite. Rather than focusing on being outrageous and entertaining, Banks and Warden focus on sappy musings about the importance of being a caring parent and a loyal friend. But if you pay to see a B-movie about a furry giant with a taste for class-A narcotics, why would you want to hear those?

It might be best to watch Cocaine Bear at home, where you can skip past the rambling sections and go straight to the laughs and screams. In the cinema, most viewers will wish that it was wittier, faster, and more willing to fulfil the gonzo potential of its in-your-face title. It’s definitely better than Banks’s last film, Charlie’s Angels, but you can’t help feeling that she has done the bear minimum.

★★☆☆☆

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February 23, 2023
Nigeria’s anthem of defiance

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How Fela Kuti’s Beasts of No Nation lives on

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February 22, 2023
What’s Love Got to Do With It? and arranged marriage on film

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“One of the greatest concepts I learnt from my time in Pakistan is the concept of Neeyat – of intention or things being judged on intention,” says Khan. “I think most people that know me, especially those from Pakistan, know that my intentions are good and that I have an enormous affection for the country.”

There is a self-aware joke in the film when Zoe’s documentary gets cancelled because, in the words of her producers, “diverse subject, white lens”. However, in the case of What’s Love Got To Do With It?, while it is written by Khan, the person behind the lens is respected filmmaker Shekhar Kapur, who was born in Lahore, where the Pakistan scenes are set. Known for his lavish period dramas Elizabeth and its sequel, both starring Cate Blanchett, this is his first contemporary film set in the West. But it is the Lahore scenes that stand out: it is definitely one of the most beautiful portrayals of the city I’ve seen on the big screen, with rich, glossy and vibrant colours. The wedding scenes have dreamy aesthetics and fantastic dance sequences. Rom-coms aren’t often this visually stunning.

Kapur was “mindful about keeping it real,” he tells BBC Culture – as evidenced visually by the lack of clichéd, exoticising filters. “Obviously, every film has its own colour palette. But use a yellow filter? I’ve never done that. This is a film about real human beings. Any kind of yellow colour here, and suddenly that’s saying we’re in this distant land that we don’t understand. That’s not true. The people are the same… with the same ideas, the same ambitions, the same problems, the same inefficiencies. And so, for me to use a filter for Lahore would be like saying we’re talking about alien people. This isn’t a film about aliens. This is a film about people.”

So, in the end, what does love have to do with arranged marriages? According to Dr Tahir, if you only look at it from the perspective of romantic love, perhaps not much at first. But there is more than one kind of love. “My argument is that in an arranged marriage there are four types of love. One is the love the parent has for their child, then the love between friends, the love between siblings and the sensual love between individuals – which all come together in the course of the marriage.” These are all themes that the film explores.

By the same token, “the rom-com mythologised version of love… this idea that it can cure you and fix you and answer all your problems is quite problematic,” says Khan, “because it means our expectations are wildly unrealistic. And that’s a new thing. Love didn’t use to mean that.”

To the surprise of no one, Kaz and Zoe do wind up together – but only after Maymouna makes clear she is in love with someone else. Khan says it was important that it was Sajal’s character that rejects Shazad’s and not the other way around in order to counteract the problematic portrayals of brown women as somehow less desirable.

The search for love can often be a struggle, and there isn’t any guarantee of success no matter what route one opts to take. What’s Love Got to Do with It? doesn’t weigh in one way or the other about which version of marriage is better. All it asks is that audiences leave their preconceived notions at the door.

What’s Love Got To Do With It? is released in UK cinemas on 24 February and will be released in the US at a later date.

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February 20, 2023
Will All Quiet on the Western Front win best picture Oscar?

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Some of the nominations for best picture at this year’s Oscars were easy to predict. The Fabelmans is the venerable Steven Spielberg’s love letter to cinema, for instance, so that was a dead cert. Top Gun: Maverick was a commercial and critical smash, so that was always a shoo-in, too. But one film on the shortlist took pundits by surprise: All Quiet on the Western Front. Adapted from the classic World War One novel by Erich Maria Remarque, it was given a mere scattering of cinema showings before streaming on Netflix; it starred an Austrian actor, Felix Kammerer, who had never been in a film before; and its director, Edward Berger, had done most of his work in television. It was also German – and no previous German film had ever been in the running for best picture. Plenty of critics expected All Quiet on the Western Front to turn up on the best international feature list, but not only did it get a best picture nomination, it appeared in eight other categories, too. And then it won the best film award at the Baftas, and an initially overlooked film became a hot favourite. It was the biggest Oscar shock since Will Smith slapped Chris Rock in 2022.

Still, perhaps that’s an outdated way of looking at it. The Oscars, and the film industry in general, have changed recently in all sorts of radical ways. And if you put those ways together, then suddenly Berger’s epic war drama seems like the most logical best picture choice of all.

More like this:

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One significant reform came in 2009, when the Academy announced that the number of films in the best picture category was being increased from five to 10. In theory, this would allow such blockbusters as The Dark Knight and Wall-E to be nominated for the top prize, as both had been snubbed earlier that year. In practice, blockbusters still don’t have much luck: Black Panther and Joker are the only superhero movies to have been shortlisted since 2009. But the new rule has led to more unusual films appearing in the best picture line-up – and more films that aren’t in English, too.

Up until 2018, only nine such films had ever made it into the category: a rough average of one every decade. But ever since Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma was nominated for 2019’s top Oscar, there has been one non-English-language contender every year – and a Korean film, Parasite, won best picture in 2020. “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films,” said the film’s director, Bong Joon-ho, when he collected his statuette.

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February 20, 2023
Five hidden symbols in Vermeer’s paintings

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5. The glass sphere in The Allegory of Faith (1670-74)

Vermeer’s religious faith is expressed most forcefully in his late allegorical painting The Allegory of Faith. The main character is a personification of Catholicism, and her appearance and gestures are taken once again from Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, this time from a figure denoting of “Faith”.

But the glass orb above her head is not in Ripa’s book, and it took scholars decades to work out what it meant. In 1975, the art historian Eddy de Jongh discovered the emblem – represented exactly as it does in Allegory of Faith suspended by a ribbon – in a book titled Holy Emblems of Faith, Hope and Charity by the Flemish Jesuit Willem Hesius. It was accompanied by a motto: “It captures what it cannot hold”.

A short verse in the book explains that the orb is like the human mind. In its panoramic reflections, “the vast universe can be shown in something small” – and likewise “if it believes in God, nothing can be larger than that mind”. The orb symbolises the mind’s interaction with God.

It might be added that all of Vermeer’s paintings are also like the orb, capturing passing events and ideas on their flat surfaces and sealing them for posterity. For all the paintings’ exceptional skill at capturing reality, Vermeer only enjoyed very modest success while he was alive. He created about two paintings a year, and the small amount of money he could earn from it meant that he couldn’t make a living by painting alone.

Perhaps his art appeals even more to us in the frenetic 21st Century because it offers a unique sense of calm. In Vermeer’s scenes, time appears to freeze in the crystalline sunlight and silence descends like a dead weight. But a vivacious world of symbols pulses beneath the surface: perennially relevant ideas about art, desire, materialism and spirituality, captured by Vermeer and lying in wait of discovery.

Vermeer is at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam until 4 June 2023.

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February 19, 2023
The iconic outfits that cause outrage

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Certain items came in for specific criticism. Take the nameplate necklace now so synonymous with Bradshaw that to many it is known simply as the “Carrie necklace”. It was something, Field says in her book, that she spotted on the young Hispanic and African-American customers who came to her shop. When asked, she is straightforward in her take: “Yes, I appropriated the name necklace from the multitude of young, gorgeous girls who were my customers in my shop,” she tells BBC Culture. “The name necklace always caught my eye, but I have always given the credit to them. At the time, I thought ‘Let me show this to Sarah Jessica!’ Happily she liked it.”

But, says Jermyn, “the series itself is consumed in a way [in which] that gets lost,” says Jermyn, “and clearly that’s really problematic”. The show was criticised for its whiteness, its characters criticised for their racist behaviour, and the costumes cannot be untangled from that.

There are privileges inherent in these outfits. “I think it’s important to think about class and ‘appropriate bodies’ as well as whiteness,” says Jermyn. “If a working-class woman or woman of colour or a large-bodied woman dresses in a comparable way that is perceived to be ‘loud’ or ‘over-accessorised’, that would be received very differently from the kind of pushback that somebody like Lily Collins or Sarah Jessica Parker gets.” She continues: “You can think about the kind of things to celebrate around refusing to fit in a box but you still have to ask the question who gets to be able to make that refusal.”

If the clothes are inextricable from the characters, then so is the anger they elicit. From Carrie to Lily Collins’s Emily, the characters that Field dresses aren’t always the most popular. Emily is a peppy young American in Paris, a 20-something marketing executive who eats, sleeps and breathes social media. Her clothes speak to that. Take the day she showed up to her new job in France, without speaking a word of French but wearing a tourist-chic blouse with a picture of the Eiffel Tower on it. Field, who co-designed season one with French colleague Marylin Fitoussi, and stayed on as costume consultant for season two,paired it with Christian Louboutin boots with “Paris” emblazoned across them and a satchel handbag that, Field writes, is “often associated with French women”.

“The ensemble,” she continues, “was consciously trying too hard, just like Emily. Her outfit for her first day of work was an unequivocal, if not slightly misguided, love letter to France’s capital.” Her penchant for literal dressing, from the berets to the Mona Lisa tote, fits perfectly with her pep.

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February 17, 2023
How Magic Mike transformed the image of male stripping

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Natazca Boon, who plays the female MC that guides the London show, tells me this feeling is completely designed from inception: “For Channing it was very important that his creative team was very heavily female; that would guide him to create this universe that feels good to watch.” Magic Mike’s choreographer and the show’s co-director is Alison Faulk, a long-term collaborator of Tatum’s. Nothing can quite prepare you for what’s going to happen at a Magic Mike show. The stage incarnation is an extraordinary choreography of bodies, acrobatics, lights and screams. It’s impossible to take everything in one go. In a regular show, there’s the stage and the audience. In Magic Mike Live, there’s the stage, ladder, balconies, plexiglass, bridges, acrobatics, water and an aerial number. The audience can take pictures and video of everything and anything, unusual for a West End show. Boon’s warm, constant interaction with the audience ushers things along and provides cues for the dancers, who, at certain key points, jump off the stage and into the audience, selecting women to dance with (or on) before moving on to the next. “The word ‘strip’ never gets spoken in the whole show,” Boon points out. The only, unspoken, rule is that only women wearing trousers can be taken on stage – and that’s only to save anyone any embarrassment when they’re being lifted up and delicately thrown around by the dancers. The Prosecco flows. The delighted shrieks are deafening. The day after seeing Magic Mike Live on the West End, I find a bright red unicorn dollar stuck inside my pocket; it’s the fake money given to attendees to throw at the performers.

As for the dancers, they are, first and foremost, expert performers but have also been selected to fit a sexy-but-sensitive mould. As Jack Manley, one of the original London dancers, tells BBC Culture, after much cajoling from his friends (“How much do you have to love yourself to go to a Magic Mike audition?”, he jokes), he initially replied to an Instagram ad that was looking for “sexy appealing males” who “love their mum”, which lead to multiple auditions culminating in an in-depth interview. Joel Ekperigin, who originally started in the Berlin show before joining the London one, recalls the audition process as unlike anything he’d ever experienced. There were dancers from all over the world, who were “confident within themselves and with a bit of grace to them,” he says.

Now, with Magic Mike’s Last Dance, the franchise has folded in on itself. “Before the third film was even a thought, Channing once described the live show as “the third movie”, Manley says – while the actual third and supposedly final movie functions as a kind of prequel to Magic Mike Live. When we meet Tatum’s Mike again, he’s pushing 40 and his custom furniture business has, like many others, been decimated by the pandemic. A chance encounter with uber-rich Maxandra Mendoza (Salma Hayek Pinault) turns into a $6,000 lap-dance-cum-sex-scene. The power dynamic is quickly established: Mike gets undressed, Maxandra keeps her jumpsuit on. He has the moves, but she has the money and, so, the power. She whisks him off to London and gifts him the opportunity to put on a live show that would channel and share the feeling she had when he danced for her.

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February 16, 2023
The gory new Winnie the Pooh horror causing a storm

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After only five months of Winnie The Pooh’s lapse into the public domain, a man had both made an entire horror film from the character, and begun that film’s release strategy. That man is UK filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield, who until recently worked for an electricity supplier while making micro-budget horror films on the side. Now, on the back of his directorial debut, Waterfield is responsible for what may turn to be one of this year’s most profitable film releases. Originally intended as a streaming release with a single-day theatrical showing in the US, now, on the back of its poster and trailer’s unexpected online virality, the film is being rolled out in cinemas across the world. In Mexico, where the film received its global premiere on 29 January, the film went to number 4 at the box office in its first week, taking in a reported $700,000. (Waterfield hasn’t disclosed the film’s specific budget, though indicated in a recent interview with Variety that it was made on less than $100,000). Those are good omens for this week’s release in the US, where it is screening in more than 1,500 theatres.

The genesis of a bizarre idea

Alongside Scott Jeffrey, a frequent collaborator as well as the film’s producer, Waterfield had been “trying to come up with ideas that hadn’t been done before”, something “extremely different and strange”, he tells BBC Culture. “What fairytales and monsters are there that we can twist in a different direction? Or change something that was never a monster into a monster? That sounded really interesting and cool.”.

As soon as Waterfield realised that Pooh had lapsed into the public domain in the US, he began racking his brain for ideas.

Waterfield had also noticed a surfeit of over-serious horror films in the current landscape; elevated horror, like The Babadook or Men which deployed “metaphors” as their bogeymen – films that, as The Guardian’s AA Dowd wrote last year, “strive, loudly and unsubtly, to be about something scarier than a sharp knife or sharp fangs, something real and important”. Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, on the other hand, strives to be nothing but a slasher film starring Winnie The Pooh and a couple of friends. The film, which is reliant on well-trodden slasher tropes throughout (think: an invincible villain on an unbending vendetta; attractive women in bikinis coming to an unfortunate end) won’t exactly move the genre forward, though it’s good, simple, bloody fun all the same.

Waterfield’s first issue: how to make Winnie The Pooh scary? “Then, I very quickly got the idea that the film’s main theme would be abandonment,” Waterfield says. Blood and Honey opens with a now-adult Christopher Robin returning to the Hundred Acre Wood, many years after departing it for college. There, he finds his once domesticated friends Winnie the Pooh and Piglet turned feral; scavenging for flesh, blood and drool hanging from their muzzles, ready to go on a killing spree, and ultimately wreak revenge upon Robin for abandoning them all those years ago.

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February 15, 2023
Alice Neel: Striking images of America’s ignored

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The painting took around three sittings to complete and Neel being Neel, there was much conversation. “She was very interested in what I was doing, which was bridging art and porn,” says Sprinkle. “I was of course thrilled that this 80-something woman was fearlessly painting me, joyfully painting me, because in ’82 we were a small fringe group, and very much prejudiced against,” Sprinkle tells BBC Culture. “I think she really captured me in a non-judgmental and beautiful way, but also with depth and complexity.”

Sprinkle’s portrait closes the show. Opening it is Neel’s glorious nude self-portrait, completed when she was 80. “All my life I wanted to do a nude self-portrait, but I put it off till now – when people would accuse me of insanity rather than vanity,” she quipped.

In between are portraits that thrum with life, vitality and Neel’s particular insight, born of her own journey to the edge. “I think many of the most interesting artists have had some extreme life experiences that allow them to paint very expansively because they paint from a place in which they have experienced altered states of mind and body and that can make for a very rich art practice,” says Nairne.

“To have that kind of nerviness to your work can be connected to a capacity to give a painting the feel of life force. You need a kind of extra bodily sensitivity and I think she was somebody who had that.”

Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle is at the Barbican Art Gallery from 16 February to 21 May 2023.

The accompanying book Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle, edited by Eleanor Nairne, with essays by Eleanor Nairne, Hilton Als and poetry by Daisy Lafarge, is published by Prestel, March 2023.

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February 14, 2023
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania: The worst Marvel film yet

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It’s a rule of superhero movies that they must culminate in an overlong action sequence, with bodies and weapons crashing around everywhere. Now imagine if that sequence were the whole movie, but with unsuspenseful, drab-looking action. There you have Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, the latest and possibly lamest instalment in the usually reliable Marvel Cinematic Universe. The heart of Ant-Man (2015) and Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) was Paul Rudd as everyman Scott Lang, who puts on his special suit and shrinks into the minuscule Ant-Man – or as I like to think of him, The Littlest Avenger. This third film throws all that away. The character is no more than a prop in a plot that sets up the next big Marvel villain, and does it without a jolt of energy.

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Scott is now in a relationship with Hope van Dyne, his partner in world-saving as The Wasp. Evangeline Lilly once more makes Hope surprisingly bland. You’d think a woman who can shrink and fly would have a little more charisma. Scott and his daughter, Cassie (Kathryn Newton), have become part of Hope’s family, which includes her genius parents, Hank Pym, (Michael Douglas) and Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), who at the end of Ant-Man and The Wasp was rescued after 30 years in the Quantum Realm, the subatomic place where the rules of time and space don’t apply.

Cassie, who was eight in the last Ant-Man film five years ago (when she was played by Abby Ryder Fortson), is now 18, so she is obviously ageing in movie-sequel years, which like the Quantum Realm itself treats time as something optional. She is a budding scientist, inspired by the man she calls Grandpa Hank, but when an invention goes wrong, they all end up in the Quantum Realm for the duration of the film. It is a place that borrows from Star Wars with a splash of Dune. There is sandy, rocky terrain. There are sections that look underwater, and plants that resemble translucent mushrooms. There are blobby creatures without faces. But the palette is a murky brown and blue, and the effect is like watching an entire film shot in a dark tunnel. Marvel has created the vibrant, majestic worlds of Thor‘s Asgard and Black Panther‘s Wakanda. It’s hard to imagine what went so wrong here.

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February 14, 2023
Your Place or Mine: Is the rom-com truly back?

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Annie Lord, dating columnist at British Vogue and author of break-up memoir Notes On Heartbreak, thinks this might be the case. “I just really want someone to run to me and tell me everything they love about me, to lay it all out there like Harry did,” she says, recalling her love for When Harry Met Sally. “I used to fantasise about that all the time, to the point where I would be disappointed if it never happened to me.” To Lord, some of the moments that stick out most from her favourite rom-coms seem outdated today, like a man defending a woman’s honour, and whisking her off her feet. “I know in my head that, as a woman, I can do that for myself. But watching those older rom-coms there’s a fantasy in not having to be self-sufficient, even though I know I can be,” she says. “They take us back to a simpler time. Everything is just so stressful right now. The planet is burning, the economy is terrible, so there’s an escapism there.” Now that we’re able to better identify outdated storylines and norms in rom-coms, there is a knowing irony which allows us to still enjoy them, with a pinch of salt.

This ironic nostalgia is also driving the wave of new rom-coms, many of which are trying to recreate the magic of old-school classics by openly borrowing their language and clichés. Now, audiences are much wiser to the narrative structure of rom-coms and aren’t always watching them for a realistic portrayal of romance, or exemplary gender politics. “We’re in an era now where people are more unapologetic about enjoying the genre and fans are familiar with most of its tropes,” Meslow says. “They know what they’re signing up for – and they enjoy it.” Some rom-coms are becoming more self-analytical and self-aware too. Billy Eichner’s 2022 rom-com Bros made constant references to rom-com tropes, Hallmark movies and the film’s own place within that canon. And we can see this as far back as 2011’s Friends with Benefits, starring Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher, where a running joke between the characters was the pair trying to avoid becoming a rom-com cliché, before succumbing to the inevitable.

The future of rom-coms

It feels like the audience for rom-coms has now expanded. “For a long time, people thought rom-coms were for women and gay men,” Betancourt says. “I definitely think that the audience has evolved and now includes more people.” This is partly down to streaming making it easier and cheaper to watch a wider variety of films. But even in the so-called rom-com slump, there were films that challenged the genre’s traditional formula. Bridesmaids (2011) was a film that featured a romantic plotline, but primarily revolved around friendship. Bad Teacher (2011) followed a purposefully villainous protagonist who openly scammed school children, but who we ended up rooting for. It’s Complicated (2010) followed an older couple who rekindled their relationship. And from Wedding Crashers (2005) to Knocked Up (2007) and Along Came Polly (2004), there are no shortage of old-school rom-coms that explored romance through a heterosexual male lens.

Now, though, we’re seeing a much greater diversity of characters and viewpoints. “You can’t write a history of the genre without acknowledging that it has been disproportionately white, rich, thin and straight,” Meslow says. “It’s also skewed towards fairly conservative relationship norms, but that is where streaming platforms can also take some credit now, because they tend to take more chances.” The new wave of rom-coms have the opportunity to expand the plotlines we’re accustomed to seeing in glossy mainstream films. In fact, one of the main criticisms of Eichner’s gay rom-com Bros – which, perhaps not unrelatedly, was initially released in theatres rather than streaming – was that it didn’t experiment enough. “Rather than reinvent the genre around a different set of mores, it simply replaces the ‘marriage plot’ with the ‘monogamy plot’, down to our former free-agent hero being harangued by his new beau about kids,” wrote Matt Brennan in the LA Times.

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February 13, 2023
Is Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 the coolest film ever made?

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However, Fellini’s film doesn’t simply portray the director in his moments of being the big man on set. Instead we have access to Guido’s dreams, as he is revisited by his dead parents, has visions of memories from his school days, and even imagines a fantastical harem where all of his previous love affairs and sexual conquests reside and eventually rebel against him. He is shown to be a deeply flawed, even troubled person, lacking the confidence his crisp suit suggests. But it’s a warm admission, with Fellini being refreshingly vulnerable in his openness.

In the end, the situating of a sincere, tender autobiography in such a cool, empty milieu raises questions as to what is real and what is fantasy. After all, two such differing worlds do not sit naturally together. “What I love about Fellini is that he was a liar,” Gilliam said in his original Close-Up interview, discussing in particular the portrayal of filmmaking. “He’s a constant liar. He twists and distorts the truth.” He elaborates further on this point today. “Fellini was a great liar and yet his lies were very close to the truth,” he adds, and in fact “a better truth than the facts!” His point being that filmmaking is such an absurd and surreal venture in the first place that it may as well be a strange dream.

Fellini’s world is still an illusion. As with magic, the film is a stylish sleight-of-hand, but the human reaction it inspires is very real and potent. “He took me down these passages,” Gilliam concludes “these ways of looking at the world and this is what I thought films were supposed to do, and many films just didn’t. He broke every rule there was to break. All the things you’re not supposed to do he did, and he made it all work!” Throwing away the cinematic rulebook was a radical but undeniably cool look.

But Fellini’s film ultimately shows that what matters is the beating heart beneath the modish exterior – and it is perhaps its air of fallible humanity, alongside its distinctly timeless style, that means Fellini’s film still feels cool today. If there was nothing beneath the sunglasses – Guido’s being an iconic pair of Prada SPR 07F like any good European jetsetter – then 60 years on, the film would surely ring hollow. 8 1/2 is arguably as much a portrait about simply being alive as it is about creativity. Perhaps Fellini’s final trick is portraying life as a kind of film of our own making, one we slip in and out of like a dream. And what illusion could really be cooler than that?

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February 12, 2023
Why being messy is good for you

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Oxford Dictionaries’ phrase of the year for 2022 – as overwhelmingly voted for by the public – was “‘goblin mode’: a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.” If we all got obsessed with making our homes cosy and beautiful during the pandemic, it feels like last year was the year we gave up: embracing the mess and the chaos that comes with normal life. To understand why we might be newly embracing mess, it’s useful to remember just how strong a grip the anti-clutter movement has had in recent years. There are scores of TV shows beyond Kondo’s, from the BBC series Stacey Solomon’s Sort Your Life Out to Netflix’s Get Organized with The Home Edit. And the fact that this obsession with tidying, order, calm and cleanliness has happened at the same time as visual social media apps have become dominant is surely no coincidence. Instagram, YouTube, and more recently TikTok – the video-sharing app that has spawned a thousand trends – have a lot to answer for.

TikTok has proved a perfect vehicle for sharing tidy, artfully styled, impossibly minimalist homes – and yes, of course, there’s a hashtag for that. Posts tagged #aesthetic have had more than 202 billion views, and even if you’re not on the app, you’ll probably recognise the look: beautifully arranged lifestyle shots of calm, soothing, white-and-beige homes full of clever storage solutions and hyper-neat drawers, with just a few scented candles, chic coffee tables, and suspiciously healthy pot plants to lend a (very generic) splash of personality. Think Kim Kardashian’s desaturated interiors, or a White Company catalogue, depending on your generational touchstones.

It is the interior design look favoured by another handy online type: That Girl. You know the one: the girl who gets up and journals, drinks a green juice, does sunrise yoga in co-ordinated pastel exercise gear, then sips a matcha latte with their breakfast bowl. They like clean eating and clean beauty and a clean house, and putting it all online. They are the flawless opposite to goblin mode. But the backlash to all this has now seriously got going – something that should come as no surprise given such lifestyle goals are hilariously unattainable for most people, and given how expensive, time-consuming and, well, boring they are. And not everyone finds tidying therapeutic – for some, decluttering is actually painful.

The biggest new app of last year was BeReal, which prompted users to take candid snaps wherever they were and whatever they were doing, at an unpredictable moment each day – designed to be the authentic antithesis of the highly staged content we’ve all got used to seeing.

Embracing the chaos

And while TikTok may be relentlessly fast-moving and not to be taken too seriously, it is still a handy bellwether for such vibe shifts. Organised mess has been on the rise for a while, with the arrival of the term “cluttercore”: the art of having masses of stuff in your home – often vintage trinkets, collectibles, or retro finds – and embracing colour and noise. Think messy maximalism: chaos, but lovingly displayed chaos.

Another current, supposedly mess-embracing micro-trend on TikTok is girls showing off their untidy bedside tables: but while these might look cluttered, it’s hard not to suspect they’re actually extremely curated, a collection of desirable skincare products, delicate jewellery, stacks of covetable books, more candles – not a grubby mug or snotty tissue in sight…

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February 10, 2023
Total Eclipse of the Heart: The most epic song ever written

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One day in the summer of 1982, Canadian vocalist Rory Dodd was summoned to the Power Station recording studio in New York City to lend his vocals to a song, written and produced by his colleague and friend Jim Steinman for Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler. “Jesus! Where’s the kitchen sink?” Dodd cried, when he heard the final, jaw-dropping mix of the track.

The song was Total Eclipse of the Heart. Released 40 years ago in February 1983, this gothic aria became an unprecedented international success that pushed the boundaries of melodrama in pop music. It topped the UK charts, unseating Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, was an even bigger hit in the US, and soared to number one in several countries. Tyler was an unlikely candidate for this level of chart dominance, her career having flatlined since her 1977 hit It’s a Heartache. Impressed by his work composing and producing the Meat Loaf opus Bat Out of Hell (1977), Tyler asked CBS Records for Steinman to collaborate with her on her next album. “The record company at the time thought I was mad,” she tells BBC Culture. “They never in a million years thought that this would come off.” But Steinman agreed to work with Tyler, hearing untapped potential in her voice, which he compared in its rasping power to Janis Joplin. He has described Total Eclipse of the Heart as a “fever song” about the darker, obsessive side of love and as “an exorcism you can dance to.”

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The song is considered one of history’s most iconic “power ballads”, often ranking highly in retrospective listings alongside such evergreens as Heart’s Alone, Journey’s Faithfully, and Foreigner’s I Want to Know What Love Is. It is easy to understand why: the full-length album cut is seven minutes of unfettered bombast. Dodd, who delivers the haunting “turn around” vocal parts, describes the marriage of his plaintive tenor with Tyler’s raspy howl as “Beauty and the Beast” but in reverse. “I don’t know what to do / And I’m always in the dark / We’re living in a powder keg and giving off sparks,” Tyler laments, singing about a romantic infatuation that overwhelms her to the point of collapse. After the first chorus, a maelstrom of drums and explosions take the song to apocalyptic heights. “Together we can take it to the end of the line / Your love is like a shadow on me all of the time,” Tyler roars. On the word “shadow” her voice cracks like a flash of lightning. As the dust settles, Dodd soothes the listener with falsetto repetitions of the “turn around bright eyes” refrain. It is inescapably epic.

But is Total Eclipse of the Heart a “power ballad”? The term is commonly invoked to describe a subset of rock and hair metal popularised in the 1980s – slow-tempo songs that climb musical, vocal, and emotional heights, fuelled by guitar riffs and thunderous drums. However, the term has been assigned to non-rock songs too: The Telegraph’s list of the 21 best power ballads includes Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U; Smooth Radio’s list includes Whitney Houston’s I Have Nothing; and in a recent piece for BBC Culture, Nick Levine described Houston’s recording of I Will Always Love You as “the ultimate power ballad.” Calling powerful ballads “power ballads” has occasionally attracted the ire of music and culture writers, but this is an inevitable result of unclear etymology. Power ballad expert and academic David Metzer identifies that the term was used as early as 1970 in Billboard Magazine – to describe the music of Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck – and has never been exclusively applied to “rock” music.

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February 9, 2023
Zanele Muholi: Unflinching images that confront injustice

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For many people in Europe, South Africa is still understood in the context of apartheid. However, this understanding often does not expand into how the system still affects black people in the country today, especially those in queer communities, who are still targets of violence. “People have a residual sense of what apartheid means, but in terms of what those experiences actually are, and the way they’re still playing out, that’s something that people are maybe not so aware of,” says Baker. The first series Muholi produced, titled Only Half the Picture (2003-2006), features photographs that simultaneously document intimate moments of people in the queer community, while also addressing past physical trauma. Aftermath (2004), for example, depicts the lower torso and legs of a person wearing briefs, a large scar visible on their right thigh.

But, for Muholi, their work also provides a space for the queer community to tell their own story, especially in South Africa. “You have museums in almost every European country, but you barely find properly allocated space for black LGBTQIA+ persons,” the photographer and activist says. London’s Tate Modern held a retrospective of Muholi’s work in 2020-21 – among the essays in the exhibition catalogue is a testimony titled I am not a Victim but a Victor, written by Lungile Dladla, a South African lesbian. Dladla recounts an evening in 2010 when a man sexually assaulted her and her friend at gunpoint on their way home from her aunt’s funeral, calling it “corrective rape”: “He said, ‘Today ngizoni khipha ubutabane.’ (‘Today I will rid you of this gayness.’),” Dladla wrote. One of the series Muholi has become known for, titled Faces and Phases, includes a photograph of Dladla from 2006, dressed in a sweatshirt and bowtie.

Brave beauties

Faces and Phases is an ongoing collection of more than 500 black-and-white portraits of black lesbians and transgender people, depicted by Muholi in the ways the individuals themselves wish to be seen. In each image, the person looks straight at the camera, seemingly demanding the viewer to look at them properly. “Muholi is invested in making sure that the person being photographed feels and is genuinely in control of the way they’re being shown,” says Baker, noting that some of the people pictured also have recorded testimonials in the exhibition. “It’s always a process of discussion, an understanding between Muholi and the person they’re photographing.”

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February 8, 2023