| | | Sort Your Life Out With Stacey Solomon: this is perfect TV – and I don't say that lightly | | by Joel Golby Nov 4, 2021 | | Like a very British Marie Kondo, Solomon encourages hoarding families to dash their trash. It shouldn’t be as good as it is – but she’s just so overwhelmingly likable How did we get here with Stacey Solomon? When the ash finally settles, we might find that the true legacy of The X Factor is actually the TV presenters it generated along the way, not the “musicians”: Stacey Solomon, Olly Murs, the national treasure that is Rylan. I would argue that staring into a camera and quickly saying “coMING UP!” in a slick way is a rarer skill set than having a good singing voice and just enough charisma to get on stage. This is why we give Ant and Dec a TV award every single year, because they are two of about six people in the country capable of doing it. Any idiot can spend too long singing the opening line of Feeling Good. About 20 people on the planet can keep your attention long enough to get through the terms and conditions of a phone-in competition. Anyway, here’s Sort Your Life Out With Stacey Solomon, which is – and I do not say this lightly – perfect television. Look at the title again: perfection. Look at the fact that it’s on BBC One: perfection (on Channel 4, a show like Sort Your Life Out would be dogged with “recapification” due to the ad breaks, and would suffer directly. On the BBC it is one clean run through, 58 minutes of uninterrupted TV). Look at the host, and realise she was born for this role. Look at the concept. Perfect, perfect, perfect. Continue reading... | | | | | Patient 1 by Charlotte Raven review – living with Huntington's | | by Kathryn Hughes Nov 4, 2021 | | The former journalist’s unsparing account of her life before and after the diagnosis of a rare neurodegenerative disease Charlotte Raven got to her mid-30s without knowing that her family carried the Huntington’s gene. This cruellest of neurodegenerative diseases, which takes years to kill but ekes out the indignity by causing you to choke on your food or become aggressive with those you love, is passed down through the generations. Each child born to a parent who has the gene has a 50% chance of inheriting it. There is no cure and treatment remains essentially palliative – an increasingly heavy cocktail of drugs to baffle the body and dull the terrified brain. In this unsparing memoir, Raven tells the story of how she came to learn that her father had Huntington’s and, in time, that she too had inherited it. Unusually, “Murph”, as they called him, did not develop symptoms until his 60s, 25 years after the first signs of clumsiness and bad temper typically appear. There had always been vague talk of a “schizophrenic” grandmother, but Raven had never made the connection, and Murph was a man who relied on cheerful vagueness to repel direct questions. With Raven’s beloved mother, Susan, already dead from a heart condition, there was no one to help untangle the full story. Continue reading... | | | | | Forza Horizon 5 review – a much-needed road-trip fantasy | | by Keza MacDonald Nov 4, 2021 | | Xbox Series S/X; Playground Games/Microsoft
Take a supercar for a beach challenge or drive into the Mexican jungle in this racing game that’s exactly as fun as its last version As we limp towards the end of 2021, I don’t think I’ve ever needed a holiday so much, and Forza Horizon 5 is here to provide one. It is a scenic, colourful escape to a sterile and faultlessly beautiful version of Mexico, with astonishing vistas and shiny cars to drive in a seemingly endless series of races, from cross-country desert circuits to street scrambles and stunt challenges. Like any great holiday, there is nothing to think about here except which fun thing to do next. Despite the change of setting from idealised Britain to idealised Mexico, it feels almost identical to 2018’s Forza Horizon 4, and has the same overwhelming maximalist tendencies – the map is a forest of icons, an abundance of potential fun, and you are constantly showered with rewards, perks and bonuses that quickly feel meaningless. But it also captures some of the same magic: the escapist fantasy of the open road, the freedom of driving, that gut-level satisfaction of revving a perfectly modelled supercar and feeling the controller shake in your hands. These vehicles, hundreds of them, all respond instantly to the slightest touch of the analogue stick or feathering of the brake. There is no more fun way to drive virtual cars than this. Continue reading... | | | | | Eternals review – Chloé Zhao's indie nuance can't power the Marvel machine | | by Peter Bradshaw Nov 4, 2021 | | The new diversity is welcome, but the Nomadland director’s socio-realist touches left me missing the brash humour and energy To paraphrase Mrs Merton: what first attracted director Chloé Zhao to the idea of directing something in the colossally lucrative Marvel franchise? Or, to paraphrase Nigel Planer’s fictional actor Nicholas Craig: were they offering Zhao a staggering amount of scope to develop the project? At all events, it was an interesting idea to hire the brilliant Oscar-winning film-maker Zhao, known for social-realist docudramas such as Nomadland and The Rider. But the very few authorial touches that she manages to bring to Eternals – some Terrence Malick-ish “golden hour” sunset scenes – only go to show how dominant the formula actually is. Perhaps there is the question of tone; I had the uncomfortable feeling that the all-important brash humour, DayGlo energy and operatic craziness of superheroism were being downplayed in favour of something more serious – the addictive inspiration of fast food being replaced by vegan cordon bleu. There are some nice touches and an attractive new diversity worn lightly, but this is an underpowered and uncertain film. Continue reading... | | | | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment