| | | 'I wanted to show what happened': the tragic story of Juice WRLD | | by Adrian Horton Dec 15, 2021 | | An HBO documentary shares the rapper and singer’s ascent filled with anxiety, depression and drug use before he died at 21 Juice WRLD: Into the Abyss, the HBO documentary on one of Gen Z’s biggest music stars, opens with the late poster child of “SoundCloud rap” freestyling straight to camera nudged only by a woozy, hymned beat. A 19-year-old Juice, real name Jarad Anthony Higgins, appears at ease toggling between disconsolation and winking bravado off the cuff: “I gotta admit myself, I’m on these drugs, feel like I can’t save myself,” he says, pausing for a cigarette pull. “Nobody’s ever felt the pain I’ve felt / so I share it / put it out to the whole world, I ain’t embarrassed.” The five-minute freestyle is an arresting introduction to Juice’s prodigious talent for rhyming “from the dome” that now doubles as an elegy. In the early hours of 8 December 2019, less than a week after his 21st birthday, Juice WRLD died of an accidental overdose of oxycodone and codeine shortly after landing at Chicago’s Midway airport. Two years later, he remains one of the most popular music artists in the world – according to Spotify, the third most streamed in the US of 2021, behind Drake and Taylor Swift – and a beloved icon of a genre whose stars burned bright and too fast. Continue reading... | | | | | The Fell by Sarah Moss review – a perspective on the pandemic | | by Lauren Elkin Dec 15, 2021 | | During the lockdown of winter 2020, a woman breaks her quarantine to head out to the hills – then disaster strikes At the beginning of all this, when the lucky ones were hiding out at home disinfecting their groceries and baking bread, some wondered what impact the pandemic would have on fiction. Would people write Covid novels? Or would this be the kind of thing fiction ignored, the way it neglected to include mobile phones or the internet or climate change for such a long time? Now, 18 months on and with no end in sight, it seems ever more important that fiction acknowledge the truths the pandemic has revealed to us: how connected we all are, and how much we fear one another. Enter Sarah Moss’s eighth novel, The Fell. Set in the Peak District over one night in November 2020, like Moss’s previous novel, Summerwater, The Fell explores isolation and claustrophobia through the various perspectives of a group of geographically proximate people. Alice is a retiree, classified as “vulnerable” because of her recent cancer treatment; she is brought groceries by her teenage neighbour Matt and his mother Kate (his father is nowhere in sight). Rob is a local volunteer with search and rescue efforts; it’s his night with his daughter, and he wants to look after her, but is called out to an emergency on the fell. Kate, after contact with a Covid-infected person in the cafe where she waitresses, has been unable to abide a 10-day quarantine; she takes off at dusk into the nearby hills without a mobile phone. At first the outing is invigorating – Kate sings folk songs and carols to herself as she walks. But at some point she falls, and then night falls, and it’s unclear how she is going to survive. Continue reading... | | | | | Could he? Will they? What if? What might happen next in Succession | | by Stuart Heritage Dec 15, 2021 | | After a shocking season finale that rewrote the dynamic of the Roy family, all bets are off for how they might recover For all its whizz-bang caper-gone-wrong energy, and for all its subsequent emotional troughs, this week’s Succession finale might have been the most important in its entire run. Because, unless I am very much wrong, Succession – a show about people trying to forcefully mount a succession – just had its succession. And now everything has to change. The episode ended with Logan Roy defying his children by selling Waystar Royco to idiosyncratic Swedish tech bro Lukas Matsson. It’s an unexpected twist, like if King Lear contained a weird new beat where Lear hands the British crown to Jack Dorsey for a laugh, but it sets up a bold new future for the show. What will happen in season four? Here are some theories. Continue reading... | | | | | I challenged Tom Cruise to send me two of his special cakes for Christmas. Did he deliver? Of course he did | | by Stuart Heritage Dec 15, 2021 | | Every Christmas, the actor sends an extreme white chocolate coconut gateaux to close friends by private jet. This year, those friends include me. Twice Reader, I am here to inform you that dreams do come true. You really can have anything your heart desires, with the proviso that you’re prepared to aggressively and repeatedly abuse your position in order to get it. What I’m trying to say is this: my year-long campaign to get Tom Cruise to send me a cake has ended in success. Roughly a year ago, I wrote a short piece about Cruise’s habit of sending $50 (£38) white chocolate coconut bundts to his closest friends at Christmas. Kirsten Dunst, Henry Cavill, Angela Bassett, Jimmy Fallon, Graham Norton and scores of other high-profile figures all receive a cake, lovingly made by Doan’s Bakery in California and shipped out by Cruise’s staff. I finished my article by hoping that I would one day be important enough to receive such a wonderful gift. Continue reading... | | | | | | | The 50 best films of 2021 in the UK, No 3: Petite Maman | | by Peter Bradshaw Dec 15, 2021 | | Céline Sciamma’s beautiful fairytale about a girl who meets her mother as a child in the woods is an artistic masterstroke Céline Sciamma’s beautiful fairytale reverie is occasioned by the dual mysteries of memory and the future: simple, elegant and very moving. Joséphine Sanz plays Nelly, the eight-year-old daughter of Marion (Nina Meurisse); Marion’s mother has just died in a care home. Marion and her partner (Stéphane Varupenne) take Nelly on a difficult journey to her late mother’s home, where she grew up, and the memories come flooding back – particularly that of a secret hut she built in the woods adjoining the house. Marion is overwhelmed with grief and leaves Nelly alone with her dad. Playing in the woods she comes across what appears to be a half-finished hut in a clearing. A girl waves happily to her, asking for help making it. She is the mirror image of Nelly (played by Gabrielle Sanz, evidently Joséphine’s twin sister) and announces that her name is … Marion. They go back to Marion’s house, an eerie mirror-image of Nelly’s mother’s childhood home. And there Nelly meets Marion’s kindly, withdrawn, thirtysomething mum, who walks painfully with a cane. Continue reading... | | | | | | | 'Chamberlain was a great man': why has the PM fooled by Hitler been recast as a hero in new film Munich? | | by Alex von Tunzelmann Dec 15, 2021 | | He is seen as the appeaser who fell for Hitler’s lies. But was Chamberlain scapegoated? Writer Robert Harris and actor Jeremy Irons discuss taking on history with their controversial new film “Any country’s present,” says Robert Harris, “is shaped by its interpretation of its past.” Harris, whose bestselling second world war novel Munich is now coming to the big screen courtesy of Netflix, adds: “We have a very strong image of this island standing alone, weak, defenceless – pulled back together by an effort of will. Well, none of it’s really true.” The big stories Britain creates from its history require heroes, but they also require cowards, failures and villains. How else could we be sure that our heroes were truly heroic, if we didn’t have comparable figures who fell short? This has been the fate of prewar prime minister Neville Chamberlain, remembered for his policy of trying to appease and contain Hitler. Munich: The Edge of War is a bold attempt to change the story. But can this fictionalised film shift public perceptions of history? Continue reading... | | | | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment