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| | | Three pantos in one day? Oh yes I did! | | by Kate Wyver Dec 14, 2021 | | A triple bill of Sleeping Beauty, Jack & the Beanstalk and Dick Whittington brings giggles, cheer, glitter galore and, well, a bit of a headache My head is filled with nothing but glitter. I recognise no language other than fart jokes. The only way you can contact me now is via audience participation. It’s been a big day: I’ve attended three weddings, defeated multiple villains, and heard more jokes about Downing Street’s cheese and wine not-a-party than Ant and Dec can fit into a whole season of I’m a Celebrity. With last Christmas spent in lockdown and festive shows pulled off the stages, I’ve been sent to overload on festive cheer by watching three pantos back to back: that’s three hapless heroes falling in love and saving the world, all in one long, loud, dizzyingly sequin-filled day. Continue reading... | | | | | The Royal Tenenbaums at 20: Wes Anderson's finest and funniest movie | | by Scott Tobias Dec 14, 2021 | | The precise dysfunctional family film set a template for the writer-director’s oeuvre and gave Gene Hackman and his on-screen offspring some of their greatest roles “I had a rough year, dad.” The whole of Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums builds to those six words, one syllable each. The line carries the weight of a family entombed by two decades of failure, depression and personal rancor, but finding some small path forward, a moment of reconciliation that might keep their disappointments from defining their future. Anderson has a gift for packing big emotions into small gestures – think about the look of recognition on Bill Murray’s face when he finally meets Max Fischer’s father in Rushmore – and this father-son moment pays off the countless other details that make it possible. This is why Anderson’s best work holds up so beautifully on repeat viewings: they’re dense with feeling, yet ruthlessly economical. Continue reading... | | | | | Colm Tóibín: 'Boris Johnson would be a blood clot … Angela Merkel the cancer' | | by Lisa Allardice Dec 14, 2021 | | The acclaimed novelist on chemotherapy, growing up gay in Ireland and writing his first poetry collection at the age of 66 In June 2018, Colm Tóibín was four chapters into writing his most recent novel The Magician, an epic fictional biography of Thomas Mann that he had put off for decades, when he was diagnosed with cancer. “It all started with my balls,” he begins a blisteringly witty essay about his months in hospital; cancer of the testicles had spread to his lungs and liver. In bed he amuses himself by identifying the difference between blood clots (a new emergency) and cancer: “Boris Johnson would be a blood clot … Angela Merkel the cancer.” He has seen off both Johnson and Merkel. In the month when he hopes he will have a final scan, he has just been awarded the David Cohen prize (dubbed “the UK Nobel”) for a lifetime achievement in literature. The author of 10 novels, two short story collections, three plays, several nonfiction books and countless essays, Tóibín has been shortlisted for the Booker prize three times and won the Costa novel award in 2009 for Brooklyn, about a young Irish woman who emigrates to New York in the 1950s, made into an award-winning film in 2015. He is surely Ireland’s most prolific and prestigious living writer. Continue reading... | | | | | Spider-Man: No Way Home review – scattered fun in ambitious sequel | | by Benjamin Lee Dec 14, 2021 | | Tom Holland’s Peter Parker returns with a host of familiar faces in a messier yet still mostly entertaining follow-up There’s a curse of sorts that’s become attached to “the third Spider-Man movie”, one that’s brought us something very bad, something very cancelled and now something very delayed. The poppy thrill of Sam Raimi’s first two instalments sputtered out in catastrophic fashion with 2007’s much-ridiculed Spider-Man 3, a lucrative yet strangely inept franchise-killer which yanked the director away from the series, unhappy with the finished product and uninterested in trying to course-correct. The next round of reboots then found itself on similar skids after a ho-hum second film led to the creatives involved also disassembling, The Amazing Spider-Man 3 fading into the ether. Now after a Covid-afflicted shoot and the postponed release that comes with that, we have Spider-Man: No Way Home, a big-budget tentpole tasked with not only proving that a Spidey threequel can work but that, after a rough year, so can a Marvel film, a company suffering from the rare critical and commercial misfire that was Eternals. Is Tom Holland’s web-slinger up to the task? The answer is: mostly yes. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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