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| | | A startled youth on a tyre swing: Tyler Mitchell's best photograph | | by Interview by Zoe Whitfield Sep 28, 2022 | | ‘I took this at a place called Cold Springs in upstate New York. The swing is a symbol of fun, relaxation and leisure. But he almost looks scared by his reflection in the lake’ The American south is a verdant place, full of beautiful and seductive environments, but it’s also threatening, when you think about its racial and political history. Atlanta, where I was born and raised, is one of the greenest cities in the US, basically a city in a forest. I am an only child and had a lot of free time to meditate in these lush spaces. Raised in the suburbs, I went to school in a predominantly white area, which forced me to think about my own Blackness and my relationship to the world around me. I’ve been making photographs since I was a teenager, primarily oriented around young Black life. My shots are theatrical, staged images, often exploring the psychological relationship young, Black, creative people have with outdoor spaces, specifically in the south. Continue reading... | | | | | Amsterdam review – turn of the screwball in David O Russell's starry muddle | | by Peter Bradshaw Sep 28, 2022 | | Christian Bale, Margot Robbie and John David Washington bring laughs to a exhaustingly wacky riff on a real-life fascist conspiracy in 1930s New York There’s usually a no more heart-sinking way of starting a movie than with the larky, slippery announcement: “Based on a true story – mostly!” or “What follows is all accurate – kinda!” It usually means the film will fall between the two stools marked “creatively interesting” and “factually informative”. However, David O Russell begins his elaborate screwball mystery Amsterdam by declaring: “A lot of this actually happened.” He means the film is a wacky riff on the little-known 1933 “White House putsch” in which a cabal of wealthy American businessmen conspired to overthrow President Franklin D Roosevelt, hoping to dupe a retired major general called Smedley Butler into leading their fascist veterans’ organisation. (Maybe the nearest British equivalent was Lord Mountbatten being approached in 1968 by a group of establishment grandees to unseat Labour prime minister Harold Wilson.) Amsterdam imagines three innocent veterans being drawn into these creepy shenanigans. Christian Bale plays Burt Berendsen, a disabled ex-soldier who lost an eye in the first world war; after The Big Short, this is Bale’s second “glass eye” role. Burt is a doctor in New York, supplying pain medication and prosthetic limbs to fellow veterans on a pro bono basis. Burt’s army pal Harold Woodman (John David Washington) is now a qualified lawyer, and helping him to run a morale-boosting ex-servicemen’s gala dinner. And the two men’s soulmate is the mercurial and brilliant Valerie Voze, played by Margot Robbie, who in the first world war was a volunteer nurse and dadaist artist who saved all the shrapnel she dug out of soldiers’ shattered bodies to create bizarre objet trouvé artworks. Continue reading... | | | | | |
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