Culture

If you’re planning on making a biopic of a major musical figure, you would be advised not to miss out various rather vital aspects of their life. For instance, Bohemian Rhapsody dealt – if at times obliquely – with Freddie Mercury’s homosexuality and AIDS. The recent Bruce Springsteen film Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere attempted to tackle his mental health difficulties and near-breakdown. Neither film was perfect, but they were at least made with reasonably good intentions. That is rather more than can be said for Antoine Fuqua’s Michael Jackson biopic Michael, which opens in US cinemas this week and has been greeted with disbelief.

I was in Budapest last month, where the city’s castle is now being rebuilt in its old neo-Baroque style. The plan is to create a near-exact replica of the complex as it stood before the city’s siege in 1945, when it was reduced to rubble during the fighting. So much of the original was destroyed that whole wings – like the palace of the Archduke Joseph – will have to be rebuilt from scratch.  The new complex has been accused of being a sort of Disneyland. This isn’t helped by the fact that many of its structures are made largely out of concrete, with the baroque facades added later as an outer shell. Yet there is a deeper reason. The project is much too self-conscious.

The actor Andrew Garfield attracted some controversy recently when, promoting his new family film The Magic Faraway Tree, he revealed that he had seen the Harry Potter series for the first time. “I know it’s controversial and we shouldn’t be putting money in the pocket of inhumane legislation right now, through she that shall remain nameless,” Garfield said. “There are so many beautiful artists that worked on those films. I have a newfound appreciation for all of the artists, and Daniel is great.” While Garfield’s appreciation of Daniel Radcliffe’s modest acting abilities as Potter might be greater than that of other viewers, his cautious decision to liken the films’ ultimate creator J.K.

The past few years have seen a slew of devastating style assaults on the English language known as "LinkedIn speak." You know the type of word salad: "synergize" instead of "combine," "ideated" instead of "thought of," "holistic" instead of – well – looking at something as a whole. Alarmingly, there is now an app, Kagi Translate, that allows you to type any sentence and it will deliver it for you in this wretched patois. For instance, write "I went to the zoo," and Kagi gives you: "I had an incredible opportunity to observe high-performing teams in a diverse ecosystem and reflect on the importance of adaptability and strategic positioning." Go on, try it.

Stephen Colbert is many things – late-night host, perpetual thorn in the side of President Trump and, some would suggest, a comedian – but few have hitherto described him as a Hollywood screenwriter. Which is why it was some of the most jaw-dropping news that the entertainment industry has seen in recent months that it has been announced that Colbert will be co-writing the latest Lord of the Rings film, currently subtitled Shadows of the Past, and that his co-screenwriter will be none other than his son Peter McGee, along with regular Rings writer Philippa Boyens. Everything about the story is, to put it mildly, perplexing.

It has been a very long time since Saturday Night Live was in the headlines for a good reason (probably Nate Bargatze’s first hosting stint in October 2023), and those who have been wishing that the increasingly beleaguered show would be put out of its misery now finally have their opportunity to say so. In last weekend’s episode, one sketch in highly questionable taste revealed a gang of canceled celebrities – including Bill Cosby, Armie Hammer and Mel Gibson – as coming forward and explaining that their various controversial or criminal activities had been driven by their having Tourette’s.

At the BAFTAs on Sunday night, John Davidson – whose story of living with Tourette’s syndrome is dramatized in the (very good) film I Swear – shouted out the N-word when black actors Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan were on stage to present an award. You’d hope that by now people might understand the mechanics of Tourette’s symptoms – that the tics are totally involuntary, and consist of erupting with the worst possible things at the worst possible times; the imp of the perverse dialed up to 11. But no. The cruel and ideological politics of identity still have a grip on the mediocrities of the creative industries This was another one of the increasing number of events in this century that feel almost comically demonstrative.

As the flames of the Epstein Inquisition burn higher, let me get my general confession into the public domain before the guardians of public morality come for me. Here begins my deposition. I, Matthew Francis Parris, do solemnly confess that I know slightly and have been on mostly friendly terms with former British ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson; and continue to believe him to have been a far-sighted force in the creation of a sane and successful Labour government such as we so notably lack now. I CONFESS: that I know former prime minister Sir Tony Blair, who knows Lord Mandelson, who knew Jeffrey Epstein, and appointed Mandelson to high office in the last century.

It’s a bit difficult to explain a Senate confirmation process to those who haven’t gone through it. It is, to put it in a single word, intense. Years ago, the first time I had a hit piece written about me, I wanted to crawl into a hole in the ground and die. During my confirmation hearing, my attitude was more, “Oh, Chuck Schumer is denouncing me from the Senate floor as a racist, anti-Semitic, white supremacist. It must be Monday.” I still haven’t even bothered to read the vast majority of press accounts or descriptions of me that have come out in the days since the hearing. It’s important in these processes to always know and remember who you are, because if you know that, what they are saying you are just doesn’t matter all that much.

On the fourth floor of Selfridges, in London, is the children’s toy department. Most of the vast space is given over to soft toys – mounds of synthetic fur, thousands of little beady eyes – and when I visited last Saturday afternoon the customers were almost all adults. I spent two hours there, standing by a tower of little Paddington bears, watching the shoppers in the queue for the register, and it was eye-opening. Almost no one was buying for a child. I saw two Chinese women with white toy lambs, a 17-year-old boy with a dragon, what looked like drug dealers waiting in line for Pokémon cards, and a genuinely troubling number of sad-looking women in their mid-twenties clutching long-eared toy bunnies made by a company called Jellycat.

The BBC reported terrible news recently about polar bears: they are thriving. This is very annoying of them as it goes against the interests of environmental activists, polar bears being the very emblem, mascot and clickbait of climate change cataclysm. But the bears’ stubborn refusal to get the memo and starve has become too obvious to ignore. The latest evidence comes from the Barents Sea, and the Norwegian-administered archipelago of Svalbard in particular, where bear numbers have been steadily increasing. Surprisingly, they are also getting fatter, according to measurements taken when bears are caught and weighed. This is despite a decline in sea-ice cover in the area, especially in fall.