An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
It’s a shame that Jane Austen can’t profit from selling the adaptation rights to her novels. In her own lifetime, she made but a modest living as a writer. Today, she would be fabulously wealthy. As it is, the copyright has long expired, so it’s all fair game. In the last three decades alone, Austen’s stories have spawned over a dozen adaptations.
AI slop is not a new phenomenon. But it is becoming more prevalent as the lazy, the modish and the subliterate take advantage of an apparently beneficial and cost-free leap in technology that will save them the time and effort formerly required to construct a speech, résumé, article or image. I only started picking up on it myself quite recently. But now, when I get the feeling I’m being fed AI-generated pictures, I react like those dogs in the movies that are trained to spot Terminators. Thanks to the proliferation of sites such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, etc., there’s an awful lot of cable-TV slop about these days, as there has to be with all that space to fill, all those subscription costs to justify.
Remember Peter Parker? By the end of the last installment of the Spider-Man movies, No Way Home, we were the only ones who could. Following a complicated but deft collision of multiverses, young Peter (Tom Holland) had realized that the only way to save the world (again) was by getting Doctor Strange to cast a spell that made everybody – including his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) – forget that he’d ever been Spider-Man. He therefore began his Brand New Day alone in his apartment with only a highly evolved piece of AI for company. Sure, he’d returned to his roots of capturing local crooks by the dozen. But while this restored the hero status that J.
The Odyssey is Christopher Nolan’s relentless, deafening three-hour take on Homer’s epic poem, and while it is technically impressive filmmaking – IMAX cameras; massive mechanical puppets, minimally pimped up by CGI; thousands of extras – it is set piece after set piece which becomes rather tiring. Even if weariness is part of the point of the Odyssey, it’s no excuse for the film being tiring. Even if weariness is part of the point of the Odyssey, it’s no excuse for the film being tiring What we get is an action blockbuster, without significant depth, although there is some heft to the final act – everybody’s favorite act, surely. Who doesn’t love it when Odysseus finally makes it back to Ithaca disguised as a beggar and no one recognizes him?
Incredible stories, otherworldly creatures, false identities, a cavalcade of trickery: the original Odyssey is packed with everything you could want from a big-screen blockbuster. And like all great stories, it’s more than just a fantasy adventure. It’s about survival, marriage, truth, what it means to be a man and much more. It’s also roughly 2,700 years old, and by picking it for his latest movie, Sir Christopher Nolan has definitively proved that the old ones are the best. But why, really, has he decided to go Greek? Screenwriters have always been suckers for a good “coming home” story. It was such a popular genre in ancient times that the Greeks even coined a name for it: “nostos.
You know you’re getting old when you see Geena Davis from Thelma & Louise cast as a granny sex symbol and Alfred Molina as a character so elderly you’re supposed to believe that he could drop at any time. This is one of the running gags of The Boroughs, a sci-fi/monster series set in an upmarket, Stepford Wives-esque desert retirement village, and clearly aimed at aging farts like I very nearly am who imagine themselves to be much younger and groovier than they now are. “Don’t worry, wrinkly kids,” the series reassures us. “By the time you hit your seventies you’ll be taking more drugs and having more sex – even crazy, orgy sex [note to squeamish viewers: this scene takes place off camera] – than ever before.
Everybody has been raving about Legends, the Netflix series about undercover customs officers in the 1990s busting a heroin ring. But even though it’s "based on a true story," there are times when it feels more like a histrionically implausible, over-reverential recruitment drive for HM Customs and Excise. "Thought they were just those men in white shirts embarrassing you at the airport by exposing the stash of cheap baccy hidden in your holiday underwear? Think again!" you can imagine the tagline running. The model here, of course, would be Top Gun – the 1986 movie, heavily supported by the US military, which supposedly caused the number of men applying to become US Navy fighter pilots to increase by 500 percent (a figure that’s since been debunked).
Here we go again. Every year, with the inevitability of death, taxes and political regicide, the BBC’s Eurovision coverage reminds viewers that most pop music produced in European countries is of a terrible standard, and that the UK’s banal offering is never going to inspire any patriotic fervor. This year, British hopes are pinned on an electropop act called Look Mum No Computer, with a truly terrible sub-Depeche Mode song called "Eins Zwei Drei" that contains the lyrics "Counting in English doesn’t cut the mustard / So sick of munching roly-poly with custard." Don’t call me Cassandra, but I suspect that Look Mum No Computer (real name: Sam Battle) will be receiving rather fewer than drei punkte from many of the international judges.
Today, Rivals returns for a second series on Disney+. The first series was that rarest of phenomena: an adaptation that didn’t hate its source material. Sure, the producers decided to cram the plot with more subtle-as-a-sledgehammer politics than appears in the actual book, but you could tell they revered Jilly Cooper and the world of Rutshire and wanted to do it justice. Cooper executively produced the first series but must have been away on some days (I can’t see her let a well-heeled huntswoman pronounce the Beaufort hunt "Boh-fore" rather than "Boh-fuht," particularly when a major scene in the book hinges on the pronunciation of "Belvoir").
Sometimes life disappoints you in interesting ways. I hated Giuliano da Empoli's 2022 book The Wizard of the Kremlin, a fictional political thriller about the dawn of Putinism, with a shuddering passion. I had, therefore, been looking forward to despising the film version when it arrived in cinemas last month, too. Yet it turns out that TWotK, directed and co-written by French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, is an impressive film: visually stunning, well cast, a straight story well told. Paul Dano (the greasy-faced young preacher from There Will Be Blood) plays Vadim Baranov, the fictional "Wizard" of the title, a whizkid theater and TV executive tasked with creating and curating a successor to the ailing Boris Yeltsin.
HBO Max is the latest streaming channel trying to lure you into yet another of those subscription contracts you only remember having signed up for about three years later when you’re trying to work out why you are so skint. Its showpiece series is The Pitt which attracts ten million viewers per episode and has been called “the best medical drama on television in years.” This is a category of excellence I find about as enticing as “most amusing form of cancer” or “most ineradicable variety of testicular lice.” But, just for you, I watched to see what the fuss is about.
Lying in bed with a swollen face, I decided that the best thing to do was nothing, so I ended up watching the Duchess of Sussex make smoothies. I don’t know why everyone is so mean about her Netflix show because it hit the spot for me. As I took to my bed after surgery to take out the old screws and plates in my long-ago broken jaw, everything put me on edge apart from watching Meghan and her lovely way of smiling and smiling as she expressed wonderment at a bunch of grapes, or the way a liquidizer whirred. As my face swelled and turned some interesting shades of green and yellow, and I wondered if I would ever smile again, there was something absolutely restorative about watching Meghan gasp with enthusiasm about flowers and honey and lettuce. Everything was “amazing!
Nostalgia is often seen as a positive emotion, but the word actually derives from the Greek nostos, meaning "homecoming," and algos, meaning "pain." Nostalgia is really a type of homesickness, an ache for something lost. As audiences watch the new trailer for the HBO Harry Potter television series, the algos may hit pretty hard: those tantalizing two minutes are the reminder we need that you can’t catch lightning in a bottle twice. The first thing you notice is simply how bad everything looks. Shows seem to have an obsession nowadays with making everything as dark as possible, so that you are constantly trying to adjust the light settings of your screen to see what’s actually happening.
A Real Pain was one of my favorite films of recent years, a tragicomic exploration of family, history, place and identity featuring two Americans in Poland – specifically in Warsaw and Lublin. My wife was also quite smitten – with Lublin as much as the film – and on the back of this began planning a weekend in the eastern Polish city. I was a little wary of such an overtly fan-like step – this felt one notch down from trying to emulate an influencer, of all the awful modern things. But she’s very good at arranging interesting weekends overseas on a minuscule budget so on this question I relented. And so it was that I found myself recently arising at 3 a.m. and heading to London's Luton airport, on which I felt sure Poland would prove an upgrade.
Now that the Stranger Things disappointment has died down – slightly – George R.R. Martin and his merry band of Game of Thrones cohorts have recaptured attention in what we must call the Thrones universe. After the warily positive but underwhelming reception that the major spin-off House of the Dragon received, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’s six-episode offering is in a lower key than either of its forbears. No dragons, no enormous battles, no big stars, just a small-scale relationship drama focusing on the hapless “hedge knight” Ser Duncan the Tall, aka “Dunk” and his child squire, Egg, whose origins are rather less lowly.
“Whitney Cummings, it is time for you to roast the year,” Andy Cohen said Tuesday night, an invitation he would perhaps go on to regret. Cohen and Anderson Cooper let Cummings loose on 2024 as part of CNN's New Year's Eve coverage. Cummings quickly breezed through a laundry list of controversial and touchy jokes in four or so minutes on live TV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IL-p-fKS08&ab_channel=WhitneyCummings She addressed “our” wistful obsession with murderers (the Menendez brothers, Gypsy Rose Blanchard, Luigi Mangione), the increased sale of baby oil, Hunter Biden's laptop, white supremacy in relation to Ariana Grande, cryptocurrency as "astrology for men" and the drones in New Jersey that the government surely knows about...
Every time Bill Maher goes viral for being a "non-woke" liberal, the conservative pundit class is eager to remind readers that Maher is not one of them. It’s a pedantic and pointless exercise, because Maher has never claimed to be. Case in point, earlier this month, National Review published another piece in a long trilogy of tired conservative columns bitching about Maher acting as some sort of “leftist agent” because he “has always made his bed with the mainstream.” “As entertainment,” wrote culture critic Armond White, “Real Time has a limited audience of HBO subscribers, yet its clips serve as a crutch for conservative TV programs — those outlets too feckless to generate their own talking points but that are always following the lead of left-wing media.
The news that comedian Shane Gillis is walking back into 30 Rock to host Saturday Night Live this month isn’t just a great moment for comedy or a testament to how much America loves a comeback story. It’s also a definitive moment in the history of cancel culture — a live representation on national television of how much the media’s power to achieve personal destruction has diminished. Gillis was by no means a famous comedian when he was chosen for the SNL cast five years ago, but the media (aided by some jealous comics) did successfully make him infamous within the space of a week. The story is familiar to everyone by now, but rather than hang his head and walk away from comedy, Gillis battled back by being really, really outrageously funny.
The Toad's Morale, Sam Tallent's stand-up comedy special, gives you the answer to the question: what if a genius-level writer decided to devote himself thoroughly to writing jokes on the subjects of sex, death and bodily fluids? Distributed on comedian Shane Gillis's YouTube channel — another giant phenomenon and also in the top tier of best podcast guests who could also play offensive tackles — Tallent's special showcases his capability for timing and rhythm. His jokes have a tempo that seems natural and relaxed in the moment, but is clearly intentional, effortless on the surface but disguising the skill of the construction under a thick layer of blue. https://youtu.be/0eIUA1jfEk0?
With all the focus on Russell Brand, it’s easy to forget that another comedian made headlines — for all the wrong reasons — last week. Two days before the world came crashing down on Brand, the New Yorker’s Clare Malone wrote a devastating piece on Hasan Minhaj. Minhaj, according to the brilliant expose, has a history of fabricating narratives. What’s particularly disturbing is that his tall tales all appear to have a unifying theme: race. More specifically, racism directed towards him, an Asian American and Muslim American, and his loved ones. Much of the New Yorker piece focuses on Minhaj’s 2022 Netflix standup special, The King’s Jester, which was marketed as a biographical account of his formative years.
