Culture

In a recent Saturday Night Live sketch, comedian Nate Bargatze portrayed General George Washington addressing his troops around a campfire in 1777, as they ask themselves what the Revolution is for. Washington shares some of his dreams for the new American republic — though he dodges difficult questions about slavery — in an effort to inspire his men to fight on. The writers take full advantage of the fact that a number of peculiarly American things, such as our version of football (in which feet rarely figure) or our complicated system of weights and measures, seem rather odd to the rest of the world. “We will be free to measure liquids in liters and milliliters, but not all liquids,” the general explains. “Only soda, wine and alcohol.

Film bros have long had their list of sacred-cow directors who can apparently do no wrong: Scorsese and Fincher and Nolan, of course, but also the likes of Denis Villeneuve, Paul Thomas Anderson and — as of this year — Greta Gerwig. To their number should now be added Paul King, a filmmaker whose name may be less familiar than some of his peers, but whose flair and ability to make apparently risky projects not only work but succeed admirably and hilariously was demonstrated by his two Paddington films. It is now confirmed by the critical and commercial success of his Charlie and the Chocolate Factory prequel, Wonka, which triumphantly overcame mediocre pre-release buzz by being a marvelously sweet confection.

After a year in entertainment dominated by the Barbenheimer phenomenon, it wasn’t hugely surprising to find that Barbie and Oppenheimer were similarly garlanded when it came to today’s Golden Globe nominations. The adventures of Mattel’s finest and most lucrative product-turned-icon are up for nine awards — in large part because it has no fewer than three nominations for Best Song, including my own favorite “I’m Just Ken” — whereas Christopher Nolan’s atomic bomb epic is just trailing behind slightly with eight, including recognition for Best Picture, Best Director and, as expected, actors Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr. and Emily Blunt.

Well, it had to happen. Taylor Swift has been the most talked-about person in the world for some time now. After 2023 saw her conquer both stadiums and the world’s cinemas with her Eras Tour film — which, with a current gross of $249 million, is now the highest-earning concert movie ever made — her remarkable year has been capped off both with the enormous success of her re-recorded album 1989 (Taylor’s Version) and now, the news that TIME magazine has awarded the thirty-three-year-old musician the accolade of Person of the Year. She follows in the footsteps of everyone from Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler to Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. There are several noteworthy features of the accolade.

Netflix’s royal saga The Crown has been one of its biggest hits of the past few years. Sacrificing subtlety for big, dramatic arcs, with award-winning performances by a cast that has, in a stroke of genius on the part of its creator Peter Morgan, changed every two seasons, it’s been the most gripping and rich account of the post-war British royal family ever put on screen. It has been helped both by an enormous budget and the useful way in which the present-day battles between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and the rest of the Firm have come to mirror The Crown’s increasingly eventful power struggles among the various branches of the family.

Did you see Wish last weekend? Chances are, according to the box office receipts, you didn’t. The latest big-budget Disney extravaganza, with the voices of Ariana DeBose and Chris Pine, was expected to be a hit, grossing a decent $50 million on its opening weekend. Instead, to the studio’s chagrin, it came in third with a comparatively measly gross of $31.7 million, bested not only by the second weekend of the Hunger Games prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, but, considerably more surprisingly, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, which soared past early estimates to come in with an impressive $32.5 million. Not bad for a film without any bankable movie stars (sorry, Joaquin), mixed reviews, a B- CinemaScore rating and a subject with which American audiences are not intimately familiar.

Most men approaching the age of eighty-six would be forgiven for taking it easy. Not so Sir Ridley Scott: legendary filmmaker, director of the eagerly anticipated epic Napoleon and, it appears from the recent interviews he has given, someone who does not give a single solitary cuss about how he, or his film, are received. He is fresh from telling historians who have criticized his film’s factual accuracy that they should “get a life” and that “when I have issues with [them], I ask: ‘Excuse me, mate were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up then.

Say what you like about Netflix’s The Crown, now coming into its final series — the first four episodes launch on the service today, with the concluding half-dozen coming next month — but it is one of the few shows that has combined winning truckloads of awards with compelling its viewers to have an opinion on its often surprising manipulations of history. Its creator Peter Morgan has been both praised and vilified for the liberties with fact he has taken, all of which he has dismissed on the grounds that he is creating fact-based entertainment, rather than a documentary series. That invention can often illuminate, rather than obscure, the workings of the forever secretive British royal family.

American Psycho was never supposed to be a hit. Bret Easton Ellis thought Glamorama would be his big seller, and Psycho was just an odd interlude; an experiment with form that mocked the disconnection, inanity and opulent obliviousness of America’s new, young, hyper-materialist upper crust. It was also a cloaked reflection of repressed homosexuality, written by a gay author who once dated a closeted financier. It’s not even that violent. Most of it is just the interior monologue of this cold man listing the clothes and food and bad music that occupies his hollow mind. And it was intensely funny, but dryly, darkly so. In short, it wasn’t an obvious literary smash.

When David Fincher’s latest picture The Killer premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, it was to a more muted reception than might have been anticipated. Part of this may have been because, with the actors’ strike very much in force, its stars Michael Fassbender and Tilda Swinton were nowhere to be seen, with Fincher himself the only A-lister on the red carpet. But it was also undoubtedly because the finished film was not remotely what many had anticipated. Early hype suggested that The Killer would follow the exploits of Fassbender’s anonymous assassin as he (inconveniently) develops a conscience, presumably setting up an existential quandary.

After a paralyzing 118 days, the actors’ strike is now, finally, looking like it’s over, following hard in the footsteps of the similarly resolved WGA strike a couple of weeks ago. The SAG are claiming victory over the studios, who took an exceptionally long time to ratify demands that included everything from increased fees for work appearing on streaming services, to protections regarding the use of AI, to reproduce actors’ images on screen. There were many times during the strike when it looked as if both sides were simply too far apart to achieve a resolution. In the end, money talks: the major Hollywood studios and streaming services realized that without the swift agreement they needed, there would be a drought of product in the marketplace next year, and beyond.

Cockburn was surprised to learn the war in Israel has a more global impact than he had previously imagined. The carnage in Gaza is affecting the way that Indian women living in the United States celebrate Diwali, at least according to the Canadian-Indian poet Rupi Kaur. South Asian women are now the latest group with a moral imperative to weigh in on the war.  Kaur’s crusade to involve an Indian holiday in a regional conflict all started when the internet poet, famous only to her 4 million Instagram followers and readers of New York women’s websites, rejected an invitation to a Diwali celebration that will be hosted by Kamala Harris on Wednesday. https://twitter.

In the Sixties, the rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones  — even if it was more of a hype battle dreamt up by their respective publicity departments — meant that whenever one band released an album or single, the other was never too far behind. Sometimes, they even explicitly referenced their competitor’s work; the Stones’s 1967 album Their Satanic Majesties Request was “inspired” by the Beatles’s LP Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released earlier that year. Yet after the Beatles split up in 1970, the rivalry seemed to be at an end, and the deaths of John Lennon in 1980 and George Harrison in 2001 apparently put paid to any possibility of the Liverpudlian band continuing in any form. Oh, how wrong we were.

Everyone had their favorite character in Friends, although I’m not entirely sure who liked Monica most. For me, the best one was always Chandler Bing: sarcastic, ironic and perpetually outraged at some unexpected or unwelcome development. Naturally, in the safe and unchallenging world of Friends, there had to be an explanation for the character’s sardonic demeanor, and so his cutting sense of humor is explained to be a defense mechanism, derived from the hurt he underwent after his flamboyant parents’ divorce. But thanks to the peerless comic skills of Matthew Perry, the actor who played Chandler, any suggestion of laborious cod-Freudianism was swiftly dispelled. The character was, above all things, very, very funny.

In the summers my grandmother would drive us south of town to where the black oaks thinned out and the world opened into pasture land and sky: prairie grass as far as you could see. Here, on their tribal land, the Seminole People would hold an annual powwow. Folks congregated to visit and eat frybread tacos, and I would skateboard with my Muskogee friends, Mike and Bobby Harjo on the cement basketball court, or along sections of sidewalk outside the aluminum-sided lodge. Around sundown, when the whippoorwills began to call from the sparse stands of blackjack and the fireflies winked on and off, the sound of drums started to pound the earth. You could feel them coming up through the soles of your shoes.

Fans of The Summer I Turned Pretty, a hit teen drama on Amazon Prime adapted from a young adult book series of the same name, are furious after discovering that one of the show's lead actors “liked” some conservative social media posts. Cockburn was first alerted to the controversy by his niece, who describes herself as the show's "biggest fan" and regularly trawls Reddit threads about the Amazon streaming series. The Summer I Turned Pretty is a coming-of-age story about a teenage girl, Isabella or "Belly,” who finds herself caught in a love triangle with a pair of brothers, Conrad and Jeremiah Fisher. Just like with the love triangles in the Twilight and Hunger Games series, fans endlessly debate over who Belly should end up with.

He stands five-foot-seven in his stocking feet — five-nine in boots — but with Clarence White’s Telecaster slung around his neck and a thick head of gray hair roostered up, he looks ten feet tall. John Marty Stuart has plucked the strings of every major figure in country music. Growing up in Philadelphia, Mississippi, his heroes were bluegrass legend Lester Flatt and American prophet Johnny Cash. Before going out on his own, Stuart only had two jobs: he joined Flatt’s band in 1972 as a fourteen-year-old mandolin virtuoso, and after Flatt retired in 1978, he joined Cash’s band as a guitarist.

It happens to be a truth of modern travel: airports as destinations in themselves, designed to provide travel needs, shopping delights and above all, entertainment. Heathrow’s Terminal 2, the Queen’s Terminal, pays homage to the late Elizabeth II, who gave her blessing to the Harrods and Fortnam & Mason stores that line the waiting areas. New York’s LaGuardia has become a paean to the subway system, replete with murals and other memorabilia of that venerable institution. Las Vegas’s Harry Reid International Airport is a casino before the casino — try your luck before hitting the strip.   Into this tradition, Tulsa International Airport in Oklahoma falls.

After a relatively quiet few weeks at the US box office, now that the Barbenheimer phenomenon has finally receded from view, it has fallen to another all-conquering icon to drag audiences back to theaters in their millions. Yes, Taylor Swift is no longer content with conquering stadia, but has now managed to establish herself as an unparalleled draw for the big screen as well, with Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour opening in American cinemas. With a first weekend gross of $97 million, it will either be the highest October launch since Joker in 2019, or even surpass it. Not bad for something made on a budget of no more than $20 million, self-produced by Swift herself and bypassing studios to be distributed directly to theaters.