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Culture

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Entertainment

Cunk on Cinema review – Diane Morgan baffles Hollywood with some of the stupidest jokes ever told

This sensationally idiotic guide to film history is hilarious. From a crude Mary Poppins gag to confusing the hell out of Michael Bay, I could listen to Cunk’s surreal tosh all day In a world of slow-burn, jargon-littered dramas, there’s something to be said for the TV programme that sets out its stall within the first 12 seconds. Cunk on Cinema is one such programme. The latest series from Diane Morgan’s sensationally idiotic documentarian is a three-part history of film that begins with our host reeling off some of humanity’s greatest achievements in her deadpan Bolton tones. Specifically, “

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Entertainment

Duran Duran drummer Roger Taylor leaves band due to tinnitus

‘I must now listen to my body and my doctors’, says Taylor, who was one of the earliest members of the new wave hit-makers The drummer for Duran Duran, Roger Taylor, is to step down from the band due to worsening tinnitus. In a statement, Taylor said: “This is one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make. Playing drums in this band has been the joy of my life, and I’ll never be able to properly thank the fans for the love they’ve shown us over the years. But the truth is that my tinnitus has been getting steadily worse, and I’ve reached the point where I must now listen to my body and my

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Business

Ebenezer review – Johnny Depp’s Scrooge tries to exorcise ghosts of business past

The latest film version of the Dickens classic A Christmas Carol is decent enough, though its star is rather better as the legendary miser before redemption arrives Here for lovers of Dickens – and fans of subtext – is an unexpectedly watchable new movie version of A Christmas Carol starring a top-hatted and heavily madeup Johnny Depp; it is a film about whether it’s possible for a man to earn redemption before it is too late. (The answer is … sure, as long as you say sorry and change your ways. But Mr Scrooge never launched a libel action against the Sun for calling him an un-Christmassy old

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Military

‘Goats are good. They listen’: the herder who defeated Montenegro’s military – and can identify her cows’ herby burps

To Hold a Mountain tells the incredible story of a woman whose way of life was threatened when she heard her pastures were set to become a Nato training zone The star of To Hold a Mountain is having trouble with her goats, which keep escaping. So my interview with Mileva “Gara” Jovanović is rescheduled to a moment where the animals are under control and Gara can descend from the peaks to her small winter residence in a small village near the capital of Podgorica, for a video call. “You have to take care of them because they are always searching for their paths,” says Gara, whose Montenegrin is

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Entertainment

‘Joni Mitchell sang Both Sides, Now over the phone to me’: folk music legend Judy Collins on her 87 remarkable years

As she continues her farewell tour, the US singer-songwriter answers your questions on romance with Stephen Stills, friendship with Carly Simon and how folk underpins all pop How did you come into Joni Mitchell’s orbit and how did you end up recording Both Sides, Now before she did? Steve-bayley I’m 48 years sober, but in the old days I drank. One night in 1967, I was passed out and the phone rang at about 3am. It was my friend [the musician, songwriter and producer] Al Kooper. He said he’d been at a club and had run into this woman, Joni, who wrote songs. He put her on the phone and she sang

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Military

Adam and Joe on spoofing ‘Christopher No-Laughs’ with a toys’ Odyssey – and Patrick Stewart’s haunted house

Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish returned for a night on stage as packed with pop-culture pisstakes as the show that made them a 90s TV cult. Here’s what we learned ‘Warning: The Adam and Joe Show is a high-density programme.” In the late 90s, that was your Friday-night cue to press record on the video player for Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish’s pop-culture potpourri of sketches, pranks and lovingly crafted, lo-fi movie parodies featuring figurines and cuddly toys. Thirty years after its debut, the duo – now both 57 – recreated their old den in the improbable environs of the Royal Albert Hall for a th

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Entertainment

You can see everything on this list: the 20 most jaw-dropping documentaries – ranked!

Ahead of the UK release of Nathan Fielder’s hotly anticipated Elizabeth Holmes film, we count down the most shocking and affecting true stories ever committed to cinema A 50-second dispatch from daily life blew the whistle on the approaching juggernaut of cinema and its unbeatable horsepower of verisimilitude. But if we must be strictly factual about the iconic Lumière brothers’ short, the anecdote about audience members fleeing their seats in fear of being crushed by the oncoming locomotive probably never happened. Continue reading...

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Entertainment

Blackhaine: Saints in the Wethouse review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(XL Recordings) His Playboi Carti collabs may have dragged Tom Heyes out of the underground, but this bracing debut remains far from the mainstream, full of garbled barks and walls of noise On the second track on his debut album, Tom Heyes accuses lesser artists of copying him. “What the fuck you even take me for?” he barks on Northside Needs Me, over a grinding, distorted bassline that comes punctuated with stammering, rave-y vocal samples. “Too much noise shit, replicating what I played before.” Of course, charging that others are merely imitating what you did previously is a venerable rap t

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Entertainment

‘I railed against the stereotype of the humourless lesbian’: the cheeky, feminist photography of Jill Posener

Her witty photos served as a rebuttal to 80s misogyny and Thatcherite conservatism. Now 50 years on, the photographer is receiving an overdue retrospective. ‘I loved that we could respond with humour,’ she says. If it were a lady it would get its bottom pinched. If this lady was a car she’d run you down.” These are the words that Jill Posener immortalised in November 1979, when she picked her way through traffic on London’s Farringdon Road to photograph something most would have overlooked: a graffitied billboard. The first sentence was there by design – a sexist attempt at wit intended to pro

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International

Public Access Afterworld by Jane Schoenbrun review – horror in the TV static

The Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma writer-director’s first novel is a wry, hugely fun journey into the dark world behind our screens Public Access Afterworld is the first novel by Jane Schoenbrun, director of cult-hit horror film I Saw the TV Glow and the more recent Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma; movies in which screens are a permeable barrier and people are menaced by the uncanny realms that lurk behind them. Here the main character is Bethany Peters, a young trans woman working as a content moderator at a YouTube-like company called GlobalVill. Her job is to watch “offensive, i

The Guardian
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