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      Gogglebox star George Gilbey dies at 40 in workplace accident

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 10:00

    TV personality also starred in Celebrity Big Brother, and made it to the reality show’s final

    Gogglebox’s George Gilbey has died aged 40, a spokesperson for the show said. The reality star was best known for appearing on the Channel 4 series alongside his mother Linda McGarry and stepfather Pete McGarry, who died aged 71 in 2021. He also appeared on the 14th series of Celebrity Big Brother in 2014, reaching the final.

    Gilbey reportedly died following an accident at work on Wednesday. A spokesperson for the Channel 4 show said: “George was part of the Gogglebox family for eight series alongside his mum Linda and stepdad Pete.

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      Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen review – the deep roots of AI

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 10:00 · 1 minute

    A secret history of machine intelligence, from 14th century horoscopes to 1930s ‘plot genies’ for coming up with storylines

    Hark. The end is nigh. “In the industrial age, automation came for the shoemaker and the factory-line worker,” writes Dennis Yi Tenen near the start of Literary Theory for Robots. “Today, it has come for the writer, the professor, the physician, the programmer and the attorney.” Like the end-of-the-planet movies that pelted the multiplexes at the turn of the millennium, newspapers and – increasingly – bookshops are awash with economists, futurologists and social semioticians talking up, down and about artificial intelligence. Even Henry Kissinger, in The Age of AI (2021), spoke of “epoch-making transformations” and an imminent “revolution in human affairs”.

    Tenen, a tenured professor of English at New York’s Columbia University, isn’t nearly as apocalyptic as he initially makes out. His is an oddly titled book – do robots need literary theory? Are we the robots? – that has little in common with the techno-theory of writers such as Friedrich Kittler , Donna Haraway and N Katherine Hayles. For the most part, it’s a call for rhetorical de-escalation. Relax, he says, machines and literature go back a long way; his goal is to reconstruct “the modern chatbot from parts found on the workbench of history” using “strings of anecdote and light philosophical commentary”.

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      Kung Fu Panda 4 review – Jack Black and Awkwafina in hurricane of slapstick more miss than hit

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 09:00 · 1 minute

    The lead pair make a brilliant double act, but the franchise has run out of its signature sweetness and charm

    The cuddly kung fu master is back. Jack Black returns as dumpling-loving panda Po, the unlikeliest of lean, mean fightin’ machines. It’s been eight years since Kung Fu Panda 3, and on the evidence here, the delay can’t be put down to KFP4 being a labour of love, the product of animation studio DreamWorks’ A team pouring in enormous amounts of effort. It’s a hurricane of slapstick (some of it in fact very funny) and age-appropriate energetic fight scenes, but lacks the sweetness and charm of the franchise at its best. It failed the wriggle test on my seven-year-old cinema date, who was squirming in her seat around the hour mark.

    The plot is a bit overfussy for its target audience of small kids, though the scriptwriters have been careful to make it work for newbies – no previous Kung Fu Panda experience necessary. It opens with Po being promoted from his role as Dragon Warrior to spiritual leader of the valley, taking over from his mentor Shifu (Dustin Hoffman – no expense has been spared on the vocal cast). But before he can appoint his successor, Po apprehends Zhen (Awkwafina), a streetwise thieving fox. The two of them make a brilliant double act: Black is adorable, Awkwafina terrific as the cynical wisecracker.

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      ‘Rental places will surge back’: readers on the fight to preserve physical media

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 08:05


    Readers share their thoughts on maintaining the world of DVDs and Blu-rays after a feature looking exploring the phenomenon

    At home we have been getting into the habit, when we identify (a knack in itself!) a show or movie we are confident we will want to re-watch, of ordering an inexpensive DVD copy.

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      ‘Every single work is a masterpiece’: the once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of the greatest Flemish drawings

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 08:00

    A new show brings together historic sketches from Bruegel to Rubens and more, capturing fleeting snapshots of everyday 16th- and 17th-century life

    The women gather in a circle, talking intensely and unselfconsciously, their attention passing from one animated face to another as the conversation darts around the group. They seem completely unaware, from a window above the courtyard where they’re chatting, the artist Jacques Jordaens is sketching them in quick red chalk and brown ink.

    It is 1659, Antwerp, and, according to Jordaens’ scribbled note at the bottom of the paper, these so-called “gossip aunts” are discussing local political “disturbances” – perhaps the recent strike of the painters’ guild. “It’s a snapshot of daily life that you don’t usually see,” says An Van Camp, the curator of Bruegel to Rubens: Great Flemish Drawings at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum.

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      Choice by Neel Mukherjee review – parables for our times

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 07:30 · 1 minute

    A bleak, brilliant moral maze of a novel about ethical dilemmas, from global poverty to the climate crisis

    In the middle ages, morality would be transmitted in images. Churchgoers would commonly find above the altar a panel of three paintings relating a biblical parable or commandment. Such altarpieces could be found in Buddhist shrines, too, which might be adorned with three scenes from the path of enlightenment. A knack for envisioning moral precepts has seen the triptych translated across many cultures and now, with the UK-based Indian writer Neel Mukherjee’s formally daring new novel, even from image to text.

    Composed of three narratives about 21st-century ethical and political dilemmas, Choice has been termed a triptych by its author and, like its visual forebears, the novel needles our moral impulses. The issues in question, from climate change to global poverty, are modern, but the novel’s interest in sin and virtue is redolent of the triptych’s medieval preoccupations. Where Choice differs is that, in its world, there are no unambiguous rights or wrongs. As one character observes of another: “No escape was offered by making what one thought was the correct moral choice.” This is a triptych for a secular age – without hope of salvation, however hard humans try.

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      Rare and raw: never before seen Rolling Stones – in pictures

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 07:00


    In 1981, photographer Brian Aris was invited to join the rock’n’roll legends at rehearsals in Boston. He captured their intense musical bond – but couldn’t corner Charlie Watts

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      Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus review – a stark, emotional finale from master musician

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 07:00 · 1 minute

    In his last weeks of life, the Oscar-winning composer is filmed at the piano by his son. It is an almost wordless paean to a remarkable career

    Short of presenting nothing more than music and a blank screen, this documentary about the late Japanese composer-performer Ryuichi Sakamoto’s last appearances is as stark and minimal as a concert film can get. And yet it’s a work suffused with emotional tones and shades, surprisingly not all of them sad even though the subject knew at the time of filming he had mere weeks left before he’d die of cancer.

    There are moments when director Neo Sora, Sakamoto’s son, turns up the lighting for the more upbeat songs and we can see the master smile, pleased with his own performance, or the composition, or … we know not what, as there is almost no dialogue, no nattering about the life. We had all that in an earlier documentary, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda . In Opus it is the music, played by the man himself, that is completely sufficient to the moment and all that remains, with the occasional very human stumbles and missed notes. When he says he needs a break for a while, exhausted by a performance, the strain is painfully visible, audible, practically palpable.

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