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      Bill Nighy: ‘I have danced naked in my front room, but you need shoes to really spin’

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 12:06 · 1 minute

    The star of The First Omen takes your questions on working as a chimney sweep, finessing his perfect sandwich – and hoping to die in a hail of bullets

    There’s an argument that you’re the person James Bond matures into: women still want to sleep with you and men want to be you. What’s your secret? MarcoPoloMint
    I have no idea. I don’t get out much and I don’t identify with whomever they’re talking about. I did used to quip that I could be James Bond’s grandfather and I’ve always wanted to say: “The name’s Nighy. Bill Nighy.” I’m very happy to hear, but it’s a bit of a stretch for me to grasp.

    When you were younger, you travelled to Paris to write a book, but never completed it. Will you ever dust down your great unfinished novel to realise your literary ambitions? VerulamiumParkRanger
    I had a very romantic idea – I was a walking cliche in my 20s – of running away to Paris to write the great English short story. The pathetic thing is that I went and stood in the Trocadéro, outside the Shakespeare and Company bookstore and under the Arc de Triomphe, hoping to catch some vibes. I sat down for an hour in front of a blank page and drew a margin, like at school, for the teacher’s remarks, but the doorbell went or the phone rang and that was the end of my literary career.

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      Nico: The Marble Index/Desertshore review – an unforgettable trip to a very dark place

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 12:00 · 1 minute

    (Domino)
    These two reissued solo albums from the German singer have a fearsome reputation – but they offer an experience like no other

    To say Nico is an artist more talked about than listened to is putting it mildly. In recent years, her life has been the subject of two plays, two autobiographies, a biopic and at least four songs, Low’s Those Girls (Song for Nico) and Beach House’s Last Ride among them. But Spotify’s list of her 10 most popular tracks contains two of her three contributions to the first Velvet Underground album – These Days and The Fairest of the Seasons – the two Jackson Browne covers from her debut solo album that were featured in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, and … five Velvet Underground songs that don’t actually feature Nico: she does appear on the No 1, Sunday Morning, but only as a spectral presence, her few backing vocals buried deep in the mix. It’s hard to think of another artist so tangentially attached to their most-streamed song – Milli Vanilli, perhaps.

    Perhaps this is rooted in the fact that Nico’s slender solo oeuvre is preceded by its reputation, or rather reputations plural. In the popular imagination, her solo work falls into three categories: unrepresentative (jaunty debut single I’m Not Sayin’ and Chelsea Girls, which the singer hated so much, she burst into tears the first time she played it); cobbled together to fund her heroin habit (1981’s Drama of Exile, 1985’s Camera Obscura); and famously unlistenable, including the two albums reissued here. Indeed, the fearsome reputation of 1968’s The Marble Index was burgeoning before it was even completed. Supposedly it lasts only half an hour because that’s as much as its putative producer, Frazer Mohawk, could stand to listen to before being overwhelmed by despair.

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      British Museum appoints new director after alleged thefts scandal

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 11:56

    Nicholas Cullinan, head of National Portrait Gallery, replaces Hartwig Fischer who resigned over disappearance of 1,500 items

    The British Museum has appointed the National Portrait Gallery head Nicholas Cullinan as its new director, after it emerged last year that hundreds of objects had been allegedly stolen from the museum’s collection .

    He replaces the interim director Sir Mark Jones, the former head of the Victoria and Albert Museum, who stood in for former director Hartwig Fischer. Fischer resigned last year over the scandal.

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      The Odyssey: It’s a Really Really Really Long Journey review – Behold, Telemachus the mummy’s boy!

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 11:10

    Unicorn theatre, London
    Even a cyclops can get lonely, even a parent can make a mistake … this electric rendering of the classic is for all the family as Odysseus’s son takes centre stage

    ‘Wallet, phone, keys, sword,” Telemachus recites to himself as he checks his pockets. Backpack on, teddy tucked in and he’s ready to go, setting off on a grand quest to find his dad. What he doesn’t reckon on is finding himself along the way.

    At its highest points – of which there are many – Nina Segal’s new production of The Odyssey is electric. Made for families, Jennifer Tang’s direction delights in Naomi Hammerton’s fast-paced songs, whirling dances and moments of highly absurd dramatic images. It’s when the music slows and the pace falters that the tension drops away. But this cast approach everything with full hearts and bright smiles, so that every lag is soon followed by a new burst of energy and adventure.

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      Carmen review – stripped-back ballet focuses on the femicide

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 11:09 · 2 minutes

    Sadler’s Wells, London
    Given its UK premiere by English National Ballet, Johan Inger’s new version of the Bizet story cuts out cliche and embraces the bleakness – albeit at the expense of some passion

    Who is Carmen? A free-spirited lover, a woman bent on destruction, or a pragmatist using the only currency she has to get what she wants? In Johan Inger’s ballet, given its UK premiere by English National Ballet, it’s hard to say. She flirts (and more) with every man she passes, but merely for sport it seems. And it turns out this is not really Carmen’s ballet – she doesn’t even get a solo – and the story belongs to Don José (Rentaro Nakaaki), a man so tortured by the fantasy of a woman who will never love him that it leads him to murder her.

    The bleakness only comes later though. It all starts out much warmer, with Bizet’s perky overture and the lively impulse and attack of the choreography. You feel a rush of energy as the women arrive, storming the stage with ruffled dresses and self-possession. Swedish choreographer Inger gives us limbs angled like arrows; deep, squat plies in second position followed by bodies zipped up on the vertical. There’s levity too and lots of floorwork, all handled easily by ENB’s agile dancers – not en pointe, but on point.

    Inger likes a choreographic device, whether that’s the chorus-like figure of Francesca Velicu who stands outside the action, reflecting its hope and woe, or the ominous gang of black-clad and masked figures who sometimes manipulate the players. Among the various lovers Carmen (Minju Kang) takes, Erik Woolhouse’s Torero, soloing in front of a bank of mirrors in a sequinned bolero, might be her true match in the narcissist stakes. Woolhouse is good, hamming it up and throwing his body into the deep curves of the choreography.

    The piece uses Rodion Shchedrin’s 1960s reboot of the Bizet score, with moody additions by Spanish composer Marc Alvarez. The stripped-back designs shift into darkness in tandem with the story, the Spanish cliches are cut out, and so is the passion. Inger’s is an interesting if emotionally hollow interpretation, focusing on Don José’s obsession and ruin. Inger’s intention was to explore violence against women, specifically men who kill their ex-partners, and there’s something in that. But perhaps we owe it to the woman in question to make her a three-dimensional character.

    • At Sadler’s Wells, London , until 6 April

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      Liu Cixin: ‘I’m often asked – there’s science fiction in China?’

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 11:03

    Author of sci-fi epic The Three-Body Problem – newly serialised by Netflix – on ‘the greatest uncertainty facing humanity’ and how finding a secret copy of a Jules Verne novel inspired his career

    Chinese author Liu Cixin’s science-fiction novels have sold millions of copies all over the world, and have won him numerous awards, including the global Hugo award for science fiction in 2015. Now, the English translation of the first book in Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, The Three-Body Problem, is back in the Amazon bestsellers charts, after the release of a TV adaptation by the creators of Game of Thrones.

    But a decade ago, few in the UK had heard of Liu and The Three-Body Problem, which begins as a contemporary murder mystery and gradually builds into a story of alien contact. When it was first published here, Nic Cheetham, managing director of Liu’s UK publisher Head of Zeus, remembers being unsure if anyone would turn up for a book signing with the author in a London bookshop.

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      Mary Poppins review – Disney’s entertainment sugar rush possesses thermonuclear brilliance

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 11:00 · 1 minute

    Manic, magic, madcap … Julie Andrews is superb in the role of the flying nanny, in a film filled with amazing songs

    Brilliant, entrancing, exhausting, and with thermonuclear showtunes from Richard and Robert Sherman, Disney’s hybrid live-action/animation classic from 1964 is now rereleased on home entertainment platforms for its 60th anniversary. And it has a brand-new certificate from the BBFC : upgraded from a U to a PG on account of “discriminatory language” from the eccentric seadog character Admiral Boom, who fires a cannon from his roof shouting “Fight the Hottentots!” (an obsolete term for South Africa’s indigenous Khoekhoe people ). However the BBFC is evidently not bothered by the foxhunting scene in which the fox has a cod Irish accent (perhaps because chimney sweep Bert, played by Dick Van Dyke , saves the fox), nor by the cheerful suicide reference made by one of the servants: “Nice spot there by Southwark Bridge, very popular with jumpers!”

    In an upmarket part of Edwardian London created on almost dreamlike artificial sets in California, the prosperous upper-middle-class Banks family are having problems controlling their high-spirited children, Michael (Matthew Garber) and Jane (Karen Dotrice); this is grumpy banker George Banks (David Tomlinson) and his suffragette wife Winifred (Glynis Johns), who is always whirling around going to votes-for-women marches. Pompous Mr Banks saunters into the action with complacent song The Life I Lead (which melodically owes a tiny bit to With a Little Bit of Luck from the stage show My Fair Lady).

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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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