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Beverly Whitney Kean obituary
2 hours ago
Actor who revealed the story of two great Russian collectors of modern and impressionist art
Beverly Whitney Kean, who has died aged 89, was a semi-mythical figure to art historians in Russia, the Us and Europe. Her book All the Empty Palaces: The Merchant Patrons of Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Russia had no precedent or rival. It is still the definitive account of the two great Moscow collectors who put together before 1914 the finest collection ever known, at the time or since, of impressionist and modern French painters, owning between them more than 50 Matisses, 43 Picassos and 27 Gauguins, not to mention Monets, Renoirs and Van Goghs. The book is a gripping read, authoritative, revelatory and impeccably researched. But what makes it unique is its date of publication, which was 1983.
Virtually nothing was known at the time about Sergei Shchukin or Ivan Morozov, whose names had been obliterated from the Soviet record. Shchukin, »
The readers' room | What you thought of G2 this week
2 hours ago
Hen-keepers flock together, Hollywood rom-coms strike a blow against gender equality – and Beckham's pants
✒ Let's begin with the chicken and the egg. On Tuesday, Leo Hickman came out as one of 500,000 Britons keeping hens. "There's just no going back," he said, "once you've tasted those sunset-coloured yolks." In one of the loveliest comments sections of the past few years, readers came out of the woodwork to share the joy.
"We kept four or five chickens at a time and a rooster for years too," reminisced Manyani. "Amelia, our favourite, would love to go to sleep on our laps and loved being stroked. Every one was an individual and surprisingly smart." "I love the way they rush towards you, crouching down to be stroked," gushed Thegecko. "It wasn't until we got four hens that I believed the stories that they are endearing creatures, with lots of character."
One commenter mistook the »
- Tom Meltzer
How Islamic punk went from fiction to reality
2 hours ago
Islamic punk was just an idea in a novel by a disaffected Muslim convert – but for the bands he inspired around the world the scene became real. Now, as The Taqwacores is about to be released, has the scene has already betrayed its ideals?
There was a time when the words "Muslim radical" painted a clear enough picture – a young man strapped with explosives, perhaps, or a bearded cleric calling for Sharia law from Land's End to John O'Groats. But things have changed. The protestors of the Arab Spring are both Muslim and radical, as are the bungling jihadis of Chris Morris's movie Four Lions. And now a new film, The Taqwacores, attempts to further stretch the definition.
The film's set up sounds familiar enough – a meek Muslim student named Yusef joins a hardcore Islamic commune in upstate New York and becomes radicalised. But this time, "hardcore" refers to punk rock. »
Your next box set: The Pacific
2 hours ago
This collaboration between Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, which tells the story of three marines fighting in the far east, is spectacular, horrifying and profound
With a final budget rumoured to be more than $200m (£122m), The Pacific is almost certainly the most expensive TV series ever made. The latest second world war collaboration between Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, it follows three Us marines fighting in the far east, and is based (with what I suspect is a generous definition of that word) on the memoirs of people who were there. Very little of the series, which first aired on Sky last year, isn't excellent.
Most of the money, you suspect, went on its monstrously spectacular battle scenes. You might feel rather ashamed of enjoying these. And you might feel, as I slightly did, that a show about a real war, and the real deaths of real people, is »
- Leo Benedictus
I swear movie anachronisms are on the mega-increase
2 hours ago
I'm no purist, but it really takes me out of a film to hear the Narnia kids saying 'Sorted!' or Alice in Wonderland using terms like 'bonkers'
Much as I wanted to enjoy Super 8, I kept getting distracted by anachronisms. The film is set, specifically, in a small Ohio town in the summer of 1979, yet one of the kids compares an alien building block to a Rubik's Cube, which didn't go on sale till 1980. (I'd already checked the date when writing about Let the Right One In.) The gas station attendant must have been going out with someone whose uncle worked at Sony, because he has a Walkman, yet I didn't even glimpse Walkmans till late 1979 – and I was living in Tokyo at the time.
Most distracting of all, the kids in Jj Abrams's film are making a zombie movie. But why? They might conceivably have caught »
- Anne Billson
The Referees – review
2 hours ago
This very diverting film gives us a quasi-telepathic access to the tense, internal world of a group of football refs during Euro 2008
They have a strange tendency to run backwards. Why? This documentary on international football referees doesn't say. But it is very diverting nonetheless. They are the sport's lawmen, subject to all the pressure experienced by the stars, but with none of the cash or adulation, and increasingly considered fair game for abuse by internet bile-spewers and even motormouth coaches for whom vilifying the ref – once unthinkable – is now an accepted mind-game technique.
The film follows a group of refs, including Britain's Howard Webb, during the Euro 2008 championship. It shows how these very human and fallible officials nervously await Uefa's judgment on their performance. As in a reality show, only a select few will be invited back to preside over the final knockout matches after the group phase.
There »
- Peter Bradshaw
Super 8 - review
2 hours ago
Jj Abrams gets together with his idol Steven Spielberg and makes a film that is part homage, part franchise – and a little disappointing, writes Peter Bradshaw
Jj Abrams's amiable, ever so slightly disappointing mystery adventure is a weird hybrid. It's an affectionate tribute to Spielberg classics such as Close Encounters and Et, but it is also itself, as the poster announces, a Steven Spielberg movie: Spielberg produces. So it's part homage, part franchise operation. Spielberg has, in effect, licensed out his (former) style to Abrams, who in some way is like a lifelong burger fan entrusted with the chief managerial job at America's biggest branch of McDonald's.
Everything about the movie has been meticulously created or recreated: the homely suburban setting, whose housing sprawl is set across a valley or plain that can be viewed, all at once, from rising ground. The setting is 1979, a time briskly established by »
- Peter Bradshaw
Readers' reviews: Maverick entertainers, film plots that technology would have ruined, and more
2 hours ago
The best of your comments on the latest film and music
Tor some reason, Film&Music got a few of you hot under the collar last week. Dave Simpson's paean to maverick entertainers was generally very well-received, but alanabit thought there was a manners issue. "It was bloody rude of you to tell everyone how much the busker earned! That is no one else's business." 1againstmany was also getting worked up: "Having lived within 15 metres of one of Lewis Floyd Henry's regular spots, I have to say he is capable of being intensely annoying." But most were extremely complimentary, with Lewis himself getting lots of praise – Cicadafamiliar said: "Saw him at Latitude last year, he was wonderful! He made us all laugh, and smile and was a brilliant presence." Dilford was heartened in a more general way: "Just the article I needed to read to firmly assure me that »
- Andrew Pulver
What it's like to win an Oscar
2 hours ago
Director Suzanne Bier had won awards for her films before, but being nominated for an Oscar – and turning up for the ceremony – was something else again, she explains
When In a Better World won the Golden Globe for foreign language film, I was amazed. My work has won awards before, but it's something you never get used to, or feel grounded about. And while it was encouraging, it didn't make me feel any more certain that we would win the Oscar – it's rarely an indicator in that category. I have to admit I paid attention to the bookmakers' odds before the Globes. They were so bad that my husband was complaining afterwards that I should have backed myself. The odds improved for the Oscars, but you still can't take anything for granted.
I'm sure my heart had stopped and I wasn't breathing while Helen Mirren and Russell Brand were reading »
- Ryan Gilbey
First sight: Sam Rumbelow
2 hours ago
Leading method-acting teacher who developed characters for one-scene shorts in forthcoming film Self Made
Who is he?
A leading method-acting teacher who has coached Natalie Press and Margo Stilley. He's the inadvertent star of artist Gillian Wearing's first feature-length film, Self Made, out on 2 September.
Explain.
In 2007, Wearing placed an ad in newspapers and job centres. It read: "Would you like to be in a film? You can play yourself or a fictional character. Call Gillian." Thousands replied, whittled down to seven. Enter Rumbelow, who worked with the group to develop characters for one-scene shorts.
So is Self Made a documentary?
Mostly. We watch Rumbelow's workshops – raw, soul-bearing, cathartic – but also five fictional shorts, each starring a member of the group. This is what you want reality TV to be like: revealing, human, touching, unpatronising, intense. Rumbelow was initially worried the film would be "some heavy conceptual rubbish".
Are the actors playing themselves? »
- Cath Clarke
Mr Popper's Penguins – review
2 hours ago
There are some laughs to be had in this moderate family entertainment, though Jim Carrey is fundamentally subdued
Jim Carrey, in effect, reprises his Scrooge turn as the star of this moderate family comedy about an uptight guy whose heart is melted, ironically, by creatures from the extreme cold; it is very freely adapted from a classic children's book. Carrey plays Popper, and there are some laughs to be had when the children from his failed marriage address him curtly by his surname: they are very much not calling him "poppa". Popper is a hard-hearted, grasping property mogul with a queasy, sleazy line in sweet-talking people into selling him their real estate so he can redevelop it in all sorts of crass ways. Yet an establishing sequence shows us that he was turned into this character through being neglected by his absentee dad, a globe-trotting explorer, who kept in touch »
- Peter Bradshaw
Knuckle – review
2 hours ago
A shrewd documentary reveals the queasy macho mythology of bareknuckle boxing in the Traveller community
"At least wars are about something!" says one bemused onlooker in the course of this shrewd documentary about the bareknuckle boxing scene in the Traveller community in Ireland and England – a dogfight cult for human beings, fuelled by feuds. For more than a decade, film-maker Ian Palmer has followed the long-running grudge between the Joyce and Quinn families, a grudge that had its ostensible origin in a 1992 brawl outside a London pub between two different Traveller clan members, which ended in the death of one and a manslaughter conviction for the other. But is that really what it's about? Or do they just love scrapping? The families are always making provocative videos challenging each other to a fight; then two unfit-looking, tubby guys emerge and square up: their training does not, clearly, include work on their abs. »
- Peter Bradshaw
The Tree – review
2 hours ago
Julie Bertuccelli's film is an outrageously twee, spiritual and supercilious drama, set in Australia, about family and grief
Some critics, with a droll nod to Terrence Malick, have nicknamed this "The Tree of Death". It is from Julie Bertuccelli, the former documentary-maker whose fiction feature debut Since Otar Left, in 2003, was a triple-deckered study of three generations of women. This is her first film since then and it is an outrageously twee, spiritual and supercilious drama, set in Australia, about family and grief. Charlotte Gainsbourg plays Dawn, a woman who lives with her husband and children in remote Queensland. When her man dies of a heart attack, driving his car into a big tree on their property, their youngest daughter takes it into her head that his spirit has gone to live in this tree. Dawn finds herself believing it too. As the tree threatens to damage the house with its gnarly roots, »
- Peter Bradshaw
French Cancan – review
2 hours ago
Jean Renoir's 1955 film, now on re-release, shows a palette and compositional sense that appear to be influenced by his father
The world of the Moulin Rouge and the cancan conjured up in Jean Renoir's 1955 film, now on re-release, is very different from Baz Luhrmann's wacky 2001 entertainment. For a start, the proceedings take place in a brightly lit salle, not mysterious nightclub darkness. Renoir's palette and compositional sense appear to be influenced by his father, and his emphasis is on commerce, loans, box office, bailiffs and debt, rather than the sleazy allure of prostitution and the consequent fascination of artists. Jean Gabin's impresario Henri Deglard is a bullish, worldly optimist; his dalliances with leading ladies are a mere bagatelle, compared to his passion for his great, yet fickle love: the audience. Nini (Françoise Arnoul) is the young washerwoman whom Henri turns into a star, with an inspired »
- Peter Bradshaw
Sarah's Key – review
2 hours ago
Kristin Scott Thomas is a journalist who uncovers a secret while researching a piece about the roundup of Jews in Paris in 1942
A few weeks ago, Rose Bosch's 2010 film La Rafle, or The Roundup, was released here. It was a decent attempt to dramatise one of French history's most horrifying episodes: thousands of Jews in occupied Paris in 1942 were rounded up at the Nazis' bidding, herded into a sports centre (the Winter velodrome, or Vel d'Hiv) before being sent on to the death camps. It took what might be called a top-down view of this event: narrating the story and showing the political machinations of high-ranking French and German officials who had decided on this horrendous action. This film, by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, comes at the same subject from a different angle. Kristin Scott Thomas plays Julia Jarmond, a modern-day journalist working on a magazine feature about the Vel d'Hiv affair. »
- Peter Bradshaw
Why do comedy stars do family films?
2 hours ago
They were once cutting-edge comics with talent to burn; now they're sharing screen time with CGI co-stars and corny critters. Ellen E Jones reports on the family comedy club
For musicians, it's 27; the mystical age at which the unlucky succumb to the consequences of their career-dictated lifestyle. For movie stars, it's more like 49. And for them, it's not heroin, or booze, or depression; it's family comedies. You want proof? This weekend you can witness Jim Carrey, esteemed star of The Truman Show and Dumb & Dumber, and six CGI penguins breakdancing all over the grave of his serious acting ambitions in Mr Popper's Penguins. Carrey turned 49 in January, and the film marks his ascension into a not-so-exclusive fellowship of once-intriguing actors who now make family comedies.
Remember the 33-year-old Steve Martin who made The Jerk in 1979? At 49, he made the dismal Sgt Bilko and now mostly diverts his genius into Cheaper by the Dozen sequels. »
Brandt Brauer Frick say you can get (slightly) jiggy with it
2 hours ago
Meet the new face of German techno: an accoustic trio who've spurned the sequencers to play live – they'll even let you dance
The avatar on Brandt Brauer Frick's Facebook page is a drawing of serious young men in shirts and ties. It's a portrait of the artists as middle managers or It support, reminiscent of Kraftwerk in their Trans-Europe Express phase. When I first meet Daniel Brandt, Jan Brauer and Paul Frick at a Frankfurt design event, they turn out to be serious young guys in sports jackets, carefully unpacking their instruments to play interstitial music for the annual Designpreis – 50 separate awards and speeches that required short blasts of music while the grinning winners find their way through the 1,000-seater hall.
Later that night I see the trio in a grotty downtown firetrap, performing on a cramped club stage, showing the same degree of professionalism and commitment at four times the volume. »
- John L Walters
Nathalie Baye: 'Happiness is doing a job you love'
2 hours ago
She pretty much defined French cinema in the 70s and 80s: intimate, kooky, charming. Now Nathalie Baye can add 'properly funny' to her CV
In Nathalie Baye's new film, there are lots of funny scenes, but this one's especially good: she hobbles fantastically through the streets of Sète one broiling summer morning, in bare feet and nightie, tailing a young man who has just deposited a love letter in her mailbox. (The love letter wasn't actually intended for her, or at least it was, but it isn't a real love letter. And the young man isn't supposed to have delivered it, still less been seen doing so. But more of that later.)
Anyway, there's one of the undisputed greats of French cinema, 63 years of age, 80-odd films to her name, an actor who has worked with Truffaut and Godard, Pialat, Chabrol and Tavernier, who has won four Césars and »
- Jon Henley
Bubba Smith – Super Bowl winner and Police Academy's Hightower – dies
7 hours ago
Charles Smith, who won NFL's highest prize with the Baltimore Colts and had a second career acting, dies aged 66
Charles "Bubba" Smith, an American football star who won a Super Bowl with the Baltimore Colts and had a second career acting in several Police Academy films, has died. He was 66.
Smith's body was found on Wednesday at his home in the Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles, said a La police spokesman, Gregory Baek.
The former NFL player is believed to have died of natural causes, but the coroner's office has not made a final determination, police said.
Smith played for Michigan State University and entered the NFL when he was drafted first overall by the Baltimore Colts in 1967.
Aside from winning a Super Bowl with the Colts in 1971, Smith also went on to play with the Oakland Raiders and the Houston Oilers before he retired in 1976, after being twice selected to the Pro Bowl. »
Close up: Lars von Trier aiming to shock again
9 hours ago
Danish director plans two edits of his new film, which will deal with 'the erotic life of a woman from infancy to middle age'
The big story (softcore edit)
One day, "Naughty Lars von Trier being naughty again" won't be enough of a headline to grab our attention. But for now, the Danish enfant terrible is back among our pages, cackling away about his plan to make two edits of his next film, Nymphomaniac - a softcore cut for the sensitive, and a hardcore version for those who thought The Idiots a touch conservative.
Previously, Von Trier has handled such fluff as genital mutilation and the end of the world. Nymphomaniac will deal with child sexuality, following "the erotic life of a woman from infancy to middle age," according to Von Trier's producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen. "Lars wants to see the sexual arousement of a girl [on screen]," Jensen added. "If Lars »
- Henry Barnes
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