18 h. ago My cultural awakening: Jackie Chan films inspired me to become a kung fu instructor

Since I saw a VHS of Rush Hour at a sleepover as a kid, the martial art has given me increased body positivity and helped me find a community When I was 12, following my parents’ divorce, I moved with my mum and sister from London to Australia, leaving behind my dad and a large extended family. It was destabilising and demoralising. Throughout high school I was bullied for my accent, clothes and looks. While Australian girls seemed like flowers thriving under the brutal sun, I felt like a sweaty, acne-prone gremlin who craved the dark and cold of home.Shortly after moving, I befriended a girl who had lost her mum. Suffering in our own ways, we found release in watching the 1998 action comedy Rush Hour, starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker as detectives trying to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a Chinese diplomat. My friend had the film on VHS, and we put it on one night when I was sleeping over. This became a regular activity, and we would fling ourse...

Culture

7 d. ago My cultural awakening: an Asian Dub Foundation song gave me the courage to take a stand against racism

The group’s campaigning single Free Satpal Ram, about a south Asian man jailed for murder after an alleged racist attack, led me to become an activist – with their lead singer as my mentorIt wasn’t New Labour, my politics A-level or the Tipp-Exed Woody Guthrie slogan “this machine kills fascists” on my friend Simon’s bag that set me on the path to activism. It was a CD single I found in a west London record shop, which I only picked up because it was by a bunch of brown guys.It was the summer of 1998, and I was 17 years old and browsing records in the Harrow Virgin Megastore, when I came across Free Satpal Ram by jungle-punk-rap band Asian Dub Foundation – a buzzing, brilliant, ramshackle protest song about a south Asian man who had been sent to jail after defending himself in an alleged racist attack in 1986. While at an Indian restaurant, Satpal Ram was stabbed with a broken bottle, and retaliated by stabbing his attacker with a penknife; the man late...

Events

8 d. ago At Work review – photographer ditches career for gig economy and writing in poverty drama

Venice film festivalThough the film is eventful enough, there is a bland placidity with which Bastien Bouillon plays a man following his dreams in this quaintly naive storyValérie Donzelli has given us a strange mixture of realism and quaint naivety in this film, based on an autobiographical novel by French photographer turned novelist Franck Courtès. There are some interesting insights into the gig economy but some very cliched and implausible representations of what happens when you become a literary author.With a kind of unvarying bland placidity, Bastien Bouillon plays someone who (like Courtès) abandoned a very successful career in photography in pursuit of his financially perilous dream of being a serious writer. We get a single shot early on of all his cameras on a shelf: he presumably does not sell any to alleviate his financial difficulties but we never see or hear about these valuable objects ever again. Continue reading...

Economics

1 week ago My cultural awakening: an ancient statue made me fall in love with my fat body

I spent decades being ashamed of the way I look. Then a visit to the Natural History Museum changed everythingI still remember the moment my body image issues began as if it were yesterday. The shaming came before the bingeing: I was 18 and my mum told me I needed to start being careful with my eating, because I was “getting fat”.She would say: “You’d be so pretty if you’d just lose weight!” I wasn’t overweight at the time, and I felt so angry. But young women aren’t allowed to be angry – so, with nowhere to put those feelings, I channelled them into food, spiralling into binge-eating as an act of revenge. Then came remorse and shame: a cycle of bingeing and restriction. Continue reading...

Politics

2 w. ago Thursday Murder Club viewers only just realising Richard Osman’s wife is in film

The Thursday Murder Club is truly a star-studded affair, welcoming an abundance of familiar faces including Helen Mirren, David Tennant, Tom Ellis and Richard E Grant.

Events

2 w. ago Christy review – outstanding actors and Cork landmarks shine in a moving and funny Irish drama

Diarmuid Noyes and Danny Power play two brothers finding their feet after time in care in a social-realist film with heart and humourHere is a terrifically warm and involving Irish movie about two brothers from Cork’s northside; it is moving and funny, with plenty of affectionate shots of the iconic Knocknaheeny water tower looming futuristically over the skyline like a 70s spaceship or one of eastern Europe’s Soviet-era war memorials. Screenwriter Alan O’Gorman and first-time director and story co-creator Brendan Canty deliver a social-realist film with heart, featuring outstanding performances of sympathy and strength, developed from Canty’s 2019 short film of the same name. It’s tough, but capable of delicacy and succeeds in conveying something very difficult to achieve without sentimentality: love of your home town. You can come for the drama and stay for the cheeky hip-hop sequence over the closing credits, a final stretch of sweetness and fun that the movie has more than earne...

Events

2 w. ago A Road to a Village review – striking visuals ballast Nepal drama of haves and have

Widening gulfs in mountain society drives one father to the precipice in Nabin Subba’s humble yet mythic parableIf an interest in realism is a bellwether for a film industry’s relationship with social conditions in a given country, it’s always instructive to see where notable examples of the genre crop up. After 2012’s Wadjda prefigured the opening up of Saudi Arabia, here is a fretful example from Nepal, resplendently shot in the vast mountainsides above the eastern city of Dharan, but which agonises about the country’s modernisation.Weaver Maila (Dayahang Rai) finds himself on the wrong side of progress after a road is built connecting the Rai village of Balankha to the valley below. With plastic tarps on sale at a local store now bursting with hot new merch, no one wants his bamboo mats any more. His electricity is cut off, stopping his scallywag son Bindray (Prasan Rai) from studying, and driving the youngster to instead obsess over other modern distractions: the elixir of Coca-...

Events

3 w. ago My Cultural Awakening: Years & Years helped me accept my bisexual identity

Olly Alexander’s stage presence and his band’s lyrics pulled together the two sides of my nature, and accept my desire for menI first discovered Olly Alexander, of Years & Years, by accident. I was teaching English as a foreign language in South Korea, and I showed a video of a BBC Glastonbury roundup on the projector as part of the lesson. I remember glimpsing an incredibly cute blond guy on stage, and being transfixed. I knew immediately that he was gay because the way he moved was unashamedly fluid and graceful. He was doing a pirouette.The clip was so short there wasn’t even a mention of the name of the band, so I had to do some detective work. I Googled something ridiculous like “bleached hair gay man Glastonbury 2015” and trawled through hundreds of search results until I found him. Continue reading...

Politics

3 w. ago Horrified plane passenger realises he is sat behind Katie Price during a flight as star jets to Turkey with boyfriend JJ Slater for MORE surgery

The hilarious moment a horrified plane passenger realises he's sat behind Katie Price has been captured on film.

Politics

4 w. ago My cultural awakening: a Steve Carell film made me realise I was being abused

After my dad died, my mum and I endured the coercive control of her new partner for years. It was The Way Way Back that freed us bothIn the first five minutes of the 2013 comedy drama The Way Way Back, a teenage boy has a conversation with his stepfather in a car bound for Cape Cod. You can only see the stepdad’s eyes in the rearview mirror, but you instantly know it’s Steve Carell. At this point, I loved Carell. He’s the reason that I, then a teenager, watched the film.“Duncan let me ask you something,” Carell’s character says. “On a scale of one to 10, what do you think you are?” Duncan responds shyly that he thinks he’s a six. Any normal adult would balk and correct him. Tell him he’s nothing less than a 10. “I think you’re a three,” says Carell’s character, Trent. Suddenly, I hated Carell with a blind fury. He was a vision of pure evil. I didn’t want to watch him in anything else, ever. Continue reading...

Events