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      Take two Van Goghs daily: the growing popularity of museum prescriptions

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 31 March

    Research backs schemes that encourage doctors to prescribe time in cultural institutions to boost mental health and reduce loneliness

    It was about six years ago that Nathalie Bondil heard of doctors prescribing outside the boundaries of traditional medicine, scribbling out orders to walk, cycle or swim, or sending their patients into nature.

    As she made her way through the halls of Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, however, she was certain that its collection of Inuit art or paintings by Claude Monet or Camille Pissarro, could also be just what the doctor ordered.

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      ‘My brain reaches for morbidity’: inside the unsettling world (and 700 Post-it notes) of artist Ed Atkins

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 31 March

    He was a digital art pioneer, making himself an avatar in disturbing films. Now Ed Atkins has a new medium: the pandemic Post-it note. Ahead of a major Tate show, we meet the shapeshifting artist

    When he was younger and his parents were out of the house, Ed Atkins used to sit on the landing and force himself to imagine all the ways they might die. “My thinking was that if I imagined it first, then it would be very unlikely to actually happen,” says the 42-year-old artist.

    Atkins’ parents didn’t succumb to any of the ways he had invented. But during the final year of his master’s course, his father, Philip, was diagnosed with cancer and died six months later, during Atkins’ degree show, in 2009. “It’s a huge thing, obviously, losing your father,” says the artist. “And it started to feed into what I was reading and was interested in. His death, and death generally, is in all of my work.”

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      James Bond should not be a woman due to franchise’s ‘profound sexism’, says Helen Mirren

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 31 March

    Actor says she is opposed to the possibility of a female 007 and that cinema should focus on telling stories of ‘extraordinary’ real female spies

    Helen Mirren has said that James Bond should never be played by a woman, as the spy franchise is “born out of profound sexism”.

    The future of 007 is currently up in the air, after Amazon MGM Studios struck a $1bn (£ 770m) deal for creative control over the character with Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, the British-American heirs to the film producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and longtime stewards of the Bond films.

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      Dreamers review – this teen dance drama is too subtle for its own good. Where’s the debauchery?

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 30 March • 1 minute

    Where other teen shows ramp up the sex, drugs and scandal, this Leeds-set saga about rivalries in a dance school keeps it real – so real it almost refuses to be entertaining

    The implausibility of the teen drama may well be the genre’s defining feature. In the 00s, we were subjected to untold glamour and relentless wisecracking by US imports such as The OC and Gossip Girl. The UK equivalent was Skins, in which a group of Bristolian party animals managed to make practically every personal problem known to man look intimidatingly cool. More recently, we’ve had mind-blowing levels of debauchery from Euphoria , mind-blowing levels of sexual literacy and candour from Sex Education and mind-blowing levels of heartwarming niceness from Heartstopper . All of it is ludicrous in its own way.

    Dreamers is different. It is realistic – jarringly so. That’s both a pro and a con for this Channel 4 drama about a group of teenage dancers living in Leeds. The series – written by Lisa Holdsworth (Waterloo Road) and Gem Copping (EastEnders), and directed by Sara Dunlop – is filmed in a meticulously naturalistic way. The camera tends to linger, documentary-style, on characters, whether they are doing something interesting or not: chatting aimlessly, walking to work, getting a glass of water. It’s very kitchen sink, not least in the sense that there are multiple shots of actual kitchen sinks. (The show’s original title was Dance School, which captures the no-frills, matter-of-fact mode far better than Dreamers.) The dialogue is sparse, underwrought and unusually true to life; the teen banter is believably awkward and sometimes people respond to questions with “I don’t know” and the conversation just sort of ends. Combined with the deluge of dancing footage – which looks brilliant and beautiful for the most part – the Dreamers aesthetic is strong and soothing: dynamic movement punctuated by shots of shabby normalcy, like a Martin Parr photograph brought to life.

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      Tribe With Bruce Parry review – he loses his mind on drugs … and it doesn’t disappoint

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 30 March

    After a decade away, the adventurer is off to gain more precious insights into tribal life – from eating weevil larva to taking ayahuasca. It’s still absolutely classic telly

    It is, scarily, 20 years since Bruce Parry first brought Tribe to the BBC. The diffident but determined former Royal Marine visited Indigenous people in the world’s most remote places and, by living as one of them, earned a level of trust that previous documentary-makers had struggled to achieve. Parry was more patient, more respectful and more physically courageous than other white interlopers had been. He gained valuable insights into tribal life and the threats to it posed by modernity. Tribe itself was simply cracking entertainment, as involving as it was educational.

    Television’s sausage machine has a way of turning the most exotic ingredients into familiar comfort food and, although it took us to the farthest corners of the planet, Tribe soon established a reliable format. Parry’s return follows the winning formula as he travels to meet the 600-strong Waimaha people, deep in the Colombian Amazon rainforest.

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      ‘Woodstock for elder millennials’: the Garden State soundtrack anniversary concert

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 30 March

    The music from Zach Braff’s seminal comedy drama took centre stage for one special night bringing back artists from Imogen Heap to The Shins

    It’s been two decades since the release of Garden State, Zach Braff’s film about an alienated young actor’s struggle to find meaning in life. But while the movie itself became a cult classic, perhaps its biggest legacy is its soundtrack, which went platinum, won a Grammy and became a cultural touchstone among a certain subset of the American population.

    So it was no surprise that, when Braff announced a 20th-anniversary concert celebrating the album, at which each of its dozen or so artists would perform, tickets were going for hundreds of dollars. This was Woodstock for elder millennials – at least a certain swath of us who, when the soundtrack came out in 2004, found an outlet for our big teenage feelings in bands like the Shins, Frou Frou and Iron and Wine. All three were among the performers at Los Angeles’s Greek Theater on Saturday evening (technically nearly 21 years after the album’s release). The concert raised money for the Midnight Mission, a century-old LA charity fighting homelessness.

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      Richard Chamberlain, hero of Dr Kildare and ‘king of the miniseries’, dies aged 90

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 30 March

    The actor died on Saturday night in Waimānalo, Hawaii of complications after a stroke, his publicist says

    Richard Chamberlain, the hero of the 1960s television series Dr Kildare who found a second career as an award-winning “king of the miniseries,” has died. He was 90.

    Chamberlain died on Saturday night in Waimānalo, Hawaii of complications after a stroke, according to his publicist, Harlan Boll.

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      Maybe I’m Amazed by John Harris review – with a little help from John, Paul, George and Ringo

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 30 March

    The Guardian journalist’s tender account of how music became a bridge between him and his autistic son, James, is full of wit and wisdom

    Halfway through Maybe I’m Amazed , there’s a photograph of John Harris’s son, James, with one of his heroes. James is a young-looking 10 in knee-length shorts decorated with stars. Ian Hunter of 1970s rock band Mott the Hoople stands beside him, a hand gently around his shoulder. “Sixty-nine years separate them,” Harris writes. “Here is proof of how songs and their creators find fans in the most unlikely of places.”

    Maybe I’m Amazed is the story of a growing child’s love of music, but it’s more than that: it’s also about how songs provided a whole world for James, and his family, after his autism diagnosis. It marks a departure for Harris, whose previous journalism, aside from his political work for the Guardian , has involved editing magazines and writing columns, reviews and other books about music.

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      The Life, Old Age and Death of a Working-Class Woman review – a son confronts his mother’s decline

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 30 March

    Didier Eribon’s guilt and shame fuels an angry and eloquent meditation on our attitudes towards the elderly and the end of life

    “My mother,” writes Didier Eribon, “was unhappy her whole life.” Abandoned as a child, she started work at 14 as a house servant, later becoming a cleaning lady and then worked for decades making glassware at a factory in France’s Champagne region.

    Married at 20, she shared a bed for 55 years with a violent, philandering and controlling man she did not love, ultimately bearing intimate witness to his Alzheimer’s disease and death. A decade later, in her mid-80s, her sons put this cognitively and physically enfeebled woman into a state-run nursing home, whose French name – établissement d’hébergement pour personnes âgées dépendantes – makes it sound nicer than it was.

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