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      TV tonight: a chilling case of catfishing, cruelty and double murder

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 28 April

    A gripping two-part documentary reveals the events surrounding the killings of Carol and Stephen Baxter. Plus: the downfall of P Diddy. Here’s what to watch this evening

    9pm, ITV1
    This two-part documentary opens with a petrified 999 call from Ellena Baxter, who was accused of murdering her parents, Carol and Stephen, in 2023. But what starts as a generic true crime tale gives way to a blow-by-blow account of the catfishing and cruelty suffered by the Baxters and their daughter in the years prior. Hannah J Davies

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      Sara Pascoe: I Am a Strange Gloop review – motherhood as Sisyphean struggle

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 28 April

    Sydney comedy festival, then touring
    The UK comedian’s standup set is both a dishy conversation with a friend and a thrilling rejection of the good mother archetype

    One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

    So goes the oft-quoted conclusion of Albert Camus’ 1942 treatise The Myth of Sisyphus – comparing all of human existence to an endless struggle.

    I Am a Strange Gloop is on in Perth on 2 May before touring across the UK from June

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      Cosmic metros, UFO circus tops and a 3,000C sun gun: the mesmerising architecture of Tashkent

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 28 April • 1 minute

    From its cavernous domed bazaar to its ravishingly muscular museum, the Uzbek capital has one of the world’s wildest collections of modernist gems. Will its bid for world heritage status succeed?

    A pair of huge turquoise domes swell up on the skyline of Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, perching on the jumbled horizon like two upturned bowls. One gleams with ceramic tiles, glazed in traditional Uzbek patterns. The other catches the light with a pleated canopy of azure metal ribs. Both recall the majestic cupolas that crown the mosques of the country’s ancient Silk Road cities of Samarkand, Khiva and Bukhara. But here, they cover structures of a very different kind.

    The ribbed metal dome crowns the home of the state circus, its futuristic-looking big top seeming to have been crossed with a UFO. Built in 1976, it’s big enough to hold an audience of 3,000. The ceramic dome, meanwhile, looms over the bustling chaos of the city’s main market, Chorsu Bazaar, built in 1980 as a wonderworld of fruit, meat and fish, sprawling across an area the size of two football pitches. Both are dazzling works of Soviet modernism, and part of a remarkable group of buildings that the country has just submitted to Unesco, in the hope of having them granted world heritage status .

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      Greta Garbo documentary reveals star as ‘a relaxed, silly, funny person’

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 28 April

    Exclusive: Previously unseen footage of actor larking about with friends at home upends Garbo’s aloof image

    She is remembered as the ultimate reclusive film star, following her shock retirement at the height of her success. But the enduring image of Greta Garbo is being challenged by a new documentary, which will show that, far from withdrawing from life – as in her most famous line, “I want to be alone” – she lived it to the full, partying with close friends.

    The British film-maker Lorna Tucker has been given access to previously unseen behind the scenes footage in which the star, once described as “the most alluring, vibrant and yet aloof character ever to grace the motion picture screen”, can be seen larking about and laughing.

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      ‘I stopped talking to my parents – and life opened up’: Heather Graham on family, ageing and ‘creepy’ film-makers

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 28 April

    The actor has seen the best and worst of Hollywood, from directors like Paul Thomas Anderson to the notorious Harvey Weinstein. She talks about her #MeToo moment, her difficult childhood and her new movie, Chosen Family

    For almost all her life, Heather Graham says, she was a “people pleaser”. It was encouraged in childhood, she says, this obligation to put others’ needs above her own, and it endured even after the 1997 film Boogie Nights had made her a star and she had severed all contact with her “judgmental, authoritarian” parents.

    Now 55, Graham was in her 40s before she recognised her self-sabotaging tendencies, and tried to correct course. “I realised, no, actually I can just ask myself, ‘What do I want?’ and make myself happy,” she says over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. “I wish I could have had this when I was 20 or 15. If I wasn’t trying to please other people, what would I have done?” It affected her romantic life and sometimes her work. “There were moments where I feel like I could have stood up for myself more,” she says.

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      In HBO’s The Last of Us, revenge is a dish best served democratically

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 28 April • 7 minutes

    New episodes of season 2 of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars' Kyle Orland (who's played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn't) will be talking about them here every Monday morning . While these recaps don't delve into every single plot point of the episode, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh.

    Andrew : And there we are! Our first post-Joel episode of The Last Of Us. It’s not like we’ve never had Joel-light episodes before, but Pedro Pascal’s whole “reluctant uncle” thing is a load-bearing element of several currently airing TV shows and I find myself missing it a LOT.

    Kyle : Yeah, I've said here in the past how the core Ellie/Joel relationship was key to my enjoyment of the first game. Its absence gently soured me on the second game and is starting to do the same for the second season.

    But I was also literally mouth agape during the hospital scene, when Ellie said she had an opportunity to talk to Joel on the porch before he died but passed on it. Anyone who's played the game knows how central " the porch scene " is to recontextualizing the relationship between these two characters before they are parted forever. I was hoping that we'd still get that scene in a surprise flashback later in the series, but now that seems unlikely at best.

    Andrew : (I am not watching that video by the way, I need my brain to stay pure!!)

    Kyle : I suppose Ellie could have just been lying to a nosy therapist, but if she wasn't, and their final conversation has just been retconned out of existence... I don't know what they were thinking. Then again, if it's just a head fake to psych out game players, well, bravo, I guess.

    Tommy is torn between love for his brother and the welfare of the community he's helped to build. Credit: HBO

    Andrew : Ellie is a known liar, which we know even before Catherine O'Hara, world's least ethical therapist, declares her to be a lying liar who lies. If the scene is as pivotal as you say, then I'm sure we'll get it at a time that's engineered to maximize the gut punch. The re-strung guitar ended up back in her room in the end, didn't it?

    We're able to skip ahead to Ellie being semi-functional again because of a three-month time jump, showing us a Jackson community that is rebuilding after a period of mourning and cleaning that it didn't want viewers to spend time on. I am struck by the fact that, despite everything, Jackson gets to be the one "normal" community with baseball and sandwiches and boring town-hall meetings, where every other group of more than 10 people is either a body-mutilation cult or a paramilitary band of psychopaths.

    Kyle : We also saw the version of Boston that Ellie grew up in last season, which was kind of halfway between "paramilitary psychopaths" and "normal community." But I do think the Last of Us fiction in general has a pretty grim view of how humans would react to precarity, which makes Jackson's uniqueness all the more important as a setting.

    We also get our first glimpse into Jackson politics in this episode, which ends up going in quite a different direction to get to the same "Ellie and Dina go out for revenge." While I appreciate the town hall meeting as a decent narrative explanation of why two young girls are making this revenge trek alone, I feel like the whole sequence was a little too drawn out with sanctimonious philosophizing from all sides.

    Even after an apocalypse, city council meetings are a constant. Credit: HBO

    Andrew : Yeah the town hall scene was an odd one. Parts of it could have been lifted from Parks & Recreation , particularly the bit where the one guy comes to the "Are We Voting To Pursue Bloody Vengeance" meeting to talk about the finer points of agriculture (he does not have a strong feeling about the bloody vengeance).

    Part of it almost felt too much like "our" politics, when Seth (the guy who harassed Ellie and Dina at the dance months ago, but attempted a partially forced apology afterward) stands up and calls everyone snowflakes for even thinking about skipping out on the bloody vengeance (not literally, but that's the clear subtext). He even invokes a shadowy, non-specific "they" who would be "laughing at us" if the community doesn't track down and execute Abby. I'll tell you what, that he is one of two people backing Ellie's attempted vengeance tour doesn't make me feel better about what she's deciding to do here.

    Kyle : I will say the line "Nobody votes for angry" rang a bit hollow given our current political moment. Even if their national politics calcified in 2003, I think that doesn't really work...
    Andrew : SO MANY people vote for angry! Or, at least, for emotional. It's an extremely reliable indicator!
    Kyle : Except in Jackson, the last bastion of unemotional, mercy-forward community on either side of the apocalypse!
    Andrew : So rather than trying the angry route, Ellie reads a prepared statement where she (again lying, by the way!) claims that her vengeance tour isn't about vengeance at all and attempts to appeal to the council's better angels, citing the bonds of community that hold them all together. When this (predictably) fails, Ellie (even more predictably) abandons the community at almost the first possible opportunity, setting out on a single horse with Dina in tow to exact vengeance alone.
    Kyle : One thing I did appreciate in this episode is how many times they highlighted that Ellie was ready to just "GO GO GO REVENGE NOW NO WAITING" and even the people that agreed with her were like "Hold up, you at least need to stock up on some better supplies, girl!"
    Andrew : Maybe you can sense it leaking through, and it's not intentional, but I am already finding Ellie's impulsive snark a bit less endearing without Joel's taciturn competence there to leaven it.

    Kyle : I can, and I can empathize with it. I think Tommy is right, too, in saying that Joel would have moved heaven and earth to save a loved one but not necessarily to get revenge for one that's already dead. He was pragmatic enough to know when discretion was the better part of valor, and protecting him and his was always the priority. And I'm not sure the town hall "deterrence" arguments would have swayed him.

    Look on the bright side, though, at least we get a lost of long, languorous scenes of lush scenery on the ride to Seattle (a scene-setting trait the show borrows well from the movie). I wonder what you made of Dina asking Ellie for a critical assessment of her kissing abilities, especially the extremely doth-protest-too-much "You're gay, I'm not" bit...

    Ellie and Dina conspire. Credit: HBO

    Andrew : "You're gay, I'm not, and those are the only two options! No, I will not be answering any follow-up questions!"

    I am not inclined to get too on Dina's case about that, though. Sexuality is complicated, as is changing or challenging your own perception of yourself. The show doesn't go into it, but I've also got to imagine that in any post-apocalyptic scenario, the vital work of Propagating the Species creates even more societal pressure to participate in heteronormative relationships than already exists in our world.

    Ellie, who is only truly happy when she is pissing someone off, is probably more comfortable being "out" in this context than Dina would be.

    Kyle : As the episode ends we get a bit of set up for a couple of oncoming threats (or is it just one?): an unseen cult-killing force and a phalanx of heavily armed WLF soldiers that Ellie and Dina seem totally unprepared for. In a video game I'd have no problem believing my super-soldier protagonist character could shoot and kill as many bad guys as the game wants to throw at me. In a more "grounded" TV show, the odds do not seem great.

    Andrew : One thread I'm curious to see the show pull at: Ellie attempts to blame "Abby and her crew," people who left Jackson months ago, for a mass slaying of cult members that had clearly happened just hours ago, an attempt to build Abby up into a monster in her head so it's easier to kill her when the time comes. We'll see how well it works!

    But yeah, Ellie and Dina and their one horse are not ready for the " Terror Lake Salutes Hannibal Crossing The Alps "-length military parade that the WLF is apparently prepared to throw at them.

    Kyle : They're pretty close to Seattle when they find the dead cultists, so from their perspective I'm not sure blaming Abby and crew for the mass murder is that ridiculous
    Andrew : (Girl whose main experience with murder is watching Abby brutally kill her father figure, seeing someone dead on the ground): Getting a lot of Abby vibes from this...

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      Kneecap concert footage assessed by police over alleged ‘kill your MP’ call

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 28 April

    Footage of Northern Irish rap trio Kneecap allegedly calling for the death of British MPs is being assessed by counter-terrorism police

    Footage of Northern Irish rap trio Kneecap allegedly calling for the death of British MPs is being assessed by counter-terrorism police.

    Video emerged of the band at a November 2023 gig appearing to show one person from Kneecap saying: “The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP.”

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      Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road review – ‘I could look forever at these passing moments in cosmic colours’

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 28 April

    British Museum, London
    The Japanese master’s weightless gaze birthed not only French impressionism but also the whole ideal of art as a way of capturing momentary glimpses of everyday joy

    The only thing wrong with the British Museum’s rapturous trip through the Technicolor world of Utagawa Hiroshige’s prints is its final section, which explores this early 19th-century Japanese artist’s continuing global influence. A patchy sampling of Hiroshige’s imitators is all a bit rushed. But then, to do justice to his after-echoes would take a blockbuster in itself, not an epilogue.

    Everywhere I looked up to this point, it was evident how precisely French impressionism followed Hiroshige’s cues. Take rain. It becomes a pleasurable urban event in Renoir’s The Umbrellas , but it was Hiroshige who first saw rain as a lighthearted excuse to put up umbrellas – in works such as his print Tarui , created in the 1830s. The impressionist theme of snow, enjoyed by Monet, is also delightfully anticipated by Hiroshige’s 1832-34 work Snow-viewing Along the Sumida River .

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      The Settlers review – this vital film forces Louis Theroux to do something he’s never done before

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 27 April

    The documentarian manages to stay calm and polite as guns are repeatedly pointed at him in the West Bank. Then someone shoves him …

    If you’ve even casually been tracking Louis Theroux’s career, you will have detected a noticeable deceleration of late. For a while, after he shed the culty sheen of his Weird Weekends persona, Theroux emerged as a sober, probing documentarian who made films about drug addiction, sexual assault and postpartum depression. These films were, without exception, vital.

    Then lockdown happened, and the wheels fell off. After going viral for a self-consciously ironic rap he did 20 years earlier, Theroux settled into the low-stakes quicksand of a generic celebrity interview podcast. You were left with the feeling of an extraordinary talent being wasted.

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