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Story of weary office drone dragged from Manchester to the Costa Blanca after his brother goes missing aims for life-affirming, gets patience-trying
Once a festival fixture, Catalan writer-director Isabel Coixet’s latest presents as a post-Brexit olive branch, reminding us Brits that unspoilt sea, sand and self-improvement is only ever a few rebuilt bridges away. Yet it progresses with such eccentricity it seems unlikely to reverse anybody’s trajectory.
An especially downtrodden Timothy Spall plays Peter, wearied finance drone and keen meteorology buff whose small, palpably lonely life – measured out in nightly ginger snaps – faces redirection after his brother disappears in the Spanish resort of the title. Stranding this cold fish in sunny climes, Coixet is aiming for life-affirming. What follows ends up closer to frown-inducing, with patience-trying just round the corner.
Somewhere in here, there’s the germ of a workable idea: reclaiming the party-central destination as a place of sun-bleached mystery and potential reinvention. After a gruelling prologue in a drably unrepresentative Manchester, the film begins to breathe a little easier overseas, as Jean-Claude Larrieu’s camera navigates the rat-runs of funpubs to sporadically alight upon stunning backdrops.
Yet what’s upfront is forever stilted and unconvincing. Any delight in seeing a film-maker harness the talent of the ever-overlooked Sarita Choudhury is immediately cancelled out by puzzlement at what she’s doing on Spall’s balcony – and why she’s performing an erotic cabaret act for pensioners who patently wouldn’t be in the audience of an erotic cabaret act.
Spall soldiers on regardless, burrowing further into his recessive character, tending a bluff northern brogue, and trying to sublimate Coixet’s airier ideas. Yet his gift – for conveying a lot with a little – is squandered on a script this on-the-nose; he can but listen as police chief Carmen Machi informs him people are boxes that need opening.
Pushing its luck at two hours, this eventually collapses in a heap of its own symbolism, barely unpacking the missing-persons intrigue it started out with. Nice views en route, but it’s a tale scribbled in haste on the back of a postcard.
It seems the reef wasn’t ruined by mass bleaching after all – it was probably just sunscreen and wokeism
Accidents and pollution are making road vehicles untenable. With public transport and ride-sharing, their demise can’t come soon enough
In 1989 a group of Chinese government urban planners came to Europe on a fact-finding mission. They were widely praised for curbing car use – the country of 1 billion people, after all, had just a few million vehicles; the bicycle was king; its city streets were safe and the air mostly clean. How did they manage to have so few cars? asked their hosts, grappling as ever with chaotic British streets, traffic jams and pollution.
“But you don’t understand,” replied one of the delegation. “In 20 years, there will be no bicycles in China.”
John Vidal is a former Guardian environment editor
Continue reading...He wanted me to stay when the drains backed up and left the garden submerged in a foul pond. Obviously I still went
I had four teenagers all packed and ready to go to Ramsgate, and I was doing a quick final scout around the house for where the terrible smell was coming from. I love seeing a teenager with an overnight bag. You just know they’ve forgotten the real stuff (toothbrush, pants) and remembered the dumb stuff (crochet hooks, spare headphone case). And they look so proud and independent.
In fact, the smell was outside the house, a backed-up drain that had made a zen-looking but appallingly foul pond of the garden. Mr Z came back from work and identified this, just as we were all leaving. “Do you want me to stay?” I said, with a lot of heavy upwards inflection to indicate that no way on earth was I going to. “Well, yes,” he replied.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...City food guide Marco Romeo on the sardines, spumante and street dancing that give the Sicilian capital its distinctive vibe
There are two parallel culinary worlds in Palermo: traditional home cooking and street food.
Continue reading...The boxer has disowned a new scripted series about his life, as those who have known him continue to have complicated thoughts on who he is and was
Mike Tyson remembers throwing his first punch at a bully. “The guy ripped the head off my pigeon,” the retired boxer once recalled in a radio interview. “This was the first thing I ever loved in my life, the pigeon. That was the first time I threw a punch.”
Half a century later, the last great undisputed world heavyweight champ is angry again. This time the perceived bully is the Disney-owned streaming service Hulu. Last week it launched Mike, a scripted series about Tyson’s life starring Moonlight’s Trevante Rhodes as the self-declared baddest man on the planet.
Continue reading...St Helens hooker holds Super League’s appearance record and turns 37 in two months, but has postponed his retirement by a year
James Roby can now do his shopping around St Helens in peace – for the next 12 months anyway. It is rare any piece of news comforts the blow of a derby defeat for Saints supporters but hours before the reigning Super League champions fell to Wigan on Friday, the news Roby had decided to postpone his retirement by one more year took the edge off.
“It has been a relief to get it out there, I won’t lie,” he says. “Every time I’m out and around the town, people are asking me what I’m doing. Am I retiring? Am I going around again? I’ve just had to smile and tell them I wasn’t sure.
Continue reading...Surveys reveal that up to 12% of the country supports unification with China, including five of its citizens in a Taipei restaurant
At a Cantonese restaurant in Taipei, Harry Chen and four old friends are shouting at each other over a Lazy Susan, stopping occasionally to toast each other with Canadian whisky or translate their argument into English.
All are retired men in their 70s – the sons of Chinese nationalist soldiers – and were born or grew up in Taiwan during its brutal decades of martial law.
Continue reading...Tax cuts for the rich is Liz Truss’s solution to all this, when what me and my dad really need is an action plan
There’s nothing more I can do to save energy – we’re already frugal because we’re already poor. We already don’t leave lights on. We don’t leave devices on or plugged in. I’ll always put on a jumper instead of turning up the heating. When it gets to real winter, we have the thermostat set at about 13. We use hot-water bottles, blankets, jumpers, big socks. I don’t cook meals or have the oven on much – I’ll microwave noodles instead. My dad eats mainly cereal, as well as tinned soups, pasta – poor people’s food. I already only wash my hair once a week. I can’t go out any less. I can’t drink less, I barely ever drink now anyway. There’s nothing more I can give up at this point. I can’t live any less.
Right now my dad gets through about £15 a week of electricity. He doesn’t have any gas. His electricity is basically the kettle, the immersion heater and the telly. When winter comes, he’ll be using space heaters to keep warm. The insulation in his flat is terrible. When his neighbours use their washing machine, things fall off the shelves – the whole place is basically made of cardboard and bogies so it’s hard to keep it warm. If we’re looking at bills doubling or tripling this winter – £250 or £300 seems possible – I don’t know how he would pay it. The first thing he’d scrimp on is food – and he cannot lose any more weight. The next step would be for him to move in with me.
As told to Anna Moore. Siobhan is in her 30s and lives in the Midlands. Names have been changed
Continue reading...MPs say it is vital tax and spending measures proposed by potential new prime minister are examined by OBR
Liz Truss has been challenged to open up her prospective emergency tax cuts and spending plans to scrutiny if she becomes prime minister and makes immediate moves to tackle the cost of living crisis.
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which produces independent forecasts based on major fiscal announcements by the government, revealed preparatory work had been under way for about a month to publish fresh economic forecasts in September.
Continue reading...Chris Evert on having ovarian cancer, Emma Raducanu’s chances of more glory, the future of women’s tennis and who is the greatest
“It was the longest four days of my life,” Chris Evert says as she remembers facing her mortality last December while waiting for a second cancer diagnosis. Evert, who won 18 grand slam titles from 1974 to 1986, had just come through surgery for ovarian cancer. She had then been tested to ascertain whether the cancer had spread, as she says “all the way to the lymph nodes connected to my reproductive organs. If I tested positive for the lymph nodes I would have been stage three or four. My kind of cancer, ovarian cancer, is very insidious and sneaky as there aren’t many signs that you have it. When you find out you have ovarian cancer you’re usually stage three or four, which means curtains, basically.”
The 67-year-old has been such a familiar presence for so long, firstly as a remarkable tennis player and then in the commentary box, that it feels jolting to hear her confront her own death. She was revered for her composure on court, even when she first became famous after reaching the semi-finals of the US Open in 1971 at the age of 16 but Evert looks up with a tangled expression when I ask her to describe her emotions while waiting for those test results.
Continue reading...Jürgen Klopp has demanded more effort and passion from his Liverpool players after “getting things off my chest” during a lengthy inquest into their poor start.
The Liverpool manager convened a meeting with his squad on Wednesday in response to Monday’s 2-1 defeat at Manchester United – they had the day off on Tuesday – and admits it was a one-way conversation. He believes Liverpool must react on Saturday at home to Bournemouth, in a game he described as “the first proper fightback early in the season”.
Continue reading...On a vintage Test-match day, the England captain bent the occasion to his will in heartwarming and engrossing fashion
There are still some unchanging certainties in the English cricketing summer; many of which were on show on a humid, bellicose second day of this second Test.
Specialist wicketkeepers are busy at the crease, all bottom-handed crunch and ferrety shovels. Anything with the name Strauss attached to it will be accepted as objective, unchallenged gospel (call it The Strauss Hundred and we’d never have heard a whimper). Old Trafford will continue to remake the world as a series of red glass boxes, the compulsory template for any licenced Manchester architect. Perhaps the eastern stand, currently flattened, might bring something new. We might get a grey box or a green box.
Continue reading...It’s time to step away from black and navy, and add some earthy colours to your wardrobe
As the seasons change, make Brad Pitt and his Bullet Train promo wardrobe your moodboard hero. His bespoke combos by Haans Nicholas Mott in life-affirming shades from peach (left) and iced-bun pink through to zingy apple green have been making headlines for all the right reasons.
Choose a palette that reflects nature with earthy tones and vegetable dyes, and consider a warm pink or cocoa as a styling counterpoint to taupe or cream. If you feel lost when it comes to choosing colours that work together, a good hack is to look at paint charts online and build a look from the complementary shade suggestions. Or, keep within tones of the same colour, as Pitt has in his peach ensemble.
Continue reading...The end is nigh when Conservative stalwarts put a vision of a free-market new Jerusalem above winning a general election
She will enter No 10, despite being the less favoured by the general public of two candidates, both of whom leave it cold. But her small party loves her, sending her ratings up with each interminable hustings, as she throws them reckless new pledges and evidence-free policies. What do they see in her that still escapes most voters?
Let’s look into the mind of an ardent Trussite. He was picked out for me by Prof Tim Bale, the great expert on the inner life of political parties. No one is ever typical, but he (who preferred anonymity) fits the broad profile of those 160,000 Tory members, being a southerner in later middle age. He’s a senior member of Liz Truss’s grassroots campaign team, closely plugged into the party he has served for decades.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...From WhatsApp to Instagram to texts and email, I was spending my life frantically picking up my phone. It had to stop.
It officially started during that strange and mystical stretch of time now known as the first lockdown, when negative news notifications were at an all-time high and the only way to have a drink with your mates was through the Houseparty app, which would be inexplicably gatecrashed by strangers.
I was inundated with infection stats, digital book club invites, viral memes that no one would have found at all funny at any other time, and work emails postponing just about everything. I wanted an off switch for the world – but I settled instead for switching off my notifications.
Georgina Lawton is the author of Raceless: In Search of Family, Identity, and the Truth About Where I Belong
Continue reading...Cruz’s eccentric director employs unorthodox techniques to manage lead actors – and polar opposites – Antonio Banderas and Oscar Martínez
It’s clever casting – and very entertaining – to put screen goddess Penélope Cruz in the role of a superstar film director. Cruz is most famous for her working relationship with Pedro Almodóvar; often she’s described as his muse – demeaningly, I think. Well, with this playful satire of the movie industry, Argentinian film-making duo Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat give her all the power in the role of a borderline tyrannical auteur with a bonkers streak (think Marina Abramović or maybe even Björk). Wearing a massive curly wig – made from saucepan scourers, it looks like – Cruz lets rip with a deliciously fun performance.
She plays eccentric director Lola Cuevas, who is starting rehearsals for her new film: an adaptation of a prize-winning novel about the rivalry between two brothers. Lola’s casting tactic is to hire two actors from different worlds in the leads. Playing the no-good drunken brother is Félix Rivero (Antonio Banderas), a global movie star with a mega-watt smile, but a bit dim in the brains department. Opposite him, respected stage actor Iván Torres (Oscar Martínez) takes the role of the strait-laced brother.
Continue reading...Scottish Power chief proposes capping household energy costs at about £2,000 a year, ahead of Friday’s price cap announcement
The Institute for Government also warned that energy bill support will be needed beyond this year, costing tens of billions of pounds more.
In their new paper outlining the government’s options, they say:
So far support is all focused on winter 2022/23, but current projections are for energy prices to be just as high, if not higher, next year.
The new prime minister will need to be ready to provide further support again. Offsetting the same proportion of bills next year would cost around £90bn. Given how long the crisis is expected to last, the government should also look at other measures to deal with the high energy bills, including investing in energy efficiency.
Here are some of the telescope’s incredible images – and what they show about how it operates, and the universe itself
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On Christmas Day last year, 30 years after its conception, the James Webb space telescope launched from French Guiana. On 28 December, it went past the moon. On 24 January, it fired its thrusters for five minutes and settled into its final orbit about 1.5m km from Earth. On 12 July, after months of painstaking setup, it produced its first image – showing us, for the first time, faraway galaxies as they were more than 13bn years ago.
The Webb telescope has been adding to this miraculous beginning ever since. Now it’s brought us something a little closer to home, a mere 615m km away: the most extraordinarily detailed images of Jupiter we’ve ever seen.
Continue reading...Analysis of 17th-century masterpiece by Dulux scientists revealed several ways of creating the perfect impasto
The secrets of Rembrandt’s painting technique on The Night Watch remain lost to time for now. But researchers tasked with solving the mystery believe they may at least have gleaned some clues as to the perfect recipe for wall filler.
Scientists at AkzoNobel, the Dutch owners of Dulux paints, have been working since 2019 with conservators at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum on the restoration of Rembrandt’s masterpiece, building a better picture of how the 17th-century painter worked.
Continue reading...Diligent researchers have drawn up a formula to predict the precise timing of the screams. I could have saved them some work
The first time my son ever went in a car, aged three months, he screamed so hard he foamed at the mouth, turned purple and then passed out for an hour. In a good light, you can still see the self-inflicted nail marks in my thighs.
Now, researchers have drawn up a neat little formula to explain precisely when such a tantrum (in this case known as “T”) may rear its head during a long car journey.
Nell Frizzell is a journalist and author of The Panic Years
Continue reading...Hair is considered a sacred part of the body in my tribe, and why Mom left me her hair, but I couldn’t give her anything
July marks one year since we buried my mother. She departed this world far too soon in February 2021 – she wasn’t even 62.
Several months after her passing, I found a plastic bag with her hair in it, along with a note she’d written in 2013, explaining that she left this lock – so soft and matted flat – for when she moved on to the other side. “I wanted to leave something still alive,” she wrote, “so I left my hair.”
Continue reading...Polls show Britons are fed up and willing to challenge the government over the cost of living. We must rediscover our history of rebellion
When millions of Britons believe rioting is justified over the soaring cost of living, it’s not hyperbole to describe the nation as a powder keg. According to a ComRes poll commissioned by the Independent, 29% of voters believe violent disorder is appropriate given the circumstances. Among 18- to 24-year-olds, nearly half think rioting is justified; and even among 35- to 44-year-olds it’s over 40%. If such a large chunk of the electorate believes that it’s justifiable to smash stuff up in protest even before the projected hike in energy prices plunges millions of households below the waterline, what fury awaits this winter?
Before I’m arrested for incitement under the Public Order Act, this is no clarion call for riots. It is to say that a democracy that is unable to satisfy the basic needs of its citizens brings mass unrest on itself. Martin Luther King aptly observed that “a riot is the language of the unheard”; how else can ordinary people force the powerful to listen? Waiting for a general election that may be two years away will not deal with the imminent humanitarian catastrophe we face.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...The EU’s tax haven and ‘dirty money’ blacklists discriminate against Caribbean countries and other poor nations while letting western nations off the hook
The Caribbean rarely makes international headlines outside of a royal visit or when a secretive tax haven is disrupted and the financial documents of the famous are leaked.
Yet tax havens are not a construct of the Caribbean but of Europe. The amount of money laundered through these countries pales in comparison to the money laundering cities of the EU. In fact, whistleblowers and investigative journalists, via the Panama, Paradise and Pandora papers, have unveiled the true origins of the illicit proceeds of crimes and where laundered or “dirty” money is really parked.
Continue reading...While more extreme threats are unlikely to be realised, sticking to the precautionary principle is just plain common sense
Our world is on course for a climate cataclysm. Or is it? Not long ago, the global heating battle lines were clear: you either believed it was happening, and that it resulted from the colossal volumes of carbon spewed out by human activities, or you didn’t. As the year on year breakdown of our once stable climate has become more apparent, however, denial has become increasingly irrelevant, and new battle lines are being drawn.
While widespread blistering heat, drought and wildfires have kept climate change in the public eye, they have also heightened tensions between those I call climate appeasers, who seek to minimise how bad climate breakdown will ultimately be, and others, disparagingly branded doomers (or doomists), who are honestly concerned that it may be catastrophic, perhaps even posing an existential threat to civilisation and possibly humankind itself.
Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL, and the author of Hothouse Earth: an Inhabitant’s Guide
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