Mubeen Blogs

Venice film festival The Venice fixture plays an illustrator haunted by his boyhood in Mario Martone’s part spooky, part sentimental oddity It’s always good to see the veteran Italian star Toni Servillo at Venice; in fact, the festival is pretty much unthinkable without him. But this initially promising prospect – adapted from a novel by Domenico Starnone – is a minor, quibbling tonal oddity, unsure if it wants to be scary or sentimental. Servillo lends it as much gravitas as he can: his mere presence is valuable ballast and the streetscape scenes of Naples are handled with a connoisseur’s touch by director Mario Martone, whose previous Naples-set movie Nostalgia was far superior. Daniele (played by Servillo) is a septuagenarian book illustrator whose old-fashioned, hand-drawn artistry is something he testily treasures. He has come back to his family home in Naples, to the gloomy apartment where he was brought up, just behind the train station, and where his grownup daughter Betta (...

Veteran Frenchman bowed out in New York but the clash of two black players in the last four of the men’s singles is testament to his effect The early days of this year’s US Open can be told in a series of farewells to competitors who plan to end their careers this year. The most moving of them all came in the form of Gaël Monfils’s grand departure inside Louis Armstrong Stadium against the wildly talented 20-year-old Learner Tien . Tien was competing in front of his home crowd, one of the Americans capable of a deep run, but for much of his straight sets defeat the Frenchman had the American crowd in the palm of his hands. Beyond the massive popularity he has garnered among tennis fans, one of the most striking parts of Monfils’s long farewell was seeing how highly nearly all of his fellow professional players, and particularly his fellow black players, regard him. Frances Tiafoe says he spent his youth looking up to Monfils. Arthur Fils considers Monfils his older brother. Naomi Osaka...

Hungarian author who explored memory and history in his fiction and was nominated for a Nobel prize The writer Péter Nádas, who has died aged 83, transformed the modern history of his native Hungary into epic fiction that rooted its upheavals and calamities in the minds, and bodies, of his all-too-human characters. “I’m not a historian,” he said. “I’m not an anthropologist, nor am I a sociologist. I work with the fates of individuals.” Those individuals filled a series of books that, in their scope, depth and stylistic ambition, made Nádas a perennial contender for the Nobel prize in literature. Yet it would be his younger compatriot László Krasznahorkai, drawing on the senior writer’s example, who took that honour in 2025 . Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/XJ79ei3

EU’s highest court allows Swedish furniture firm to begin proceedings after Vlaams Belang used its trademarks in immigration campaign Ikea has won the right to take legal action against a Belgian far-right political party that parodied the Swedish flatpack furniture firm’s branding in its anti-immigration campaign. In a ruling on Tuesday, Europe’s highest court said that Ikea had the right to oppose the use of its trademarks and distinctive graphics by Vlaams Belang, a rightwing Eurosceptic political party that advocates for an independent Flemish state. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/yUvkM4f

Facial recognition and spotters part of operation at Emirates that involved a dozen incidents and two arrests The concourses are silent when, deep in the Emirates Stadium’s bowels, Chief Inspector Pete Dearden’s briefing begins. Arsenal’s 4.30pm kick-off against Chelsea is still hours away but the fixture carries significance as a London derby and because the Premier League champions are hosting a realistic challenger. Dearden is a senior officer in the Metropolitan police’s public order command and Sunday’s matchday commander. He is, to borrow football jargon, giving the pre-match team talk, running through intelligence and in-game tactics. “Set the right style and tone,” he says. After Dearden has finished, the police room becomes a pseudo-station for the afternoon, with all incidents triaged by the same crime officer. Football offences can be found in niche legislation, and the Met wants London’s matchdays to be, so far as possible, policed uniformly. Continue reading... from Th...

Storm, which may make impact as soon as Monday, is third system in weeks to threaten state during hurricane season Hawaii has declared a state of emergency as powerful Hurricane Lowell makes its way toward the islands, with the first impacts expected as soon as Monday. The storm is the third system in just over three weeks to threaten Hawaii during an active hurricane season in the central Pacific. Lowell remained a category 3 hurricane early on Sunday morning, packing winds of 125 miles per hour while moving north-west at six miles per hour. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/8jWYPrs

My father doesn’t ask for help from just anyone. And yet he asked for mine. He believed in me My dad and I believe in many of the same things: cheesecake; the Geelong football club; my mum. And that we should immediately be experts at anything. First try. No practice. No revision. He taught me this in kindergarten. Every day he pushed me to be brilliant. We played spelling games in the car and did maths workbooks for fun. Before I started school I had “published” a library of my own books, complete with copyright information. I had become – and I’m assuming this is true of most Guardian writers – a precocious kid who irritated everyone around her by being boisterously, aggressively right about everything all of the time. Just like my dad. (Obviously I’ve grown a lot since then.) Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/8lRpSkf