Wham! 10 Days in China review – pop meets politics in George and Andrew’s great leap east

The duo’s groundbreaking 1985 tour reveals a strange collision of pop stardom and communism, a re-edit of Lindsay Anderson’s efforts that got him fired Here is a documentary that has a very important story to tell, maybe more important than it feels comfortable admitting. It’s about two separate subjects – or maybe three: Wham!, China and film-maker Lindsay Anderson. A superpower nervously edging towards western-style openness, a pop band nervously doing what needed to be done to make it big in the US, and a great film director, needing the money, taking on a project he didn’t really believe in. In 1985, Wham!’s beetle-browed manager Simon Napier-Bell had a cunning plan for how George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley could break the US: Wham! would be the first ever western pop band to perform in mainland China. They would play where the Beatles, the Stones and Elvis had never played, and the resulting global publicity would launch them into the US. (He was right – it did.) In our modern ag...

In His New Memoir, Tom Felton Discusses The Lessons He Learned From The Generous And Sympathetic Robbie Coltrane

Coltrane, who passed away on Friday at the age of 72, is remembered by Felton in the book published on Tuesday as "one of the few actors I knew when we started producing the Potter films" because of his appearances in GoldenEye and Cracker. He was a jokester but also the target of other people's jokes simultaneously. Felton, 35, writes about Coltrane, who portrayed Rubeus Hagrid, the good-natured, half-giant guardian of the keys and grounds at Hogwarts, who Felton's Draco Malfoy constantly mocks in the movie. Felton recalled an era when he and franchise star Daniel Radcliffe would switch people's phone settings to other languages, making it tricky to revert to the English language. According to what the author has said, Robbie was most certainly the punch line of that joke more than that due to the fact that his response to it was so pleasant. He would pull his brows together, look around, and say, "What f—-er did that?" He gave the impression that he was prepared to kill the person responsible, but in reality, he was just getting into the spirit of things. The thoughtful and kind Coltrane imparted many important life lessons to the young actors, including Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, according to Felton. According to what he says, Robbie was constantly eager to remind us that we weren't there to cure cancer. We were not preventing the end of the planet. We were just making a film at the time. We need to keep this in mind, avoid getting too big for our britches and keep a sense of humor about the situation. According to Felton, he possessed a sizeable portion of Hagrid's personality, which characterized him as a kind and generous giant who kept his focus on what was truly essential in life.

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