From Melania to Kid Rock’s halftime show: why is Maga art so dreadful?

As the right stokes culture wars, their alternatives to ‘woke’ Hollywood prove to be shoddily made and uninspired It’s not fair, what they did to rightwing folks on Super Bowl Sunday. Regular viewers could either take in an elaborate and joyful halftime performance from Puerto Rican recording artist Bad Bunny , one of the most popular music stars in the world, or, if they weren’t interested in football or in Bad Bunny ’s music, they could quietly find something else to watch or listen to. There are a lot of options out there. Those who wanted to prove their Maga bona fides or loyalties, however, may have felt obligated to watch a parade of similar-sounding country singers lead into a performance from a shorts-wearing Kid Rock , jumping around and seemingly lip-syncing to a novelty hit from 1999. For rightwingers who couldn’t stomach the Spanish lyrics to Bad Bunny songs, they could take comfort in the clear English of the man also known as Robert Ritchie: “Bawitdaba, da-bang, da-ban...

Dreaming an Island review – an eerie tour of planet Earth’s depopulated future

This documentary about a small Japanese island, a once thriving mining outpost that now has only 100 residents, lightens its existential concerns with a focus on human connection

In his second full-length documentary, Swiss director Andrea Pellerani gives us a guided tour of what a post-industrial, post-growth, or even an eerily post-human future might look like. We are on the south-western Japanese island of Ikeshima. Once a thriving mining outpost that was home to 8,000 people, since the facility’s closure in 2001 it has been reduced to just 100 mostly elderly holdouts. As the residents fish the grey sea off abandoned wharves, inspect pregnant cats and loiter around derelict lots, there is a sense they inhabit the set of a long-shuttered stage play, and are awaiting new lines.

Though it begins with long tracking shots of greenery choking empty apartment blocks, Dreaming an Island isn’t exactly ruin porn. Pellerani is more interested in the vestiges of human activity, and milks a distinct absurdity from the stalwart locals. One collects “fun” beach flotsam, there are guides waiting rather optimistically for an upswing in coal-mining tourism, while Ikeshima’s sole restaurateur hopes for a customer. “Is there anything interesting to see?” asks one who finally turns up. “In what sense interesting?” she replies.

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