‘When no one laughs, your soul leaves your body’: have you heard the one about the Bradley Cooper film inspired by John Bishop … ?

Is This Thing On? is Cooper’s third film as writer/director – and his third to wonder whether performing saves or destroys your love life. He and stars Will Arnett, Laura Dern and Andra Day talk gags, growth and relationship goals Last Christmas, the audience at an open-mic night in New York welcomed to the stage a new standup. Alex Novak, he said his name was. Mildly funny, bit depressed. Mostly told jokes about getting divorced. Weirdest thing though: he looked exactly like that guy from Arrested Development . “I was so naively unaware of what to expect,” says Will Arnett, almost a year later. “I’ve been comedy-adjacent for a lot of my life, but not a comedian. I had no idea what I was in for.” Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/hBIcyrg via IFTTT

‘I am all for strangeness’: Tilda Swinton on artistic integrity, acting and the afterlife

The Oscar-winning Scottish actor answers questions from Observer readers and famous fans including Pedro Almodóvar, Wes Anderson and Elton John

Tilda Swinton has been posing in different costumes for the Observer’s photographer and, as I arrive, has just changed into tartan trousers, saucy two-tone shoes and is standing perfectly still as a hairdresser attends to a blond quiff that makes her look like an incredible exotic bird – or a dandy hooligan, although her face looks too seraphic to mutate into aggro. What you see almost at once is that Swinton is giving 100% to the task at hand while being obligingly considerate to everyone around her. The mix of professionalism with warmth disarms, especially when you might have expected a superstar loftiness.

For Swinton is a superstar – ranked by the New York Times as one of the greatest actors of the 21st century. Original, distinctive and questing, she has played everything from a distraught mother in Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011) to the ancient, querulous Madame D in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and the White Witch in the Narnia series (2005-2010). She was in Almodóvar’s short The Human Voice (2020) and is about to star in his next full-length feature (details still under wraps). She is a chameleon yet always herself. She has won an Academy award, a Bafta, been nominated for three Golden Globes and, having just turned 63, is still seen as a fashion icon of androgynous beauty with an unchanging profile – like a figurehead on the prow of a ship. What a difference there must be, I’m thinking as I watch her in front of the camera, between her “real” life in the Scottish Highlands by the sea and all this London razzmatazz.

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