Brushstrokes to revive the Renaissance - The New Barcelona Post

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This weekend, the identity of the next James Bond is finally expected to be known – to the insiders, at least. According to reports, a number of youngish British actors – definitely three, possibly five – will have their final screen tests. To say it has been a long time coming is an understatement. It is five years since Daniel Craig was killed in a hail of missiles at the end of No Time to Die, and in that time – even long before it – a swarm of actors have been tipped to replace him, only to age out of the role due to a combination of indecisiveness and cutthroat backstage corporate shenanigans. Whoever is declared to be 007 will be joining the franchise after what is likely to be the longest fallow period in the franchise’s 64-year history. As such, this is kind of a big weekend. Let’s run through what we know so far. The candidatesIf three actors are to screen test for Bond this weekend, then they are Callum Turner, Josh O’Connor and Jack Lowden. If there are more – some outlets state that one other actor might be participating, others two – then they won’t include Jack O’Connell or Jacob Elordi, who are both out of the race for one reason or another.

Overheard in the auditorium during the interval: it’s like Tales of the Unexpected meets Jackanory. But if those references are dated by several decades, they go some way to summing up the strange mix of elements in this drama about a boy who goes missing from a village, and the ancient myth of a “green man” who might have something to do with it. But then, Max Porter’s novel, on which it is based, weaves so many seemingly incongruent parts together to create its own beautiful brand of rural noir. It might be better described as The Missing meets This Country meets Stranger Things, except the Upside Down here is English countryside. The story follows townie couple Robert (Raj Bajaj) and Jolie (Hanora Kamen), who move to the sticks and are just settling in when their otherworldly son, Lanny (Atlas Johnson-Dutfield on press night), goes missing. A local artist (Richard Cant), dubbed “Mad Pete” – for his bohemianism or, as a gay man in these parts, for his sexuality? – had formed a friendship with Lanny and is now considered prime suspect. The myth of a pagan figure, Dead Papa Toothwort, looms over the human drama as the police procedural unfolds.

It all began on a Dutch trading ship in 1628. No, really. When the Batavia set sail from Amsterdam, it crashed and the shipwrecked survivors were left stranded on a tiny island off the coast of Western Australia. As mutineers eyed the Batavia’s stash of silver, shipmates, friends and families turned on each other. About 100 people were brutally murdered, making it one of the most violent chapters in maritime history. Nearly 400 years later, in 2015, creative entrepreneur Marc Pos had a lightbulb moment while reading about this “adult Lord of the Flies” atrocity. It gave him the idea for a reality TV show – the game of trust and treachery we now know as The Traitors. It was originally envisaged to take place on a boat, with banished players jumping overboard into the sea. Co-creator Jasper Hoogendoorn joined Pos to develop the idea, The Mutineers. After 20 rejections, they fine-tuned the game further. Filming it on a boat was too limiting, so they shifted the action on to dry land – and looked for more aesthetic inspiration. Pos was once a choirboy in a 14th-century cathedral, gazing up at its spooky gothic architecture.

A quintessential 21st-century horror story: a private equity firm has set its sights on your company. That’s the premise behind director Lee Chang-dong’s new film, Possible Love, and the idea for it first came more than a decade ago, when mass layoffs resulted in a standoff that “fundamentally changed the Korean labour movement”. In 2009, workers at Ssangyong Motors company protested against plans to lay off between 37 and 43% of the workforce, staging a historic 77-day strike and occupation of the factory that was eventually broken up by riot police. “Until that point in time in Korea, labourers’ rights were widely accepted,” Lee says, speaking through an interpreter in a central London hotel; “however, afterwards, the basic rights of labourers changed; to the public, they couldn’t be seen as more important than market profitability or corporate competitiveness.”At the time, Lee shelved the project. “The more I examined the pain of these individuals” – after the violent crackdown on the Ssangyong Motors strike, there were several suicides, and reports of long-term mental health issues – “I constantly asked myself: am I worthy of telling this story? And if I am, how do I tell it?