10 of the best
Movie makeovers from Pretty Woman to Grease 4
Netfl ix & Quill
Joel Golby dissects new forensic drama Traces 7
Back to live, back to reality
Will gigs return? Plus music highlights for 2021 8
Emma Ma
...
10 of the best
Movie makeovers from Pretty Woman to Grease 4
Netfl ix & Quill
Joel Golby dissects new forensic drama Traces 7
Back to live, back to reality
Will gigs return? Plus music highlights for 2021 8
Emma Mackey
The Sex Ed star speaks! Plus fi lm for 2021 12
Events horizon
Art, theatre, dance, comedy and games for 2021 16
Film 19
Music 22
Art 24
Stage 25
Sound & Vision
The best of TV, streaming and podcasts 26
Seven-day TV and radio guide 30
Solved!
Why are stormtroopers such crap shots? 58
MODERN TOSS. COVER: TOBY TRIUMPH
4 The Guide
Desperately Seeking Susan
Amazon Prime Video (£)
Out with the old, in with the new : suburban
housewife puts on groovy jacket and learns
that life isn’t all picket fences and ironing.
In Susan Seidelman ’s 1985 comedy, bored
Roberta (Rosanna Arquette ) lives vicariously
through enigmatic drifter Susan (Madonna ),
whose messages she reads in the personal ads.
Her obsession leads to an appropriation of
Susan’s lacy, trashy aesthetic – and liberation.
F THE
Movie makeovers
ALLSTAR/ORION PICTURE
Manhatter
The fi lm’s production
designer was Santo
Loquasto, who has
also worked regularly
with another chronicler
of New York life,
Woody Allen
The Guardian 2-8 January 2021 The Guide 5
Superman
Now TV
The original Clark
Kent , played by
Christopher Reeve
in Richard Donner’s
1978 superhero fi lm ,
looked cute in his
wonky specs and
crumpled suit, but
it took a pair of red
underpants and a
dinky kiss curl for
Lois Lane to see the
man that he truly was.
Admittedly, his ability
to fl y probably helped.
Gigi
Available on DVD
A Parisian playboy
forms a friendship
with a 15 -year-old girl,
only to realise he loves
her, in this Vincente
Minnelli musical from
1958 . Nowadays, Louis
Jourdan’s Gaston
would be looking at
prison time but, as
Gigi, Leslie Caron is
delightful, illustrating
her transition to
adulthood with a
luminous satin gown.
Titanic
Now TV
Young Leonardo DiCaprio in a tux? Don’t
mind if we do. If there is one thing better
than Jack Dawson as a grubby, below-deck
ragamuffi n, it’s the spruced-up version in
black tie nervously waiting at the bottom
of the grand staircase for raft-hogger
extraordinaire Rose De Witt Bukater (Kate
Winslet) in James Cameron’s 1997 movie.
Mrs Doubtfi re
Disney+
Chris Columbus ’s 1993
comedy stars Robin
Williams as a divorced,
out-of-work actor who
loses custody of his
kids and dresses up
as an elderly Scottish
housekeeper in order
to hang out with them.
Cue an avalanche
of slapstick as his
prosthetic face gets
run over by a lorry and
his bosom goes up in
fl ames in the kitchen.
S
N
T
K
C
in
19
lo
w
cr
it
Easy A
Netfl ix
When Emma Stone’s
squeaky-clean Olive
Penderghast tells a
fi b about losing her
virginity in Will Gluck’s
2010 high-school
comedy, her reputation
takes a nosedive.
Instead of coming clean
or hiding out at home,
Olive boldly takes
on the slut-shamers
by strutting through
the campus in a killer
corset and shades.
6 The Guide 2-8 January 2021 The Guardian
Grease
Now TV
Olivia Newton-John
had to be sewn into
the high-waisted
spandex trousers that
signalled her passage
from pastel-wearing
prude to volcanic sex
bomb. In doing so,
she wins the heart of
lead doofus, Danny
Zuko ( John Travolta ),
and provides the 1978
fi lm musical with its
biggest number, You’re
the One That I Want .
Fiona Sturges
Spider-Man
Now TV
Portrait of a speccy
adolescent baffl ed
by his own body. In
this case, it’s not just
puberty wreaking
havoc with Tobey
Maguire’s Peter
Parker but a bite
from a genetically
engineered spider,
prompting him to go
to bed as a teen dweeb
and wake up fully
ripped and with 20/20
vision, in Sam Raimi’s
2002 reboot.
Pretty Woman
Digital platforms (£)
The “rich dude rescues downtrodden hooker ”
plot hasn’t aged well, and we all know Julia
Roberts looked better in thigh-high leather
boots than her later fusty lady-about-town
outfi ts. Still, Roberts’s transformation in Garry
Marshall’s classic 1990 rom com is a blast,
never more so than when she visits sweet
revenge on the snooty Rodeo Drive shop
assistants who initially refuse to serve her.
Overboard
Digital platforms (£)
Makeover fi lms like
to empower their
female characters
by putting them in a
pretty frock. Not 1987’s
Overboard, which
transforms Goldie
Hawn ’s pampered
heiress into a dirt-poor
housewife. If you
overlook the small
matter of Kurt Russell
having kidnapped
Hawn and installed her
as his domestic slave,
it’s a lot of fun.
ALLSTAR/ALAMY
10
of the
best
The Guardian 2-8 January 2021 The Guide 7
I
Joel Golby channel-hops through the week’s TV
It’s actually good
that they make TV
like Traces: it frees
up an hour of our
lives to go and do
something else
I would like to thank the series Traces (Monday,
9pm, BBC One) for helping me come to what I
think is actually a very zen realisation that will
help me thrive for the rest of my natural life: not
all TV has to be good, you know. I mean good
TV is great, don’t get me wrong – nothing better
than putting your phone away and getting stuck
in to an exceedingly high -quality box set – and
mediocre TV has a place, too (something mild to
make dinner to) and, actually, if all TV was good
(on every channel! At every hour of the day!)
then we wouldn’t have time for work or sleep or
family or friends, because we’d have our eyes
propped open watching television, constantly.
So it’s good that they make TV sometimes that
isn’t very good, because it frees up an hour of
our lives to go and do something else.
Anyway, Traces. Here’s the idea, which is
so woozily absurd that I have to just recount
it word-for-word from the BBC blurb: “When
Emma Hedges (Molly Windsor) returns to
Dundee to start her new job as a lab technician,
she’s encouraged to take part in an online course
teaching the principles of forensic science. Given
a fi ctitious murder case, her task is to identify the
victim and establish how they died. But having
completed the fi rst module, Emma knows exactly
who the victim is: her mum!” Can I just hit this
back with a very simple: what?
From the fi rst moment, Traces makes you
ask questions. Such as: why would someone
who se mum got murdered and is clearly still very
aff ected by that go into a clearly quite triggering
career in murder investigation? In the exact same
city her mum was murdered in? Or: why, if her
dad still lives in Dundee, did she go to live with
her aunt in Nottingham for 18 years, instead of
him? Is it literally because they cast an actor with
a Nottingham accent and had to write round
that? Or: why, if your mum was murdered after
attending a festival of ships (not even getting
started on that), why would you get an anchor
tattooed on your hand? To remember that your
mum got snatched from a nautical festival and
then murdered? You want to memorialise that?
With a tattoo? That reminds you of the murder?
Literally every time you look at your hand?
I have , and I’m not joking here , dozens more
of these questions, but I was too distracted by
the janky dialogue – “Well done on getting the
job by the way!”; “Dad, pick up your phone.
Where are you?”; as well as this back-andforth, which I almost folded my laptop down
on: “Where’s your mum?”, “Aye she’s bad. Her
lungs are terrible. I think she’s dying.”, “What ?”
– and a completely all-over-the-place plot ( I’m
pretty sure the entire murder arc is somehow
dependent on a traffi c jam that happens in the
fi rst few seconds of the show) to write any more
of them down. If you like murder investigation
shows – and, frankly, who doesn’t love hearing a
Scottish person say “murder ” with relish? Come
on, that’s class – then there’s probably something
here for you, just about. If you don’t … have you
considered the idea that not all TV has to
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