The MUSIC 26 Guide 2021 complete

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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 [Show More]

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