A documentary about Donald Trumps battle with Aberdeenshire residents over a golf course reveals the corporate, sociopathic nature of his political vision

The polls tighten. The fear rises. And there could hardly be a more urgent or relevant film than this.

Five years ago, British director Anthony Baxter made a Michael Moore-esque documentary about the obnoxious arrogance of Donald J Trump, who was vandalising a coastline of natural beauty near Aberdeen to build a golf course, in so doing making promises on job creation and finding a useful idiot in Alex Salmond, who had rolled over with the necessary political permissions. In the course of all this, Trumps building workers had cut off the water supply to an elderly, courageous widow, Mrs Molly Forbes, and her son Michael. The Forbes family had refused to sell up. Now, five years later, Baxter has returned to find this water supply has still not been restored.

The point about Trumps grisly Scottish adventure is that its a very real dummy run for what he would be like as an international statesman in the arena of politics and diplomacy. Of course he is a mendacious sociopath, and he has far too easily coerced forelock-tugging UK officials into doing his bidding. When Trump talks about bringing the private business style into politics, this is what he means: corporate lawyers attacking local communities; and breaking promises on jobs, supposedly the cornerstone of what passes for Trumps political vision. What on earth is Nicola Sturgeon doing about this? Or Scottish Secretary David Mundell? Whatever happens in the US presidential election, it is time for them to stand up for Mrs Molly Forbes.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/nov/03/youve-been-trumped-too-review-donald-trump-golf-course-documentary

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As bullish statements of hope-you-like-our-new-direction intent go, the first track released from Lambchops 12th album took some beating. Kurt Wagners Nashville collective have long been more eclectic than the alt-country tag suggests, tackling everything from soul to lounge music, but theyve never tried anything like The Hustles 18 largely instrumental minutes of chugging house beats, softly pulsing electronics, abstract woodwind and sparse flecks of piano. Its utterly lovely, a phrase you could also usefully apply to JFKs haze of vocodered vocals and jazzy piano, or Harbour Countys glitchy synths and echoing guitar. For an artist whos come to electronica relatively late, Wagner seems to have an innate understanding of how to pull it into his orbit. The synths and effects never feel like the result of tentative dabbling: Flotus still sounds like Lambchop, even when it sounds nothing like they have done before. Indeed, it plays out like a counterpoint to the wracked alienation of Bon Ivers recent Auto-Tune-heavy 22, A Million, filled with warmth, wistful nostalgia and soft, autumnal light.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/nov/03/lambchop-flotus-album-review-kurt-wagner

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I’d be lying if I said unplugging my Amazon Echo didn’t feel a bit like a breakup. “Alexa,” I whispered while pulling the plug, “it’s just for now.” Butit wasn’t Alexa, it was me. More specifically, it was someone else. I needed the space for Google Home.

The $129 Home smart speaker playsa vital role inGoogle’s futuristic vision of “a Google for everyone,” powered by itsomnipresent Assistant. Virtually nothing about it is new; it’s like someGoogler bought an Echo and wondered if, uh, maybe Google should make one, too. (I mean, the product development timeline does allow for this.) Its not a knock-off, though. Google aspires to another level of power, personalization, and accuracy—not to mention a cuter package than the goth tennis ball can Amazon designed.

I like Home. It providesmuch of what Echo offers, while signaling far more product and platform ambition than Amazon. Great potential is worth only so much, though, and Amazon seems to understand better than anyone what’s possible withthese devices right now. Sometimes Home feels like sci-fi magic. Sometimes it reaches beyond its grasp and falls flat. The Echo is less impressive, but more reliable.

The good news is, you cant go wronghere. Youll like them both, though neither is perfect. The question is how much youre willing to bet on what these devices could be, and which company you think can deliver on that promise.

Speaker of the House

Any gadget sitting front-and-center in your home had better look nice. Home does. It sits 6inches tall, with a bulbous bottom and a sharply sloped top which makes it easy to seethe four lights that indicate Home is listening or working. It looks like something you might plant a succulent in, or a modernist orange juice carafe. Or an air freshener.

Read more: https://www.wired.com/2016/11/review-google-home/

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As an enthusiast-driven brand, Bang & Olufsen has exceedingly high design standards. Any product that comes off the line has to have that polished, modern B&O look—sleek aluminum, polished black control screens, striking shapes. Maintaining such standards is difficult, but it has benefits. You get to charge a premium, for one (and B&O very much does). Also, strong design creates the perception that the care given to the visual aspect of the product extends into everything else about it. In the case of speakers for example, people see something amazing and automatically think, well, that must sound amazing too.

Which brings us to Bang & Olufsen’s new, $1,495 BeoSound 1 portable wireless speaker. The speaker’s conical, aluminum design jumps out from across the room. From certain angles, the top fifth or so of the speaker appears to float above its base. The BeoSound 1 looks nothing like a speaker, which is a benefit if you want to make a modern visual statement in your home. It’s wireless and battery powered, so you can move it around the room, place on the patio, or even schlep it to your Swiss chalet for slope-side serenades. Music streaming over AirPlay, Bluetooth, and Google Cast is supported, so you can pump tunes in from your phone in whatever way makes sense. Support for Spotify, Deezer, TuneIn, and QPlay (for China) is built in as well.

WIRED

The distinctive design of the BeoSound 1 really is a showstopper. And its engineers’ attention to design does transfer into the speaker’s usability and functionality. The BeoSound 1 does a lot, and it’s all easy enough to do.

Setup is simple, and afterward, the speaker is easily controlled from B&O’s BeoSound mobile app. Volume can also be manually controlled by rotating the top of the speaker, which is just a big knob. You can also skip songs with a quick finger swipe of the speaker itself. There’s a 40-watt amp for the midrange speaker and a 20-watt amp for the woofer, both powered by a built-in battery that lasts 16 hours if you listen at a normal level (4 hours if you crank it).

TIRED

While the build and usability of the BeoSound 1 are impressive, the audio quality of the speaker leaves a bit to be desired. The BeoSound 1 can be played loudly—louder than expected. One sign of a truly great speaker is that it retains clarity at high volumes. The BeoSound 1 distorts pretty significantly up the volume curve. This is compounded by the fact that it’s easy to accidentally crank the volume to eleven when using the manual knob control. Even at lower volumes, the sound is simply good enough, with the high end in particular showing signs of the distortion that becomes more apparent as the volume gets louder.

RATING

6/10 – If visual design and usability are important to you, the BeoSound 1 can get the job done. Just be careful not to crank it up too loud.

Read more: https://www.wired.com/2016/11/review-bang-olufsen-beosound-1/

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The Home Office has been forced to review curfews imposed on people after they leave immigration detention centres, a BBC investigation has found.

It comes after the Court of Appeal ruled in March that it had imposed the curfews unlawfully.

The law firm that took the Home Office to court says potentially thousands of people may be entitled to compensation.

Those subject to curfews cannot leave their home for up to 12 hours at a time.

The curfews are not directly linked to time served in prison, but some immigration detainees have committed a crime. Others have overstayed their visas or are seeking asylum.

‘Life on hold’

Lisa Matthews, from human rights organisation Right To Remain, told the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire programme that immigration curfews are “highly damaging” to people’s lives.

“The policy was unjustifiable, unnecessary, punitive and unlawful. We believe that if the Home Office believes it is above the law, this is a danger for us all.”

Nabil Abdullah, 30, has been subject to an immigration curfew for three years. He lives with his partner Claire Cummings and their baby Sydney in Middlesbrough, having moved to the UK as a child.

Eleven years ago, he served a year in prison for street robbery and was eligible for deportation as a foreign national, but Sudan – where he was born – refused to accept him back on four occasions, leaving him stuck in the British immigration system.

He is currently on bail from immigration detention. The curfew was imposed by the Home Office.

Mr Abdullah has been ordered to stay inside his home during the curfew hours of 20:00 to 08:00 every day. If he breaks his curfew, it is a criminal offence.

Because of the curfew, Mr Abdullah recently missed his grandmother’s funeral and had to get written permission to attend the birth of his baby.

He does not know if, or when, the curfew will be removed. Currently, he is not allowed to work or study and is not entitled to benefits.

“The way I look at it,” he said, “it’s like I’m dead. I can’t do anything. All I’m hoping for is all these things will disappear, put a full stop to it.”

‘Normal rules don’t apply’

Ravi Naik of ITN solicitors, the law firm that took the Home Office to court, said the curfews suggested an alarming disregard for the rule of law by the government – whether or not people have sympathy for those subject to them.

“The fact the Home Office [admitted in court] it had ‘assumed’ there was legal authority for these curfews until this challenge was brought, really underlines how the Home Office has treated these individuals.”

Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott said the immigration curfews “are in some cases more severe” than those handed out as part of bail from prison, which she found “quite extraordinary”.

“It shows that once you get lost in the immigration system, people think that the normal rules of natural justice don’t apply to you.

She says the Home Office must “review each and every one of these cases”.

Compensation claims

The Home Office told the BBC it was “reviewing all cases in which a curfew is in place as part of electronic monitoring to ensure the validity of the curfew”.

It added: “We have taken action to simplify bail powers as part of the Immigration Act 2016.”

But in cases where curfews have been historically imposed unlawfully, the government could be facing a large compensation bill. Mr Abdullah, for example, is considering taking legal action.

The Victoria Derbyshire programme is broadcast on weekdays between 09:00 and 11:00 on BBC Two and the BBC News Channel.

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37787007

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The Pixel phone.  (Google)

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2016/10/21/reviews-are-in-googles-pixel-phone-takes-on-iphone-7.html

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The return of Perrys phenomenally successful character has funny moments but shoddy direction and gay panic jokes make it scary in the wrong way

Halloween 2016 is the scariest its been since we thought there were real witches up in Salem. We are weeks away from an election that could give us a president as orange as a Jack-o-Lantern that wouldnt just decompose after a few weeks. Its terrifying and we could all use some catharsis, no matter the source. It may just be the bad vibes talking, but the image of Tyler Perrys Madea racing down a street screaming Help me, Jesus! with zombies hot on her trail seems slightly profound? Its an unexpected reaction to one of Perrys low-budget comedies that mostly trades in pratfalls and bawdy invective before slamming into a wall of treacly pop-psychology. But its a very strange time in America right now.

Tyler Perry is a horrible director and a rancid writer, but I absolutely love Madea. With Tyler Perrys Boo! A Madea Halloween, she stars in her ninth feature film. Add that to a slew of plays, television appearances and a direct-to-DVD cartoon and its undeniable that she is a pop culture icon. She is rude, loud, violent, boastful of her criminal past, but, for reasons psychologists could only understand, we crave her approbation. Her thorny approach to life flies in the face of every family value that seemingly serves Perrys wholesome audience, and this is why hes a genius. Somehow, when Madea does the horrible thing, its all right. And when she finally comes around and does something decent, its like a big warm hug.

Id like to take a second look at Tyler Perrys Boo! A Madea Halloween with a stopwatch just to see how much of it is devoted to extolling the virtues of corporal punishment in child rearing. One awkwardly blocked scene consists of Madea (played by Tyler Perry in drag) sitting in her straight-laced nephew Brians living room (Brian is also played by Perry) with her brother Joe (Perry in a white wig) and her two pals Aunt Bam (Cassi Davis) and Hattie (Patrice Lovely), and the four elders riff on whoopin ass for what feels like forever. If Andy Warhol ever came back from the dead, the director of the eight-hour film consisting of a single shot of the Empire State Building, would be shocked at how long this sequence drags on. But sprinkled among the desultory morass are occasional firecrackers of brilliant schtick-based comedy.

Perry is an outstanding performer, whose biggest laughs frequently come from sputtered reactions of anger and frustration. Theres plenty of it in Tyler Perrys Boo! A Madea Halloween (yes, Im going to use the full name every time, this movie is all about excess) and it stems from a plot too ridiculous to spend much time describing. Brians 17-year-old daughter Tiffany (Diamond White) wants to sneak out to a costume party at a nearby frat house, but to do this she and her pal Aday (Liza Koshy) have to spook the old chaperones with a spooky tale. Then they head to the party, get found out, and there follows a series of increasingly far-fetched pranks.

The final act shoves a message in our face, something about kids respecting their parents, and parents rejecting todays namby-pamby parenting methods and getting tough. It crescendos in a series of gay panic jokes when Brian and Madea pretend someones throat gets slashed and all the kids end up on a prison bus. Its just one of the many moments of tonal strangeness, but rather than dwelling on that its much more fun to remember the scenes of Madea knocking the wind out of evil clowns or Aunt Bam griping about her hip surgery and toking on more medical marijuana. Theres also the absurd moment when a horny frat boy suggests going to fifth base, and a riff in which Madea tries to get a preacher to hurry up past his praying while making an emergency phone call. Its truly a marvel of extemporized, non-verbal comedy. Its just that these moments come amid so much filler.

I cant call Tyler Perrys Boo! A Madea Halloween anything resembling a good film (its shot with the production values of a television sitcom) but it is so relentless that, like gorging on a bag of trick or treat candy, its undeniably addictive. Before the stomach ache comes.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/oct/21/tyler-perry-boo-madea-halloween-review

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Charlie Brookers future shocker, where people are constantly projecting a sunny image of themselves and rating each other out of five, feels terrifyingly close

Imagine a time where zombie-like people look only into their smart phones. They swipe and they rate not just cabs and restaurants but people, too. They take photos of themselves being happy and looking good; also photos of things funny things, sunny things, or food they are eating, cool food. Then they post the pictures and wait, for feedback, for approval. They are posting their lives not so much their real lives but the lives they want other people to see and think they are living. Mostly they worry, about how they are seen, about their status

Imagine? Look about you: that time is here, even if some of the technology in Black Mirror: Nosedive (Netflix) isnt quite yet. Lacie Pound (brilliantly played by Bryce Dallas Howard), along with everyone else, wears contact lenses that feed her information about people and about their ratings. Not here yet, but not a million miles on from Google Glass. Likewise the hologram she meets, of herself complete with hairstyle upgrade and sexy hunk in the kitchen of a new apartment at the Pelican Cove Lifestyle Community, as an extra incentive to inspire, aspire to, sign up. I was surprised the cars werent self-driving, but that was probably more about logistics and cost.

Otherwise, its basically Instagram plus Facebook plus Twitter plus Snapchat plus FaceTime plus Uber plus all the rest. And look, there is an actual app (not available in the UK, sadly) Peeple, where your character is your currency that lets you review other people as if they were a B&B. In Africa your social media reputation can get you a bank loan. Far from far-fetched, this shit is real, and if its not here now, its only five minutes away. Thats the scary thing and the power about this and every episode of Charlie Brookers Black Mirror.

Its not just about the technology, more about people. Again Brooker has taken the above and turned it into a moving human story, about Lacies ultimately doomed attempt to better herself as in improve her personal rating from 4.2 out of 5 by being maid of honour at her (not really) best friends wedding.

Nosedive feels bigger and more cinematic (it is directed by film director Joe Wright) than previous

Black Mirror episodes. It looks and sounds beautiful: the sterile saccharine pastel nightmare of home and office; the bleak freeway-scape from above at night; Naomis private island wedding at the end, all blondes and jocks and perfect teeth; Max Richters thoughtful score, integral rather than incidental.

Fabulous performances too, not just from BDH, but also from Alice Eve as Naomi, oozing plastic fakery; and from James Norton as Lacies brother, who might only be a 3.7 but (because) hes somehow managed to keep a foot on the ground, in whats important, in reality.

You have too, you say? Youre a long way from all this? So youve never worried how many Twitter or Instagram followers youve got? Youve never posted something, then waited hopefully for positive feedback a retweet perhaps from someone with a higher status (more followers) than you? Youve never felt anxious about any of this stuff, or what people think of you? Well, thats OK. This isnt about you then.

Series three of Black Mirror is available on Netflix now.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/oct/21/black-mirror-review-charlie-brooker-nightmare-sterile-world-is-only-five-minutes-away

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In this masterly documentary, Gianfranco Rosi contrasts the lives of the desperate thousands landing on the shores of a Sicilian island with the everyday existence of the locals

Gianfranco Rosis beautiful, mysterious and moving film is a documentary that looks like a neorealist classic. It is a portrait of Lampedusa, the Sicilian island where desperate migrants from Africa and the Middle East arrive each year hoping for a new life in Europe: 400,000 in the last 20 years. Around its coast thousands are drowned, or dragged dead from their grotesquely unsafe inflatables, burned or poisoned by fumes from the diesel with which their craft have had to be refuelled from jerry cans mid-journey, in choppy seas. Lampedusa has quietly become the tragic epicentre of the migrant experience: part holding tank, part cemetery.

The title refers to a wartime Sicilian song that a local DJ is shown playing, about the bombing of an Italian warship in 1943 in port at Lampedusa, prior to the islands surrender to the allies, and how the flames lit up the night: Che fuoco a mare che c stasera (What fire at sea there is tonight). It also put me in mind of the line from the maritime hymn: For those in peril on the sea. Islanders in Lampedusa make a living from fishing. Generations have grown up and grown old with the fear of dying at sea. The endless tide of migrants has made that fear a daily and horrible reality.

Using mainly fixed camera positions and no narrative voiceover, Gianfranco Rosi enigmatically juxtaposes scenes, switching between the migrants daily, desperate landfall, and the everyday existence of one Lampedusa family: and one young boy in particular, Samuele, whose uncle is a fisherman. Samuele does his best at school, he slurps his pasta at dinner, and he likes cutting branches that will make handles for his naughty slingshots. He has a lazy eye that doctors are treating with the old-fashioned method of blanking out one lens for the good eye, forcing the lazy one to work harder. Samuele is also suffering from hyperventilation and anxiety, and is seen by the same depressed doctor who has to attend to the migrants and carry out autopsies on their wretched corpses. He is the one explicit point of contact between the migrants story and Samuele, one hint of a symptom, or a larger malaise.

Rosis previous film was the fascinating Sacro GRA, a prose-poetic study of the Grande Raccordo Anulare, or ring road around Rome, and the people who live on this margin. There is a similar effect in Fire at Sea. Rosi has recorded quiet details from indigenous Lampedusan lives at the periphery of something far more historically dramatic and sensational, but the quietly telling details are like jetsam, flung out centrifugally. The film does not take a view; it does not demand action. It simply shows us the details, and I felt I learned more from this film than from the nightly TV news.

The migrants themselves pass through the film almost too quickly for individual lives to be registered, except one Nigerian who tells his story almost like a preacher or an actor: The sea is not a place to pass by The sea is not a road. This is daily life, the film is saying: maybe like life during wartime. It is not a temporary eruption or crisis that will be imminently solved within the conventional news cycle. Here is the rhythm of daily existence; it is Lampedusas new normal.

There is an enigmatic pageant of scenes: setting the table for supper, listening to the radio, opening the hangar door for the air-sea rescue helicopter (a mesmerically slow and sinuous sequence), migrants having a football match in near darkness and arguing about which nationalities can play, migrants dead bodies taken ashore by coastguards in white hazmat suits. The islanders are not shown objecting to the migrants, or welcoming them, or discussing what to do about them. I concede that this is arguably a flaw, an artefactual silence that drains the situation of its political reality. But it shows that this is a situation that Lampedusa has become used to over decades.

Samuele himself is a compelling figure. There is one very simple edit Rosi contrives, showing him taking aim with his catapult and then just cutting to his face in closeup, frowning with concentration: pugnacious, yet innocent and vulnerable. In its quiet way, it is sensational. Im tempted to say Samuele is a descendant of Enzo Staiola as young Bruno in De Sicas

Bicycle Thieves. What does Samueles face mean? Has he somehow absorbed the spores of world history? Is his artless manner a way of suggesting that life will go on, with or without compassion or solutions? Fire at Sea is masterly film-making.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jun/09/fire-at-sea-review-masterly-and-moving-look-at-the-migrant-crisis

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Willkommen bei den Hartmanns takes humorous look at how Germans deal with the new arrivals – but critics say refugee protagonist is little more than plot device

The refugee crisis may have divided Germany and sown discord in family households, but it could ultimately help the country be more at ease with its new-found liberal identity. That is the optimistic thesis proposed by the countrys first refugee-themed comedy.

Willkommen bei den Hartmanns (Welcome to the Hartmanns), which features some of Germanys biggest stars and opens in cinemas on Thursday, tells the story of Diallo, a Nigerian asylum seeker who is taken in by a family in a posh district of Munich after mother Angelika, a retired headteacher played by Senta Berger, visits a local refugee shelter.

The newcomers arrival triggers a series of domestic dramas father Richards late-life crisis, daughter Sophies failed love life, workaholic son Philips burnout and grandson Bastis poor grades which are eventually resolved in a rollicking finale involving clashes between Pegida-style patriotic citizens and leftwing activists outside the Hartmanns home.

The arrival of over a million migrants and refugees in Germany since the start of 2015 has until now mainly inspired films of a darker nature. In February, long-running German TV crime franchise Tatort ran an episode with a plot line that evolved around the death of a group of migrants who had suffocated in the back of a lorry, echoing a real-life tragedy on a motorway in Austria in 2015.

At the start of this year, Gianfranco Rosis documentary Fire at Sea, observing the refugee crisis through the eyes of Lampedusa locals, also won the top prize at the Berlinale film festival.

But Willkommen bei den Hartmanns is the first to try to gain some comic mileage out of recent events. Director Simon Verhoeven does so by directly incorporating some of the stories that have dominated the news in Germany and around Europe over the last year.

A taxi driver begins stalking Sophie after rescuing her from what he believes to be a sexual assault of the kinds perpetrated in Cologne on New Years Eve, while the Hartmanns tensions with their crucifix-wearing, Polish-surnamed neighbour come across as a direct nod to recent diplomatic standoffs between western and eastern European countries.

Its enough for Frau Merkel to invite the entire third world into our country were not going to do the same in our home as well, says Richard, initially dismissing his wifes desire to take in a refugee as borne of a helpers syndrome. Better than an asshole syndrome, his daughter Sophie quips back.

Verhoefen, who started developing the films screenplay before Angela Merkels decision to keep open Germanys borders to thousands of refugees stranded in Budapest last September, however tries to be even-handed when drawing up caricatures.

Pensioners at Munichs refugee shelter engage in absurd one-upmanship over their volunteering with my refugees. One of the asylum seekers auditioning for a bed at the Hartmann residency is a man in his 40s, claiming to be an unattended minor. And at the end of the film, one of Diallos former roommates at the shelter turns out to be an Isis sympathiser after all.

We Germans are still so inhibited about our own identity even though we are a free, tolerant and great country, Sophies love interest, played by Austrian-Tunisian actor Elyas MBarek, complains at one point in the film. Weve got to stand up and defend those values.

Reviews of the film have been mixed. While praising the films intentions, Moritz von Uslar in weekly Die Zeit bemoaned a lack of classic punchlines: Shouldnt material like this, which catches our society at its most vulnerable, nervous and insecure, have produced a film that is not just OK, but brilliant, wild, provocative and incorrect in the best sense of the word? Others have pointed out that the refugee character, supposedly the films protagonist, ends up as little more than a plot device to solve Germanys own domestic dramas.

Played by Belgian actor Eric Kabongo who is pictured but not named on the posters promoting the film asylum seeker Diallo eventually manages to gain a residence permit.

Its an optimistic ending to an optimistic film: two weeks before the films release, Merkel met Nigerias president, Muhammadu Buhari, to discuss how the countrys asylum seekers who have had their application rejected could be returned more swiftly to their home country. The approval rating for Nigerians applying for asylum in Germany currently lies at about 8%.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/02/german-comedy-film-explores-impact-refugee-crisis-willkommen-hartmanns

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