The Penguin Lessons review – Steve Coogan seabird comedy drama tries to sell feelgood mood
Coogan plays Tom, who takes a job in Peronist Argentina in 1976, teaching English at a stuffy private school for the sons of wealthy expatriates, and is wary of the overbearing headteacher, played by Jonathan Pryce. On a holiday to Uruguay, he rescues a penguin from an oil slick on the beach and finds himself responsible for this bedraggled bird. He ends up smuggling it back to Argentina with him where, named Juan Salvador, it becomes the unhappy and lonely man's feathered friend – actually, his only friend. But all this happens in tandem with Michell's personal involvement in combating the horror of the Argentinian junta in which innocent people get 'disappeared' by the secret police – and this of course blunts the feelgood mood that the film is trying to sell.
Well, it is based on a story from real life, and real life is messy and doesn't conform to neat Hollywood genres. On the page, a memoir can perhaps better accommodate more of the baggy, contradictory impulses and implications. Weirdly, I felt that this odd film might have worked better if it was just about the lonely man and the penguin without the Argentinian tyranny – or just about the lonely man and the Argentinian tyranny without the penguin. The real non-CGI bird itself is very sweet.
The Penguin Lessons is in Australian cinemas from 17 April and UK and Irish cinemas from 18 April.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Scotsman
18 minutes ago
- Scotsman
The musicians non-English speakers are using to learn the language
This article contains affiliate links. We may earn a small commission on items purchased through this article, but that does not affect our editorial judgement. Is Eminem helping a generation of non-English speakers pick up the language, or is someone else a much greater help instead? Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Learning English doesn't have to be a boring task - in fact, many musicians have made it easier for non-English speakers to pick up some 'lingo' Preply decided to find out who the musicians are that many fans are using as a means to learn English, based on their current research. Here are the artists that research found were the easiest to learn English from, and those artists who have made it more complex. Have you ever heard a song by a non-English speaking musician only to find their diction and vocabulary are better than many of the people you've met in your life? Perhaps that is because those artists in question chose to learn English not from a language school but from picking up dialogue from the pop culture world - be it television, film or on this occasion, music. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Shakira, for example, admitted that she was motivated to learn English so she could write songs for her first English-language album, and although she did work with a tutor, she listened to music, including Bob Dylan, to better understand the language. She's not alone either - Ricky Martin, Jackie Chan and Tove Lo have all recalled using English-speaking popular culture to help with the language barrier. But Preply, the online language learning app that connects tutors to learners worldwide, wanted to find out which artists are the easiest to learn from, and which artists are not. They analysed over 150 music artists and the lyrics of 25 of their popular songs to create their metric, with the results somewhat surprising. The science part (Methodology) Who from the English-speaking world of music has been helping those non-English speakers pick up the subtle nuances of the language, and who has made it completely complicated? | Canva/Getty Images To determine the Language Difficulty Quotient (LDQ)—a score designed to quantify the accessibility of an artist's lyrics for language learners- Preply employed a three-part methodology. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad First, they selected 158 artists from global popularity charts and gathered the lyrics from their 25 most popular songs. Next, for each artist, the research measured three core linguistic metrics: Vocabulary Accessibility: The percentage of words an artist uses from the 1,000 most common English words. A higher percentage indicates a more accessible language. Vocabulary Rarity: The average frequency rank of each unique word within a vast text corpus. A lower average rank suggests more common vocabulary. Vocabulary Difficulty: The average proficiency level (A1-C2) assigned to words by the Oxford English Dictionary. A lower average level signifies easier vocabulary. Finally, Preply calculated the LDQ by normalising these three metrics to a common scale, ensuring that a higher score consistently equated to "easier" language. These adjusted scores were then averaged and scaled to a final score from 1 to 100, with a higher LDQ indicating greater linguistic accessibility. Which musicians are the easiest to learn English from? It would appear that the more 'genteel' the work, the easier it is for non-English language speakers to pick up some of our vocabulary. British indie group Keane tops the list, with a language difficulty quotient of only 89.78, followed by 3 Doors Down (87.52) and Fleetwood Mac in third with a quotient of 87.16. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The top ten least complex musicians to learn English from Keane 3 Doors Down Fleetwood Mac Tears for Fears Gotye A-ha PinkPantheress Empire of the Sun Lynyrd Skynyrd Jimin (BTS) Which musicians are the most difficult to learn English from? Understandably, there are a lot of hip-hop artists whose vernacular at times is incredible, if you can only catch what they are saying. Topping the complex artists to learn from list is Eminem, with his rapid-fire verses including those found on 'Rap God' sending him to the top of the list with a quotient of 9.25, followed by Doechii (18.18) and Playboi Carti rounding out the top three with a quotient of 18.74. The top ten most complex musicians to learn English from Eminem Doechii Playboi Carti Kendrick Lamar GloRilla Tyler, The Creator Macklemore BigXthaPug Travis Scott J. Cole Have you learned a foreign language through just listening to music in that musician's native tongue? Or have you learned English through another set of musicians previously? Let us know your musical education by leaving a comment down below.
Economist
37 minutes ago
- Economist
Why 'Wednesday' is wickedly successful
WHEN YOU think of Netflix's biggest English-language dramas, you probably imagine matchmaking, monsters or malignant young men. Seasons of 'Bridgerton', 'Stranger Things' and 'Adolescence' all rank in the platform's top ten releases, having racked up hundreds of millions of views. But the streamer's breakout hero is a gloomy girl who has long plaits, psychic visions and a knack for sarcasm. 'Wednesday', about the eldest child of the Addams family, is a supernatural smash. Viewers spent 1.7bn hours—roughly 200,000 years—watching the show in the three months after its debut in November 2022. According to Parrot Analytics, a data firm, 'Wednesday' made $360m in advertising and subscription revenue for Netflix between its release and March of this year: that is $40m more than the first season of 'Squid Game', Netflix's biggest title in any language, did in an equivalent period. 'Wednesday' returns to screens for a second season on August 6th. What explains its otherworldly power? Part of its appeal is its mix of the ordinary and the eerie. Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) is, in some ways, a typically sullen teenage girl. She bickers with her family, made up of a brother, Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez), an eccentric uncle, Fester (Fred Armisen), and her parents, Morticia and Gomez (Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzmán, whose hairpiece looks like a flattened chinchilla covered in asphalt). Wednesday finds most people annoyingly, boringly conformist, and prefers the company of Thing, an ambulatory severed hand. She loathes school—in this case, the Nevermore Academy, which specialises in educating outcasts. Like many of her real-life peers, she enjoys true crime—but, unlike them, she is able to help solve local murders thanks to her premonitions. The show shares traits with 'Stranger Things' in that both follow a group of winsome teenagers investigating strange happenings in a small town. (And both are the scrubbed-up children of David Lynch's 'Twin Peaks' without the originality or genuine existential dread.) And like 'Harry Potter' the school is replete with coloured uniforms and houses filled with unusual characters, from gorgons to werewolves. But 'Wednesday' looks different from those shows thanks to the involvement of Tim Burton, a film-maker famous for wry gothic fantasies such as 'Beetlejuice' and 'Edward Scissorhands'. He has helped to produce 'Wednesday' and directed half of its episodes. (His longtime musical collaborator, Danny Elfman, has also written some of its unsettling score.) The script is snappy: combined with the quick, tortuous plotting, it provides laughs, jump scares and creepy moments. 'Want to take a stab at being social?' Wednesday's perky room-mate asks her in the first season. 'I do like stabbing,' Wednesday retorts. It has no doubt helped 'Wednesday' that its characters have been mainstays of Halloween costumes for decades. The family, nameless to begin with, first appeared in a single-panel cartoon in the New Yorker in 1938. In 1964 a tv executive brought them to the small screen. Charles Addams, their creator, lamented that the family was only 'half as evil' as in his comics, yet the show made the Addamses twice as popular—and Addams himself a much wealthier man. Subsequent black-comedy films in the 1990s boosted their fame again. Addams would be pleased that, over the years, the oddball family has become increasingly macabre, as well as zany and camp. In the first series Gomez staged train crashes with model trains. In the current one, Wednesday punishes the boys who bully Pugsley by releasing hungry piranhas into a swimming pool during water-polo practice. Yet the Addamses are not popular because they are wicked or weird. (In the current series, they are kinder, better people than the 'normies' who hate them.) They have endured across generations because, beneath the idiosyncracies, they are a functional family. If you ignore the severed hand, the household is made up of two parents, two children, an uncle and a grunting servant. Wednesday's family is both what every teenager fears—cringeworthy—and what they wish for: loving and accepting. Gomez and Morticia are besotted with each other and they dote on their children, who love and torture each other in equal measure, as siblings often do. 'Wednesday' is heartening as well as spooky viewing, on any day of the week. ■
Time Out
an hour ago
- Time Out
A Michelin-starred Texan BBQ is coming to London
Meat lovers, this one's for you. One of most-acclaimed BBQ joints in Austin, Texas is coming to London for four weeks of flesh-based joy. Michelin starred smokehouse InterStellar BBQ is decamping from Texas for a kitchen takeover at Electric Bar & Diner at The Ned from September 5 until October 5. It'll be a collaboration with Hackney-based barbecue gang From The Ashes and there will just be one menu item on offer; a hearty sharing platter that includes peach tea glazed pork belly, pulled lamb shoulder, confit duck leg, beef short rib, and chilli & cheese sausage. There's also the option to add on Australian wagyu brisket, and a dessert of banana pudding with Jack Daniel's caramel sauce is also included. Sides include Texas toast, slaw, beans and beef fat potatoes. The whole thing comes in at £140 per platter for two, so it'll be £70 a head if you're sharing - and you probably should unless you want to go home in an ambulance. Speaking about the collab, John Bates of InterStellar says: 'It is the first time ever that I will be bringing my BBQ style, smoke and flavour to the UK. This is a great opportunity for BBQ enthusiasts to try authentic Texan BBQ right in the heart of the City of London.' 'We have been admirers of John's approach to BBQ and smoking for some time so are looking forward to teaming up with one of the best,' says From The Ashes, who you can find at the Five Points Courtyard in Hackney every Friday to Sunday. InterStellar scored its first Michelin star in last year's inaugural Texas Michelin Guide, and is one of only four Texan smokehouses to receive the honour.
