Given a big budget and major-studio backing after the success of his 2009 independent sci-fi hit District 9, the South African writer-director Neill Blomkamp is able to do some pretty impressive world-building. In fact, he creates two worlds. The first is the dusty, sun-bleached, over-populated and economically depressed Earth of the 22nd century (filmed in Mexico City), wherein humanity is oppressed by corporate villainy and robotic civil servants.
The second, tantalisingly in sight but out of the reach of the masses, is Elysium: a vast space station in the Earth's lower orbit (filmed in Vancouver), where the exclusive few enjoy opulent wealth, verdant golf courses and a perfect health-care system. Jodie Foster plays the ruthless Elysian defence minister charged with maintaining the sanctity of this ultimate gated community; Matt Damon plays Max Da Costa, an ex-con with nothing to lose, on a mission to infiltrate it.
It's nice to see some blockbuster sci-fi entertainment with something to say, even when its themes are writ so large. And it doesn't matter that immigration and economic disparity were also the themes of District 9. The problem is that, after creating two such interesting new worlds, Blomkamp doesn't give you enough time to look around them.
But this plot is at the same time too busy and too simple; there are too many characters but too little characterisation. The industrial accident that leaves Max in need of the kind of health care you can only get on Elysium apparently also turns him into a grim and one-dimensional hero. The humour that was the distinguishing feature of District 9 evaporates at about the same time. And as spectacular as it is, the action too quickly degenerates into one long breathless flurry of running and shooting and blowing things up.
2013-08-07 Walt Disney to lose millions on Lone Ranger film bbc.co.uk
Walt Disney has warned that its Lone Ranger summer blockbuster will lose it between $160m-$190m (£104m-£124m) after heavy spending on promotion failed to bring returns.
The news came with the entertainment giant's third quarter results.
They showed earnings almost unchanged but revenue up 4%, thanks to its theme parks and cable networks, such as ESPN.
he losses from the Lone Ranger film, which stars Johnny Depp, will show up in the next quarterly figures.
The film had its premier in early July and made $29m in US and Canadian ticket sales over its first weekend, a figure considered weak in the industry for a major release.
It opens in the UK this weekend.
Disney said Iron Man 3, which was released in late spring, had fared worse than The Avengers which was out a year earlier, but that its Pixar movie Monsters University was doing better than its children's film Brave did a year ago.
Mr Iger said he was happy with the results, adding: "We are confident that our strategy of creating high-quality branded content positions us well for the future."
He said he appreciated the risks associated with high-cost films, but that he still thought they were worth the risk.
2013-07-08 JOANNA CRAWLEY. 'It's Very Disappointing': Disney Could Be Facing A $150 Million Loss For The Lone Ranger entertainmentwise.com
Disney could be left with huge losses following the disastrous opening week ticket sales for it's new blockbuster The Lone Ranger. With Despicable Me 2 trouncing the Western caper, can Johnny Depp's film claw back the cash in the weeks to come?
Despicable Me 2 was the runaway winner at the US box office over the Independence Day Weekend. Living up to estimates, the Steve Carell animation notched up massive sales, making it one of the highest July Fourth debuts of all time, with a massive $82.5m.
The same couldn't be said for The Lone Ranger. Following poor reviews the Johnny Depp vehicle could only managed a disappointing $29.4m. With an estimated production bill of $250m, Disney could be looked at a major flop despite the A-List talents of Johnny Depp, who is reunited with his Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski for the the western reboot.
Previous estimates placed the loss at $100 million but following the weekend box office results, experts have told The Hollywood Reporter that the loss could now surpass the $150 million marl.
On top of that huge production budget, worldwide marketing costs have also added $175 million to the total bill for the movie, which means that if estimates that the film will only rake in $125 million in the US are correct, there's going to be major money down the drain.
In the overseas market, The Hollywood Reporter report that the film is estimated to take $150 million for a worldwide total of $275 million.
usatoday.com
2013-06-25 JENNIFER SCHUESSLER. Scholar Asserts That Hollywood Avidly Aided Nazis nytimes.com
Ben Urwand. The Collaboration. Hollywood's Pact with Hitler
The list of institutions and industries that have been accused of whitewashing their links to the Third Reich is long, including various governments, the Vatican, Swiss banks and American corporations like I.B.M., General Motors and DuPont.
Now a young historian wants to add a more glamorous name to that roll call: Hollywood.
That the German government meddled in the film industry during Hollywood’s so-called golden age has long been known to film historians, and such activity was chronicled in the American press at the time. (“Long Arm of Hitler Extends to Hollywood Studio,” read a 1937 headline in Newsweek.)
But Mr. Urwand, 35, offers the most stinging take by far, drawing on material from German and American archives to argue that the relationship between Hollywood and the Third Reich ran much deeper — and went on much longer — than any scholar has so far suggested.
On page after page, he shows studio bosses, many of them Jewish immigrants, cutting films scene by scene to suit Nazi officials; producing material that could be seamlessly repurposed in Nazi propaganda films; and, according to one document, helping to finance the manufacture of German armaments.
“There’s a whole myth that Warner Brothers were crusaders against fascism,” Mr. Urwand said. “But they were the first to try to appease the Nazis in 1933.”
Mr. Urwand, an Australian-born scholar whose Jewish Hungarian maternal grandparents spent the war years in hiding, said his project began in 2004, when he was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. He came across an interview with the screenwriter Budd Schulberg vaguely mentioning that Louis B. Mayer used to meet with a German consul in Los Angeles to discuss cuts to his studio’s movies. Smelling a dissertation topic, he began digging around.
In the German state archives in Berlin, Mr. Urwand found a January 1938 letter from the German branch of 20th-Century Fox asking whether Hitler would share his opinions on American movies, and signed “Heil Hitler!”
Other discoveries followed, including notes by Hitler’s adjutants recording his reactions to the movies he watched each night (he loved Laurel and Hardy but hated “Tarzan”), and a scrapbook in which Jack Warner documented a Rhine cruise that he and other studio executives took with an Allied escort on Hitler’s former yacht in July 1945 as part of a trip exploring postwar business opportunities.
“That was the one time I actually shouted out in an archive,” Mr. Urwand recalled.
He also uncovered detailed records of regular studio visits by German officials, including Georg Gyssling, the special consul assigned to monitor Hollywood, who watched films, dictated scene-by-scene requests for cuts and engaged in bizarre debates. (Did “King Kong,” for example, constitute “an attack on the nerves of the German people?”) And Mr. Urwand found records of a global network of monitors who made sure the cuts were made in all countries, including the United States.
Hollywood’s “collaboration,” Mr. Urwand argues, began in 1930, when Carl Laemmle Jr. of Universal Studios agreed to significant cuts in “All Quiet on the Western Front” after riots by the Nazi Party, then rising in Germany. (Laemmle, Mr. Urwand acknowledges, would later help hundreds of Jewish refugees secure visas to the United States.)
And it lasted, in his telling, well past November 1938, when Kristallnacht became front-page news around the world.
In June 1939 Metro-Goldwyn Mayer treated 10 Nazi newspaper editors to a “good-will tour” of its studio in Los Angeles. Mr. Urwand also found a December 1938 report by an American commercial attaché suggesting that MGM was financing German armaments production as part of a deal to circumvent restrictions on repatriating movie profits.
Mr. Urwand said that he found nearly 20 films intended for American audiences that German officials significantly altered or squelched. Perhaps more important, he added, Jewish characters were all but eliminated from Hollywood movies.
2013-06-16 Faster than speeding bullet, 'Man of Steel' sets June record reuters.com
"Man of Steel," the big-budget reboot of the Superman franchise, leaped over the apocalyptic buddy comedy "This is the End," collecting a muscular $113.1 million to lead the domestic box office with the year's second-largest debut weekend and the biggest June opening ever.
"Man of Steel," starring British-born Henry Cavill in the first Superman movie released in seven years, carried a hefty budget of $225 million and took in a total of $125 million through Sunday including early screenings, according to BoxOffice.com.
The special-effects laden film is the story of the infant Kal-El, who escapes his doomed home planet Krypton and grows up in the idyllic town of Smallville with his parents, played by Kevin Costner and Diane Lane. Amy Adams plays the budding super hero's girlfriend Lois Lane.
The film, directed by Christopher Nolan, who scored big hits with "The Dark Knight" and "Inception," added $71.6 million from overseas box offices in 24 markets.
2013-06-12 Steven Spielberg Predicts 'Implosion' of Film Industry hollywoodreporter.com
Steven Spielberg on Wednesday predicted an "implosion" in the film industry is inevitable, whereby a half dozen or so $250 million movies flop at the box office and alter the industry forever. What comes next -- or even before then -- will be price variances at movie theaters, where "you're gonna have to pay $25 for the next Iron Man, you're probably only going to have to pay $7 to see Lincoln." He also said that Lincoln came "this close" to being an HBO movie instead of a theatrical release.
George Lucas agreed that massive changes are afoot, including film exhibition morphing somewhat into a Broadway play model, whereby fewer movies are released, they stay in theaters for a year and ticket prices are much higher. His prediction prompted Spielberg to recall that his 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial stayed in theaters for a year and four months.
"We're talking Lincoln and Red Tails -- we barely got them into theaters. You're talking about Steven Spielberg and George Lucas can't get their movie into a theater," Lucas said. "I got more people into Lincoln than you got into Red Tails," Spielberg joked.
Spielberg added that he had to co-own his own studio in order to get Lincoln into theaters.
"The pathway to get into theaters is really getting smaller and smaller," Lucas said.
Mattrick and Spielberg also praised Netflix, prompting Boorstin to ask Spielberg if he planned to make original content for the Internet streamer. "I have nothing to announce," said the director.
2013-06-02 Xan Brooks. Michael Douglas on Liberace, Cannes, cancer and cunnilingus guardian.co.uk
In August 2010 Douglas walked on to the David Letterman show to confirm that he was suffering from throat cancer, that the disease was at stage four and that stage five was death. Tributes were polished and obituaries prepared. That he is even here in Cannes is cause for celebration. The fact that he comes with what is surely his boldest, most exhilarating role to date qualifies him as some kind of Lazarus.
Following the diagnosis, Douglas subjected himself to two months of chemotherapy and radiation, a draining, exhausting process that made him lose more than 13.5kg (30lb). Today, however, he looks OK: whippy, bright-eyed and only a little slack around the jawline. He has just come from lunch and is easing back towards his fighting weight.
How is his health right now? "Good, thanks. I have to check in regularly – now it's every six months – but I'm more than two years clear. And with this kind of cancer, 95% of the time it doesn't come back."
In 2000 Douglas married Zeta-Jones, Swansea-born and exactly 25 years his junior (they share the same birthday). Their relationship has played out in the press as a tinny, 21st-century retread of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton – the Hollywood insider and the Welsh upstart, with the gender roles reversed. The forecasts were stormy but the marriage has lasted. They have two children together.
The throat cancer, I assume, was first seeded during those wild middle years, when he drank like a fish and smoked like the devil. Looking back, knowing what he knows now, does he feel he overloaded his system?
"No," he says. "No. Because, without wanting to get too specific, this particular cancer is caused by HPV [human papillomavirus], which actually comes about from cunnilingus."
From what? For a moment I think that I may have misheard.
"From cunnilingus. I mean, I did worry if the stress caused by my son's incarceration didn't help trigger it. But yeah, it's a sexually transmitted disease that causes cancer." He shrugs. "And if you have it, cunnilingus is also the best cure for it."
I'm still thinking about what he said earlier, about HPV and oral sex and how it can be both cause and cure. Can that last bit be right? A doctor the Guardian later speaks to insists it makes no sense. I had hoped it could be true; it sounded oddly karmic. Douglas has lived not wisely and perhaps not even well – but certainly to the full. He has drunk and smoked and snorted, and had plenty of sex. His appetites brought him to the brink of disaster. It would be nice if they could now be his salvation too.
en.wikipedia.org
2013-04-12 James Arden. 3D films set for popularity slide guardian.co.uk
Audiences for films in 3D are projected to decline in 2013, the first drop since 3D exploded with Avatar in 2009, according to a report compiled by Fitch Ratings.
Since the success of James Cameron's sci-fi epic, more and more movies have jumped on the latest iteration of the 3D format, which is no longer confined to animation or big-budget action films. The likes of Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby and Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity will also exploit the new technology.
However, Fitch has concluded the novelty is starting to wear off. 3D box office takings in the US and Canada have remained static at $1.8bn for the past two years, and are set for a slight year-on-year decline in 2013 despite a strong lineup of 3D releases, including Star Trek Into Darkness, Iron Man 3 and Man of Steel.
"Attendance likely benefited from the initial proliferation of 3D films," says the report. "However, the initial excitement has dwindled, and consumers are focused again on the overall quality of the film and are weighing the cost of a premium ticket versus a base 2D ticket."
While overall box office takings increased in 2012 to a record-breaking $34.7bn worldwide, 3D failed to make a similar impact. "Going to the movies remains one of the lower-cost forms of entertainment," says Fitch's study. "However, increased pricing, particularly on 3D films, may erode this perception over time."
2013-04-05 Mary McNamara. Roger Ebert: First citizen critic and father to us all latimes.com
The first citizen critic, making heady discourse available even to those of us who would never visit the Algonquin or walk the halls of the New Yorker, boldly leveraging the technology at hand to broaden his impact without diminishing his integrity, he was, in many ways, father to us all.
Ebert helped release the critical voice from its ivory Eastern Seaboard skyscraper. Having overcome their initial reluctance to share anything but that reluctance, he and Siskel cleared a floor space for the revolutionary idea of criticism as conversation rather than edict -- they disagreed, often strongly but rarely dismissively. They were willing to expose the tender white underbelly of their profession -- it all comes down to opinion -- in an effort to illuminate, and popularize, the importance of critical thinking itself, to show how it was separate from simple reaction.
Unlike other important film critics of the late 20th century, he was not afraid to laud the emotional reaction to film, something every viewer could experience, but he didn't pander to it. Instead, he followed his heart back up to his intellect, and took us with him, showing us, often precisely, why this image or those words did more than just trigger a dopamine drop and why that image and these words did not. He did not see enthusiasm as shorthand for stupid, did not use his often scathing wit to go for the zinger at the expense of the insight. He was witty but never mean, dry but never cynical and when he loved, he loved loudly.
More important -- most important -- he managed to die without ever becoming old. He aged, of course, and endured a horror of physical disintegration that seemed to come from a vengeful universe -- a critic literally losing his ability to speak is the sort of irony preposterous anywhere but real life. But his voice was not limited to the physical plane and he never stopped loving what he did, or figuring out how to do it differently, blogging and tweeting until the day he died.
2013-04-03 U.S. film critic Roger Ebert says cancer has returned reuters.com
Pulitzer Prize-winning U.S. film critic Roger Ebert says he is battling cancer again and that he will scale back his writing by taking a "leave of presence" from his more than four-decade career.
Ebert, 70, known for his rhetorical power and prolific output, said he will undergo radiation treatment that will force him to take time away from his job.
"I must slow down now, which is why I'm taking what I like to call 'a leave of presence,'" Ebert said in a blog entry posted late on Tuesday, adding that he would scale back his workload.
Ebert, who had lost his ability to speak and eat after surgeries for thyroid and salivary gland cancer in 2002 and 2003, said the cancer was discovered by doctors after he fractured his hip in December.
"The 'painful fracture' that made it difficult for me to walk has recently been revealed to be a cancer," Ebert said, giving no further details about the type of cancer or diagnosis.
"I am not going away," Ebert said. "My intent is to continue to write selected reviews ... What's more, I'll be able at last to do what I've always fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review."
The Chicago resident said he also would take time to write about his illness.
Ebert, whose reviews are syndicated to more than 200 newspapers, has been reviewing films for the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975.
2013-03-07 RICHARD BRODY. GODARD’S TRUTHFUL TORTURE SCENE newyorker.com
In 1960, France was embroiled in the Algerian war, in which some of its soldiers tortured prisoners (mainly Muslims) suspected of involvement in the pro-independence militancy, while agents waged a dirty war against Algeria's advocates in Europe. Against this backdrop, Jean-Luc Godard made his second feature film, “Le Petit Soldat” (“The Little Soldier”), whose story centers on a planned extrajudicial assassination and depicts the practice of torture, at length and in detail.
Godard’s harsh and direct, yet complex and intimate approach to the subject contrasts with Bigelow’s relatively careless, aesthetically mediocre, and entertainingly grandiose and unsophisticated way with it, and the crucial differences that result are ultimately not just aesthetic but moral.
The place to start with is the point of view; the thing to start with is the sound. The protagonist is Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor), a twenty-six-year-old French man who arrives in Geneva and makes contact with his handlers, who order him to assassinate a radio commentator whose political broadcasts are in support of Algerian independence. But in the meantime he has met and fallen in love with Veronika Dreyer (Anna Karina), a young Danish woman of Russian descent and an aspiring actress, and doesn’t want to carry out the mission. His handlers pressure him into it; in the course of their conflict, activists with the Algerian independence movement recognize him, kidnap him, and, in order to get him to reveal his handlers’ phone number, torture him. I won’t go into detail on the dénouement but will stick with the torture scene itself.
Where the images appear to be faithful representations, the soundtrack is wildly, but subtly, distorted. The movie is almost entirely dubbed, as Godard’s first feature, “Breathless,” had been. (Godard even started work on “Le Petit Soldat” before “Breathless” had been released—he feared that if the first film did poorly he might not get to make a second film at all.) But, unlike the soundtrack of “Breathless”—for which Godard collected a vast number of location sounds and put them together in an elaborate sound edit, resulting in a mix so dense and so precisely matched to the image that many critics mistook it for sync sound—that of “Le Petit Soldat” is obviously dubbed. For instance, many scenes feature no ambient sound at all, which is especially noticeable when they take place in a convertible that’s moving in traffic: there’s no sound of motors or wind, a car door closes soundlessly as characters speak clearly to each other, the snap of a cigarette-lighter cover is the only sound that’s heard. It’s as if the image is the realm of the objective reality that Bruno experienced but the soundtrack as a whole blends with his interior monologue to convey the realm of subjectivity, of experience from within.
After his capture, Bruno is brought, barely conscious, to an apartment, where his captors partially undress him, handcuff him, and question him. When he refuses to answer, they show him photos of other French agents who refused to talk and were tortured to death, and they warn him of the ordeal he’s about to face. Over a pan shot across the façade of a bland modern building, Bruno explains that his captors asked him to work with them but that, when they refused him a cash advance, he turned them down. Bruno is dragged to the bathroom, handcuffed to the fixtures, and held at gunpoint as his head is sprayed with water. Cut to a pan shot of the building: Bruno, in voice-over, says, “Torture is monotonous and sad. It’s hard to talk about it. I’ll do so as best I can.” A piece of classical piano music comes on the soundtrack; one of his captors views himself in a mirror and combs his hair; a woman who works with them puts paper in her typewriter; one of the torturers enters the bathroom, bringing a transistor radio. Bruno asks, “Why are you doing this?” The torturer responds, “Sometimes one must have the strength to cut one’s path with a dagger”; he lights a whole book of matches for a cigarette, and burns the palms of Bruno’s hands with the matches. A pan shot, linking the torturer, the matches, the handcuffed arm, and Bruno’s face makes clear that the actor actually endured, for a brief moment, the torture—and he briefly, quickly, quietly gasps. Meanwhile, the torturer intermittently turns up the volume on the radio—but no sound comes out of the radio and no screams come out of Bruno, who continues to speak in voice-over about attempting to forget the pain by thinking as much as possible, as quickly as possible—including about Veronika—as he’s seen in close-up, looking into the camera with a gaze of defiant serenity.
he scene in question is, in a narrative sense, simple—it depicts events that took place in an apartment in Geneva over a short span of time—and its images and sounds are, in themselves, simple, but it’s put together as an amazingly deft and complex interweave of a wide range of elements that turns a mere anecdote into an experience that’s as much aesthetic as personal, as concrete as hallucinatory, as intimate as historical. There’s more breadth and depth—more of a sense of history at large, of the intrinsic and profound horror of the practice and the experience of torture, and of the moral issues involved in political action—in that thirteen-minute sequence than in the whole of “Zero Dark Thirty.”
2013-02-04 Jessica Winter. Kathryn Bigelow: The Art of Darkness time.com
Zero Dark Thirty credits its story to "firsthand accounts of actual events," drawing on Boal's original reporting and meetings with CIA officials; its composite characters are based on real people, living and dead. The film opens with a black screen and real audio recordings of 9/11 victims calling for help from the burning towers. It then cuts to a black site, where Maya (Chastain) observes her colleague Dan (Jason Clarke) as he tortures a detainee, Ammar (Reda Kateb). The first 25 or so minutes of the film are largely taken up with torture: Ammar is strung up, beaten, waterboarded and kept awake for 96 hours straight.
Pale and stricken, clearly aghast at the abuse but resolved to stay in the room with the subject, Maya in Zero Dark Thirty's early scenes is an audience surrogate. She can also be read as a stand-in for Bigelow herself — an exceptionally skilled, workaholic woman triumphing in a male-dominated realm — though Bigelow politely shrugs off the comparison. "It's a natural parallel, and there's perhaps some connective tissue there, but if anything, it would be subconscious and not conscious," she says.
Maya is our only constant as the film barrels through 10 years of punctuated equilibrium in the war on terrorism, pausing over the July 7, 2005, attacks in London, the September 2008 bombing of the Islamabad Marriott hotel and the suicide attack on the CIA's Forward Operating Base Chapman in December 2009, finally arriving at the Abbottabad compound on the morning of May 2, 2011. Perhaps the finest action director at work today, Bigelow choreographs the predawn raid in near real time with breathtaking suspense and precision as well as a chilling matter-of-factness that drains the sequence of elation or jingoism.
"Where there's clarity in the world, there's clarity in the film," Bigelow says. "Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan. That's clarity. And where there's ambiguity in the world, there's ambiguity in the film." Bigelow is unambiguous in stating that she thinks torture is "reprehensible," but critics of Zero Dark Thirty object to what they see as a causal relationship between torture and the uncovering of bin Laden's lair. They've also cried foul that Bigelow — who calls Zero Dark Thirty "a reported film" — and Boal make claims to both its journalistic bona fides and its right to artistic license.
"First, the interrogation scenes are inaccurate and overwrought and just plain wrong," says former CIA director Michael Hayden, who argues that the film conflates the abuses of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay with the more strictly controlled and clinical interrogation techniques he says were employed at CIA black sites. "Second, though I can't imagine Abbottabad happening without making use of information that we got from detainees, the linear, straight-line connection from that information to Abbottabad that the movie suggests is also overdone. And finally, it was far more of a team effort than Maya against the world." (Maya is based on a real-life CIA operative who tracked the courier over years; she is reportedly still active in the field and cannot be identified.)
"It's a good and eminently watchable movie," says Robert McFadden, a former Naval Criminal Investigative Service special agent in charge and a senior vice president at the Soufan Group, a strategic consultancy. "It's also disturbing and misleading." McFadden challenges Bigelow's decision to follow recordings of 9/11 victims just before their deaths with a fictionalized torture sequence. "To go from 'based on firsthand accounts' to the recordings — which are so visceral, which provoke such an emotional response — to the torture, I think most people would come away thinking, Yeah, we needed to do that."
Also, McFadden says, "The average viewer would have to be left with the idea that torture — or enhanced interrogation techniques, depending on your perspective — were critical in putting together the mosaic that led to Osama bin Laden. From open-source reporting and from people with access to the information, we know that, no, that information did not come from torture."
THE IDEA OF THE HERO
"It's an important filmmaker who trusts the audience to participate," Chastain says. Zero Dark Thirty's audiences have participated, to say the least, and they have raised vital questions about what the film gets right and wrong and why it matters. But part of the negative response can be seen as the product of Hollywood-movie conditioning, the expectation that we should identify with a heroic protagonist, share her motivations, enjoy her successes and, above all, feel a sense of triumph as we walk out of the theater. The impulse is especially strong in the context of bin Laden's assassination: a purely black-and-white conclusion, with identifiable and unconflicted heroes assigned to the task, is irresistible.
Bigelow's movies don't work that way, and they never have. Jeremy Renner's bomb-disposal savant in The Hurt Locker routinely and willfully endangers himself and his fellow soldiers and seems permanently alienated from his wife and toddler son. In Near Dark "the good guys are the bad guys," as Bigelow puts it; that is, they are vampires. The terrorized rookie that Curtis portrays in Blue Steel is both hero and victim and seems irreparably damaged by movie's end. Ralph Fiennes' protagonist in Strange Days is a sleazy, pathetic salesman of black-market virtual-reality gear; we recoil from him more than we root for him. In K-19 a Soviet naval crew succumbs to radiation sickness largely because of the hubris of their commanding officer, played by Harrison Ford.
"I wanted to dispense with all the movie tropes — the clean through line, the idea of the hero," Bigelow says of K-19. "It was interesting trying to get that one financed, because you'd be pitching it, saying, 'This really happened. They averted a thermonuclear event off the coast of a NATO base.' I remember sitting in some executive's office, and they said, 'O.K., but who are the good guys?' 'What do you mean? The Russians are the good guys.' 'No, I mean, who are the Americans?'"
One might pose a similar question of Zero Dark Thirty, which portrays its intelligence-gathering Americans as variously savage, dedicated, flighty, monomaniacal, generous, blinkered, amoral and hollowed out. Who are these Americans? And how was American history and identity shaped — or warped — by the methods employed in our decade of vengeance? The film's heroine, fittingly, is a mystery unto herself, with no backstory; there are many questions that the audience can't ask her, such as "What do you do outside of work?" and "Are you dating anybody?" and "No, really, do you do anything but work?" These are questions, by the way, that Bigelow isn't terribly keen on answering either.
2013-01-25 Slavoj Žižek. Zero Dark Thirty: Hollywood's gift to American power guardian.co.uk
Here is how, in a letter to the LA Times, Kathryn Bigelow justified Zero Dark Thirty's depicting of the torture methods used by government agents to catch and kill Osama bin Laden:
"Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time."
Really? One doesn't need to be a moralist, or naive about the urgencies of fighting terrorist attacks, to think that torturing a human being is in itself something so profoundly shattering that to depict it neutrally – ie to neutralise this shattering dimension – is already a kind of endorsement.
Imagine a documentary that depicted the Holocaust in a cool, disinterested way as a big industrial-logistic operation, focusing on the technical problems involved (transport, disposal of the bodies, preventing panic among the prisoners to be gassed). Such a film would either embody a deeply immoral fascination with its topic, or it would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to engender dismay and horror in spectators. Where is Bigelow here?
Without a shadow of a doubt, she is on the side of the normalisation of torture. When Maya, the film's heroine, first witnesses waterboarding, she is a little shocked, but she quickly learns the ropes; later in the film she coldly blackmails a high-level Arab prisoner with, "If you don't talk to us, we will deliver you to Israel". Her fanatical pursuit of Bin Laden helps to neutralise ordinary moral qualms. Much more ominous is her partner, a young, bearded CIA agent who masters perfectly the art of passing glibly from torture to friendliness once the victim is broken (lighting his cigarette and sharing jokes). There is something deeply disturbing in how, later, he changes from a torturer in jeans to a well-dressed Washington bureaucrat. This is normalisation at its purest and most efficient – there is a little unease, more about the hurt sensitivity than about ethics, but the job has to be done. This awareness of the torturer's hurt sensitivity as the (main) human cost of torture ensures that the film is not cheap rightwing propaganda: the psychological complexity is depicted so that liberals can enjoy the film without feeling guilty. This is why Zero Dark Thirty is much worse than 24, where at least Jack Bauer breaks down at the series finale.
The debate about whether waterboarding is torture or not should be dropped as an obvious nonsense: why, if not by causing pain and fear of death, does waterboarding make hardened terrorist-suspects talk? The replacement of the word "torture" with "enhanced interrogation technique" is an extension of politically correct logic: brutal violence practised by the state is made publicly acceptable when language is changed.
2013-01-04 Naomi Wolf. A letter to Kathryn Bigelow on Zero Dark Thirty's apology for torture guardian.co.uk
The Hurt Locker was a beautiful, brave film; many young women in film were inspired as they watched you become the first woman ever to win an Oscar for directing. But with Zero Dark Thirty, you have attained a different kind of distinction.
Your film Zero Dark Thirty is a huge hit here. But in falsely justifying, in scene after scene, the torture of detainees in "the global war on terror", Zero Dark Thirty is a gorgeously-shot, two-hour ad for keeping intelligence agents who committed crimes against Guantánamo prisoners out of jail. It makes heroes and heroines out of people who committed violent crimes against other people based on their race – something that has historical precedent.
Your film claims, in many scenes, that CIA torture was redeemed by the "information" it "secured", information that, according to your script, led to Bin Laden's capture. This narrative is a form of manufacture of innocence to mask a great crime: what your script blithely calls "the detainee program".
What led to this amoral compromising of your film-making?
Could some of the seduction be financing? It is very hard to get a film without a pro-military message, such as The Hurt Locker, funded and financed. But according to sources in the film industry, the more pro-military your message is, the more kinds of help you currently can get: from personnel, to sets, to technology – a point I made in my argument about the recent militarized Katy Perry video.
It seems implausible that scenes such as those involving two top-secret, futuristic helicopters could be made without Pentagon help, for example. If the film received that kind of undisclosed, in-kind support from the defense department, then that would free up million of dollars for the gigantic ad campaign that a film like this needs to compete to win audience.
This also sets a dangerous precedent: we can be sure, with the "propaganda amendment" of the 2013 NDAA, just signed into law by the president, that the future will hold much more overt corruption of Hollywood and the rest of US pop culture. This amendment legalizes something that has been illegal for decades: the direct funding of pro-government or pro-military messaging in media, without disclosure, aimed at American citizens.
It may seem extreme to make comparison with this other great, but profoundly compromised film-maker, but there are real echoes. When Riefenstahl began to glamorize the National Socialists, in the early 1930s, the Nazis' worst atrocities had not yet begun; yet abusive detention camps had already been opened to house political dissidents beyond the rule of law – the equivalent of today's Guantánamo, Bagram base, and other unnameable CIA "black sites". And Riefenstahl was lionised by the German elites and acclaimed for her propaganda on behalf of Hitler's regime.
But the world changed. The ugliness of what she did could not, over time, be hidden. Americans, too, will wake up and see through Zero Dark Thirty's apologia for the regime's standard lies that this brutality is somehow necessary. When that happens, the same community that now applauds you will recoil.
Like Riefenstahl, you are a great artist. But now you will be remembered forever as torture's handmaiden.
2013-01-03 Jose A.Rodriguez Jr. A CIA veteran on what ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ gets wrong about the bin Laden manhunt washingtonpost.com
It is an odd experience to enter a darkened room and, for more than 21 / 2 hours, watch someone tell a story that you experienced intimately in your own life. But that is what happened recently as I sat in a movie theater near Times Square and watched “Zero Dark Thirty,” the new Hollywood blockbuster about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
When I was head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center from 2002 to 2004 and then director of the National Clandestine Service until late 2007, the campaign against al-Qaeda was my life and obsession.
I must say, I agree with both the film critics who love “Zero Dark Thirty” as entertainment and the administration officials and prominent senators who hate the movie for the message it sends — although my reasons are entirely opposite theirs.
Indeed, as I watched the story unfold on the screen, I found myself alternating between repulsion and delight.
First, my reasons for repulsion. “Zero Dark Thirty,” which will open for Washington audiences Friday, inaccurately links torture with intelligence success and mischaracterizes how America’s enemies have been treated in the fight against terrorism. Many others object to the film, however, because they think that the depiction of torture by the CIA is accurate but that the movie is wrong to imply that our interrogation techniques worked.
They are wrong on both counts. I was intimately involved in setting up and administering the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program, and I left the agency in 2007 secure in the knowledge not only that our program worked — but that it was not torture.
What I haven’t heard anyone acknowledge is that the interrogation scenes torture the truth. Despite popular fiction — and the fiction that often masquerades as unbiased reporting — the enhanced interrogation program was carefully monitored and conducted. It bore little resemblance to what is shown on the screen.
The film shows CIA officers brutalizing detainees — beating them mercilessly, suspending them from the ceiling with chains, leading them around in dog collars and, on the spur of the moment, throwing them on the floor, grabbing a large bucket and administering a vicious ad hoc waterboarding. The movie implies that such treatment went on for years.
The truth is that no one was bloodied or beaten in the enhanced interrogation program that I supervised from 2002 to 2007. Most detainees received no enhanced interrogation techniques, and the relative few who did faced harsh measures for only a few days or weeks at the start of their detention. To give a detainee a single open-fingered slap across the face, CIA officers had to receive written authorization from Washington. No one was hung from ceilings. The filmmakers stole the dog-collar scenes from the abuses committed by Army personnel at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. No such thing was ever done at CIA “black sites.”
The CIA did waterboard three of the worst terrorists on the planet — Abu Zubaida, Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — in an effort to get them to cooperate. Instead of a large bucket, small plastic water bottles were used on the three men, who were on medical gurneys. The procedure was totally unlike the one seen in the movie but was consistent with the same tactic used, without physical or psychological damage, on tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel as part of their training.
Most Americans probably think waterboarding was stopped by President Obama once he took office in 2009. Few know that the technique was last used in 2003, when Obama was still an unknown state senator in Illinois.
And, if you pay close attention, “Zero Dark Thirty” also concedes that it was a matrix of intelligence capabilities — including interrogation, other human intelligence, expert analysis, signals intelligence and imagery analysis — that came together to lead the SEALs to bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad. I say “if you pay close attention” because the intelligence tradecraft is overwhelmed by the intense and misleading interrogation scenes at the start of the movie.
I had to smile at one scene in which a White House official demands more information from the CIA, only to be asked how the agency is supposed to obtain it when the detention and interrogation program has been taken away. The screenwriter seemed to catch the nuance that the administration has made the CIA’s job much harder.
Despite its flaws, inaccuracies and shortcuts, I do believe this film is well worth seeing. Like the real hunt for bin Laden, it goes on way too long, but there is value in the end. Theatergoers should understand, however, that “Zero Dark Thirty” is more than a movie and less than the literal truth. This is especially apparent in the final scene, with Maya in tears, drained, not sure where to go or what to do next.
Her real-world counterparts have no doubt: The battle against al-Qaeda is far from over.
2012-12-13 Peter Bergen. A feminist film epic and the real women of the CIA cnn.com
Editor's note: Peter Bergen is CNN's National Security Analyst and author of "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden, from 9/11 to Abbottabad," which this story, in part, draws upon.
The star of the new film "Zero Dark Thirty" is a flame-haired female CIA analyst Maya (played by Jessica Chastain) who is obsessed with finding Osama bin Laden.
Maya sits in on brutal interrogations of al Qaeda detainees without a qualm and is constantly berating her male bosses to do more to find the leader of al Qaeda. And Maya is there at the end of the movie, identifying bin Laden's body shortly after a Navy SEAL team has killed him in Abbottabad in northern Pakistan.
Maya doesn't have a significant other or even much of a social life to speak of. The only friend she has is another female CIA analyst, Jessica, a CIA official of a slightly older generation who is almost as obsessed as Maya is about hunting down the leaders of al Qaeda.
When men come into Maya's life their only significance is to act as enablers to get what she wants: the head of Osama bin Laden. Or men are obstructions to that goal to be rolled over.
The CIA station chief in Pakistan won't give Maya the agents on the ground to follow the man she believes is bin Laden's courier, so she screams obscenities at him and threatens him with a congressional investigation. She gets what she wants.
"Zero Dark Thirty's" director, Kathryn Bigelow is, of course, the first woman to win an Oscar for best director, for the 2008 film "Hurt Locker." Previously, the stars of Bigelow's movies have been men playing roles that are quintessentially macho; U.S. Army bomb techs in Iraq in "Hurt Locker" or Soviet submariners during the Cold War in "K-19: The Widowmaker."
From the founding of the bin Laden unit at CIA in December 1995 onward, female analysts played a key role in the hunt for al Qaeda's leaders.
The founder of that unit, Michael Scheuer, explains, "(Female analysts) seem to have an exceptional knack for detail, for seeing patterns and understanding relationships, and they also, quite frankly, spend a great deal less time telling war stories, chatting and going outside for cigarettes than the boys. If I could have put up a sign saying, 'No boys need apply,' I would've done it."
2012-10-30 MICHAEL CIEPLY. Disney Buying Lucasfilm for $4 Billion mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com
The Walt Disney Company, in a move that gives it a commanding position in the realm of fantasy movies, said Tuesday it had agreed to acquire Lucasfilm Ltd. from its founder, George Lucas, for $4.05 billion in stock and cash.
The sale provides a corporate home for a private company that grew from Mr. Lucas’s hugely successful “Star Wars” series, and became an enduring force in creating effects-driven science fiction entertainment for large and small screens. Mr. Lucas, who is 68 years old, had already announced he would step down from day-to-day operation of the company.
In a hastily convened conference call with investors Tuesday afternoon, Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, said the company plans to release a seventh “Star Wars” feature film in 2015, with new films in the series coming every two or three years after that. Mr. Lucas will be a consultant on the film projects, Mr. Iger said.
Combined with the purchase of Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion in 2009 and of Pixar Animation Studios for $7.4 billion in 2006, the acquisition will help secure the legacy of Mr. Iger as a builder who aggressively expanded the company since taking charge in 2005. Mr. Iger is set to step down as chief executive in March of 2015, but will remain with Disney in a lesser role under an employment deal he reached with Disney last year.
2012-10-29 MICHAEL CIEPLY. Movies Try to Escape Cultural Irrelevance nytimes.com
Next year’s Academy Awards ceremony — the 85th since 1929 — will be landing in a pool of angst about movies and what appears to be their fraying connection to the pop culture.
After the shock of last year’s decline in domestic movie ticket sales, to $1.28 billion, the lowest since 1995 (and attendance is only a little better this year) film business insiders have been quietly scrambling to fix what few will publicly acknowledge to be broken.
That is, Hollywood’s grip on the popular imagination, particularly when it comes to the more sophisticated films around which the awards season turns.
As the awards season unfolds, the movies are still getting smaller. After six weeks in theaters “The Master,” a 70-millimeter character study much praised by critics, has been seen by about 1.9 million viewers. That is significantly smaller than the audience for a single hit episode of a cable show like “Mad Men” or “The Walking Dead.”
“Argo,” another Oscar contender, had about 7.6 million viewers through the weekend. If interest holds up, it may eventually match the one-night audience for an episode of “Glee.”
The weakness in movies has multiple roots.
...collapse in home video revenue, caused partly by piracy, drove film salaries down. Television, meanwhile, raised its pay, and attracted movie stars like Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Laura Linney, Claire Danes and Sigourney Weaver.
Ticket sales for genre films like “Taken 2” or Mr. MacFarlane’s broad comedy, “Ted,” remain strong. And a growing international audience, particularly in China, has brightened the outlook for action-hero blockbusters like Marvel’s “Avengers” or “Dark Knight Rises.”
But the number of films released by specialty divisions of the major studios, which have backed Oscar winners like “Slumdog Millionaire,” from Fox Searchlight, fell to just 37 pictures last year, down 55 percent from 82 in 2002, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.
The turn toward Mr. MacFarlane, who directed and voiced a foul-mouthed Teddy bear in “Ted,” his main contribution to feature film, has left the Academy scratching for ways to get the public reinvested in the sort of pictures it typically honors. Its staff, for instance, has been looking at the possibility of getting filmmakers who have made Best Picture winners to join a promotional campaign in theaters. In Los Angeles the Academy is also building a movie museum, meant to showcase the medium.
2012-10-28 Guy Adams. William vs Woody Allen as Faulkner estate sues director over two-line quote independent.co.uk
A series of claims filed in Mississippi last week by Faulkner Literary Rights LLC seeks compensation and damages from roughly 100 people and companies who, it claims, have profited from the illegal misappropriation of the Nobel Prize-winning author's oeuvre.
Among the defendants is Allen, whose 2011 film, Midnight in Paris, is targeted owing to a line spoken by Gil Pender, the character played by Owen Wilson. "The past is not dead!" it reads. "Actually, it's not even past. You know who said that? Faulkner. And he was right. And I met him, too. I ran into him at a dinner party."
Faulkner's estate says Allen should have asked permission for the phrase to be used. It is further peeved that he misquotes the writer's original line, which can be found in the 1950 book, Requiem for a Nun, and reads: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
The lawsuit claims: "The use of the infringing quote and of William Faulkner's name in the infringing film is likely to cause confusion, to cause mistake, and/or to deceive the infringing film's viewers as to a perceived affiliation, connection or association between William Faulkner and his works, on the one hand, and Sony, on the other hand."
It seeks "damages, disgorgement of profits, costs and attorney fees" from the film's distributor, Sony Pictures Classics, and up to 100 as-yet-unnamed exhibitors who profited from screenings. Midnight in Paris, for which Allen won a screenwriting Oscar, made almost $160 million (£99 million) at the box office.
The legal action seems curious since copyright does not usually apply to the "fair use" of quotations. And US free speech laws make it tricky to censor artistic expression.
"This is a frivolous lawsuit and we are confident we will prevail," Sony told The Hollywood Reporter, which broke news of the suit. "There is no question this brief reference (10 words) to a quote from a public speech Faulkner gave constitutes fair use and any claim to the contrary is without merit."
Faulkner Literary Rights LLC was founded by the writer's daughter, Jill Faulkner Summers, following his death in 1962. She died in 2008, and it is now managed by Lee Caplin, a film producer from Los Angeles, for the commercial benefit of his descendants.
2012-10-02 David Denby. Whatever Happened to Movies for Grownups? newyorker.com
David Denby. Do the Movies Have a Future?
The six major studios want to make three kinds of movies. They want to make blockbusters costing a hundred and fifty million dollars and up (with another fifty to a hundred million dollars spent on promotion)—that is, films that are based on comic books, video games, and young-adult novels. These movies mostly feature angry pixels contending in the dead air—action sequences of total physical abandonment and virtually total meaninglessness, in which nothing imprints itself on your memory except the experience of being excited. They want to make animated features for families, some of which—especially the ones from Pixar—are very good. And they want to make genre movies—thrillers, chick flicks, romantic comedies, weekend-debauch movies (female as well as male), horror movies. Movies that have a mostly assured audience. Some of those are very good, too, and I sometimes praise them. “End of Watch,” which is out right now, is a good buddy-cop picture. But it’s not all that we want from movies.
The range of films made by the studios has shrunk—serious drama is virtually out of the question. A good, solid movie like Tony Gilroy’s “Michael Clayton” (2007), with George Clooney, wouldn’t have a shot at being made now. I suspect “The Social Network” got made only because Aaron Sorkin wrote the script. “Lawrence of Arabia,” from 1962, which is playing all over the county October 4th for one day on big screens, wouldn’t even be considered now. At the studios, the blockbuster obsession joins with the opening-weekend obsession. Since grownups tend to wait for reviews or word from friends, they don’t go the first few days the movie is playing. That means, as it has for years, that people from, say, fifteen to twenty-five years of age exercise an influence on what gets made by the studios way out of proportion to their numbers in the population. My friends under about forty-five accept this as normal: They don’t know that movies, for the first eighty years of their existence, were essentially made for adults. Apart from the fall season, adults are mostly abandoned for the rest of the year. They wander about looking for something to see and usually retreat (quite rightly) into television.
There’s always the independent cinema, of course, and these productions range from moderately expensive to virtually nothing (literally a few thousand dollars). But it’s very hard for many serious independent films to gain traction in the theaters. Marketing is extraordinarily expensive, and the theatre chains can be hostile to independent movies (money is made in the complexes by the maximum number of bodies lining up at concession stands). Still, every year, two or three things break through to a decent-sized audience. In 2011, it was “Margin Call,” a very articulate and handsomely acted version of a Lehman Brothers-type meltdown.
2012-09-14 David Denby. Has Hollywood Murdered the Movies? tnr.com
SIX HUNDRED OR SO movies open in the United States every year, including films from every country, documentaries, first features spilling out of festivals, experiments, oddities, zero-budget movies made in someone’s apartment. Even in the digit-dazed summer season, small movies never stop opening—there is always something to see, something to write about. Just recently I have been excited by two independent films—the visionary Louisiana bayou mini-epic, Beasts of the Southern Wild, and a terse, morally alert fable of authority and obedience called Compliance. Yet despite such pleasures, movies—mainstream American movies—are in serious trouble. And this is hardly a problem that worries movie critics more than anyone else: many moviegoers feel the same puzzlement and dismay.
When I speak of moviegoers, I mean people who get out of the house and into a theater as often as they can; or people with kids, who back up rare trips to the movies with lots of recent DVDs and films ordered on demand. I do not mean the cinephiles, the solitary and obsessed, who have given up on movie houses and on movies as our national theater (as Pauline Kael called it) and plant themselves at home in front of flat screens and computers, where they look at old films or small new films from the four corners of the globe, blogging and exchanging disks with their friends. They are extraordinary, some of them, and their blogs and websites generate an exfoliating mass of knowledge and opinion, a thickening density of inquiries and claims, outraged and dulcet tweets. Yet it is unlikely that they can do much to build a theatrical audience for the movies they love. And directors still need a sizable audience if they are to make their next picture about something more than a few people talking on the street.
I have in mind the great national audience for movies, or what’s left of it. In the 1930s, roughly eighty million people went to the movies every week, with weekly attendance peaking at ninety million in 1930 and again in the mid-1940s. Now about thirty million people go, in a population two and a half times the size of the population of the 1930s. By degrees, as everyone knows, television, the Internet, and computer games dethroned the movies as regular entertainment. By the 1980s, the economics of the business became largely event-driven, with a never-ending production of spectacle and animation that draws young audiences away from their home screens on opening weekend. For years, the tastes of young audiences have wielded an influence on what gets made way out of proportion to their numbers in the population. We now have a movie culture so bizarrely pulled out of shape that it makes one wonder what kind of future movies will have.
EARLIER THIS YEAR, The Avengers, which pulled together into one movie all the familiar Marvel Comics characters from earlier pictures—Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, and so on—achieved a worldwide box-office gross within a couple of months of about $1.5 billion. That extraordinary figure represented a triumph of craft and cynical marketing: the movie, which cost $220 million to make, was mildly entertaining for a while (self-mockery was built into it), but then it degenerated into a digital slam, an endless battle of exacerbated pixels, most of the fighting set in the airless digital spaces of a digital city. Only a few critics saw anything bizarre or inane about so vast a display of technology devoted to so little. American commercial movies are now dominated by the instantaneous monumental, the senseless repetition of movies washing in on a mighty roar of publicity and washing out in a waste of semi-indifference a few weeks later.
Many big films (not just the ones based on Marvel Comics) are now soaked in what can only be called corporate irony, a mad discrepancy between size and significance—for instance, Christopher Nolan’s widely admired Inception, which generates an extraordinarily complicated structure devoted to little but its own workings. Despite its dream layers, the movie is not really about dreams—the action you see on screen feels nothing like dreams. An industrialist hires experts to invade the dreaming mind of another industrialist in order to plant emotions that would cause the second man to change corporate plans. Or something like that; the plot is a little vague. Anyway, why should we care? What is at stake?
Most of the great directors of the past—Griffith, Chaplin, Murnau, Renoir, Lang, Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Welles, Rossellini, De Sica, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Bergman, the young Coppola, Scorsese, and Altman, and many others—did not imagine that they were making films for a tiny audience, and they did not imagine they were making “art” movies, even though they worked with a high degree of conscious artistry. (The truculent John Ford would have glared at you with his unpatched eye if you used the word “art” in his presence.) They thought that they were making films for everyone, or at least everyone with spirit, which is a lot of people. But over the past twenty-five years, if you step back and look at the American movie scene, you see the mass-culture juggernauts, increasingly triumphs of heavy-duty digital craft, tempered by self-mockery and filling up every available corner of public space; and the tiny, morally inquiring “relationship” movies, making their modest way to a limited audience. The ironic cinema, and the earnest cinema; the mall cinema, and the art house cinema.
“Give me the children until they are seven, and anyone may have them afterwards,” Francis Xavier, one of the early Jesuits, is supposed to have said. The studios grab boys when they are seven, eight, or nine, command a corner of their hearts, and hold them with franchise sequels and product tie-ins for fifteen years. The Twilight series of teen vampire movies, which deliciously sell sex without sex—romantic danger without fornication—caught girls in the same way at a slightly older age. The Hunger Games franchise will be with us for years. In brief, the studios are not merely servicing the tastes of the young audience; they are also continuously creating the audience to whom they want to sell. (They have tied their fortunes to the birth rate.) Which raises an inevitable question: will these constantly created new audiences, arising from infancy with all their faculties intact but their expectations already defined—these potential moviegoers—will they ever develop a taste for narrative, for character, for suspense, for acting, for irony, for wit, for drama? Isn’t it possible that they will be so hooked on sensation that anything without extreme action and fantasy will just seem lifeless and dead to them?
THE LANGUAGE OF big-budget, market-driven movies—the elements of shooting, editing, storytelling, and characterization—began disintegrating as far back as the 1980s, but all of this crystallized for me a decade ago, in the summer of 2001, when the slovenliness of what I was seeing that year, even in the Oscar-winning Gladiator, hit me hard. The action scenes in Gladiator were mostly a blur of whirling movement shot right up close—a limb hacked off and flying, a spurt of blood, a flash of chariot wheels. Who could actually see anything? Yet almost no one seemed to object. The old ideal of action as something staged cleanly and realistically in open space had been destroyed by sheer fakery and digital “magic”—a constant chopping of movement into tiny pieces that are then assembled by computer editing into exploding little packages. What we were seeing in Gladiator and other movies were not just individual artistic failures and crass commercial strategies, but was a new and awful idea of how to put a picture together.
Consider a single scene from one of the most prominent artistic fiascos of recent years, Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor. Forget Ben Affleck’s refusal to sleep with Kate Beckinsale the night before going off to battle; forget the rest of the frightfully noble love story. Look at the action sequences in the movie, the scenes that many critics unaccountably praised. Here’s the moment: the Japanese have arrived, dropped their load, and gone back to their carriers. Admiral Kimmel (Colm Feore), the commander of the Pacific fleet, then rides through the harbor in an open boat, surveying the disaster. We have seen Kimmel earlier: not as a major character, but as a definite presence. Before December 7, he had intimations that an attack might be coming but not enough information to form a coherent picture. He did not act, and now he feels the deepest chagrin. Dressed in Navy whites, and surrounded by junior officers also dressed in white, he passes slowly through ships torn apart and still burning, ships whose crews, in some cases, remain trapped below the waterline.
Now, the admiral’s boat trip could have yielded a passage of bitterly eloquent movie poetry. Imagine what John Ford or David Lean would have done with it! We have just seen bodies blackened by fire, the men’s skin burned off. Intentionally or not, the spotless dress whites worn by the officers become an excruciating symbol of the Navy’s complacency before the attack. The whole meaning of Bay’s movie could have been captured in that one shot if it had been built into a sustained sequence. Yet this shot, to our amazement, lasts no more than a few seconds. After cutting away, Bay and his editors return to the scene, but this time from a different angle, and that shot doesn’t last, either. Bay and his team of editors abandon their own creation, just as, earlier in the movie, they jump away from an extraordinary shot of nurses being strafed as they run across an open plaza in front of the base hospital.
People who know how these movies are made told me that the film-makers could not have held those shots any longer, because audiences would have noticed that they were digital fakes. That point (if true) should tell you that something is seriously wrong. If you cannot sustain shots at the dramatic crux of your movie, why make violent spectacle at all? It turns out that fake-looking digital film-making can actually disable spectacle when it is supposed to be set in the real world. Increasingly, the solution has been to create more and more digitized cities, houses, castles, planets. Big films have lost touch with the photographed physical reality that provided so much greater enchantment than fantasy.
The problem is that too many ordinary scenes in many big movies are cut like car chases. One of the tendencies of conglomerate aesthetics is to replace action and drama as much as possible with mere movement. Conglomerate aesthetics requires a dozen trash epiphanies (explosions, transformations, rebirths) rather than the arc of a single pure visual climax; mass slaughter rather than a single death. The job of luring the big audience to the Friday opening—the linchpin of the commercial system—has destroyed action on the screen by making it carry the entire burden of the movie’s pleasure. In Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, sensation has been carried to the point of a brazenly beautiful nihilism, in which a modishly “dark” atmosphere of dread and disaster overwhelms any kind of plot logic or sequence or character interest. You leave the theater vibrating, but a day later you don’t feel a thing. The audience has been conditioned to find the absence of emotion pleasurable.
As the narrative and dramatic powers of movies fall into abeyance, and many big movies turn into sheer spectacle, with only a notional pass at plot or characterization, we are returning with much greater power to capers and larks that were originally performed in innocence. The kind of primitive chase, for instance, that in 1905 depended on some sort of accident or mischief rather than on character or plot has been succeeded by the endless up-in-the-air digital fight. The 1905 scene has a harum-scarum looseness and wit; the destructive action scenes in movies now are brought off with a kind of grim, faceless glee, an exultation in power and mass: We can do it, therefore we will do it, and our ability to do it is the meaning of it, and even if you’re not impressed, it is still going to roll over you.
Neo-primitivism is one of the great strategies of modern art—Picasso and his African masks; Bartók re-fashioning folk materials in his advanced music; Chuck Berry drawing on “hillbilly” rhythms for his own super-charged songs. Neo-primitivism cleared away the mush of Viennese or Edwardian sentiment, the perfume and pallor of Paris salon art, the Brill Building softness of early-1960s rock. In movies, a great deal of mush has also been cleared away (the tyranny of niceness that ruined so many family movies in the 1940s; the physical, verbal, and sexual coyness of the 1950s). But the continuous motion of crass conglomerate product aimed at the young has removed much else as well, such as the mysteries of personality, sophisticated dialogue, any kind of elegant or smart life, and, frequently, a woman’s emotions (think of Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford) as the center of a movie. The studios have been devoted to the systematic de-culturation of movies, and the casting away of all manner of dramatic cunning laboriously built up over decades.
It is shocking to be reminded of some of the things that are now slipping away: that whatever is introduced in a tale has to mean something, and that one thing should inevitably lead to another; that events are foreshadowed and then echoed, and that tension rises steadily through a series of minor climaxes to a final, grand climax; that music should be created not just as an enforcer of mood but as the outward sign of an emotional or narrative logic; that characterization should be consistent; that a character’s destiny is supposed to have some moral and spiritual meaning—the wicked punished, the virtuous rewarded or at least sanctified. It was a fictional world of total accountability.
For decades, the rules of the scriptorium signified “Hollywood” in both the contemptuous sense and the honorific sense—a system dismissed by the humorless and pleasureless as “bourgeois cinema,” but also enjoyed around the world by millions and praised in majestic terms by critics, most notably André Bazin. Looking back to the late 1930s from a dozen or so years later, and passing judgment on precisely such conventions, Bazin announced that “in seeing again today such films as Jezebel by William Wyler, Stagecoach by John Ford, or Le jour se lève by Marcel Carné, one has the feeling that in them an art has found its perfect balance, its ideal form of expression, and reciprocally one admires them for dramatic and moral themes to which the cinema, while it may not have created them, has given a grandeur, an artistic effectiveness, that they would not otherwise have had. In short, here are all the characteristics of the ripeness of a classical art.”
The ripeness of a classical art. The words are stirring, but at this point almost embarrassing. What on Earth did Bazin mean? Never mind Le jour se lève, which is impossible to understand without evoking French literary and philosophical traditions. What about the American films Bazin mentions? What’s in these movies? What satisfactions did they offer? And is it mere weak-souled nostalgia that makes one long for their equivalent now?
In Jezebel, from 1938, everything revolves around a central character of extraordinary perversity. Julie Marsden, played by Bette Davis, is a rich belle in pre-Civil War New Orleans. Her situation is paradoxical: she exercises the largest possible freedom within the confines of a social tradition that allows women no other career than that of a coquette. Taut and over-defined emotionally—she demands categorical approval or rejection—Julie values the predominance of her own will more than love, more than society, more than anything. In other words, she is admirable, dislikable, and crazy. She torments her high-minded beau (Henry Fonda) and wears a scarlet dress to a society ball at which unmarried women have traditionally worn white, knowing full well that the act must compromise her fiancé and destroy her own social position.
What audiences feel about characters on the screen is probably affected more than most of us realize by the way the space surrounding the people is carved up and re-combined. In John Ford, the geographical sense is very strong—the poetic awareness of sky and landscape and moving horses, but also the attention to such things as how people are arrayed at a long table as an indication of social caste (the prostitute at one end, the fine lady at the other). The best use of space is not just an effective disposition of activity on the screen, it is the emotional meaning of activity on the screen.
Directors used to take great care with such things: spatial integrity was another part of the unspoken contract with audiences, a codicil to the narrative doctrine of the scriptorium. It allowed viewers to understand, say, how much danger a man was facing when he stuck his head above a rock in a gunfight, or where two secret lovers at a dinner party were sitting in relation to their jealous enemies. Space could be analyzed and broken into close-ups and reaction shots and the like, but then it had to be re-unified in a way that brought the experience together in a viewer’s head—so that, in Jezebel, one felt physically what Bette Davis suffered as scandalized couples backed away from her in the ballroom. If the audience didn’t experience that emotion, the movie wouldn’t have cast its spell.
This seems like plain common sense. Who could possibly argue with it? Yet spatial integrity is just about gone from big movies. What Wyler and his editors did—matching body movement from one shot to the next—is rarely attempted now. Hardly anyone thinks it important. The most common method of editing in big movies now is to lay one furiously active shot on top of another, and often with only a general relation in space or body movement between the two. The continuous whirl of movement distracts us from noticing the uncertain or slovenly fit between shots. The camera moves, the actors move: in Moulin Rouge, the camera swings wildly over masses of men in the nightclub, Nicole Kidman flings herself around her boudoir like a rag doll. The digital fight at the end of The Avengers takes place in a completely artificial environment, a vacuum in which gravity has been abandoned; continuity is not even an issue. If the constant buffoonishness of action in all sorts of big movies leaves one both over-stimulated and unsatisfied—cheated without knowing why—then part of the reason is that the terrain hasn’t been sewn together. You have been deprived of that loving inner possession of the movie that causes you to play it over and over in your head.
The glory of modernism was that it yoked together candor and spiritual yearning with radical experiments in form. But in making such changes, filmmakers were hardly abandoning the audience. Reassurance may have ended, but emotion did not. The many alterations in the old stable syntax still honored the contract with us. The ignorant, suffering, morally vacant Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull was as great a protagonist as Julie Marsden. The morose Nashville was as trenchant a group portrait and national snapshot as the hopeful Stagecoach. However elliptical or harsh or astringent, emotion in modernist movies was a strong presence, not an absence.
THE STRUCTURE OF the movie business—the shaping of production decisions by marketing—has kicked bloody hell out of the language of film. But the business framework is not operating alone. Film, a photographic and digital medium, is perhaps more vulnerable than any of the other arts to the post-modernist habits of recycling and quotation. Imitation, pastiche, and collage have become dominant strategies, and there is an excruciating paradox in this development: two of the sprightly media forms derived from movies—commercials and music videos—began to dominate movies. The art experienced a case of blowback.
In recent years, some of the young movie directors have come out of commercials and MTV. If a director is just starting out in feature films, he doesn’t have to be paid much, and the studios can throw a script at him with the assumption that the movie, if nothing else, will have a great “look.” He has already produced that look in his commercials or videos, which he shoots on film and then finishes digitally—adding or subtracting color, changing the sky, putting in flame or mist, retarding or speeding up movement. In a commercial for a new car, the blue-tinted streets rumble and crack, trees give up their roots, and the silver SUV, cool as a titanium cucumber, rides over the steaming fissures. Wow! What a film-maker! Studio executives or production executives who get financing from studios do not have to instruct such a young director to cut a feature very fast and put in a lot of thrills, because for their big movies they hire only the kind of people who will cut it fast and put in thrills. That the young director has never worked with a serious dramatic structure, or even with actors, may not be considered a liability.
The results are there to see. At the risk of obviousness: techniques that hold your eye in a commercial or video are not suited to telling stories or building dramatic tension. In a full-length movie, images conceived that way begin to cancel each other out or just slip off the screen; the characters are just types or blurred spots of movement. The links with fiction and theater and classical film technique have been broken. The center no longer holds; mere anarchy is loosed upon the screen; the movie winds up a mess.
2012-07-19 Tom Shone. Un-American Activities slate.com
No longer the indigenous film industry of North America, Hollywood is now the world’s jukebox, pumping out what Michael Eisner once called “planetized entertainment.” It’s one reason the Oscars have turned into such a mad scramble of late, even fishing overseas for quality crowd-pleasers—The Artist, The King’s Speech, Slumdog Millionaire—while reserving a spot on the nominations list for something flinty and home-spun from the indie world. Two years ago it was Winter’s Bone, which plunged audiences into the meth labs of the Ozarks. This year it is most likely to be Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, which takes us deep into the swamplands of Louisiana. Together they almost amount to a new genre: the American Exotic, mixing myth and magic realism to trawl the furthermost reaches of the American disaster zone for wide-eyed urban audiences, the same way they used to trawl the Third World.
Even the genre is telling: Magic realism used to be the genre of South America, not North, the way storytellers make sense of the everyday absurdities and violent disparities of the developing world. That the genre has found any purchase on the northern American continent is a subtle but damning indictment, both of how broken down America has gotten around its edges, but also of just how foreign the country now seems, even to Americans. It’s a whole other world out there. Somebody really ought to make a movie about it.
2012-07-10 Allison Kaplan Sommer. Why I’m not bribing Woody Allen to shoot a movie in Israel haaretz.com
en.citizendium.org
06/24/2001 WALTER ISAACSON, Woody Allen. "The Heart Wants What It Wants"
I live in Israel, and I’m happy to see it improve its international image as much as anyone else. I also happen to enjoy excellent films, including great Woody Allen movies. Like much of my 40-something generation, classics like Annie Hall and Manhattan were huge cultural influences on me, and I have seen them over and over. While I don’t religiously go to every single movie he churns out annually, when one of them gets good word of mouth and sounds like it is worth seeing, I’m there. I think I count as a fan.
So why wouldn’t I pull out my wallet and jump aboard the new project launched by Rob Eshman of the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, pitched so charmingly on YouTube by the beautiful Israeli actress and producer Noa Tishby?
The goal of Eshman’s initiative, The Woody Allen Israel Project is to raise $9 million in investments to help convince Allen shoot his next movie in Israel.
1. First and foremost, there are a lot of causes asking for my hard-earned money - there are political causes, there are incredible charities that can save lives, feed the starving and protect the endangered, there’s the guy who begs for change on the corner. Would I really choose to direct my limited funds to a multi-millionaire filmmaker to make his bazillionth movie no matter where he filmed it?
2. The project presents itself, tongue and cheek, as a Birthright trip for Woody Allen. Come on. The guy is 76 years old and it’s not just that he hasn’t had the opportunity to ever visit Israel. He’s deliberately chosen not to come to Israel, even though he has a huge fan base here, his films have opened festivals here, and I’m sure been offered enough funding by Jewish moguls to cover the private jet that would whisk him straight to the Presidential Suite at the King David Hotel. No interest, despite the fact, as Eshman points out, he’s been happy to go almost anywhere else. So it’s up to ME to bribe him to come?
3. What has Woody Allen ever done for me? Let’s leave aside politics and the tantrum he threw on the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times at the outbreak of the intifada in 1988, chiding Israel for making him look bad, when he cried: "My goodness! Are these the people whose money I used to steal from those little blue-and-white cans after collecting funds for a Jewish homeland?"
I can understand why neurotic middle-aged Jewish men everywhere would be grateful that Woody Allen branded them as funny and sexy. But to be frank, the way he’s ‘defined the image’ of “Jewish woman” hasn’t done me any great favors.
In film after film, the women with Jewish characteristics are the shrewish unattractive controlling ones, usually discarded, who stand as preludes to his protagonists’ romance with a string of young (in the case of Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan, very young) shiksa goddesses. Yes, true, he is following in a grand Hollywood tradition and who knows - he may even have even been aware that Scarlett Johansson was Jewish when he cast her in the blond goddess roles. But that’s no excuse for the fact that in his long, long, list of films, there is not even one vaguely Semitic-looking heroine and plenty of stereotypical Jewish shrews and crazies, while all of his heroes are almost always Allen-esque Jewish guys (or WASPS like Owen Wilson trying hard to act like one.)
2012-05-25 Kaleem Aftab. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy calls for West to intervene in Syria independent.co.uk
Bernard-Henri Lévy is calling for France and the West to intervene in Syria as his new documentary The Oath of Tobruk debuts at the Cannes Film Festival tonight.
“I made this film for Syria,” he told The Independent in an exclusive interview. “It is time for us to intervene. One of the targets of movie is to show what can be done in Syria. I know that it is possible to do, it is feasible and it is doable and it's a shame that it is not done and this is why the movie is done, to show what can be done.“
According to Lévy the film shows why intervention worked in Libya and not Iraq and how the conditions are present in Syria. “In Iraq we had no international mandate, there was no demand on the ground of the people, there was no representative leader for the forces against Saddam Hussein, in Iraq it was Western versus Arab country in Libya there was a real coalition with Arab countries involved in coalition with Emirati and Qatar forces. Intervention is justified if you have these conditions.”
The documentary is a personal perspective of the uprising in Libya. It explains how he travelled to Libya as a journalist, meeting and getting involved with the rebels fighting against Muammar Gaddafi's regime, later making the telephone call to French president Nicolas Sarkozy asking him to take action. The film features interviews with Sarkozy, David Cameron and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
2012-05-25 Michel Moutot. From Tobruk to Cannes, Libyan rebels hit red carpet middle-east-online.com
French writer and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy will stride the red carpet at Cannes Friday with four Libyan rebels for the premiere of his documentary on the Libyan war, "The Oath of Tobruk".
Levy, who was instrumental in persuading France to actively support the rebellion, made the film both to chronicle the struggle against Moamer Gathafi and to pay homage to his father, who fought in Libya with the free French forces during World War II.
Levy, France's most telegenic philosopher, spent the eight months of the war with the insurgents, as well as journalists and political leaders, playing the role of participant observer.
"I wanted to document the piece of history in which I was a witness, and an actor," he said in Paris before the premiere.
"It's not a history of the war in Libya, but there are things I was the only person to see... because I was the only one there."
Levy's direct involvement in the struggle reached its most potent with a satellite phone call he made from Benghazi to then-French president Nicolas Sarkozy, and it is one of the film's most potent scenes.
"I'm calling you to propose you meet them. It's a major political move, you know that better than me. It would mean recognising them," he tells Sarkozy, whom he calls a friend.
"If we want to stop the massacre, we need to bomb the airports and meet a delegation from the Libyan national council. It will be a political thunderbolt."
Levy, who spent the spring criss-crossing the country, scribbles battle plans and weapon requests for Sarkozy on scraps of paper.
He visits rebel-held zones, liberated cities, front lines, field hospitals, Western officials -- all before the omnipresent camera of director Marc Roussel.
"This film has two themes: brotherhood and memory," Levy said. "I loved, I still love, these women and men.
"And all that time I was cherishing the memory of my dad as a young free French fighter, who came to Libya's sands before me. What a feeling!"
Levy plans to dedicate the film to Syria's rebels when it screens at Cannes.
Besides the four Libyan rebels, he will also walk the red carpet with two Syrian opposition figures who recently fled the bloody crackdown by President Bashar al-Assad's government against the uprising that kicked off there in March 2011.
The Syrians plan to attend the event with their faces covered by "free Syria" flags to disguise themselves and protect their families in Syria from retaliation.
2012-05-18 Cannes First: Lead Actor of Italian Movie in Jail for Double Murder forbes.com
Aniello Arena, the star of Matteo Garrone’s brilliant new film, “Reality,” is in prison for life for murder. In Italy. He was cast by Garrone from his prison theatre troupe.
Watching the movie, a sort of Truman Show look at the effect of reality TV on a Naples village family, you’d never guess that the charismatic fellow playing Luciano is in real life a murderer serving a 20 year to life term. He was able to make the under some kind of Italian work release program. He’s described in Italian newspaper reports a “lifer” in his prison. And a brilliant actor.
Arena could easily wind up winning Best Actor here. He won’t be able to attend the ceremony if so.
en.wikipedia.org
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2012-01-30 Molly Driscoll. Film critics pick the 50 best movies of all time csmonitor.com
2011-09-26 Ben Fritz. Hollywood downloads a post-DVD future latimes.com
Across Hollywood, a quiet revolution is brewing that's about to transform living rooms around the world.
After desperate attempts to prop up the industry's once-thriving DVD business, studio executives now believe the only hope of turning around a 40% decline in home entertainment revenue lies in rapidly accelerating the delivery of movies over the Internet.
In the next few years, the growing number of consumers with Internet-connected televisions, tablets and smartphones will face a dizzying array of options designed to make digital movie consumption a lot more convenient and to entice users to spend more money.
With films that can be accessed on any digital device, downloaded as iPhone apps or shared on Facebook as easily as a photo, it may be the biggest shift in Hollywood's business model since the explosion of the DVD in the late 1990s.
Four studios have already experimented with so-called premium video on demand, in which consumers pay $30 to rent a movie only two months after it debuts in theaters. Recently Sony Pictures began selling some movies online two weeks before they become available on DVD.
Until now, most people have been largely uninterested in buying movies online, no matter the price or timing. Purchasing digitally typically means downloading a file to a single device, less convenient than a disc that can be moved from a bedroom to a minivan to a portable DVD player. Research firm IHS Screen Digest estimates that Internet movie purchases will be flat this year compared to last, while online rentals will surge 41%.
Hollywood's solution is to put movies in the "cloud," creating virtual copies that people can access, after purchase, from any Internet-connected device. An initiative called UltraViolet will launch this year, when Blu-ray discs for films like "Green Lantern" and "The Smurfs" will come with free cloud copies. By next year, most online and DVD purchases will connect to UltraViolet's "virtual locker," and Apple's iTunes is expected to have a similar offering.
2011-06-24 Harriet Walker. Lonesome George: Why Clooney is unlucky in love independent.co.uk
Not only is George Clooney one of Hollywood's most high-earning and lusted-after stars, he's also now the most eligible bachelor in town. The actor announced his split from girlfriend of two years Elisabetta Canalis this week, releasing a statement to American TV show Entertainment Tonight.
"We are not together anymore," it read. "It's very difficult and very personal and we hope everyone can respect our privacy."
This break-up is the latest in a line of failed relationships for the 50-year-old serial monogamist, who is currently promoting his film The Ides of March, which will open in Venice this summer.
He married actress Talia Balsam in Las Vegas in 1989, but the couple separated after four years, and Clooney's dance card has been marked by a series of models since then. In 1995, he dated TV presenter Karen Duffy; from 1996 to 1999, he was linked to Celine Balitran, a French law student from Paris, who was 23 and working as a waitress when she met him.
Balitran subsequently moved to LA to be with him, where her looks secured her modelling contracts with lingerie label Victoria's Secret, among others. Then came UK model and TV presenter Lisa Snowdon, who was on and then off again with the actor for five years, and more recently, Vegas waitress Sarah Larson, who Clooney dated for a year in 2007.
Despite his own stellar reputation, Clooney has had relationships with fairly low-profile and ordinary (beyond their incomparable beauty, of course) women – friends say this is to do with the actor's own rather modest, and often humble, outlook on life and the nature of his fame.
"I am sincerely fond of him," said actress Tilda Swinton in 2008. She became firm friends with Clooney when they worked on Michael Clayton and Burn After Reading together.
"Would it be too peculiar to say that I feel somehow protective of him? He tends to decide the mood of the room, which must feel like a bit of a strain for him. I don't know whether he always found himself in this position, or if this is a by-product of superstardom."
Clooney is known for his fun-loving and sociable side, not to mention his voracious enjoyment of the company of attractive women. "Who wants 70 virgins?" he joked in 2005 about suicide bombers. "I want eight pros."
He also owns an 18th century villa on the edge of Lake Como, to which he regularly invites friends and holds large parties; it became a regular haunt for the fabulous during Milan's twice-yearly menswear shows.
"He loves the guys and the camaraderie of the guys," actor and friend Richard Kind told the press.
Clooney has a soft spot for practical jokes, and once bought a fleet of motorbikes for him and his friends. "I have my friends – nine guys for 25 years," he has said. "They're the guys I see every Sunday."
In other words, being George Clooney's girlfriend seems an auxiliary and temporary role, calling to mind Hollywood's great golden age romancers Errol Flynn and Clark Gable. And what more might you expect from a man who once sold a kiss at a charity auction for more than £200,000?
2011-05-19 Robert Kirchgassner. Von Trier banned from Cannes Film Festival thecelebritycafe.com
Director Lars von Trier was declared “persona non grata” Thursday by the Cannes Film Festival because of his remarks about Adolf Hitler.
Gilles Jacob, president of the festival, said that von Trier has been banned from the rest of this year’s festival, although Jacob didn’t say if the director would be allowed to attend future gatherings.
The festival had previously honored von Trier’s 2000 film Dancer in the Dark, making the move to ban him unprecedented. His current film, Melancholia, is still in competition for prizes at this year’s festival. If it wins any, however, von Trier will not be allowed to attend or collect.
The director said that he sympathized with Hitler in a speech he gave Wednesday. The stars of Melancholia, including Kirsten Dunst and John Hurt, sat by him when these remarks were made, with shocked looks on their faces. He later said he was joking and apologized.
"He's upset by this matter," Thierry Fremaux, Cannes general director, said. "He recognized that the festival had to take a firm position in regards to his comments.”
2011-02-17 David Gritten. West is West: Ayub Khan-Din interview telegraph.co.uk
It’s been 12 years since East is East, the uproarious comedy-drama about a large, quarrelsome Anglo-Pakistani family living in Salford, became an enormous, well-loved word-of-mouth hit. At the time of its 1999 release, it was the most successful fully-funded British film ever; its screenwriter, Ayub Khan-Din, who had adapted his autobiographical stage play to film, was the man of the moment.
In East is East, set in 1971, the head of the family is George (“Genghis”) Khan (Om Puri), an imperious fish-and-chip shop owner and father of seven, married to Ella (Linda Bassett), an English woman. He tries to raise his children as traditional Muslims and arranges marriages for his sons; but they feel more British than Pakistani, and finally rebel against him.
The action in West is West, in which Puri and Bassett reprise their roles, occurs in 1976. Their youngest son, 15-year-old Sajid (Aqib Khan), is shoplifting, generally misbehaving and being bullied at school. George decides to take him to Pakistan to gain a sense of his cultural heritage.
But, while in Pakistan, George also comes face-to-face with the wife and daughters he abandoned three decades previously when he left for England.
West is West, he confirms, is every bit as autobiographical as East is East: “When I was 12 or 13, I was a real problem. I was playing truant from school, where suddenly a lot was made of the fact I was half-Pakistani. I was a pain in the backside, a horrible kid. Any excuse not to go to school was fine by me. So my dad said, 'Well, let him go to Pakistan. It might work – and we don’t want him here.’ ”
Pakistan was a profound culture shock to him: “And that’s why the change of scene is so abrupt in the film. You go from Salford, which had toilets, electricity and running water, and suddenly it’s a completely different country – a different century, even. There are camels on road, and the occasional dead body on the roadside.”
He stayed there a year: “I didn’t go to school or anything. I was completely obnoxious to everybody – my dad’s first wife, his daughters. What you see is a pretty accurate description of me at that age. But, by the end, I loved being there. I spent my time just wandering round villages. It was the best education my parents could have given me.”
His only regret now is that he lacked the maturity to talk to his father’s abandoned wife and his two half-sisters, “to get their side of the story”.
...it is almost certain that Khan-Din will be best remembered for his stories about Salford’s Khan family. And, tellingly, he thinks they could work as a trilogy. This means another sequel will follow West is West. (If the logic of the previous titles prevails, it should follow Kipling’s famous line of verse and be called “Never The Twain Shall Meet”.)
2011-01-24 Christopher Hitchens. Churchill Didn't Say That slate.com
The King's Speech is an extremely well-made film with a seductive human interest plot, very prettily calculated to appeal to the smarter filmgoer and the latent Anglophile. But it perpetrates a gross falsification of history. One of the very few miscast actors—Timothy Spall as a woefully thin pastiche of Winston Churchill—is the exemplar of this bizarre rewriting. He is shown as a consistent friend of the stuttering prince and his loyal princess and as a man generally in favor of a statesmanlike solution to the crisis of the abdication.
In point of fact, Churchill was—for as long as he dared—a consistent friend of conceited, spoiled, Hitler-sympathizing Edward VIII. And he allowed his romantic attachment to this gargoyle to do great damage to the very dearly bought coalition of forces that was evolving to oppose Nazism and appeasement.
Churchill had helped build a lobby, with strong grass-roots support, against Neville Chamberlain's collusion with European fascism. The group had the resonant name of Arms and the Covenant. Yet, as the crisis deepened in 1936, Churchill diverted himself from this essential work—to the horror of his colleagues—in order to involve himself in keeping a pro-Nazi playboy on the throne. He threw away his political capital in handfuls by turning up at the House of Commons—almost certainly heavily intoxicated, according to Manchester—and making an incoherent speech in defense of "loyalty" to a man who did not understand the concept. In one speech—not cited by Manchester—he spluttered that Edward VIII would "shine in history as the bravest and best-loved of all sovereigns who have worn the island crown."
In the end, Edward VIII proved so stupid and so selfish and so vain that he was beyond salvage, so the moment passed. Or the worst of it did. He remained what is only lightly hinted in the film: a firm admirer of the Third Reich who took his honeymoon there with Mrs. Simpson and was photographed both receiving and giving the Hitler salute. Of his few friends and cronies, the majority were Blackshirt activists like the odious "Fruity" Metcalfe. (Royal biographer Philip Ziegler tried his best to clean up this squalid story a few years ago but eventually gave up.) During his sojourns on the European mainland after his abdication, the Duke of Windsor never ceased to maintain highly irresponsible contacts with Hitler and his puppets and seemed to be advertising his readiness to become a puppet or "regent" if the tide went the other way. This is why Churchill eventually had him removed from Europe and given the sinecure of a colonial governorship in the Bahamas, where he could be well-supervised.
Almost the entire moral capital of this rather odd little German dynasty is invested in the post-fabricated myth of its participation in "Britain's finest hour." In fact, had it been up to them, the finest hour would never have taken place. So this is not a detail but a major desecration of the historical record—now apparently gliding unopposed toward a baptism by Oscar.
2011-01-21 Roger Ebert To Debut Facial Prosthesis On New Show Roger Ebert To Debut Facial Prosthesis On New Show Roger Ebert To Debut Facial Prosthesis On New Show npr.org
Roger Ebert is debuting a facial prosthesis along with his new public television show on film criticism.
The veteran critic was left disfigured after surgeries for a cancerous growth in his salivary gland.
He wrote on his blog that he'll appear on his new "Ebert Presents at the Movies" in a prosthesis for his lower face and neck. Since the operations left him unable to speak, Ebert communicates through a voice in his laptop.
The 68-year-old Ebert says the prosthesis "will be a pleasant reminder of the person I was for 64 years."
2011-01-09 BEN HARTMAN. ‘Horrendous’ Israeli ‘70s film becomes a cult favorite jpost.com
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Showing that shlock trumps taste, nearly 100 people crowded the Tel Aviv Cinematheque on Friday night for the midnight screening of the burgeoning cult film An American Hippie in Israel.
The 1972 film – surely one of the worst films ever made in Israel, or beyond – has been appearing at midnight on the first Friday night of the last four months, and has evolved into an Israeli cult event on par with the midnight screenings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show in the US, albeit one still in its infant phases.
As a result of its new-found popularity, the film is also set for a limited US release later this year, following its acquisition nearly a decade ago by US company Grindhouse Releasing, which specializes in cult and “exploitation films.”
The company’s theatrical director, David Szulkin, said the film has received very positive feedback after two previous showings in Los Angeles, and that the company plans to release it in US theaters and on Blu-ray disc this year.
The film bears all the hallmarks of a classic cult movie: terrible dialogue, worse camera work and editing, and heaps of gratuitous nudity and violence.
The movie centers around New York native Mike, the hippie (played by Asher Tzarfati), who, fresh from the killing fields of Vietnam, lands in Israel one sunny morning clad in a white rabbit fur vest, bellbottoms and a bowler hat. He links up with some Israeli flower children and they skipacross the city, eventually making their way to Eilat to build a utopia far away from the rat race.
The love fest predictably soon turns into a bloodbath, and floating plastic sharks prevent the crew’s escape from the coral island south of Eilat. Throughout the movie, Mike is hounded by a duo of menacing mimes in black suits and zombie make-up, whose motives are unknown but whose methods are murderous.
The monthly midnight showings were engineered by Yaniv Eidelstein, a 32-year-old Tel Aviv resident who hunted down the film after finding a trailer for it online in 2007.
2010-12-06 MGM bankruptcy plan approved whtc.com
The company has spiralled into debt in recent years and the financial turmoil left a number of high profile movie projects in hold, including Lord Of The Rings prequel The Hobbit and the latest James Bond picture.
Last month (Nov10), executives filed for bankruptcy and announced plans for a massive debt-restructuring deal with bosses at Spyglass Entertainment, the U.S. company behind Star Trek and Get Him to the Greek, who will take over the running of MGM.
U.S. bankruptcy judge Stuart Bernstein approved the Hollywood studio's restructuring plan at a hearing in New York on Thursday (02Dec10), with a lawyer for MGM revealing the studio is expected to emerge from bankruptcy within the next few weeks.
The court approval means MGM bosses can now get back to work on movies such as The Hobbit and the new Bond film, which were both put back into production after the announcement of the restructuring plans.
2010-12-04 Polanski's 'Ghost Writer' steals the show at Europe's Oscars france24.com
Roman Polanski's political thriller "The Ghost Writer" swept the board Saturday at the European Film Awards, the continent's version of the Oscars.
The movie won six of the seven categories in which it had been nominated, including best film.
Polanski, meanwhile, was named best director, to add to the Silver Bear he won at the Berlin International Film Festival in February on the film's world premiere.
Asked about Polanski's absence Saturday, organiser Tiina Lokk told Estonian television: "Would you have wanted us to become famous for turning Polanski in?"
Estonian authorities, however, had said Polanski could attend unhindered, noting that under the Baltic state's law the statute of limitations in the case had expired.
2010-11-21 Dawn C.Chmielewski, Claudia Eller. Disney Animation is closing the book on fairy tales articles.latimes.com
Once upon a time, there was a studio in Burbank that spun classic fairy tales into silver-screen gold.
But now the curtain is falling on "princess movies," which have been a part of Disney Animation's heritage since the 1937 debut of its first feature film, "Snow White." The studio's Wednesday release of "Tangled," a contemporary retelling of the Rapunzel story, will be the last fairy tale produced by Disney's animation group for the foreseeable future.
"Films and genres do run a course," said Pixar Animation Studios chief Ed Catmull, who along with director John Lasseter oversees Disney Animation. "They may come back later because someone has a fresh take on it - but we don't have any other musicals or fairy tales lined up." Indeed, Catmull and Lasseter killed two other fairy tale movies that had been in development, "The Snow Queen" and "Jack and the Beanstalk".
2010-10-08 Medvedev gives Wajda Russian Friendship Order thenews.pl
Russian president awards Polish director of "Katyn"
Oscar-winning Polish film director Andrzej Wajda has received the Order of Friendship from Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev.
Wajda was appreciated by Russians for "his contribution to the development of Russian-Polish relations in the field of culture".
Russian media, calling the 84-year-old Polish director a "classic of the world cinema", mention that Wajda was awarded many film prizes, including the 2000 American Academy Award.
Russian broadcaster NTV said that Wajda’s film Katyn, about the massacre of Polish officers by NKVD in 1940, was "one of the most acclaimed premiers in Russia this year".
NTV added that Wajda’s father was among the officers killed in Katyn and that is why it was important to him to reveal historical truth about the crime.
Moscow Echo radio station points out that, in fact, Katyn was first shown in Russia in 2008 but only in two cinemas so not many people watched it. Only in 2010, the radio station says, when a Russian TV channel broadcast the film, it reached mass audience.
The Order of Friendship is one of the highest state decorations of the Russian Federation. It replaced the Order of Friendship of Peoples awarded by the Soviet Union since 1972.
2010-09-12 Claude Chabrol telegraph.co.uk
In 1968 Chabrol met the producer André Génovès, who gave him a free hand to make the film of his choice. He picked Les Biches, an intense psychological study of a three-way struggle for sexual domination between a bisexual woman, her protégée and the handsome architect who becomes the lover of both. More stylish and disciplined than anything Chabrol had made before, with a fat part for the actress Stéphane Audran, whom he had married in 1962, Les Biches restored his critical reputation and ushered in the most sustained creative phase of his career.
Between 1967 and 1973 he produced a stream of outstanding dramas, many starring his wife, in which he put the bourgeoisie under the microscope, exposing its prejudices and hypocrisies yet defending the strength of family ties. They included La Femme Infidèle and Que la Bête Meure (1969), La Rupture (1970), Just Before Nightfall (1971) and Les Noces Rouges (1973).
Best of all was Le Boucher (1970), about the love between a schoolteacher and the village butcher with a compulsion to murder young women. It had a depth and emotional commitment new in Chabrol's work, prompting Le Figaro, in a moment of unaccustomed hyperbole, to call it the best French film since the Liberation. Many of these films had a thriller structure reminiscent of Hitchcock and macabre touches that would not have been out of place in his work, such as the scene in Le Boucher when a murder is signalled by the victim's blood dripping from an overhanging rock into a schoolgirl's sandwich.
In general, Chabrol avoided what he called "big subjects", preferring little themes to which he could give the big treatment. When he departed from this principle, the results were usually unfortunate, as in Ten Days' Wonder (1972), an Ellery Queen story with Orson Welles and Anthony Perkins that he inflated into a study of comparative religion; and Nada (1974), an ill-considered foray into the field of politics and international terrorism. Of Ten Days' Wonder it was said that he let his belly rule his brain, accepting the assignment only because it could be shot in Alsace, where he was eager to sample the cuisine.
Some of his best work in later years was with the actress Isabelle Huppert, whom he first directed in Violette Nozière (1978), the story of a notorious murderess who poisoned her family. For Chabrol she also played the last woman to be guillotined in France (for carrying out abortions) in Une Affaire de Femmes (1988); the title role in a version of Madame Bovary (1991); and the village postmistress with a shady past in La Cérémonie (1995), an adaptation of a Ruth Rendell thriller.
With the beginning of the new century, Chabrol seemed to regain his earlier form, making a number of films which were quite well-received. They included Merci pour le Chocolat (2000); The Bridesmaid (2004); and The Comedy of Power (2006). A Girl Cut in Two (2007) turned on a rich family's attempt to freeze out their son's widow. His last film was Bellamy (2009), with Gerard Depardieu.
Chabrol was married three times: to Agnès Goute, Colette Dacheville (the actress Stéphane Audran) and Aurore Pajot. He had four children.
2010-09-12 Lizzy Davies. French film-maker Claude Chabrol dies guardian.co.uk
Claude Chabrol, the celebrated French film director and a founding father of the Nouvelle Vague movement, has died aged 80.
Christophe Girard, the deputy mayor of Paris, announced the filmmaker's death this morning, saying: "[Chabrol] was a colossal French director: free-minded, impertinent, political and loquacious. Thank you, Claude Chabrol, thank you for the cinema."
A compatriot of greats such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, Chabrol rose to acclaim in the late 1950s after the release of Le Beau Serge, which was widely considered to have triggered the New Wave of innovative French cinema.
He went on to become one of Europe's most prolific directors, turning out more than 80 films for the cinema and television. In the late 1960s and 70s he established himself as a master of the psychologically explosive suspense thriller with works such as The Butcher and The Unfaithful Wife.
From 1978 onwards, Chabrol's collaborations with the young actor Isabelle Huppert proved hugely successful, with both gaining critical acclaim for films including Violette Noziere, about a young murderess; Story of Women, about a Vichy-era abortionist; and Madame Bovary, an adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's novel of adultery and bourgeois oppression in 19th-century Normandy.
2010-08-31 KIM SEVERSON. Roger Ebert: No Longer an Eater, Still a Cook nytimes.com
graphics8.nytimes.com
The thing is, he doesn’t eat and he doesn’t talk. Or rather, he can’t eat and he can’t talk. He hasn’t for four years, ever since cancer took his lower jaw, and three attempts to rebuild his face and his voice failed.
In those first few moments at the table, you try not to look at the empty place where his jaw used to be. You wonder how it feels to receive your nourishment through a tube directly into your stomach. You cringe when the waitress offers him a menu and asks if he wants something to drink.
But soon, in a flurry of hand gestures, glances, scribbles in a little spiral notebook and patient asides from his wife, Chaz, he’s having a conversation. You’re laughing. And you get to ask the question: How bad do you miss eating?
"For a few days I could think of nothing but root beer," he said about the weeks after the surgery that removed much of his jaw. He passed through a candy fixation, romancing Red Hots and licorice-flavored Chuckles.
And he circled back time and again to a favorite meal served at Steak ’n Shake, an old-fashioned hamburger chain beloved in his part of the Midwest. When he wrote about it last year on his blog, Roger Ebert’s Journal, people saw that the legendary movie critic for The Chicago Sun-Times could also knock out some great food writing.
He both writes and thinks about food in the present tense. Ask about favorite foods and he’ll scribble a note: "I love spicy and Indian." An offer to bring some New Jersey peaches to his summer home here on the shore of Lake Michigan brings a sharp defense of Michigan peaches and a menu idea. "Maybe for dessert we could have a salad of local fresh fruits."
How can a guy who has no tongue write a recipe?
"It’s all experience, my visuals and friendly tasters," he wrote to me. "I’ve used The Pot so very many times I know what everything I make in it MUST taste like."
The first rice cooker in the Ebert household was a wedding gift from the couple’s longtime friend and personal assistant, Carol Iwata. It wasn’t until Mr. Ebert became serious about losing weight and went to the Pritikin Longevity Center & Spa in Florida that he began to tinker with cooking grains other than rice. He went nerdy and deep.
"Whenever Roger learns anything, he becomes obsessed with it," Mrs. Ebert said
Mrs. Ebert, a lawyer who grew up in a big family and is more used to cooking for a crowd, designed the huge kitchen in the lake house, which her husband has owned since the 1980s. It has generous counters and an oversize table that seats a dozen. They have hosted Fourth of July parties with 300 people and Thanksgiving for 30.
Since his operations, the cooking has been on a much smaller scale.
The dish we prepared one day last month didn’t have a name and wasn’t written down anywhere.
2010-07-12 Henry Chu. Roman Polanski avoids extradition to U.S. latimes.com
Oscar-winning film director Roman Polanski will not be extradited to the United States to face sentencing for having sex with a 13-year-old girl more than 30 years ago, Swiss authorities announced Monday.
The Swiss Federal Department of Justice and Police said a flaw in the U.S. extradition request could not be ruled out and that Polanski, who maintains a vacation home in Switzerland, could reliably expect not to be arrested and deported since the U.S. knew of his frequent presence there over the last few years but never acted on it.
Polanski, 76, has already been released from house arrest, the justice department said.
The announcement was a dramatic development in a case that has lasted more than 30 years. In 1978, Polanski fled the U.S. hours before he was to be sentenced for having unlawful sex with a minor.
The director has been in Swiss custody since September of last year, when police in Zurich arrested him on his arrival in the city to accept a lifetime achievement award at the local film festival. The arrest was performed at the request of authorities in Los Angeles.
The U.S. lodged a formal extradition request at the end of October. Legal experts said that, by law, Swiss justice officials were obliged to rule on the request only on technical and administrative grounds, examining it to see that all proper procedures were followed, rather than on the actual merits of the case against Polanski.
In its decision Monday, the Swiss justice department said it could not exclude the possibility that the extradition request was "undermined by a serious fault," because the U.S. had failed to turn over certain documents requested by the Swiss with regard to the case.
Specifically, the Swiss wanted to determine whether the 42 days Polanski already served in a Los Angeles jail would have been considered sufficient time served for having sex with a minor.
Also, Swiss authorities said that, until 2009, the U.S. had not filed any extradition request against Polanski "for years," even though it knew he had bought a house in Switzerland in 2006 and was a regular visitor there. That gave the director a reasonable expectation that he was not under threat of arrest and deportation from there.
"Roman Polanski would not have decided to go to the film festival in Zürich in September 2009 if he had not trusted that the journey would not entail any legal disadvantages for him," the Swiss justice ministry said.
Swiss authorities allowed the director to leave prison and stay under house arrest while it considered his extradition. But because Polanski, as a foreign national, was judged a possible flight risk, he had to pay $4.5 million in bail and hand over all of his identification papers to the police.
On Dec. 4, 2009, Polanski was released from his prison cell to begin house arrest at the Milky Way, his three-story chalet in the luxurious resort town of Gstaad, in the Swiss Alps. He was reunited there with his wife and their two children.
2010-07-12 NICK CUMMING-BRUCE. Swiss Reject U.S. Request to Extradite Polanski nytimes.com
Switzerland will not extradite the film director Roman Polanski to the United States to face charges of unlawful sex with a minor because of a possible fault in the American application for his extradition, Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf told a press conference on Monday.
"He’s a free man," she said.
Mr. Polanski was arrested on an international warrant issued by the United States on charges dating from 1977. The director fled on the eve of sentencing in California because of fear that the presiding intended to renege what his defense lawyers said was a deal to avoid a prison sentence.
Ms. Widmer-Schlumpf said the American authorities had rejected a request by her ministry for records of a hearing by the prosecutor in the case, Roger Gunson, in January 2010 which should have established whether the judge who tried the case in 1977 had assured Mr. Polanski that time he spent in a psychiatric unit would constitute the whole of the period of imprisonment he would serve.
"If this were the case, Roman Polanski would actually have already served his sentence and therefore both the proceedings on which the U.S. extradition request is founded and the request itself would have no foundation," the Swiss Justice Ministry said in a statement.
2010-06-02 Star Trek star Patrick Stewart knighted at Palace news.bbc.co.uk
Sir Patrick
Actor Sir Patrick Stewart paid tribute to a former teacher as he was knighted by the Queen at Buckingham Palace.
The 69-year-old said he owed "literally everything" to the English teacher who first encouraged him to perform.
"Although many people in my life have had great influence on me, without this man none of it would have happened," he said following Wednesday's investiture.
The classically-trained actor is best known for his roles in Star Trek: The Next Generation and the X-Men films.
2010-05-30 Emma Woollacott. Hurt Locker producer sues 5,000 BitTorerent users tgdaily.com
Hurt Locker producer Voltage Pictures has filed a widely-anticipated lawsuit against illegal file sharers.
The suit, filed in the Columbia District Court, accuses 5,000 BitTorrent users of copyright violation. It's one of the biggest ever lawsuits against individuals.
Even Voltage doesn't know the names of the defendants, who have been identified only by their IP addresses. It plans to subpoena ISPs this week to get the users' names.
Once it's identified these people, they'll be sent letters inviting them to cough up $1,500 to settle - and warning them that it'll be ten times as much if they don't pay up and the case goes all the way to court.
Hurt Locker was leaked on the internet via BitTorrent about six months before its official US release. Although it was a critical success, winning six Academy Awards, it proved a disappointment in terms of box office takings. The fim grossed less than $17 million - and Voltage sees a connection.
"A Defendant's distribution of even one unlawful copy of a motion picture can result in the nearly instantaneous worldwide distribution of that single copy to a limitless number of people," reads the suit
2010-04-23 US court rejects Roman Polanski's in absentia bid news.bbc.co.uk
A US court has rejected a bid by film director Roman Polanski to be sentenced in absentia for a child sex case.
The move by the California Second District Court of Appeal clears the way for Polanski, now 76, to be extradited from Switzerland to the US.
Polanski has been under house arrest in Switzerland since September facing a US arrest warrant over his conviction for unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl.
2010-01-28 Andrew Pulver, Xan Brooks.Disney shuts doors on Miramax guardian.co.uk
The Walt Disney Company, which bought Miramax from the Weinstein brothers in 2005, has closed down the studio after 30 years in business.
It was the independent, art-house studio that became a major industry player in the 1990s, courtesy of such Oscar-winning hits as Pulp Fiction and The English Patient. But there was no Hollywood-style happy ending for Miramax studios, which shut up shop today with the loss of 80 jobs.
Founded by producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein back in 1979, Miramax flourished as an independent distribution and production outfit, before becoming part of the Disney empire in 1993. The company scored with low-budget hits such as Clerks and sex, lies and videotape, helped launch the career of Quentin Tarantino, and scooped Oscars with the likes of The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love. The Weinstein brothers – who named the company after their parents Max and Miriam – quit to form the Weinstein Company in 2005.
During its heyday, Miramax was regarded as arguably the industry's most respected and influential production company. But in recent years its output has been downscaled by Disney, and its demise was predicted long before today's closure of its offices in LA. The six Miramax pictures that are currently awaiting distribution - including John Madden's The Debt and Last Night, starring Keira Knightley - now face an uncertain future.
2010-01-19 LUCHINA FISHER. 'Avatar': Backlash Builds Against Film and Filmmaker James Cameron abcnews.go.com
While the film was busy breaking box-office records -- passing $1 billion in ticket sales worldwide in 17 days, putting it just behind Cameron's other blockbuster, "Titanic" -- a backlash aimed at the writer-director and the film has been building. The criticism comes from every corner: conservatives, people of color, paraplegics and atheists.
"I don't think it's a need to take the movie down," Greg Kilday, the Hollywood Reporter's film editor, said. "At this point, there's not much anyone can do to stop its success."
At Sunday's Golden Globes, the film took home two of the biggest prizes, best picture and best director for Cameron. And it's poised to win big at the Academy Awards in March.
2010-01-14 'Valley of the Wolves: Palestine' might lead to more crises todayszaman.com
A scriptwriter for the Turkish television series "Valley of the Wolves" has said that they have started work on a new spinoff, "Valley of the Wolves: Palestine," which might lead to more crises between Turkey and Israel.
Bahadir Ozdener told NTV that they could have been even harsher in their criticism of Israel in the series. Israel has complained that Turkey should be more careful about how it depicts Israel in the television series.
"We were trying to show that Israel and the United States are behind acts of terrorism. Memati's son Ali Memati was kidnapped by Israel," he said, referring to the plot of the series.
In one part of the series, main character Polat Alemdar rescues Ali Memati, who was held at the Israeli Embassy.
Ozdener also said that they had featured a Jewish doctor who was involved in an organ mafia in another story arc and that operations in Israel later revealed a similar network in the real world.
2010-01-11 Eric Ditzian. Your Unresolved 'Avatar' Questions Answered mtv.com
Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora (James Cameron's Avatar)
Why Were Avatars Developed?
Genetically engineered from human and native Na'vi DNA, avatars were originally envisioned as mine workers who did not need protective gear to breathe the alien air. However, the cost proved prohibitive and not enough avatars could be produced. When Sully arrives, avatars are only used for scientific field work. Unlike the four-fingered and -toed Na'vi, avatars maintain five fingers and toes for reasons that are still not understood.
The History of the Resources Development Administration
The RDA is at the center of the story — they're the ones plundering Pandora for resources and transporting folks through space — but we don't get any backstory about how the company came to be. According to the book, the story of RDA's creation is a familiar one: Two founders borrow money from their folks and launch their business in a Silicon Valley garage. Just a few decades after its beginning in the early 21st century, RDA began construction of a global network of super-fast trains that allow workers to commute to work from thousands of kilometers away. From there, the trip to Pandora was just a quick 4.4 million light years.
How Long Have Humans Been On Pandora?
The guide puts the arrival of humans as several decades before the events of "Avatar" in 2154. After astronomers identified Pandora as an Earth-like world with intense magnetic properties, an unmanned research craft discovered a substance later dubbed "unobtanium": a naturally occurring superconductor that can be used as a powerful energy source. Granted monopoly mining rights to the resource, RDA built a ship called the ISV Venture Star to travel to Pandora and begin bringing unobtanium back to Earth.
Traveling to Pandora and Communicating with Earth
Now powered by unobtanium, RDA's 10 starships travel at 70 percent of light speed, resulting in a one-way trip that takes nearly six years. Conveniently, though, communication with Earth is instantaneous. The process, made possible through a deep understanding of quantum mechanics, was perfected in the decades prior to the events of "Avatar." But that doesn't mean folks on Pandora get to phone home all the time. The cost of sending a message is "approximately $7,500 per bit."
2010-01-05 Patrick Goldstein. 'Avatar' arouses conservatives' ire latimes.com
latimes.com
John Podhoretz. Avatarocious. Another spectacle hits an iceberg and sinks
It's no secret that "Avatar" has been stunningly successful on nearly every front. The James Cameron-directed sci-fi epic is already the fourth-highest-grossing film of all time, having earned more than $1 billion around the globe in less than three weeks of theatrical release. The film also has garnered effusive praise from critics, who've been planting its flag on a variety of critics Top 10 lists. The 3-D trip to Pandora is also viewed as a veritable shoo-in for a best picture Oscar nomination when the academy announces its nominees on Feb. 2.
But amid this avalanche of praise and popularity, guess who hates the movie? America's prickly cadre of political conservatives.
For years, pundits and bloggers on the right have ceaselessly attacked liberal Hollywood for being out of touch with rank and file moviegoers, complaining that executives and filmmakers continue to make films that have precious little resonance with Middle America. They have reacted with scorn to such high-profile liberal political advocacy films as "Syriana," "Milk," "W.," " Religulous," "Lions for Lambs," "Brokeback Mountain," "In the Valley of Elah," "Rendition" and "Good Night, and Good Luck," saying that the movies' poor performances at the box office were a clear sign of how thoroughly uninterested real people were in the pet causes of showbiz progressives.
Of course, "Avatar" totally turns this theory on its head. As a host of critics have noted, the film offers a blatantly pro-environmental message; it portrays U.S. military contractors in a decidedly negative light; and it clearly evokes the can't-we-all-get along vibe of the 1960s counterculture. These are all messages guaranteed to alienate everyday moviegoers, so say the right-wing pundits -- and yet the film has been wholeheartedly embraced by audiences everywhere, from Mississippi to Manhattan.
To say that the film has evoked a storm of ire on the right would be an understatement. Big Hollywood's John Nolte, one of my favorite outspoken right-wing film essayists, blasted the film, calling it "a sanctimonious thud of a movie so infested with one-dimensional characters and PC cliches that not a single plot turn, large or small, surprises. . . . Think of 'Avatar' as 'Death Wish' for leftists, a simplistic, revisionist revenge fantasy where if you . . . hate the bad guys (America) you're able to forgive the by-the-numbers predictability of it all."
John Podhoretz, the Weekly Standard's film critic, called the film "blitheringly stupid; indeed, it's among the dumbest movies I've ever seen." He goes on to say: "You're going to hear a lot over the next couple of weeks about the movie's politics -- about how it's a Green epic about despoiling the environment, and an attack on the war in Iraq. . . . The conclusion does ask the audience to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency. So it is a deep expression of anti-Americanism -- kind of. The thing is, one would be giving Jim Cameron too much credit to take 'Avatar' -- with its . . . hatred of the military and American institutions and the notion that to be human is just way uncool -- at all seriously as a political document. It's more interesting as an example of how deeply rooted these standard issue counterculture cliches in Hollywood have become by now.
2010-01-03 'Avatar' passes $1 billion at world box office reuters.com
"Avatar" sped past the $1 billion mark at the worldwide box office after three weekends in release, making it the fourth-biggest movie of all time, according to data released on Sunday.
James Cameron's 3-D sci-fi epic earned $1.02 billion, powered by sales of $202 million during the New Year holiday weekend, distributor 20th Century Fox said.
The only movies ahead of it are Cameron's "Titanic" ($1.8 billion), "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" ($1.12 billion), and "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" ($1.07 billion)
2009-11-27 David Charter, Charles Bremner. Sarkozy 'very effective' in securing Polanski release timesonline.co.uk
Roman Polanski’s family yesterday praised the role played by Nicolas Sarkozy in securing the film director’s release on bail after two months in a Swiss prison.
The French President "has been very effective" behind the scenes, according to the film director’s sister-in-law Mathilde Seigner, as Mr Polanski prepared to move from a cell to house arrest in his luxury chalet in the exclusive Alpine village of Gstaad.
Ms Seigner refused to elaborate on the nature of Mr Sarkozy’s assistance but the President may have been influenced by his wife Carla Bruni’s own connections with the chic Parisian artisic set to which Mr Polanski, his actress wife Emmanuelle Seigner and her sister all belong.
The Swiss authorities said that Mr Polanski would be allowed out once the agreed bail of 4.5 million Swiss Francs had been received. They have ordered that he should not leave his chalet - for fear that the first-rate skier might slip over the nearby border via a mountain pass into his adopted French homeland and escape US justice a second time.
2009-11-26 FRANK JORDANS. Polanski prepares for luxury Alpine house arrest accesshollywood.com
After two months in a Swiss jail, Roman Polanski prepared Thursday for the splendid captivity of his $1.6 million chalet in one of world's most luxurious winter resorts.
Polanski will have views of snowcapped Alpine peaks, spacious rooms and the all the amenities of a town with a reputation for catering to the wishes of the rich and famous.
But he won't be able to go out the front door.
In this isolated bastion of wealth - which Elizabeth Taylor once called home and Michael Jackson visited - the 76-year-old director will be placed under house arrest as soon as he posts $4.5 million bail, surrenders his identity documents and is fitted for an electronic bracelet that allows authorities to monitor his whereabouts.
The Justice Ministry declined Thursday to appeal a court decision granting Polanski bail, and said it would release him from jail while it considers whether to extradite him to the United States for having sex in 1977 with a 13-year-old girl.
"He must not leave this house," the ministry said in a statement.
Gstaad (pronounced guh-SHTAHD) offers a range of quality restaurants and hotels, and "people here can order food to their chalets any time," said Marlene Mueller of the local tourism agency.
From the gourmet shop Pernet Comestibles, fine food such as fresh oysters, Swiss cheeses and a range of whiskies and wine can be delivered.
And, even though Polanski may now be the world's most famous fugitive, most locals are likely to leave him alone.
"You can get almost everything here, provided you've got the money," tourism chief Roger Seifritz told The Associated Press. "Locals tend to go to the big cities to buy things, but our rich guests can get what they want right here.
2009-11-20 A. O. SCOTT. Almodovar's Happy Agony, Swirling Amid Jealousy and Revenge movies.nytimes.com
Penélope Cruz, Lluís Homar
The story might seem simple at first - a film noir potboiler of jealousy and revenge - but as it unfolds, the narrative reveals an intricate and enigmatic structure, full of twists and reversals. The visual and aural textures are lush and sensual, as we’ve come to expect from Mr. Almodóvar, and yet the rich colors and deep sonorities somehow illuminate an unusually austere emotional terrain.
Like "All About My Mother," "Talk to Her," "Bad Education" and "Volver" - not a bad decade’s work, by the way "Broken Embraces" leaves the viewer in a contradictory state, a mixture of devastation and euphoria, amusement and dismay that deserves its own clinical designation. Call it Almodóvaria, a syndrome from which some of us are more than happy to suffer.
Mr. Almodóvar’s characters tend to be stricken with their own versions of the malady - subject to strong and confused longings, surprised by pain in their pursuits of pleasure. When we first meet him, Harry Caine (Lluís Homar), the central male figure in "Broken Embraces," seems to have found a cure. A writer and former film director, Harry is blind as the result of a long-ago car accident and skilled at using his disability as a tool of seduction. He is looked after by Judit (Blanca Portillo), who used to be his production assistant, and by her son, Diego (Tamar Novas), and generally appears content to live in a sunny present tense of casual sex, steady work and easy friendship.
Mr. Almodóvar has a gift for happy beginnings. But the law of narrative (and the law of desire, to cite one of his early titles) mandates trouble, and Harry’s curious English pseudonym, evoking both "The Third Man" and "The Postman Always Rings Twice," is a premonition of lurking shadows. Harry’s current life, it turns out, is an edifice of willed forgetting and strenuous denial. His past is a secret he is trying to keep, above all from himself. But circumstances conspire to pry open the vault, and Harry is compelled to tell the tragic story of the man he used to be.
At the same time, though, the tale framed by Harry’s reminiscence is so strange and beautiful, so perfectly realized, that no exposition could damage it. The word flashback hardly does justice to the episode from Harry’s old life - when he was a dashing, sighted cinéaste named Mateo Blanco - that lifts "Broken Embraces" into the company of Mr. Almodóvar’s other recent masterworks.
Back then, 14 years before the bright, blinded present, Mateo, whose surname connotes both innocence and blankness, embarked on an ambitious film project - a comedy called "Girls and Suitcases" - and also on a headlong, perilous affair with an actress. Her name was Lena, and she was the mistress of an industrialist named Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez), who was the film’s main financial backer. Let the past tense in that sentence stand as an indication of how it all ended. The fact that Lena is played by Penélope Cruz may tell you everything else you need to know.
Or maybe not. Ms. Cruz has become Mr. Almodóvar’s link to the glorious movie-star traditions of the past. In "Volver" he made her an incarnation of melodramatic maternity, evoking the wounded resilience of Anna Magnani and Joan Crawford without sacrificing her natural comic verve. Here she adopts a more haunted and haunting persona, that of a woman trapped by circumstances and by her own choices in a wrenching professional and romantic dilemma.
But since Mr. Almodóvar’s sympathy gravitates naturally toward women, Lena is much more than a static image of female suffering or an object of male hunger. Shadows of past screen goddesses may still flicker across her face and form - Audrey Hepburn, Gloria Grahame, Simone Signoret - but she seems at once freer and more vulnerable than they were.
2009-10-02 Arnie wades into Polanski debate news.bbc.co.uk
Roman Polanski should not get special treatment because he is a "big-time movie director", California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has said.
2009-09-30 LINDA HERVIEUX. Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski has enjoyed life of luxury on the lam nydailynews.com
It's been a luxe life on the lam for movie director Roman Polanski.
Most fugitives assume fake identities and hide out in flophouses, but since fleeing from a rape charge in California in 1978, Polanski has lived openly in France - regularly shuttling from his Paris penthouse to a swank Swiss hideaway.
Polanski, 76, a dual citizen of France and Poland, traveled freely across Europe before the Swiss nabbed him Saturday in Zurich on a U.S. request.
Polanski's lawyers Tuesday asked a judge to free him from jail while he fights extradition. That's unlikely to happen because he was a fugitive for more than 30 years.
Residents of Gstaad, the swank ski resort where Polanski spent most of last summer and has been a familiar face for decades, were stunned.
2009-09-30 Yann Le Guernigou, Jill Serjeant. French support softens for Polanski, Hollywood divided reuters.com
Film director Roman Polanski, arrested earlier this week in Switzerland, saw support weaken on Wednesday for his effort to evade sentencing in the United States in the rape of a 13-year-old girl three decades ago.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters in New York that Polanski's extradition from Switzerland to California to face sentencing on the 1977 sex crime charge was a matter for judges, not diplomats, to handle.
In France, the government changed its passionate protests about Polanski's arrest to a more measured stance and described the charges as serious. A French government spokesman said the "Chinatown" director was "neither above nor below the law."
Major U.S. newspapers called on the Oscar winner to account for the crime, and commentators said U.S. public opinion was running strongly against Polanski. Few in the cinema world in Hollywood and Europe stepped forward on Wednesday to join his supporters.
The director fled the United States fearing a California judge would renege on his initial plea deal, which would have set the director free after spending 42 days in detention while awaiting trial, and instead send him back to prison for years.
Polanski's arrest first drew outrage in Europe's diplomatic and artistic quarters. Around 100 mostly European artists have signed an online French cinema industry petition demanding Polanksi's release, and U.S. directors Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and David Lynch have joined in.
But support in Europe and Hollywood appears to be eroding. Along with the French government's new focus on strictly legal matters, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Tuesday said that while Polanski should be offered consular help, ministers need not get involved in the extradition battle.
"The case involves a great director but still, it is also a case of rape, of sex with a child," Tusk said.
French director Luc Besson told RTL radio he liked Polanski but was unsure about the case. "I have great deal of affection for him, he's a man I like a lot, who I know a bit...I don't know anything about this case but I think if you don't show up for a trial, you put yourself in the wrong. I don't have any judgment to make on this but it's true, I have a daughter, she's 13 and if she were raped, I wouldn't think quite the same thing, even 30 years later," Besson said.
In Hollywood, influential movie mogul Harvey Weinstein's call earlier this week for U.S. filmmakers to lobby against Polanski's extradition has fallen on many deaf ears.
There has been only silence from some of Polanski's oldest friends, including actor Jack Nicholson who appeared in 1974's "Chinatown" and at whose home the rape occurred.
2009-09-28 Richard Cohen. Let Polanski Go -- But First Let Me At Him voices.washingtonpost.com
It's alright with me if Roman Polanski is freed by the Swiss authorities who have detained him at the request of the United States -- if first I get a chance to bust him one in the mouth. I agree that it has been a very long time since he pleaded guilty to having sexual intercourse with a 13 year old girl -- more than 30 years, actually -- but that itself was a reduced charge. He had allegedly plied the girl with champagne and given her a quarter of a Quaalude before, as the Victorians used to say, having his way with her. He is a squalid excuse for a man.
For saying that I know I stand in mortal peril of being accused by the French and much of the Pacific Palisades of being a moral prude (ha!) or a vengeance-seeking scold. The arrest has produced consternation in Hollywood and apoplexy in France, where even the culture minister, Frederic Mitterrand, got into the act. He decried that "a new ordeal is being inflicted on someone who has already known so many during his lifetime." Oui. But he drugged and sexually abused a child.
Polanski is a great film director -- although the much-acclaimed "Chinatown" has a muddled script -- but his true talent is to make fools of his friends.
2009-09-27 Festival says director Polanski in Swiss custody google.com
en.wikipedia.org
Director Roman Polanski has been taken into custody by Swiss police on a 31-year-old U.S. arrest warrant, organizers of the Zurich Film Festival said Sunday.
The organizers said in a statement that Polanski was detained by police Saturday in relation to a 1978 U.S. request, without giving details.
Zurich police spokesman Stefan Oberlin confirmed Polanski's arrest, but refused to provide more details because he said it was a matter for the Swiss Justice Ministry.
Polanski has lived for the past three decades in France, where his career has continued to flourish. He received a directing Oscar in absentia for the 2002 movie "The Pianist."
Festival organizers said Polanski traveled to Switzerland to receive an award for his lifetime of work as a director.
They said Polanski's detention had caused "shock and dismay," but that they would go ahead with Sunday's planned retrospective of the director's work.
2009-05-25 MANOHLA DARGIS. Violence Reaps Rewards at Cannes Festival nytimes.com
“The White Ribbon,” a meticulous examination of patriarchal domination, won the Palme d’Or at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival on Sunday. Directed by the Austrian-born Michael Haneke and shot in black and white, the much-admired film — a foundation story about National Socialism set in a rural pre-World War I German community — turns on a series of violent events that appear to be the work of some children. In 2001 Mr. Haneke won the Grand Prix (effectively second place) for his harrowing drama “The Piano Teacher,” which starred Isabelle Huppert, president of this year’s competition jury.
The Grand Prix, also announced on Sunday, went to “A Prophet,” a pitch-perfect film from the French director Jacques Audiard about a young inmate who becomes a master criminal during a prison stretch. The film was the critical favorite throughout the festival, and Mr. Audiard received a standing ovation from the audience when he mounted the stage. Far more surprising was the Jury Prize (third place), which was split between “Fish Tank,” a slice of Brit-grit realism from Andrea Arnold, and the neo-exploitation vampire flick “Thirst,” from the South Korean director Park Chan-Wook. Both were booed by the press watching the show via live broadcast.
Although big Hollywood still turns up at Cannes (the Pixar movie “Up” opened the festival), the studios don’t show much work here unless Clint Eastwood has a new one. All too often quality is now the province of their specialty divisions, some of which were recently shut down.
2009-05-18 Jose Martinez. Woody Allen settles billboard lawsuit with American Apparel for $5 million nydailynews.com
Allen
Woody Allen reached a $5 million settlement Monday with a popular clothing company that will keep his image off its billboards - and his dirty laundry out of sight.
The filmmaker sued raunchy American Apparel chief guru Dov Charney for $10 million over billboard ads showing Allen in black Hasidic garb in a scene from "Annie Hall."
The settlement in Manhattan federal court came as jury selection was set to start in the case.
"It's of course possible by going through the trial a jury might have awarded me more money but this is not how I make my living and five million dollars is enough to discourage American Apparel or any one else from ever trying such a thing again," Allen said outside the courthouse.
Allen briefly showed up in the courtroom - where a marshal asked him to put away his copy of the Daily News - before heading to the judge's chambers to sign off on the deal.
2009-04-19 Rhys Blakely. Rubina Ali's family brawl after father denies offering Slumdog actress for sale timesonline.co.uk
Report: ‘Slumdog’ girl's dad tried to sell her
There were ugly scenes outside the home of one of the child stars of Slumdog Millionaire today, when Rubina Ali's mother demanded the young actress be removed from the care of her father.
Slum-dwelling Rafiq Asghar Ali Qureshi is alleged to have offered the nine-year-old for sale for £200,000 in an illegal adoption deal.
"We are considering Rubina's future," he is claimed to have told an undercover newspaper reporter from the News of the World, who was posing as an interested buyer from the Middle East.
"We've got nothing out of this film. They haven't looked after us. They gave some money at the start, but they gave nothing afterwards. They gave us around 150,000 rupees (GBP 2,000).
2009-03-06 Ian Drury. To my special friend Gordon, 25 DVDs: Obama gives Brown a set of classic movies. Let's hope he likes the Wizard of Oz i.dailymail.co.uk
i.dailymail.co.uk
As he headed back home from Washington, Gordon Brown must have rummaged through his party bag with disappointment.
Because all he got was a set of DVDs. Barack Obama, the leader of the world's richest country, gave the Prime Minister a box set of 25 classic American films - a gift about as exciting as a pair of socks.
Mr Brown is not thought to be a film buff, and his reaction to the box set is unknown. But it didn't really compare to the thoughtful presents he had brought along with him.
Perhaps pertinently, given Britain is floundering in an economic slump, the DVD collection was thought to feature the movie of John Steinbeck's Great Depression novel, 'The Grapes Of Wrath'.
2009-02-13 Peter Gabriel spurns Oscars over downsized set reuters.com
Peter Gabriel has rejected an offer to perform at the Academy Awards next week after the veteran British rocker learned he would have just a minute to sing his Oscar-nominated tune from Disney's "WALL-E".
Gabriel and composer Thomas Newman will compete for the best song Oscar on February 22 with "Down To Earth," a tune from the hit Pixar cartoon. The other two nominees are a pair of compositions from "Slumdog Millionaire."
2009-02-02 John Podhoretz. Suburban 'Titanic' weeklystandard.com
Richard Yates's novel Revolutionary Road is a work in disguise. It takes the form of a domestic tragedy, but it is actually a savage satire. There really isn't anything quite like it in the canon of modern American fiction. Indeed, it is so singular a performance that Yates, who never wrote anything one-fiftieth as good after it, may not really have understood himself what he was up to when he wrote it.
What makes Revolutionary Road so memorable is not its story of a dissatisfied young couple, the Wheelers, who hatch a disastrous escape plan from the leafy suburbs of New York where, they are certain, the life is being choked out of them. After all, there were dozens of works of popular sociology, novels, and stories written in the 1950s about the deadening conformity of upper-middle-class American life; in 1964 Betty Friedan took those same ideas, already worn into scuffed clichés, and cobbled them into The Feminine Mystique.
No, what gives Revolutionary Road its unforgettable resonance is Yates's fundamental dismissal of the grievances of his characters. Whatever woes they have are entirely of their own making. The Wheelers are fools to believe that their lives are so horrid when they and the marriage they have contrived together are the only really horrid things in it. And they are fools to believe they are better than the people around them, a view that derives directly from those novels and works of sociology Revolutionary Road is subtly parodying in its portrait of the Wheelers.
The unpleasant new film version of Revolutionary Road is both remarkably faithful to and a complete hash of the novel. Screenwriter Justin Haythe has done a splendid job of compressing the incidents and events of the novel into a two-hour script, and the work of director Sam Mendes is tasteful and careful. But they have no idea what the novel is about. They think Revolutionary Road is one of the 1950s conformity books of which it is actually a critique.
And so they take the Wheelers at face value--or rather, they take April Wheeler (Kate Winslet) at face value. In the movie, April is entirely justified in her conviction that she is being stifled in the suburbs. Her dream of escape to Paris would, Mendes and Haythe seem to think, really free her from bourgeois bondage. The only real crime on display in Revolutionary Road is that Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio) doesn't understand how much his wife needs to flee and what will happen to her and to him if she doesn't get it.
This is a fatal misreading of April, one of the most interesting monsters in American fiction--a dynamically sexual, intelligent, and sharp-tongued woman whose odd indifference causes men to love her and causes her to feel no love for them or her children or much of anything. Her soullessness is apparent in the novel well before they move to the suburbs. Yates views her with pitiless eyes; the movie does little but pity her.
What's odd about Winslet's work here is that two years ago she played another dissatisfied suburban housewife in the immensely superior Little Children, and her performance in that film was spectacular. In Little Children, Winslet seemed aware that her character had summoned most of her trouble upon herself. But the mid-1950s setting of Revolutionary Road has caused this wonderful actress to play April Wheeler not as an individual but as a type, as her tribute to Friedan's miserable housewife suffering from "the problem that has no name." Friedan produced a caricature, and so does Winslet.
DiCaprio is technically a very fine actor, but in this, his first real effort at playing a husband and father, he is undone by his inability to imagine what a 30-year-old man of the 1950s might actually have been like. For one thing, such a man would have worked hard at eliminating any trace of the high and breathy tone of a teenager in his voice, which DiCaprio still retains. I hate to put it this way, but he has left me no choice: When, on at least two occasions in the course of the movie, DiCaprio actually weeps with rage, he cries like a girl.
Without the dual effect of Yates's portrait of an unhappy marriage made more unhappy by excuses and fantasies generated by popular culture, Revolutionary Road is simply an off-putting portrait of marital bile generated by two uninteresting people. It wants to be raw, but is instead just a pile of gristle.
2008-12-02 Jill Serjeant. Polanski seeks dismissal of decades-old sex charge reuters.com
Oscar-winning film director and fugitive Roman Polanski asked a Los Angeles court on Tuesday to dismiss a 30-year-old charge of unlawful sex with a minor, his lawyers said.
Polanski, 75, fled the United States in 1978 to avoid serving a prison sentence after entering a guilty plea on charges of having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl.
The film director's lawyers said they had new evidence, sparked by a documentary film earlier this year, that revealed "judicial and prosecutorial misconduct ... so distorted the legal process that the interests of justice can only be served with complete dismissal of the case."
Polanski, who directed movie classics such as "Rosemary's Baby" and "Chinatown," has French citizenship and cannot be extradited to the United States.
2008-09-11 Havel works on new movie by Milos Forman iht.com
Former Czech President Vaclav Havel has been working on a movie with Oscar-winning director Milos Forman, an official said Thursday.
Havel cooperated with Forman on the screenplay for a film based on the book "Le Fantome de Munich" ("The Ghost of Munich") by French author Georges-Marc Benamou, Havel's aide Sabina Tancevova said.
The book focuses on events surrounding the signing of the Munich Agreement in Germany on Sept 29, 1938 by Adolf Hitler, Italian leader Benito Mussolini, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier.
2008-02-25 Oscar 2008 winners in full telegraph.co.uk
2008-02-24 A. O. SCOTT. Are Oscars Worth All This Fuss? nytimes.com
THERE is something of a consensus among critics - a disagreeable bunch, it should be noted - that 2007 was one of the best years for movies, American movies in particular, in recent memory. As a result the leading contenders for major Oscars have unusually solid aesthetic bona fides. Of course there are those who grouse about the endings of “There Will Be Blood” and “No Country for Old Men,” who find “Juno” more grating than charming, who were baffled by “Michael Clayton” or who were bored by “Atonement,” but all in all it looks like an impressively strong field. Meanwhile the Writers Guild strike, which had threatened to encircle the Kodak Theater with picket lines and bury the Academy Awards in bad feelings, has been settled. The show will go on - Sunday night at 8 - and everybody’s happy.
Well, maybe not everybody. I’m only slightly ashamed to admit that I found myself hoping that the strike would shut the Academy Awards down; that for once, in a year of such cinematic bounty and variety, appreciation for the best movies could be liberated from the pomp and tedium of Hollywood spectacle.
2007-11-16 Merav Yudilovitch. 'My life is a tango, my heart - a melodrama' ynetnews.com
In 1944, Max Jacob, a homosexual poet, converted Jew and one of Picasso's closest friends, was sent to a concentration camp. The movie about his life, 'Monsieur Max,' will be featured at the 'Jewish Eye' film festival. In an interview with ynet, director Gabriel Aghion talks about glorious solitude and disappointments
A portrait of Jacob painted by his friend Modiligni
Wiki on Jacob
2007-08-30 Dalya Alberge. Sci-fi films are as dead as Westerns, says Ridley Scott entertainment.timesonline.co.uk
He was the director of two of the most critically acclaimed science fiction films, but now Sir Ridley Scott believes that the genre is so tired and unoriginal that it may be dead.
At the Venice Film Festival for a special screening of his seminal noir thriller Blade Runner, Sir Ridley said that science fiction films were going the way the Western once had. "There’s nothing original. We’ve seen it all before. Been there. Done it," he said. Asked to pick out examples, he said: "All of them. Yes, all of them."
The flashy effects of recent block-busters, such as The Matrix, Independence Day and The War of the Worlds, may sell tickets, but Sir Ridley believes that none can beat Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Made at the height of the "space race" between the United States and the USSR, 2001 predicted a world of malevolent computers, routine space travel and extraterrestrial life. Kubrick had such a fastidious eye for detail, he employed Nasa experts in designing the spacecraft.
Sir Ridley said that 2001 was "the best of the best", in use of lighting, special effects and atmosphere, adding that every sci-fi film since had imitated or referred to it. "There is an overreliance on special effects as well as weak storylines," he said of modern sci-fi films.
2007-08-01 Peter Popham. Legend of Italian cinema, Antonioni, dies, aged 94 news.independent.co.uk
The second great film director to die this week, Michelangelo Antonioni passed away on Monday night at his home in Rome, aged 94. The Italian director, whose work became identified with the vanity of the late 1960s, thanks to his two foreign films, Blow-up and Zabriskie Point, had been in retirement since suffering a devastating stroke in 1982.
Despite the long silence, broken in 1995 by Beyond the Clouds, made with Wim Wenders, Antonioni remained a treasured figure. He was awarded an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 1995.
Born to a middle-class family in Ferrara, north-east Italy, in 1912, Antonioni graduated in economics and worked in a bank before gravitating to journalism, writing film criticism for the local paper. His first experiment in filming was a disaster: around 1940 he set out to make a documentary in a mental hospital, but when the set lights were turned on they sent the patients into delirium and the film had to be abandoned.
He began making documentaries during the Second World War. The first, set in his own backyard, was Gente del Po (People of the Po): made in 1943 but not shown until 1947 when it was finished, despite much of the footage having been lost or damaged.
Antonioni was out of sympathy with the neo-realists who dominated Italian cinema in the 1950s. Nor was he particularly interested in plot and character. Instead, starting from his first feature film, Cronaca di un Amore, he was preoccupied with the helplessness of human beings before their compulsions and the circumstances that confine them, with repetitiveness, the menace of both interior and exterior landscapes, the dumbness of people before their destinies.
The director made challenging films throughout the Fifties then hit his stride in the following decade with L'Avventura, still a favourite of his aficionados.
Suddenly he was famous and celebrated. The culmination of his success, though it looks rather dated now, was his only film set in Britain, Blow-Up, about the accidental involvement of a fashion photographer, played by David Hemmings, in what may or may not have been a murder. The film features cameos by the Yardbirds and a very young Janet Street-Porter, dancing in stripey loon pants.
And like Bergman, Antonioni's influence lingers on. "Even today Antonioni is the most imitated film-maker in the world, particularly in the Far East," said the director Paolo Taviani. "Often we find ourselves watching an Asian film and saying to each other, it's just like Antonioni."
2007-07-31 John Podhoretz. DEATH & THE DIRECTOR nypost.com
NOT so long ago, Ingmar Bergman was one of the most celebrated and famous men in the world - the recipient of universal praise for having transformed the corrupt young medium of the movies into a vehicle for difficult, punishing, sobering, existentialist high art.
He was so renowned that some trifling income-tax troubles in his native Sweden made headlines across the globe - on the grounds that it was an outrage for Sweden to be treating its greatest artist so shoddily.
And yet, when word came yesterday of Ingmar Bergman's death at the age of 89, it seemed like a bulletin from the past - as though the man who had once been the foremost writer-director in all of cinema had been gone from this earth not just a day but for an entire era.
Bergman had been the key figure in a painstaking effort, by him and by critics worldwide, to elevate the cinema into an art form equivalent to novels, poetry or classical music.
These were not the kinds of critics who wanted people to believe that westerns or gangster movies or musicals could be great art on the order of Tolstoy and Dickens. These critics wanted the movies instead to mimic the forbidding demands and even more forbidding themes of high modern art - from the difficult poetry of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound to the assaultive aesthetic of Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp.
Bergman was their man. In a relentless series of films - one or two a year - made between 1950 and 1982, he punished his audiences with a view of life so dark and foreboding that he made his fellow existentialist artist, Samuel Beckett, seem as upbeat as Oprah.
The darkness of Bergman's vision of the world and his uncompromisingly bleak expression of that vision resonated with those who viewed art not as a form of the most sublime entertainment - entertainment that transcends the merely pleasurable to offer a transformative experience - but rather as the secular version of a stern sermon.
Art, in this view, wasn't supposed to be easy to take or pleasurable to take in. It was supposed to punish you, assault you, scrub you clean of impurities.
Bergman used motion pictures to explore grand and grandiloquent themes - the fear of death, the horrors of old age, the mysteries of womanhood, the disasters of marriage, the trauma of living without God. Happiness, contentment, even momentary good feeling are all but absent from a Bergman movie, which is a portrait of a traumatized species.
He stopped making motion pictures in 1982, though he wrote and directed several small films for television. And the truth is, he quit just in time. His day had passed. After decades of declaring modern life worthless and offering only suicide as a way out of the nightmarish tangle of human existence, Bergman had nothing more to say.
Worse still, the earnestness of his vision was beginning to wear pretty heavily. It is impossible these days to watch his most famous film, "The Seventh Seal," without laughing - because its famous scene of Death playing chess has been so frequently and devastatingly parodied over the years that it has become one of the great images of cinematic pretentiousness.
As for the society of people who needed Ingmar Bergman to stand as the greatest example of what the cinema should do, they too had had their day by 1982. For the basic truth is that the critics who described Bergman as the greatest of film artists were people embarrassed by the movies.
2007-07-31 Obituary: Ingmar Bergman news.bbc.co.uk
Ingmar Bergman
Liv Ullman
Ingmar Bergman, who has died aged 89, was known as "the poet of the cinema".
One of his most acclaimed films, Fanny and Alexander, evoked the joys and terrors of the childhood that shaped his imagination.
He said it summed up his life as a film-maker, with its young hero discovering a love of the arts from a toy theatre, as the director himself had done.
Theatre and film offered an escape from a home life where personal feelings were suppressed.
He was born in 1918 and his father was Lutheran chaplain to the Swedish royal family and a strict disciplinarian.
He became director of the Helsingborg City Theatre in 1944, the same year that saw his first film script, Frenzy, brought to the big screen by Alf Sjoberg.
Bergman went on to be a leader of the so-called "auteur" directors, whose films featured a personal visual style, tackling profound questions about love, death and God.
But it was not until the appearance of two tales of all-consuming love affairs - Summer Interlude in 1951 and Summer with Monika in 1953 - that his cinematic work was celebrated.
His career also enjoyed many lighter moments, and 1955's Smiles of a Summer Night was a comedy of sexual manners.
His reputation was confirmed by the international art-house hit The Seventh Seal in 1957.
Bergman, who managed to maintain a parallel career in theatre, was also fascinated by mental breakdown.
He examined it closely in films such as Through a Glass Darkly, which won a best foreign film Oscar in 1962 and explored the effect of schizophrenia on both the patient and their family.
Face to Face, made in 1976, depicted the nervous breakdown of a psychiatrist, and starred Liv Ullmann in a much-acclaimed performance.
Bergman himself suffered a mental breakdown not long afterwards.
His personal life was problematic - he was married five times and his films often starkly examined the tensions between married couples.
Ullmann was one of several actresses with whom the director formed relationships and she starred in the famous Scenes from a Marriage.
He fathered eight children with his wives and mistresses, including one who only found out that she was Bergman's daughter when she was 22 years old.
He remained popular throughout the 1970s, celebrating his love of musical theatre in 1975 in his film of Mozart's Magic Flute.
But in 1976 he was arrested for tax evasion. Although the charge was later dismissed, it was said to have contributed to his mental problems.
Bergman took refuge in a mental health clinic before seeking exile in Germany for a decade, where he made several films.
2007-02-23 Johannes Wetzel. DAS LEBEN DER ANDEREN (THE LIVES OF OTHERS) culturekiosque.com
Ulrich Muhe as Captain Gerd Wiesler
The Oscar for Best Foreign Film of 2006 will be awarded on February 25th, and the winner just might be Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others ) This German film on the Stasi (the secret police in the former East Germany), has already won numerous German and European film awards.
Released in the U.S. in February, Das Leben der Anderen is a very well-made film with an outstanding cast. Despite its unusual length (2:17) and fairly conventional direction, an atmosphere of suspense is sustained throughout.
All reviewers had to acknowledge that the story told in this picture is unfortunately a fairy-tale and not a fine example of heroic resistance to the regime. The director of the Stasi-Museum located in the former Hohenschönhausen prison, laments the film's "careless" way of dealing with the past. The Stasi officer (Ulrich Mühe) , assigned to keep under surveillance the couple of a celebrated actress (Martina Gedeck) and a famous playwright (Sebastian Koch), changes sides. He rescues the writer from serious trouble and pays for that by being demoted. Such events not only never happened, but never could have happened, given the severe control mechanisms of the Stasi.
2006-12-31 Philip Sherwell. 'They're nothing like us' telegraph.co.uk
For nearly four decades, Professor Bartolomé Alonzo Caamal has pursued his mission to keep the Mayan language and culture alive. So the Mexican academic, whose forebears built one of the great civilisations of pre-Columbian America, was delighted when he heard that Mel Gibson's next blockbuster would be a Mayan epic filmed in his native tongue.
Prof Caamal's excitement, though, rapidly turned to disappointment when The Sunday Telegraph showed him Apocalypto, the Gibson film that topped the US box office when it opened this month and will be released in Britain on Friday.
Prof Caamal could never have dreamed that a hit movie would be made in Yucatec, the language still spoken by an estimated 800,000 people in the region. But the donnish 56-year-old, who has taught the Mayan language since he was 20 and now oversees its instruction in schools in central Yucatan, shook his head with disbelief as he watched the film's brutal excesses. "Such violence and sacrifice was certainly part of Mayan life," he said. "But the Mayas were about much more than that.
"They were a spiritual people, a philosophical people, a people who believed in harmony with nature. Where is all that in this movie? I had hoped this film would capture our culture and civilisation, but it seems Mel Gibson wasn't interested in those aspects of our history. I am very worried about the message this will send to people around the world."
Mayan groups had hoped the movie would generate interest in a people who built great pyramids and temples across Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and Honduras, but now fear it will only give the impression of a savage culture. Ignacio Ochoa, the director of the Guatemalan Nahual Foundation that promotes Mayan culture, said: "Gibson replays, in glorious big budget Technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserved, in fact, needed, rescue."
"I show you temples and incredible architecture. It's there if you look. In the end, though, the main objective is to tell that story." Gibson has long been a lightning rod for criticism for his on- and off-screen behaviour. He has fought a protracted battle with alcohol abuse and is a fundamentalist Catholic who has been dogged by criticisms of racism and homophobia.
2006-12-17 Philip French. 50 Lost Movie Classics observer.guardian.co.uk
2006-10-20 Sukhdev Sandhu. There's something about Marie telegraph.co.uk
Marie Antoinette (2006)
Wiki on Marie Antoinette
Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette
What a bold, timid, stupid, lovely film is Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. It was greeted by boos and hisses by a section of the French audience at its Cannes première earlier this year. They objected to it not so much because it was a revisionist work of art that sought to salvage the reputation of a much-maligned Queen of France, but for precisely the opposite reason: it's a historical film that has little interest in history; a costume drama with lots of costumes but precious little drama.
Its tone is clear from its opening shot, a knowing gesture to all those people who only associate the queen with the anti-working-class phrase (one she never actually uttered) "Let them eat cake", shows a reclining Marie, surrounded by pastries and staring directly at the camera. For a second, it seems as if she's winking. Clearly, to complain about its shallowness and superficiality is like accusing a chocolate fountain of not being nutritious enough.
2006-09-23 Film noir is coming out of the shadows telegraph.co.uk
From last year's Sin City, and this year's Brick, Lucky Number Slevin and The Black Dahlia, through to the forthcoming Hollywoodland and The Good German, the noir is once again casting a shadow across mainstream moviemaking. Notoriously difficult to categorise - some see it as a movement, others as a genre, a sub-genre, or even just a style - film noir is nevertheless thrillingly easy to recognise; just look for the following unmistakable elements.
A gloomy palette
The classical age of film noir lasted from 1941-58, taking root in a country at war before blossoming in the uncertainty that followed. It adopted a visual style defined by low-key lighting, chiaroscuro effects and extreme camera angles.
The use of darkness and shadow, while encouraged by hard-up studios pushing directors to cut costs, was inspired primarily by German Expressionism. Stanley Kubrick's 1956 classic The Killing is a perfect example, casting layers of abstract shadow across the actors' faces, and plunging almost every background into darkness.
A brooding hero
Nurtured in a harsh climate, noir heroes are almost always alienated from society: tortured souls, riddled with angst, who chart a course through humanity's murkier, often criminal, waters. "I feel all dead inside," says the ex-convict lead in 1946's The Dark Corner. The protagonists in noir, whether male or female, are regularly brought low by the spectre of their dark past or doomed by their passionate pursuit of a future full of money, power or love.
A femme fatale
In many noirs, the male character (often a cop, gumshoe, war veteran, reporter or criminal) is presented with the femme fatale, a fiendishly attractive yet diabolically dishonest woman who leads him into danger. It is the man's failure to recognise or accept her flaws that destroys him.
Described as films of trust and betrayal, noirs have produced countless temptresses, although few can equal the chilling blend of beauty and brutality achieved by Jane Greer in Out of the Past (1947).
Hard-boiled action
Just as filmmakers wallowed in the gloom of the post-war years, so too did writers, many of whom took advantage of the advent of the paperback to bring a cavalcade of battered and bitter heroes to the pages of popular novels. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M Cain and Cornell Woolrich wrote tough-man fiction where unflinching heroes delivered moral judgment - accompanied by slick, macho one-liners - to the especially nasty denizens of a corrupt underworld.
Hollywood turned to these novels for source material. The crisp dialogue of The Maltese Falcon, for example, written by Hammett in 1930 and filmed in 1941 by John Huston with Humphrey Bogart in the lead, has seen the movie become an artefact of popular culture.
A glimpse beneath the skin
Film noir often takes a subjective stance, allowing the viewer to "put themselves under the skin" of the male lead, according to German director Fritz Lang, whose 1933 Expressionist masterpiece, M, was remade as an even more disturbing American noir in 1951. Noir succeeds by giving visual access to the protagonists' psychological nightmares, in which they may well shift from aggressor to victim, or from hunted to hunter.
A political undertone
In post-war America, the oppressive restriction of McCarthyism and the threat of nuclear war prompted the paranoia that pervades the noir cycle. The fear of the bomb, and the injustice of McCarthy's reign, is reflected in the unease of the hero in classic noirs such as Night and the City (1950), and Kiss Me Deadly (1955).
2006-06-04 CLIVE JAMES. 'American Movie Critics'. How to Write About Film nytimes.com
2006-05-16 Pat Buchanan. Whose God may we mock? townhall.com
f "such lies and errors had been directed at the Koran or the Holocaust," said Archbishop Angelo Amato, the Vatican's secretary for the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, "they would have justly provoked a world uprising."
The archbishop was speaking of "The Da Vinci Code," the Ron Howard film that debuts at Cannes and opens worldwide this week, and is expected to gross $500 million by summer's end.
For what "The Da Vinci Code" says is that Roman Catholicism is a gigantic fraud, that the church has for centuries been perpetrating a monstrous hoax, duping hundreds of millions into believing something it knows is a bald-faced lie. At the novel's heart lies the contention that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, that they had a daughter, that the Vatican has known this and been hiding the descendants of Jesus, that Opus Dei is a secret order whose agents will engage in murder to protect the secret.
2006-03-19 TOM TUGEND. Cohn defends 'Paradise Now' nomination jpost.com
Arthur Cohn
Producer Arthur Cohn, a six-time Oscar winner, has passionately defended the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for nominating the Palestinian movie Paradise Now for a best foreign film Oscar.
The film, which follows two Palestinian suicide bombers on a mission to blow up a bus in Tel Aviv, drew angry opposition both in Israel and the American Jewish community with critics charging that the movie "humanized" terrorists. The best picture prize was ultimately awarded to another film, South Africa's Tsotsi, at the March 7 Oscar ceremony.
Cohn expressed his feelings last week in a letter to Yossi Zur, whose 16-year-old son was killed in a bus bombing in Israel. Zur had launched a petition, eventually signed by more than 36,000 supporters, asking the Academy to revoke the nomination for Paradise Now.
A Swiss citizen known for his strong support of Israel, Cohn praised the Academy for "never involv[ing] itself in questioning or rebuffing the contents of those films nominated for 'best foreign film.'" He went on to credit the Academy for rescuing his own films from obscurity and thereby bringing Holocaust and Jewish themes to worldwide attention.
2006-03-11 US cinema suffers year of slump news.bbc.co.uk
Box office takings in the US slid by 6% in 2005, final figures have revealed.
Cinema ticket revenues amounted to $9bn (£5.2bn), while total attendance fell by 9% to 1.4bn people.
Some 240m fewer tickets were sold in 2005 compared with the previous year, according to data from The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
2006-03-06 Ray Hanania. Paradise may never come ynetnews.com
I did expect, and maybe somewhat foolishly, that while we Palestinians and Israelis have failed to achieve a genuine peace, maybe in the more than half century of hate-driven violence we might have preserved our human dignity to at least show each other a minimal amount of respect.
Have we really advanced when some of us, on both sides, still cannot utter the other’s name? We deny each other’s existence hoping that somehow that denial might make the other side and the conflict disappear.
Though we can’t have our dream of a peace, maybe we might still be able to strive for that the dream with some civility, not just civility towards each other but for ourselves.
Clearly, this year’s Academy Awards night demonstrates that this conflict might never end.
I’m not speaking about the content of the film, "Paradise Now." Whether they are documentaries, dramas or reflections of reality, films are not real. The content can be debated to all extremes.
On the web page and the official notices of the Academy, "Paradise Now" was listed as coming from 'Palestine."
But in announcing Hany Abu-Assad’s film, actor Will Smith veered from the official description and said the film from a place more acceptable to the critics, "the Palestinian territories."
I don’t know if that was his choice, or a compromise by the Academy. Even after the Oscar was given to the South African film "Tsotsi," the Academy continued to list "Paradise Now" as coming from "Palestine" in its literature and on its official web page.
You want to know why Palestinians and Israelis don’t have peace? Because there are enough of us on both sides who are so petty in their hatred that they can’t even say each others’ name.
Those who hate Israel insist on calling it the "Zionist entity." Those who hate Palestine insist on denying it that name, Palestine.
But what we saw was something even more tragic in our relationship as Palestinians and Israelis.
"Paradise Now" was among five films nominated for an Oscar by the members of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It did not win.
If Palestine doesn’t exist, more will argue that maybe Israel doesn’t exist, either.
2006-03-02 Avner Hofstein. Oscar nominee: People hate Israelis for a reason ynetnews.com
In an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth, the Israeli-born director of the Golden Globe award winner for Best Foreign Film emerges as no less controversial than his recent production. At the beginning of our talk he demands that when quoting him I would refrain from using the term "terrorist" to describe people sent to explode themselves in buses and markets.
This is an act of terror, but this terror derives from another terror, Abu-Assad explains. Suicide bombings are a reaction to your terror, he says, and suggests the most accurate term to describe a suicide bombing would be "a counter-terrorist act."
Abu-Assad deeply resents Linor's article, which stirred a row of its own upon publication. Articles like this make it harder for me to fight prejudice against Jews, he says.
Someone dares speak up against your movie and already it's hard for you to avoid being critical toward Jews?
They are not just opposed to my film; they also claim to represent all Jews, he states. This is why such an article is "racist and fascist," he says.
Even during the Holocaust, people did not strap on a bomb and set out to kill innocent people.
This was a different situation that only lasted six years, Abu-Assad replies, adding that in the first 30 years of occupation there were no suicide bombings. Who knows what would have happened in Germany had the oppression continued for 30 years, he asks rhetorically.
2006-03-01 Israelis ask Oscars to drop suicide bomb film theage.com.au
A group of Israelis who lost children to Palestinian suicide bombings has appealed to organisers of next week's Academy Awards to disqualify a film exploring the reasoning behind such attacks.
The bereaved parents said they had gathered more than 32,000 signatures on a petition against the nomination in the best foreign film category of Paradise Now, a drama about two West Bank friends recruited to blow themselves up in Tel Aviv.
The controversial film was made by an Israeli Arab director and actors working with a Palestinian crew and locations. The producer was a Jewish Israeli and the funding was European.
2006-02-23 David Bedein. An open apology to Steven Spielberg. 'Munich' an accurate reflection of Israeli reality ynetnews.com
About two months ago, I published remarks about Steven Spielberg's new movie, Munich.
"The movie Munich, produced by, Steven Spielberg, represents the ultimate of moral equivalency, since it equates the 'human interest' story of PLO murderers with the human interest of the unarmed Israeli athletes whom they murdered."
These comments relied on reviews of Munich from well-meaning friends of Israel abroad. Only now that I've seen the movie myself here in Jerusalem do I realize that their perception of what distorts reality in Israel is far different from the reality that we live here in Israel.
Now, I can say clearly there is no moral equivalency whatsoever in this movie. I owe Mr. Spielberg a public apology.
David Bedein is the Jerusalem bureau chief for the Israel Resource News Agency
2006-02-22 Eldad Beck. Anti-Semitic Turkish hit movie slammed ynetnews.com
A new Turkish action film, Valley of the Wolves - Iraq, is being screened in Germany, and has caused a bitter public debate. Calls have been made to boycott the film due its anti-Semitic and anti-American themes, and senior German politicians have called for
the film to be banned due to concerns that it will cause Turkish and Muslim communities in Germany to become more extreme.
The film, which is also the most expensive production made in Turkish film history, has quickly turned into a blockbuster, and over a quarter of a million people in Turkey and Germany have watched it since its release a week ago, Israel's leading newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported.
2006-02-19 Ofer Shelah. Saving Munich ynetnews.com
Steven Spielberg is deeply insulted. He knew before he started he would be attacked in America - by fundamentalists, he calls it - but Israel is a different story.
In Israel? His second homeland? The country he once said in interview he was willing to die for? Him, the man who created "Schindler's List" and a massive Holocaust memorial project by encouraging survivors to talk on video?
Part 2
2006-02-17 Susan Stone. The Road to Guantanamo service.spiegel.de
imdb.com
Nigel Morris. Horrors of Camp Delta are exposed by British victims
English director Michael Winterbottom's provocative new film "The Road to Guantanamo" premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival this week. The docu-drama blends interviews, news footage and re-enactments to tell the story of three British Muslims taken from Pakistan to the US prison camp on Cuba.
Ruhel Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul, all British Muslims, traveled in 2001 from central England to Pakistan where, according to their account, Iqbal was to meet and marry a young woman his mother had arranged for him in Islamabad. The other men were to serve as witnesses. But the young men got sidetracked in Karachi, where they answered the call of an imam at a local mosque for volunteers to travel to Afghanistan. What started as a bus trip into the neighboring country on the verge of war with the United States -- which they claim they took "one, for experience, and two, to help" -- would turn into an odyssey of "torture" and "degrading treatment" for the men. After arriving in Afghanistan, the men, who were all between the ages of 19 and 23, fell into the wrong hands and were eventually imprisoned and transported to the US prison for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Though never charged with any wrongdoing, the men were detained for two years until the British government, Washington's closest ally in the war on terror, negotiated their release.
2006-02-13 Sebnem Arsu. Moviegoing Turks meet new enemy, and it is U.S. nytimes.com
The crowd cheered, clapped and whistled as the Turkish agent plunged the knife into the chest of the enemy commander.
"Valley of the Wolves - Iraq," which opened last week in movie theaters in Turkey, Austria and Germany, is a Rambo-like action story involving, in this case, Turkish gunmen who seek revenge against a tyrannical occupying army.
But in this version, the most expensive movie ever made in Turkey, the enemy is no oppressive third-world dictatorship. The commander's name is "Sam" - as in Uncle - and the opposing forces are Americans, who are being punished for offenses against Turkish as well as Iraqi pride and honor.
Sam William Marshall, played by Billy Zane, is portrayed as a sociopath, killing people without a second thought and claiming that he is doing God's will, a thinly veiled reference to statements by President George W. Bush about America's "crusade" for democracy in Iraq and the Middle East.
2006-02-12 Itamar Eichner. Israel vs. Paradise Now ynetnews.com
Powerful Israelis, Jews in Hollywood exert pressures on American Academy members, in a bid to prevent Palestinian movie Paradise Now from winning Oscar. Meanwhile, Israeli diplomats get Academy's commitment not to present film as representing Palestinian state.
Palestinian movie Paradise Now's win in the Golden Globe awards last month has aroused concern among many influential Israelis and Jews in Hollywood over the success of the Palestinian production that depicts the story of two suicide bombers on their way to carry out a terror attack in Tel Aviv.
2006-02-08 Ariana Melamed. The other 'Munich' ynetnews.com
The host network and the timing are not incidental. Ron Meiberg's "Hit List", a documentary that tracks the reprisals following the Munich Olympics massacre, found a home on Israel's Channel 2, which is slowly but surely expropriating all possible national values.
Gadget lovers are once again be impressed by Mahmoud Hamshiri's assassination in Paris by an explosive device inserted into his telephone at his apartment. Others are sure to have a renewed sense of nostalgia for operation "Fountain of Youth" by hearing Ehud Barak's description of how he put on makeup ahead of the operation for the hundredth time.
And spy book readers just what they love, and wherever the visual effect was not dramatic enough, there was a musical embellishment to send shivers down the spine.
You would have to be a rationalist and a cynic from Mars not to see the symbolism in the Munich massacre - "a few kilometers from the Dachau extermination camp."
But you would also have to be an uncompromising Israeli patriot to connect Dachau and Munich in a direct line, without wondering even for a moment about the connection between Israel's actions towards the Palestinian population since 1967 and the massacre.
As N. says in the film, "it was a sacred mission, a national mission for the Jewish people, for the Israeli people".
Rafi Eitan, in a chilling confession says it simply: "You become an executioner... you become the hangman."
2006-02-07 Irit Linor. Anti-Semitism now ynetnews.com
Two years ago, the creators of Paradise Now asked the Israel Film Foundation for public funding to help produce the film. They were turned down thanks to a number of reviewers - including myself - who were taken aback by its moral character.
Thus, Israel missed out on the chance to be part to an exciting, quality Nazi film.
I don't use the term "Nazi" frivolously or out of anger. Such a claim must be backed up, particularly when the subject is a film that conforms to all the criteria of quality filmmaking, and which barely contains any Jews. One could, perhaps, have been content with the phrase "anti-Israel" or "anti-Semitic.
But the film hasn't got any "Jews" in it and no "Israel," because Jewish Israel is referred to in the film as "them," or "occupation," or "killing" or an "injustice" that has no historic background or human form.
The only Jewish Israeli given a name is called Abu Shabab, the man who takes the terrorists to Tel Aviv and receives payment only after the terror attack (or "operation," in the film's phrasing) takes place. As he takes the terrorists to the Dolphinarium parking lot, the only Hebrew word in the film escapes his lips as he wishes the murderers "good luck."
And so, in just a few seconds, Beyer and Abu-Assad manage to define the Israeli, that is, the caricature Jew: fat, ugly, older, bearded, hungry for young Aryan girls and prepared to do anything for money.
The suicide bombing to which the innocent heroes go is an act that, from its genesis to its conclusion, is devoid of victims. There may not even be a bombing, just a close-up on Nashef's soft eyes, and a white screen. Not even a 'boom.'
Maybe in the end he just changed his mind. The two murderers are kind, their clothes - Tarantino style - fit them well, so you like them. How could you not?
The movie is a success because of the sophisticated direction of Hany Abu-Assad. There is no blood, and Nablus apartments with exposed cinderblock walls look every bit as romantic as a Tuscan villa. Everything is so beautiful, it's clear the terrorists are just like us, just with more tastefully decorated homes.
And again the message is clear: if these people can become murderers - than clearly so could I.
Just before they go out to blow you and me up, the two cool killers sit down to eat a final meal, together with eleven men, in the exact arrangement and with the exact number of participants in Leonardo's famous painting of the Last Supper.
In order to prevent any of the non-Jews from interpreting the scene inappropriately and to maintain its visual context, there are no cuts during the scene.
There isn't a Christian on the planet who isn't familiar with that painting, or who doesn't know who's sitting around that table. The Christian whose mind will have no trouble conjuring up the association of Jesus just prior to his crucifixion.
So we've got a modern day Jesus and an innocent victim who will die - because of whom? An interesting question.
2006-02-05 Arik Carmon. Spielberg's moral relativism ynetnews.com
2006-01-29 Yoav Birenberg. Walk on Water nominated for French Oscar ynetnews.com
ynetnews.com
After Hannah Laslo's triumph at Cannes, the Israeli film industry has chalked up another award: Last Friday, the French Academy of Cinema announced Walk on Water, the 2004 film by Eytan Fox and Gal Uchovsky, has been nominated for the prestigious César prize - the France's Oscars - in the category of best foreign film.
The Israel movie will compete against Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, Woody Allen's Match Point and a Spanish film, The Sea Inside by Alejandro Amenabar.
2006-01-24 Film director, 10, calls the shots news.bbc.co.uk
On the sets of the film, Kishan Shrikanth confidently calls the shots like all other directors - even though he is only 10.
Master Kishan - as he is known as - comes from the southern Indian city of Bangalore and is a veteran in the regional film industry.
Starting at the tender age of four, he has already acted in 24 regional feature films and has starred in 1,000 episodes of a hit Kannada-language soap opera on television.
But now Master Kishan has decided to try his hand at directing his first feature film, C/O Footpath (Care of Footpath), which he has also co-written.
The film is about the street children who have no other address than the footpaths in India's big cities.
2006-01-24 Yitzhak Benhorin. Munich widow blasts Spielberg ynetnews.com
"I watched the Golden Globe film awards all tense. When Spielberg and Kushner failed to win anything, I jumped for joy."
Why?
Because they produced a fantasy. That a Jewish producer and director never bothered to call (former Mossad Chief) Tzvi Zamir or anyone else to learn about what really happened. None of us were invited to premiers in Hollywood or Israel, because they were afraid we'd speak out.
"The American media wanted to interview me, but I refused, because anything I had to say, for better or worse, would have plugged the movie. I don't want people to see it, even if my son is in it."
2006-01-23 Erich Follath, Gerhard Spoerl. The Morality of Revenge service.spiegel.de
2006-01-22 Yaakov M. Rabkin. Spielberg on Jewish survival ynetnews.com
Ynet 12/27/05. Munich mastermind has no regrets
Steven Spielberg’s latest offering begins and ends with intimate scenes of a married couple. The husband and wife are the same, but the man, full of love and tenderness for his pregnant wife at the beginning of the film, is overwhelmed by hate and violence by the time the film ends.
What happens in between explores, often in graphic detail, the transformation of a loving husband into a virtual brute.
"Munich" appears as a metaphor for the Zionist dream of transforming "the meek Diaspora Jew" into "the new brave Israeli." The film focuses on the fundamental difficulty of reconciling this dream with Jewish morality.
"The only blood that matters to me is Jewish blood", says the man with a South African accent, affirming a Jewishness that neither his looks, nor his words seem to suggest.
The Aryan-looking blue-eyed blond self-righteous man recalls the image of the "new Jew" that Zionist posters used to portray in the 1930s and 1940s.
It would be wrong to attribute nefarious intentions to Spielberg, who voiced his concern in this cinematographic "midrash" (allegory). Several recent books (Prophets Outcast, Wrestling with Zion, the Question of Zion) deal with the same conflict between Zionism and Jewish values. Spielberg and his team project this conflict on the screen.
Yaakov M. Rabkin is Professor of History at the University of Montreal. His recent book on the history of Jewish opposition to Zionism is scheduled to appear in English under the title A Threat from Within: a Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism in Spring 2006
2006-01-19 Actor Fiennes back in spotlight news.bbc.co.uk
Ralph Fiennes
In Constant Gardener
British actor Ralph Fiennes, who is up for a best actor Bafta for The Constant Gardener, has been turning in critically acclaimed performances since Schindler's List won him his first Oscar nomination in 1993.
A classically trained actor who researches every nuance of a role, Fiennes has appeared in a string of high profile Hollywood films over the past 12 years.
The actor lives in London with actress Francesca Annis, 61, whom he first met in 1995 when she played Gertrude to his Hamlet. He was previously married to former ER star Alex Kingston.
2006-01-19 Film Critic Roger Ebert Declares War on SCHLUSSEL (& Ann Coulter) debbieschlussel.com
2006-01-17 Suna Erdem. Turks swap sides as war film turns US into foe timesonline.co.uk
imdb.com
BENJAMIN HARVEY. In Turkish Movie, Americans Kill Innocents
AN ANTI-AMERICAN film charting US abuses in Iraq has broken box-office records in Turkey, exploiting a wave of nationalism gripping Washington’s only Muslim ally in Nato.
Valley of the Wolves - Iraq has been watched by more than 2.5 million Turks in its first ten days. Such is the success of the most expensive Turkish film ever made (GBP5.8 million) that lawyers and police have been raiding the sellers of pirate copies.
"The film is absolutely magnificent," Bulent Arinc, the parliament Speaker and one of several politicians to attend the gala in Ankara, said. "It is completely true to life.
Applause broke out when the American "bad guy", played by Billy Zane, was killed. The film begins with a real-life incident in which US troops arrested 11 Turkish special forces in Iraq and marched them off at gunpoint, an event for which the US has apologised but never fully explained. It deeply upset Turks, who are normally favourably disposed to all things American.
The story follows Polat Alemdar, an intelligence agent, as he travels to Iraq to avenge one of the Turkish soldiers, who was so tormented that he committed suicide. Polat joins a bride who survived a wedding massacre perpetrated by Zane’s character. The abuse at Abu Ghraib is portrayed in full.
2006-01-11 Xan Brooks. Spielberg loses out at the push of a button film.guardian.co.uk
...the man who put a capital B into the contemporary blockbuster, whose films have grossed billions and whose name is usually the stamp of glorious cinematic success, has been humbled. By a button. Pushed, it seems, mistakenly.
This has had a profound effect on the director's latest opus, at least as far as the members of Bafta are concerned. By tomorrow they have to nominate the films they think worthy of accolade, and Spielberg's Munich was expected to be among them, tipped for awards both in Britain and at the Oscars.
But the preview DVD sent to the academy's members is unplayable on machines used in the UK. As a result the majority of Bafta's 5,000 voters will not have seen the film, due to be released in Britain on January 27, and can hardly be expected to recommend it for acclaim.
2006-01-08 Uri Klein. Deconstructing Woody haaretz.com
Apparently Woody Allen had to leave America in order to garner admiration there again. In America, said Allen during a conversation in London a few months ago with journalists from several countries, "there have been journalists and critics who adored me and supported my work tremendously - and they died."
If indeed this was one of the reasons for the renowned film director's decision to leave New York, where he has made most of his films, and direct a film in London (Allen hastens to deny this with a broad smile) * then it has been for the best. His new film, "Match Point," which was released in the United States a week ago and will be screened in Israel starting at the end of next week, is winning Allen the best reviews he has had in a long time. Among the best is A.O. Scott's review in The New York Times, in which he wrote that "Match Point" is not only the best film Allen has made in many years, but also one of his best films ever. In addition to the good reviews, "Match Point" has already been nominated for four Golden Globe awards, and there is little doubt that it will be included among the Oscar nominations this year.
Even those who do not share any sweeping enthusiasm for the film can agree with the statement that "Match Point" is a fuller and especially a more enjoyable film than most of Allen's recent works, among which have been somewhat embarrassing flops like "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion," "Anything Else" and "Melinda and Melinda."
According to Allen, the main subject of his new film is the power of luck. "People are afraid to acknowledge or to face what huge dependency they have on luck," he says. "There's a tendency to think we have great control over our lives or some control, but the truth of the matter is that we don't have the control that you think. You think you have control - you think if you get up in the morning, you exercise, you eat right and don't smoke, you will be healthy. But it doesn't work that way - you still get cancer and you still get hit by a bus. So much is luck. But if you face that, it's a very unpleasant feeling. You like to feel 'I have some control over events' ... You do have some control, but much less than you think, and that's why I wanted to make the movie."
Allen sees himself as a person who has been lucky all his life. This started with the first film he directed, "Take the Money and Run," in 1969, and has continued throughout his long career.
"Yes, the first stroke of luck was my first movie, 'Take the Money and Run.' At that time it was a reasonably significant budget, a million dollars," says Allen. "At that time I had never directed a film in my life and no company would give me a million dollars to direct a film, and I had tried to get the film made and couldn't get it made. They were talking to me about Jerry Lewis directing the movie and I wanted to direct it. And just at that time a new company formed, Palomar Pictures, and they couldn't attract big-time filmmakers and they were forced to come to me. And it was sheer luck that they formed then and said, well you can direct it, and I directed it and that opened the door and it was a success and a big break for me."
He goes on to say: "I've had nothing to complain about. I've had all the opportunities in the world, all the artistic freedom in the world, and all the breaks in the world, so I can't complain."
Allen also rejects the suggestion that his film is a British version of Theodore Dreiser's novel "An American Tragedy," which was made in 1951 into the film "A Place in the Sun," directed by George Stevens, and has a plot similar to "Match Point." At the last Cannes Festival, where "Match Point" was screened for the first time outside the competition (many believe that had the film been entered in the competition, it would have won the prestigious Golden Palm award), Allen declared that he had never read Dreiser's book and had not seen Stevens' film.
Though Allen says that nowadays he is more prone to serious films, his next work, also made in England, is a comedy called "Scoop." This time, unlike in "Match Point," Allen also wrote a role for himself in the film.
The next film also stars Scarlett Johansson - this time as a cub reporter at a college newspaper, who gets into trouble investigating a murder. "I saw her in two things, in 'Ghost World' and 'Lost in Translation.' When I shot 'Match Point' with her, I saw how funny she was and I thought you have to do something more amusing. So I wrote this picture about journalists and she plays a not very good journalist, and she's great," says Allen, adding that he hopes to make more movies with her.
2006-01-07 Amir Taheri. The Despicable Self-Loathing Preached by 'Syriana' arabnews.com
The would-be ruler of an oil-rich Arab state is planning a policy reform that includes allowing girls to go to school, and signing an oil contract with China. But days before he takes over he is assassinated when a remote controlled bomb destroys his bulletproof limousine in the middle of the desert.
But who would want such an enlightened prince out of the way?
The answer given in "Syriana", the new Hollywood blockbuster starring George Clooney, is simple: The murder was planned and carried out by the CIA, the dirty-tricks arm of the United States of America.
But why would the US want an enlightened Arab leader murdered at a time that President George W. Bush is publicly calling for such leaders to emerge in the Arab world?
Again, the answer provided by the scriptwriters is straightforward: The US government is controlled by Texas oil interests that cannot allow any Arab state to sign an oil contract with China.
In North Africa where France ruled for more than a century every shortcoming, and every major crime, is blamed on the French. From Egypt to the Indian Ocean all was the fault of the British, until the Americans emerged as a more convincing protagonist in the fantasyland of conspiracy theories. (In Libya where Italy ruled for a while in the last century, even the fact that the telephones don’t work in 2006 is blamed on the Italians.)
Would it change anything if one were to remind the conspiracy theorists that none of the high profile political murders in the Arab world over the past century had anything to do with the US or any other foreign power?
Let us start with Rafik Al-Hariri, Lebanon’s former prime minister, who was murdered last February. Was he killed by the CIA or, as Abdul-Halim Khaddam, Syria’s former Vice President, now asserts by a criminal coterie in Damascus?
"Syriana" is not only about a single political murder. It also depicts the US as the power behind much of the terrorism coming from the Middle East. The film shows American oil companies as employers of Asian slave labor while the CIA is the key source of supply for bombs used by terrorists.
The self-loathing party in the US, which includes a disturbingly large part of the elite, is doing three things.
First, it says that America, being the evil power it is, is a legitimate target for revenge attacks by Arab radicals and others.
Secondly, it tells the American people that all this talk about democracy is nonsense if only because major decisions are ultimately taken by a cabal of businessmen, and politicians and lawyers in their pay.
Lastly, and perhaps without realizing it, the self-loathing Americans reduce the Arabs to the level of mere objects in their history.
2006-01-04 Kate Connolly. Did the Cubans assassinate Kennedy? telegraph.co.uk
Spiegel. Klaus Wiegrefe. New Film Offers Strong Theory but Weak Evidence
The Cuban secret service was behind the assassination of President John F Kennedy, according to evidence presented in a new television documentary.
Rendezvous with Death, to be shown on German television on Friday, offers the most convincing evidence that Fidel Castro's regime was behind the most talked-about murder of the 20th century.
A former agent of the Cuban secret service G2 talks for the first time about how Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin, was, he claims, pointed out to the Cubans by the KGB.
Huismann spent three years persuading people to break their silence about Oswald's alleged Cuba connections. His film is based on testimony by former US, Cuban and Russian agents, KGB files and Mexican archives.
One of the main witnesses is a retired FBI agent, Lawrence Keenan, now in his eighties. Keenan was sent after the assassination to trace Oswald's footsteps in Mexico.
The evidence he found - linking the Cubans with the murder - prompted the FBI head, J Edgar Hoover, on the orders of President Lyndon Johnson, to withdraw Keenan after three days.
Huismann wrote his film with Gus Russo, author of the 1998 book on the Castro-JFK rivalry, Live by the Sword.
IMDB on Wilfried Huismann
Gus Russo. Live By The Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK
2006-01-03 ELI VALLEY. Steven Spielberg's unforgivable 'sin' jpost.com
One of the more vociferous criticisms of the film is that Spielberg and his co-screenwriter, Tony Kushner, allowed the film's protagonist, Mossad agent Avner, to be plagued by doubts about his mission.
Months before the movie's release, Michael B. Oren, author of Six Days of War, launched a preemptive strike against Munich when he told The New York Times: "I don't know how many of them actually had 'troubling doubts' about what they were doing... I don't see Dirty Harry feeling guilt-ridden."
True, one would be hard-pressed to imagine Clint Eastwood in an apron, as Spielberg depicts Avner in his first meeting with his team of assassins. One critic sniffed, "Real Mossad agents who hunted the terrorists... were not metrosexual sensitive guys."
Indeed, the film revises the myth of the Israeli warrior, described by Oz Almog in The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew as "the polar opposite of the Diaspora Jew: he was self-confident, proud, and brave, knowing what lay before him; a leader, not a subject."
But what makes Munich a complex film - and a bane to its right-wing critics - is not that Spielberg has feminized the Mossad. The problem is that he has humanized it.
The irony is that in this film Spielberg has gone to the greatest lengths in his career to create human beings as opposed to cardboard cutouts as characters. For this he has earned the wrath of those who refuse to concede ambiguities in Israel's history. The criticism of "humanization" is most often leveled at the film's portrayal of Palestinian terrorists who, the critics claim, are given moral equivalency with the Mossad agents.
BUT THERE are two meanings of "humanize" - "to represent as human" and "to make humane."
Munich does not portray its Palestinians as humane. Even the most well-developed Palestinian in the film is still portrayed as a butcher, and at no point does the film urge its audience to root for the terrorists over the Mossad agents. Rather than making them compassionate, Spielberg has portrayed terrorists as human beings who contemplate, argue and debate.
ONE IS left to wonder: Do we really want to glorify Mossad officers as unthinking automatons or trigger-happy Dirty Harrys? Are these the new Jewish ideals?
What's especially odd is that the same critics who defend Israel's army as the most moral fighting force in the world are shocked at the portrayal of a Mossad agent as morally conflicted.
Although it is by no means an anti-Zionist film, Munich punctures the contention, popular in the Jewish community, that Israel has brought nothing but unadulterated goodness to the Jewish experience. While defending both Israel's right to exist and its response to terror, and while plainly indicating that violence has been thrust upon Israel by its enemies, the film nonetheless concedes the human toll that a lifetime of violence has begotten both on the individual and on the Jewish nation.
We are in a sad state of affairs if, almost 60 years after the creation of Israel, we must banish this topic as taboo and deny discussion of our all-too-human experiences of pain and moral doubt.
The writer, based in New York, is the author of The Great Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe.
2006-01-01 BRET STEPHENS. Munich. What's wrong with Steven Spielberg's new movie opinionjournal.com
frontpagemag.com
Steven Spielberg wants you to know one thing about "Munich," his just-released, semi-historical, instantly controversial account of Israel's efforts to avenge the massacre of its athletes at the 1972 Olympics: "I worked very hard," he says, "so this film was not in any way, shape or form going to be an attack on Israel." So why is his movie raising such hackles among Israelis and those generally known as the "pro-Israel" crowd?
Maybe it has something to do with his choice of a screenwriter, Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright brought in by Mr. Spielberg to rework the original screenplay by Eric Roth. Mr. Kushner (who, like Mr. Spielberg, is Jewish) believes that the creation of the state of Israel was "a historical, moral, political calamity" for the Jewish people.
Maybe it has something to do with Mr. Spielberg's curious use of "Jewish" tropes. Again and again in "Munich," the Israelis are seen counting the cost of each kill, down to the last dollar: $352,000 for an assassination in Rome; $200,000 for a bombing in Paris.
Maybe it has something to do with the historical liberties Mr. Spielberg takes in telling the story. "Vengeance," the George Jonas book upon which the film is largely based, is widely considered to be a fabrication. The book is based on a source named Yuval Aviv, who claimed to be the model for Avner but was, according to Israeli sources, never in the Mossad and had no experience in intelligence beyond working as a screener for El Al, the Israeli airline.
Maybe it has something to do with Mr. Spielberg's depiction of the Palestinian targets. The Israeli team's first quarry is an elderly, evidently kindly man whom the audience first encounters reading from his Italian translation of Scheherazade. Target Two is a well-spoken diplomat and doting father.
Maybe it has something to do with the strawman arguments the Israelis offer for exacting their revenge. "The only blood that matters to me is Jewish blood," says Steve (Daniel Craig), the most macho of the Israeli hit men.
Maybe it has something to do with the false dichotomy the film establishes between Jewish ideals and Israeli actions. "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values," pronounces the fictional Mrs. Meir. Yet the Torah and Talmud are replete with descriptions of the justified smiting of one enemy or another. (Hanukkah, for instance, commemorates the Maccabean victory over the Seleucid empire.) It is Christianity, not Judaism, that counsels turning the other cheek.
Maybe it has something to do with what in Hollywood is known as the hero's "character arc." Avner is introduced in the film as the quintessential sabra, the son of Zionist pioneers personally selected for the mission by the prime minister herself. But as his doubts about his mission grow, so does his disillusionment with Israel. On a return visit to Israel, he can barely bring himself to shake the hands of two soldiers who congratulate him for his rumored exploits. By film's end, he has moved his family to Brooklyn and convinced himself that the Mossad is targeting him for assassination.
Maybe it has something to do with the film's final scene. Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush), Avner's snarling Mossad handler, has come to New York to ask Avner to "come home." Avner refuses; Israel, apparently, is no longer a suitable place for a morally sensitized man. Next, Avner invites Ephraim to join him at home for supper. "Break bread with me," he says. "Isn't that what Jews do?" Now it's Ephraim who says no, as if to suggest that such old-fashioned courtesies are no longer of interest to today's hard-of-heart Israelis.
Maybe it has something to do with Mr. Spielberg's decision to depict the actual slaughter of the Israeli athletes (bizarrely interwoven with an especially vulgar sex scene) at the end of the film rather than at the beginning. The effect is to jumble cause and consequence; to make the massacre seem like a response to Israeli atrocities; to turn Munich into just another stage in the proverbial cycle of violence, or what Mr. Spielberg calls a "response to a response." Mr. Spielberg has said he made this film as a "tribute" to the fallen athletes. What he has mainly accomplished is to trivialize their murder.
2005-12-30 Peter Rainer. Woody Allen serves a winning 'Match Point' csmonitor.com
In Woody Allen's "Match Point," Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), a hustling Irish tennis pro, insinuates himself into the British country club establishment by marrying Chloe (Emily Mortimer), the daughter of a prominent businessman, while pursuing an affair with his brother-in-law's red-hot fiancée, Nola (Scarlett Johansson). It is not a comedy, not even slightly.
Allen is so identified with New York City that whenever he ventures outside it to make a movie, it's headline news. "Match Point," his latest, was filmed in London (he's already filmed a second project there), but the reasons have more to do with artistic freedom than aesthetics. In an interview in the latest issue of "Written By," the Writer's Guild of America's magazine, Allen says, "I might work abroad a little bit unless I can find a situation in the United States where they'll let me make my movies the way I can make them."
In terms of its story there is no compelling reason why Allen could not have set "Match Point" in New York's Upper East Side (his neighborhood), but the change of scenery has done him some good. If the American studios are less amenable to Allen's cloistered, control-freak working methods these days, he seems to have made up for it: "Match Point" is his best film in some time, although it should be pointed out that it is his only good film in some time. Even "Match Point" suffers by comparison to its obvious predecessor, "Crimes and Misdemeanors," which explored similar moral issues more profoundly.
Still, the film is good enough that you don't feel the need for a few laughs to leaven the grimness. It's about the role that luck plays in determining fate.
2005-12-28 A.O.SCOTT. London Calling, With Luck, Lust and Ambition movies2.nytimes.com
Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as a former tennis pro, Scarlett Johansson as an American actress
Because Woody Allen's early films are about as funny as any ever made, it is often assumed that his temperament is essentially comic, which leads to all manner of disappointment and misunderstanding. Now and then, Mr. Allen tries to clear up the confusion, insisting, sometimes elegantly and sometimes a little too baldly, that his view of the world is essentially nihilistic. He has announced, in movie after movie, an absolute lack of faith in any ordering moral principle in the universe - and still, people think he's joking.
In "Match Point," his most satisfying film in more than a decade, the director once again brings the bad news, delivering it with a light, sure touch. This is a Champagne cocktail laced with strychnine. You would have to go back to the heady, amoral heyday of Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder to find cynicism so deftly turned into superior entertainment. At the very beginning, Mr. Allen's hero, a young tennis player recently retired from the professional tour, explains that the role of luck in human affairs is often underestimated. Later, the harsh implications of this idea will be evident, but at first it seems as whimsical as what Fred Astaire said in "The Gay Divorcée": that "chance is the fool's name for fate."
If you walked in after the opening titles, it might take you a while to guess who made this picture.
After a while you would, of course. The usual literary signposts are in place: surely no other screenwriter could write a line like "darling, have you seen my copy of Strindberg?" or send his protagonist to bed with a paperback Dostoyevsky. But while a whiff of Russian fatalism lingers in the air - and more than a whiff of Strindbergian misogyny - these don't seem to be the most salient influences. The film's setting is modified Henry James (wealthy London, with a few social and cultural outsiders buzzing around the hives of privilege); the conceit owes something to Patricia Highsmith's Ripley books; and the narrative engine is pure Theodore Dreiser - hunger, lust, ambition, greed.
Not that the tennis player, Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), seems at first to be consumed by such appetites. An Irishman of modest background, he takes a job at an exclusive London club, helping its rich members polish their ground strokes. He seems both easygoing and slightly ill at ease, ingratiating and diffident. Before long, he befriends Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), the amiable, unserious heir to a business fortune, who invites Chris to the family box at the opera. From there, it is a short trip to an affair with Tom's sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer), a job in the family firm and the intermittently awkward but materially rewarding position of son-in-law to parents played by Brian Cox and Penelope Wilton.
London is Manhattan seen through a glass, brightly: Tate Modern stands in for the Museum of Modern Art; Covent Garden takes the place of Lincoln Center. As for the breathtaking South Bank loft into which Chris and Chloe move, it will satisfy the lust for high-end real estate that has kept the diehards in their seats during Mr. Allen's long creative malaise.
What passes between Chris and Nola is not only desire, but also recognition, which makes their connection especially volatile. As their affair advances, Ms. Johansson and Mr. Rhys-Meyers manage some of the best acting seen in a Woody Allen movie in a long time, escaping the archness and emotional disconnection that his writing often imposes. It is possible to identify with both of them - and to feel an empathetic twinge as they are ensnared in the consequences of their own heedlessness - without entirely liking either one.
But it is the film's brisk, chilly precision that makes it so bracingly pleasurable. The gloom of random, meaningless existence has rarely been so much fun, and Mr. Allen's bite has never been so sharp, or so deep. A movie this good is no laughing matter.
2005-12-28 Fawaz Turki. The Crossweave of Spielberg’s 'Munich' arabnews.com
2005-12-28 Marianne Wellershoff. Scarlett Scores with "Match Point" service.spiegel.de
Picture gallery
Scarlett Johansson hit the big time with "Lost in Translation." But her career slumped briefly afterwards -- until, that is, Woody Allen came along. Johansson plays Nola in Allen's new film "Match Point," a bitter satirical critique of high society.
Nola is an American actress in London in Woody Allen's new film "Match Point," which starts in Germany on Thursday. She is played by Scarlett Johansson, also an American. Indeed, their shared country of origin represents the only similarity shared by the actress and her role.
Ironically, though, the 21-year-old Johansson didn't even have to audition for her role in "Match Point." "I got a call asking if I could start shooting in a week in London," she explains. The British actress Kate Winslet had chosen to bow out of the film, having worked herself to exhaustion. "For the first time in a long time," Johansson explains, "I took the summer off, which is why I had time. I was unbelievably lucky. How could I say no when Woody wants me?"
Johansson's luck isn't just the opportunity to work with Woody Allen. Her recent films ("Anything Else," "Melinda and Melinda") have hardly been blockbusters. Finally she can work herself back into top form. The film -- about a failed professional tennis player named Chris who sleeps his way up the society ladder and in the end has to decide between passionate love and a social career -- tells a bitterly satirical story about a society with a few at the top and the masses at the bottom.
And truth be told, Johansson needed a little luck. Following her breakthrough in the romance "Lost in Translation" and the art-house flick "Girl with a Pearl Earring," her career had come to a screeching halt. Michael Bay's $120 million science-fiction drama "The Island" was supposed to make her the star of a blockbuster -- instead she became the main actress in an expensive flop.
Not that "Match Point" will break box office records. That, after all, hasn't been the fate of any Woody Allen film in the last 15 years -- at least not in America. Allen is better loved in Europe than at home. But the film deserves commercial success, if only for the opening scene. A tennis ball flies against the upper edge of the net and ricochets straight upwards. It's the moment of fate when everything is decided -- which side of the court it will fall on and whether everything will go well or end badly.
The Irish ex-tennis pro Chris (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) hopes in fact that his ball will make it over the net, as he signs up to teach tennis lessons at a high society club in London. He quickly becomes friends with his charge Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode), who, while possessing little athletic talent, possesses quite enough money. Furthermore, Tom has a pretty sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer). Lacking all other career plans, she is urgently seeking a husband.
Just at this moment Chris turns up, and it could be game, set and match, if not for the fact that the ball sometimes hits the very edge of the net. And that means, in this case, that on a short holiday at the Hewett Estate Chris meets Toms fiancée Nola.
For him it is desire at first sight. For her on the other hand it is about sex, and even more the art of being sexy, the only skill she possesses which she can in fact rely on. Indeed Scarlett Johannson, with her strange brew of languor, aggression and hysteria, has never been so sexy as in "Match Point."
Chris feels so close to Nola because both are social climbers. She on the other hand, has already mastered the manners of higher society. Whereas Chris orders chicken at a restaurant right away, she orders blini with caviar for starters.
How much are love and passion worth? More or less than money and career? "Match Point" is such a great satire because while it illustrates the British upper class, it, analyzes the more general question: What does it mean when a society blocks social mobility and when career can no longer be used to climb the social ladder? What happens when only luck and connections permit the desired ascent? And what are the moral fundaments of this kind of paradoxical system?
It is a global theme which Allen unfolds in "Match Point," and one can almost tell that he had planned to set it in New York. But in the end, it was shot in London to save money, despite the fact that Allen loathes working outside of Manhattan. When Winslet had to excuse herself and Johansson replaced her, the role of a failed British actress was changed to that of a failed American one, but the script functioned just as well. In fact more so. "That only took an hour," Allen said.
Johansson, who grew up as an architect's daughter in Greenwich Village, says she didn't plan her career strategically. While she attended the Professional Children's School in New York, all she did was say yes to scripts that she liked; and if she was rejected, she says, it was no big deal -- even if she describes herself as "unbelievably ambitious."
The only role she "absolutely wanted to play" was the depressive, cynical teenager in Robert Redford's "Horse Whisperer." She put up with numerous auditions until she had her way. Johansson was 13 years old, and already in the business 5 years.
2005-12-23 Dan Williams. The other 'Munich': Israeli spies tell their side today.reuters.co.uk
A pocketful of receipts helped blow the lid off Israel's most notorious intelligence bungle.
It was in 1973, after spies dispatched to Norway killed a waiter mistaken for the Palestinian mastermind of a raid on the previous year's Munich Olympics where 11 Israeli athletes died.
The assassins might have got away, except that one of them was not a trained member of Israel's spy agency Mossad but a Danish-born volunteer brought aboard for his language skills.
Hoping to recoup expenses, he had kept his receipts. Once detained by Norwegian police, he provided a paper trail that led to the capture and prosecution for murder of the rest of team.
So when director Steven Spielberg, in his new film on the post-Munich reprisals, showed a Mossad case officer ordering agents to hoard receipts while in deep cover abroad, eyebrows were raised among veterans of the intelligence service.
"It's an absurd version of the modus operandi," former field agent Gad Shimron said when asked about the thriller "Munich".
"Munich" shows the Olympic attack, followed by another established fact: Israel's Prime Minister Golda Meir instructing Mossad to track down and kill the Palestinians held responsible.
In the film, Meir goes further, personally recruiting the hero, Avner, to lead the team. Shimron said this was unheard of.
Spielberg shows a hit-team isolated in the field for months, and including a forger and bomb-maker so it can function alone.
But Mossad veterans say the reprisals, like all top-priority missions, were executed by a large number of agents, in stages.
Shimron was more damning of the all-male makeup of the team.
"It's standard practice to include female agents in such operations," he said. "Anyone who has been on a stakeout knows that having a lady on hand helps you avoid being spotted."
Much of the criticism from Israelis in the know focuses on the film's depiction of the moral debates that burden the team.
A former Israeli special forces officer who took part in a Mossad assassination in the 1980s called this fanciful.
"Look, we all did mandatory military service, we all had combat experience, and we all accepted the necessity of hitting out at our enemies. Israel is a country at war," he said.
"So you go, you do the job, and you hope you'll be back in time to eat breakfast with your kids and take them to school."
Shimron said Mossad provides in-house psychologists to help any agents who develop doubts about their work.
2005-12-23 Michael Saba. 'Syriana': The Plot Behind the Movie's Plot arabnews.com
sabamps@aol.com
The movie is supposedly "loosely based" on a 2002 book by former CIA agent, Bob Baer, entitled "See No Evil." Baer’s book which is subtitled, "The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism" keys on his own tales of serving the CIA in the Middle East and includes much self aggrandizement about his work there.
Baer later wrote in 2003 another book entitled, "Sleeping with the Devil: How America Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude," and various other articles about Saudi Arabia in 2003 including a May 2003 piece in the Atlantic Monthly magazine called "The Fall of the House of Saud."
One begins to see a pattern forming behind the movie’s intent with statements such as Gaghan’s "hands of Islamic fundamentalist" comment and utterances from other principals involved in the film like Baer. After a recent screening of "Syriana" to the Washington D.C. Press Club in a panel discussion, Baer said, "The unfortunate fact is that until we find an alternate source of energy, we depend on the Middle East. The second unfortunate thing is that any oil company, whether international or American, has to be engaged in corruption in order to secure these oil sources in the Middle East."
Other members of Baer’s panel interestingly included Stephen Gaghan, Jon Coifman of the National Resources Defense Council, Dan Becker of the Sierra Club, Cliff May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy and Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy. Strange bedfellows, you say. Well maybe it is not so strange when you start to put all of the pieces together.
imdb.com
Robert Baer. See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism
Robert Baer. Sleeping with the Devil : How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude
2005-12-19 Sharon aide promotes Munich film news.bbc.co.uk
Director Steven Spielberg has hired one of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's key aides to market his film Munich in the country.
The film, about the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games, opens in Israel next month.
Eyal Arad, who helped plan the recent Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, has arranged a Tel Aviv screening for the widows of the murdered sportsmen.
The film is based on the 1984 book Vengeance, which is said to be based on the confessions of an officer from the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad who broke ranks in protest at its "aggressive tactics".
It portrays a team of hitmen torn by questions of conscience and on the run from Palestinian gunmen.
That version of events has been rejected by historians in Israel and elsewhere.
But one of the widows who saw Spielberg's film said a lack of historical accuracy may have worked in Spielberg's favour.
2005-12-18 Woody Allen explains why he loves filming in London news.bbc.co.uk
2005-12-11 DAVID BROOKS. What 'Munich' Left Out mcnblogs.com
Debbie Schlussel. Munich"--as Brought to You by Abu Spielberg, Minister of Disinformation
Haaretz. Shmuel Rosner. Loving and hating Spielberg's movie: tinyurl.com
Haaretz 12/27/2005. Palestinian architect of Munich attack slams Spielberg's film: haaretz.com
The Palestinian mastermind of the Munich Olympics attack in which 11 Israeli athletes were killed said on Tuesday he had no regrets and that Steven Spielberg's new film about the incident would not deliver reconciliation.
The Hollywood director has called "Munich", which dramatizes the 1972 raid and Israel's reprisals against members of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), his "prayer for peace".
Mohammed Daoud planned the Munich attack on behalf of PLO splinter group Black September, but did not take part and does not feature in the film.
He voiced outrage at not being consulted for the thriller and accused Spielberg of pandering to Israel.
"If he really wanted to make it a prayer for peace he should have listened to both sides of the story and reflected reality, rather than serving the Zionist side alone," Daoud told Reuters by telephone from the Syrian capital, Damascus.
2005-12-11 Israel LA envoy criticizes new Spielberg film 'Munich' haaretz.co.il
Israel's consul-general in Los Angeles levelled criticism Sunday at Steven Spielberg's "Munich," saying that the new film drew an incorrect picture of the Mossad's hunt for the PLO terrorists of the 1972 Olympic massacre, and taking the legendary director to task for morally equating the Israeli agents and their Palestinian terrorist targets.
Ehud Danoch, Consul General of Israel in Los Angeles, said Spielberg had addressed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with "a certain pretentiousness" and "quite superficial statements."
The film follows a Mossad hit squad assigned to track down and kill the Palestinian Black September gunmen behind the abduction of Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics. Eleven atheletes were killed in an ill-fated rescue operation attempted by German security forces.
"The film is based on the book written by George Jonas, a book in which there is no truth," said Ehud Danoch, Consul General of Israel in Los Angeles, in a reference to Canadian journalist Jonas' book Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team.
"It is, in fact, based on things that [self-styled Mossad man] Yuval Aviv told the author," Danoch said. "This same Yuval claimed to have been in the Mossad and the head of a Mossad team, a claim that was untrue. At most he was a 'selector' for El Al for a few months," Danoch said, referring to the airline's unarmed security personnel who interview departing passengers.
Amazon. George Jonas. Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team: amazon.com
2005-12-04 Shmuel Rosner. Why I didn't like the new Spielberg film haaretz.com
At the core of the dilemma presented by the new Steven Spielberg film, called Munich, is the question of whether the practice of targeted assassinations is one worth pursuing. However, there is a bigger dilemma. The director hasn't made up his mind if he is against the method for practical reasons or for moral reasons.
Israelis don't speak to one another the way Spielberg thinks they do (they also don't speak English to one another, but what can you do), nor do they behave the way in which he portrays them as behaving. And most of them don't have significant doubts regarding the Israeli government's decision to hunt and assassinate the perpetrators of the massacre at the Munich Olympics.
The film tells the well-known story of the Israeli government's revenge for the killing of 11 athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The Israeli Mossad carried out most of the dirty work, although Israel has never formally acknowledged responsibility for the shootings, explosive booby-traps and raids that killed some 10 Palestinians linked to the Black September terrorist group behind the Olympics slayings.
The movie was "inspired" by the story, as the producers tell us at its onset, but does not stick to it faithfully. The book upon which it was based, Revenge, is highly controversial, and one can't expect the film to draw the correct conclusions when the historical line from which it is drawn is flawed.
The political message is also problematic. Spielberg himself had hinted that the portrayal of events would not be a flattering one to Israel, its aim being to raise questions about the practice of targeted assassinations - both by Israel in its war against its Arab enemies, and by the U.S. fighting its "war on terrorism."
2005-12-01 David Thomson. Happy Birthday, Allen Stuart Konigsberg enjoyment.independent.co.uk
Woody Allen
Today, Allen Stewart Konigsberg (aka Woody Allen) turns 70, and in the past 12 months he has directed and delivered two films - Melinda and Melinda (among his worst), and Match Play (which may be his best). So the first thing to remark on is the work rate.
If we look at people who are of his generation - at Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich - let’s count the numbers. Coppola, Scorsese and Bogdanovich have all directed about 20 times. Woody Allen’s number is twice as large.
Despite the stirring example of most of his presidents (from Kennedy to Bush), despite the concurrent history of American expansion and aggression in the world, and despite the constant stress on manliness in his culture (not least that of the movies), Woody Allen favours nerds, nebbishes, failures, laughing stocks and despised intellectuals. He retains a wistful notion that men (and women) with knowledge, reason, sensitivity and responsibility might yet be revealed as the inescapable core of society. In other words - and in the context of American film, this is shocking - he presents characters like ourselves.
With occasional assistance (Marshall Brickman co-wrote Annie Hall), Allen has written all of his movies. Indeed, he has invented them. People sometimes lament that he tends to repeat the same few situations over and over again, but he does not adapt novels or plays. He creates stories, and some argue that nothing bespeaks the bankruptcy of modern American movies more than its chronic need to remake old films and adapt novels.
More than that, in an age in which motion pictures have tended to abandon talk, intricate character and the plot development of the one plus the other, Allen’s movies are full of talking and listening heads.
There was a youthful air in Allen films once of how the characters (and the director perhaps) just longed to fall in love. Equally, there was a suspicion that Woody Allen made and cast his movies to meet adorable women. But the love affair between Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Scarlett Johansson in Match Point is unusually urgent and irrational, and filled with intimations of ruin. The yielding to sex in a wheat field in the rain is more unrestrained than anything Allen has done before. And the lucidity with which the film sees this heat turning to ice is just as striking and frightening. Coming on the trail of too many recent comedies that seemed feeble and thin, Match Point helps remind us that this is the maker of Interiors, Stardust Memories, Crimes and Misdemeanours, The Purple Rose of Cairo and Radio Days - films that are not really comic, but bitter-sweet musings on the way life’s slippery texture will trap most of us.
Allen does not like to get close to actors, and I think that chill is palpable and disturbing. It also leaves a vacuum too often that ends up being filled with the disastrous fussiness of Allen himself. He is so good a writer, that casting himself amounts to self-betrayal.
He has taste, but very narrow taste. He loves Manhattan, but to the extent that he hardly likes to be anywhere else. He loves jazz and popular song, but his tastes seem to stop in 1945 or so with his own Dixieland style. It’s startling to realize how seldom he has left New York, and I think it’s salutary that the two chief departures - Annie Hall and Match Point - should fare so well.
2005-11-27 Peter Bradshaw. Munich film.guardian.co.uk
2005-11-17 Ann Coulter. Are you now or have you ever been a second-rate filmmaker? townhall.com
As noted here previously, George Clooney's movie "Good Night, and Good Luck," about pious parson Edward R. Murrow and Sen. Joseph McCarthy, failed to produce one person unjustly accused by McCarthy.
Meanwhile, I can prove that Murrow's good friend Lawrence Duggan was a Soviet spy responsible for having innocent people murdered. The brilliant and perceptive journalist Murrow was not only unaware of the hundreds of Soviet spies running loose in the U.S. government, he was also unaware that his own dear friend Duggan was a Soviet spy - his friend on whose behalf corpses littered the Swiss landscape.
Decrypted Soviet cables and mountains of documents from Soviet archives prove beyond doubt that Lawrence Duggan was one of Stalin's most important spies. "McCarthyism" didn't kill him; his guilt did.
IMDB. Good Night, and Good Luck
Wiki on McCarthy
Wiki on Duggan
2005-10-02 Sue Summers. Roman a clef observer.guardian.co.uk
I telephone his office and by sheer luck Polanski himself answers. 'Why should I make an exception for you?' he asks, in that voice fascinatingly poised between French and Polish. Because he'll enjoy it, I tell him. 'Bullshit,' he replies. Then laughs.
As Charles Dickens knew so well, it's amazing what a little laughter can do. A week later I am sitting opposite Polanski in L'avenue, a trendy restaurant situated among the Guccis and Chloes of smart Avenue Montaigne, just next door to where he lives with his third wife, the 39-year-old French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, and their two children, Morgane, 12 and Elvis, 7.
'I am widely renowned, I know, as an evil, profligate dwarf,' the director wrote in his 1984 autobiography Roman. But that was then. The Polanski I meet is an attractively rumpled family man with a thick head of grey hair, expensively creased linen jacket and trainers. While certainly small, he is slim and agile and, like many people who lost their childhood in the Holocaust, looks much younger than his real age, which is 72.
Endearingly, the case which most obsesses him is not the one against Vanity Fair but the dreadfully heavy school case his daughter has to carry to school. 'I've weighed it and it's between eight and eight-and-a-half kilos,' he says. 'Do you have the same thing in England? It's a scandal, I think. I have complained to the school, of course, but it's like chopping water.'
'Don't make me regret giving this interview,' he says when he thinks my line of questioning is deviating too far from Oliver Twist into territory he finds uncomfortable. 'I can see you are slowly sliding into doing a "portrait" of me, as they call it, which I hate. Stick to the point - revenir à nos moutons, as the French say.' Since there is something about Polanski that makes you want his good opinion, all this is making me nervous. My mind strays from Dickens to Basil Fawlty and 'Don't mention the war'.
The new film continues the recent major upturn in Polanski's creative energy after the erratic offerings of the late Eighties and Nineties - Pirates, Frantic, The Ninth Gate and Death and the Maiden. First there was The Pianist, his superb realisation of the life of Holocaust survivor Wladyslaw Szpilman, which saw the director confronting his own past as a Jewish child in Nazi-occupied Poland for the first time and won him the 2002 Oscar for best director. Now he has achieved the seemingly impossible task of adding a new dimension to Oliver Twist, when for more than half a century many have believed it was impossible to improve on David Lean's classic.
What prompted him to turn to Dickens was the desire to make a film his children could see for a change. 'They come on the set of my movies, they know what I am doing, they live around all that, but the result of all this work is something so remote from their world they can't identify with it,' he says. 'I wanted something they could, so I started looking for subjects that would be suitable.' Although he reads to his children every night, the only Dickens he had read them was A Christmas Carol; it was his wife, Emmanuelle, who suggested Oliver Twist, knowing his fondness for Carol Reed's film of the Lionel Bart musical Oliver!
Surprisingly, he had never seen Lean's film until he and writer Ronald Harwood - who also collaborated with him on The Pianist.
With a £25 million budget, Oliver Twist is the director's most expensive film ever. Much of the money went into recreating Dickensian London - from contemporary drawings such as those by Gustave Doré - in the streets of Prague.
Polanski's son and daughter each has a cameo role in the film - Morgane as a girl at the door of a cottage Oliver goes to looking for food and Elvis as a little rich boy who loses his hoop to Fagin's boys. 'It's for them, so they will be able to remember the movie some years from now when I won't be around,' says their father. 'Well, I won't be. It's obvious.'
Oliver reunited Polanski with members of his Oscar-winning team from The Pianist. In fact, he has worked with some of the same people - many of them British - for over three decades.
Polanski spent the rest of the war hidden with families in the Polish countryside. 'Being without food or clothing is immaterial to a child,' he said during the making of Oliver. 'Being separated from your parents is intolerable.' At the end of the war, he discovered that his mother had been murdered in Auschwitz. Although his father had survived by working as a slave labourer in a stone quarry and they were reunited, he remarried and had little time for his son.
The years in America which followed, though they produced arguably two of his best films, Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown, were to prove personally disastrous. Polanski became a part of an event which perhaps more than any other signalled the end of the Sixties dream of love and peace when in 1969 his second wife, the actress Sharon Tate, was killed in their Bel Air home by the Charles Manson 'family'. At the time of her murder, Tate was eight months pregnant with their first child.
A distraught Polanski went back to Europe but returned to California in the Seventies to make Chinatown. It was after this that he became embroiled in the sex scandal which was to change his life, pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor and fleeing the country rather than
In a profile of the fashionable Manhattan restaurant Elaine's, the magazine had alleged that Polanski propositioned a Swedish model while en route for the funeral of his murdered wife with the boast that he could 'make her into the next Sharon Tate'.
He decided to fight what he termed this 'abominable lie' in the full knowledge that Condé Nast's lawyers would use all of his sexual history against him.
I have already heard from one of Polanski's associates that he was 'angry and bitter' over the way the British press covered the case, feeling that he was the one being put on trial. But now all that is behind him. 'They lost, that's what counts,' he says. 'I feel very well about it, particularly since it was a unanimous verdict and I'm sure the jurors must have felt good when they read an article in the Mail on Sunday in which the woman [who, in fact, was Norwegian] confirmed that it never happened.'
His victory over the magazine, however, has not stopped its editor, Graydon Carter, from reopening the whole subject at enormous length in this month's issue. 'Bad loser,' Polanski says with a grin. 'Sour grapes.'
2005-09-10 Ang Lee takes Venice Golden Lion news.bbc.co.uk
Ang Lee
George Clooney (l) saw his film's star David Strathairn win best actor
Ang Lee's gay cowboy film Brokeback Mountain has won the coveted Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
The film is adapted from a short story by Annie Proulx and stars Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as love-struck cowboys who have a 20-year affair.
George Clooney's film Good Night, Good Luck had been the hot favourite among film critics to take the Golden Lion on the last night of the 11-day annual festival.
The McCarthy-era film, directed by and featuring Clooney, won best screenplay.
Its star David Strathairn won the best actor prize for his portrayal of journalist Edward R Murrow.
2005-08-30 Filmmaker 'earns £94m from Rings' news.bbc.co.uk
A movie producer earned $168m (£94m) from The Lord of the Rings films even though he did not work on the trilogy, trade paper Variety has reported.
Saul Zaentz got the payout from film studio New Line because he bought the rights to JRR Tolkien's books in 1976.
The three Lord of the Rings films made more than $2.9bn (£1.6bn) at box offices around the world and the final instalment won 11 Oscars.
New Line still faces a legal challenge from the trilogy's director Peter Jackson, who says the company withheld his share of profits from the first film.
2005-08-26 Crowe settles over 'phone rage' news.bbc.co.uk
Crowe was arrested following the incident in June
Russell Crowe has reached a settlement with a hotel worker who sued him after allegedly being hit with a telephone.
In June, Mr Crowe, 41, allegedly struck New York concierge Nestor Estrada with a phone when it did not work.
The Oscar-winner still faces a criminal charge of second degree assault and is due back in court on 14 September.
He has also been charged with fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon - the telephone.
The actor has publicly apologised, telling the Late Show with David Letterman it was one of the "most shameful" situations of his life.
The incident happened in June when Mr Crowe was staying at the Mercer Hotel, having just flown from the UK where he was promoting his boxing movie Cinderella Man.
He said he became frustrated when he could not get through to his wife, Danielle Spencer, at their home in Australia.
He is alleged to have ripped the phone from the wall, taken it down to the lobby area and thrown it in the direction of Mr Estrada.
2005-08-19 Alan Hadar. Shooting Star haaretz.com
Four months ago, Lior Ashkenazi collapsed. It happened in the evening, in a small room in an apartment hotel in the center of Tel Aviv, where he has been living for the past few months. This time he was alone, without a wife by his side, without a performance in a play later in the evening. It was just him with himself - and with the drugs, the depression, the loneliness, the transience, but without the deep, durable ability to cope with the international success of the film "Walk on Water" (2003) in which he stars.
The intensive rehabilitation and recovery process has not yet concluded, but has at least put Ashkenazi back on his feet and made it possible for him to continue working. In two weeks his first new project since the crisis will be launched: "In Treatment," a daily drama series on cable television in which he plays a fighter pilot who grounds himself in the wake of a trauma and seeks treatment from a psychologist (played by Assi Dayan).
Ashkenazi is also taking part in a new film by Uri and Benny Barabash and is continuing to perform in two plays produced by Beit Lessin, "The Blue Room" and Tom Stoppard's "The Real Thing." A cameo in the next film by his good friend, the director Eytan Fox (who made "Walk on Water"), has already been tailored for him. His continued path is assured; the question is whether Ashkenazi has learned how to walk on water.
Lior Ashkenazi, 36, was born in Ramat Gan. His parents, Shmuel and Victoria, immigrated to Israel from Istanbul with Ashkenazi's older sister. His father worked in a printer's shop, his mother was a housewife. The language spoken at home was Ladino. A poor student, Ashkenazi attended several schools until he reached Kibbutz Regavim. He did not stand out among his classmates and was also not "one of the boys" - those who were interested in cars and soccer. He was easily bored and looked for thrills.
He did his army service in the Nahal infantry brigade, serving in the territories during the first intifada, and took part in the killing of a wanted Palestinian. A year ago, in an interview on Yehoram Gaon's variety show on Channel 1, he did not make do with telling the story of how he and others jumped the wanted man and beat him to death - he also likened the Israeli army's activity to the acts of the Nazis. The comparison infuriated viewers in the studio to the point where the director had to call a halt to the filming.
Immediately after his army service he enrolled at the Beit Zvi School of Theater in Ramat Gan, to study acting.
The insecurity accompanied him throughout his studies. "I thought I was no good. I was usually cast in the role of the lover, in the classics and in comedies. That didn't interest me," Ashkenazi says. On the other hand, he didn't connect with the characters of heroes: "I don't believe in heroes. Every person has a weak point. When I played the hero, I wanted to introduce weaknesses and dark sides. A psychiatrist once gave me an anti-depression pill. A few weeks later I felt `happy' - and a whole part of my emotional range disappeared. You don't cry, you're not sad. I stopped taking the pills. I couldn't get used to it."
After completing his studies, he began acting in the repertory theater - Be'er Sheva Theater, Habima and Beit Lessin - usually as a minor lover. In 2003, after the success of Dover Kosashvilli's comic film "Late Marriage," in which Ashkenazi had the lead role, he left Beit Lessin in favor of the Cameri Theater. A year later, now with star status, he accepted Zipi Pines' offer to return to Beit Lessin. In the meantime, he landed increasingly hefty roles in television series.
One thing that kept bugging Ashkenazi was his categorization as good-looking. "At some point, I began to understand that I was being cast because of the good looks. That's a downer. There was one movie in which the casting director said, `He's too good-looking.' I called the director and asked him why. To say good-looking is terribly petty, thoughtless. The tragedy of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt is that they will always be better looking than the other actors. For a long time I got roles of `be beautiful and shut up' or unimportant roles of lovers. It was all very minor stuff. Now my hair is starting to go gray. I say, `Okay, let me play fathers.' But what happens? They say, `Hey, white hair is really sexy.'"
The breakthrough came in "Late Marriage," which was a tremendous success both in Israel and internationally. The daring long, naturalistic sex scene with Ronit Elkabetz not only entered the pantheon of Israeli cinema, it was also hugely acclaimed by American critics.
The film was acquired for distribution in dozens of countries, and Ashkenazi, Fox and Fox's partner Gal Uchovsky, the screenwriter of "Walk on Water," started touring internationally, together and singly, to promote sales. Ashkenazi: "You sleep in luxurious suites, fly business class, eat in dazzling restaurants, drive in limousines, you are invited to cocktail parties with stars you grew up watching, and you're pampered like a true star. Wow, you say, this is a whole different style. It's confusing. The proportions are different abroad. There are no proportions. Hysterical excitement. Try as I might to show equanimity, I didn't really succeed. I would call friends right away and say, `You'll never believe who I met in the hotel lobby.'"
The madness intensified during the trip to the United States. "Everything you want, happens. It's like the second before a parachute jump, all that adrenaline. The amount of chemicals the brain secretes is incredible, and it eats up your reserves. I had never released energies like that in my life. Your sense of confidence on a scale of one to ten is a hundred. You are courted, become omnipotent, start to believe everything people write about you - superb, genius, gorgeous."
Fox understands: "In America we would go to a party, and he would magnetize the women. I saw how much energy and interest he drew. Girls are in love with him, it's indescribable, but he also stimulates identification in men."
Then offers from Hollywood started to come in.
Ashkenazi: "I decided not to go for it. I knew that no foreigners had succeeded in the United States. Antonio Banderas had 15 minutes of glory in the States, married Melanie Griffith and is now dubbing cats. I would have got lost. I could never have been alone in that man-eating city, Los Angeles. I would have come to a very bad end."
A few months passed. There were fewer trips abroad; the offers from Hollywood were not converted into contracts. It was all over. Ashkenazi: "For others you are living a fantasy, but your own life is humdrum. And at this stage you are already alone, without friends or love."
But not without drugs. Especially cocaine. . .
Apart from the drugs, he started to break the cycle of routine by disengaging completely from the life he had lived. He split with his girlfriend, the screenwriter and playwright Sigal Avin, and started living in hotels and apartment hotels.
In the past few weeks he has tried to rehabilitate his relations with the outside world. "I started to meet with those who still agreed and to explain things.
He is still getting accustomed to bachelorhood. "Being single is a completely different world. You're an on-duty father twice a week and for the rest of the week you're a bachelor. Publicity opens doors for you, you don't have to do much courting of girls. I'm still checking things out. I don't know what the ideal is. Thirty-six is old, but I'm still looking. I was never a gigolo, I always had long-term relationships. Now I am on a journey, I don't know where it will end."
In the meantime, his schedule is full. For the past month, he spent the days shooting the Barabash brothers' new film and his evenings performing on the stage. Not surprisingly, all of his roles deal with the essence of masculinity, new and old. In the Stoppard play he is a cynical, self-assured dramatist who falls apart after the women in his life betray and abandon him. In "The Blue Room" he investigates, in different variations, the balance of forces between man and woman. In the Barabash film, he is a gnarled cop and in "In Treatment" he is a fighter pilot who is anxious about his masculinity.
2005-07-30 Ian Jack. Back to the future film.guardian.co.uk
Jean Martin as Col. Mathieu
The first thing to say about The Battle of Algiers is that it's a thrilling, unsettling film, a tribute to the script of Franco Solinas and the music of Ennio Morricone as well as to the direction of Pontecorvo, who made nothing nearly as good before or after. It tells the story of the Algerian insurrection against the French in the late 1950s: first the revolt in the Algiers casbah, and then the repercussions from the French paratroops who were sent to quell it - terrorism and counter-terrorism - ending with a postcript that shows Algeria about to win independence from France in 1962. Pontecorvo shot his film only three years later - in Algiers, recreating real events and real characters in grainy black and white. It employs only one professional actor - Jean Martin, who plays the commander of the French paratroops, Colonel Mathieu. Sometimes you think you're watching a newsreel and sometimes a documentary. In fact, what you are always watching is a brilliant confection of reality.
Pontecorvo was a politically committed film-maker, a Marxist who had joined the anti-fascist resistance in Italy during the second world war, and his film came out of a desire to dramatise and humanise the struggle against colonialism. If the key text of the time was Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961 with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre, then The Battle of Algiers, which was banned in France for several years, could be seen as its cinematic equivalent. Except that it isn't. Such was the spirit of the mid-60s, at least among the kind of people who went to art-house cinemas, that Pontecorvo seems to have taken it for granted that his audience's sympathy would instinctively side with the rebellious Algerians, the Muslims of the casbah. The historical injustice of their situation is never spelled out. Instead, Pontecorvo focuses narrowly on the conflict, trying to deepen our understanding of the barbarous behaviour on both sides, bombs from the Algerians and torture from the French.
As I looked at it again, what struck me was its prescience; how it described a world now familiar to all of us, when at the time of its appearance in 1965 it described only a particular Algerian world that had recently been left behind. As paratroops raid a house, a helicopter hovers overhead. Hidden cameras film Muslims as they leave the casbah for the French quarter and the footage is played before an audience of paratroops. (How can you spot a terrorist? You can't.) Mathieu draws the cell structure of the rebels on a blackboard, three or four people to each cell, no cell knowing another. "Four hundred thousand Arabs live in the casbah," Mathieu says. "Are they all our enemies? We know they're not." He cuts a sympathetic figure, despite his dark glasses and his brutal strategy - the only workable one he knows, - which is to find some likely suspects and torture information from them. He has fought in the French resistance as well as Vietnam. When at a press conference someone mentions a pro-independence newspaper piece by Sartre, Mathieu wonders why "the Sartres are always on the other side".
The most terrible moments come when three women leave the casbah to plant their bombs. First, they are asked to dress as Francophile women to avoid detection at the checkpoints. Then they rendezvous with a bomb-maker who attaches a timer to each device. Each woman now goes her own way with a bomb in her basket - to a café, a milk bar, and the offices of Air France. There they slyly slide their bombs under their stools and chairs they sit on, pushing them back with their heels. The French are entirely innocent of their fate, ordinary people doing ordinary things. Young couples dance to jukebox music, a little boy licks an ice-cream, a Frenchman offers his seat to one of the bombers as she stands at the bar and orders a Coke. Pontecorvo splices the scenes of their unbearable unknowingness with shots of a clock as its hands move towards 5.45. The women leave, the bombs explode. The camera captures the shock and incomprehension of the bloodied survivors as they stumble from the wreckage. We never see the boy and his ice-cream again.
2005-07-27 In brief: Spielberg's Olympic road to Munich film.guardian.co.uk
Munich will be the title of Steven Spielberg's historical thriller based on the 1972 Olympics hostage drama which ended with the death of 11 Israeli athletes. Originally called Vengeance, the film dramatises the story of the Israeli agents sent to Munich to assassinate Palestinian activists holding their countrymen hostage. Filming is currently taking place in the US, Malta, Hungary and Poland and the film is due for release on December 23.
2005-07-22 Claire Cozens. Polanski wins libel case against Vanity Fair media.guardian.co.uk
The Oscar-winning film director Roman Polanski has won £50,000 in libel damages after successfully suing Vanity Fair magazine over an allegation he said made him appear "callously indifferent" to his dead wife's memory.
A high court jury today found in favour of the director of Rosemary's Baby, Tess and The Pianist, who sued over an article in the glossy magazine alleging he tried to seduce a Scandinavian model on his way to his murdered wife's funeral by claiming he could make her "another Sharon Tate".
Polanski said the claim, in an article about the fashionable New York restaurant Elaine's, was an "abominable lie" that made him appear "callously indifferent" to his wife's memory.
Condé Nast, the publisher of Vanity Fair, suffered an early blow to its case after Polanski was able to provide documents proving he had flown directly from his home in London to Los Angeles for Tate's funeral.
The publisher insisted the alleged incident had taken place shortly afterwards, when Polanski visited Elaine's with the actor Mia Farrow, star of Rosemary's Baby.
But Farrow told the court Polanski had been in no mood for seduction on the night in late August 1969 when she met him in Elaine's, and that he had brushed off two women who tried to flirt with him.
She said the gruesome murders by members of the Manson Cult were all the film director could talk about, and that he became so upset they had to leave the restaurant and go for a walk outside.
The film director, who has been wanted in the US since 1977 for having sex with a 13-year-old girl, delivered his testimony from Paris after winning special permission from the House of Lords.
He told the court he could not come to the UK because of the risk he may be arrested and extradited to the US.
2005-07-20 Obituary: James Doohan today.reuters.co.uk
newsimg.bbc.co.uk
newsimg.bbc.co.uk
As the chief engineer on the fictional Star Trek spaceship USS Enterprise, Montgomery "Scotty" Scott cut an often flustered figure.
He dealt, on a seemingly weekly basis, with the ship's overloaded reactors and damaged warp drives.
His plaintive, if somewhat unauthentic, Scottish cry - "I dannae if she can take any more, Captain!" - rang through the outer edges of the cosmos as Captain James T Kirk urged even more power out of the craft.
For millions of TV viewers worldwide, this low budget science fiction show was the highlight of the week and Scotty one of its best-loved characters.
It made the man behind Scotty, actor James Doohan, into one of the entertainment world's most familiar faces.
James Montgomery Doohan (he shared a name with his most famous character) was not, in fact, a Scot but a Canadian.
Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1920, his early life, like that of his contemporaries, was dominated by World War II.
Doohan's wartime experiences were every bit as hair-raising as his fictional fights with the Klingons.
As a captain in the Royal Canadian Artillery Regiment, he lost a finger on the first morning of the D-Day landings in Normandy.
...his aerobatic exploits, which included nearly crashing his aircraft in Holland while taking "a look" at a German U-boat, earned him the title of "the craziest pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force".
After the war, Doohan spent two years studying acting at New York City's Neighborhood Playhouse, where he later taught.
...it was with Star Trek, which first aired in 1966, that Jimmy Doohan got his first real taste of stardom.
Working alongside fellow Canadian William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley, he benefited from the strong characterisation which offset the show's small budget.
And in 2000, aged 80, Doohan boldly went into fatherhood for the seventh time when his then 43-year-old wife gave birth to a daughter, Sarah.
imdb.com en.wikipedia.org
2005-07-18 Michael McCarthy. Penguins come out on top news.independent.co.uk
Penguins - some of them, at least - are as tough as they come. Don't think little waiters in black and white frock coats. Think SAS.
This truth will forcefully be brought home later this year with the release of a film that has not only shed new light on one of the most distinctive groups of birds, but which has also become the surprise box-office smash hit of the summer in the US.
March of the Penguins is a low-budget movie with a big impact. Directed by a French biologist, Luc Jacquet, this wildlife documentary cost a mere £4.5m to make, but is putting more bottoms on American cinema seats than the Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise epic War of The Worlds, which cost £100m.
It focuses on the remarkable life cycle of the emperor penguin, Aptenodytes forsteri, the largest of the 17 penguin species, all of which are found in the southern hemisphere. The emperor is the southernmost species of all: it breeds on the ice-bound Antarctic land mass.
Thousands gradually come together, tramping over the ice in long single files like patrols of infantry. The sight is mesmerising, for the march of the penguins is up to 70 miles.
When at last they reach their mating grounds on the ice, courtship begins, or, as the publicity from distributors Warner Bros has it, "in the harshest place on Earth, love finds a way." The birds mingle and chatter, with females choosing males after distinctive mating rituals captured by Jacquet and his two cameramen, who spent a whole year with the birds.
As one book on penguin behaviour puts it, "before copulation they face each other, and bow several times." Then they pair up, monogamously, to face the trials ahead. And what trials they are; for the breeding season of the emperor penguin is the Antarctic winter. As the six-month dark descends and the thermometer drops with it, to minus 60 and even lower, the female bird produces an egg - and promptly departs. The effort has been so great and she has gone without nourishment for so long - up to seven weeks - that now she must return to the sea to feed.
The task of incubating the egg in the harshest conditions on earth now falls to the male.
But most survive, and so do their eggs, kept secure and warm in a fold of abdominal skin just above their feet; and after 60 days of this, the eggs hatch. The male feeds the tiny chick at first with a milky substance, then the female returns to take over, recognising her mate by call.
But success is not automatic; if the female is late back - or falls prey to leopard seals or killer whales in the water - the male has to leave the chick and return to the sea himself, or he will starve to death.
2005-07-15 Peter Bradshaw. The Guardian profile: Roman Polanski film.guardian.co.uk
The 71-year-old Polanski has a body of work which is rich in violence, transgression and horror. In his great period there is the psychological nightmare Repulsion (1965), his demonic shocker Rosemary's Baby (1968); there is Chinatown (1974) and his paranoid thriller The Tenant (1976). These could be a displacement or transformation or exorcism of all the terrible things that have happened in Polanski's life, which include imprisonment in the Krakow ghetto as a child and witnessing his parents being taken away to a Nazi concentration camp. His father returned, his mother did not.
But he has a dark and ambiguous reputation as a man who is both victim and culprit, an ambivalent emblem of the licentious 60s and 70s. He is famous for being married to Sharon Tate, who was murdered by the Manson cult in 1969, and notorious for admitting to sex with a 13-year-old girl eight years later and fleeing the US to France to evade imprisonment, where he still resides.
All these things had been fading into memory. Polanski's victim, now a 40-year-old mother of three, has publicly forgiven him. His wartime drama The Pianist (2002), garlanded with the Cannes Palme D'Or and an Academy Award, had almost redeemed him.
But now he wants to reopen old wounds, by suing Vanity Fair for libel in the amenable British courts - on the grounds that it is on sale in the UK - for a 2002 article that claimed he had tried to seduce a woman in a New York restaurant at the time of Tate's funeral. He vigorously denies the allegation.
The judgement may go his way. But by making his private sexual conduct an admissible subject for debate, might his reputation be sullied all over again?
Polanski fought for the right to testify from Paris by videolink, because he fears extradition to the US from Britain. Won't that simply be a self-defeating reminder of his culpable past? It could be a calculated risk for a man who, fortified by the respect accorded to his prizes and grey hairs, wants to confront the dark heart of his past and set the record straight for good and all.
Nick James, the editor of Sight and Sound magazine, says: "It is a slur on their relationship, and if it turns out to be false then Polanski will have been fully justified in taking action, and he is defending a different aspect of his integrity than that which was damaged after the underage case."
"I like the man," says Geoff Andrew, the National Film Theatre's programmer, who has met and interviewed Polanski many times. "He always struck me as a very genuine sort of guy, a very courteous and a very old-fashioned person. He is incensed by this article, simply on the grounds of inaccuracy. He feels quite rightly he has been treated badly in the press. This is a smear upon his love for her."
Polanski was born in Paris in 1933 to a Jewish father and Roman Catholic mother; they were Poles who moved to Krakow when he was three. When the Germans invaded the Polanskis were imprisoned in the ghetto, and in 1943 the Nazis ordered the civilians to move out. His father managed to cut a gap in the barbed-wire fence and told the terrified Roman to flee to the house of a family he had paid to look after him. "Get away!" he hissed at the sobbing boy, as the SS officers were ordering the Jewish men to line up. Roman ran, never looking back.
Later he was to discover that his mother was murdered in the gas chambers but his father, though pressed into slave labour in a stone quarry, survived. The boy wandered the countryside, living hand to mouth, being taken in by friends and strangers.
After the war, Polanski was reunited with his father and became entranced by movies; he attended the renowned Lodz film school.
After his breakthrough film of 1962, the Oscar-nominated Knife in the Water, Polanski came to London and made one of his undisputed masterpieces: Repulsion, about the paranoia and madness of a young Frenchwoman alone in London, played by Catherine Deneuve. His reputation as a master of nightmarish fear was growing.
On the set of his uncertain, wacky comedy-horror picture, The Fearless Vampire Killers, he met and fell in love with Tate, and married her in London - having divorced his first wife, the Polish actor Barbara Lass-Kwiatkowska.
Riding high, Polanski moved to Hollywood, and under the patronage of the Paramount producer Robert Evans directed his next masterpiece, Rosemary's Baby. It still stands up as an almost unwatchably disturbing story of a young woman, played by Mia Farrow, who is impregnated by the devil.
At the height of his success, tragedy struck. In August 1969 the pregnant Tate was murdered by the Manson gang, who stormed Polanski's California home while he was away.
Heartbroken and stunned by the revelation that the new world was just as barbaric as the old, Polanski returned to Europe and threw himself into his work, directing a well-received version of Macbeth.
He returned to the US for his next commercial breakthrough, and arguably the film which he never surpassed: the neo-noir thriller Chinatown. It made a star of Nicholson in the classic gumshoe role and created a vivid and semi-mythical history for Los Angeles.
His success was once again to be wrecked, this time by his own actions: he was charged with the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl in Nicholson's jacuzzi. Polanski pleaded guilty but panicked, skipped bail and fled to France, where he had already taken citizenship and from where he could not be extradited.
He had been forgiven by his young victim of the Hollywood fleshpots and all of the West Coast muttered that at least Polanski had received some measure of condemnation and his victim some sort of closure - unlike many unpunished sybarites of the 70s LA music and film scenes. Polanski had remarried; surely now he could be revered as a great film-maker and artist?
Then the Vanity Fair article came out which crossed the line: openly using the memory of his late wife against Polanski - so he decided to sue.
Tate's sister Debra will testify for him. So will Mia Farrow.
But arguing this out means expending hot air on the issue of who said what to whom in a restaurant long ago. A can of old and unlovely worms will be opened.
Libel cases traditionally turn on the damage to a plaintiff's good name, and the question of Polanski's unexpired statutory rape charge must inevitably arise.
The legendary pessimistic ending to his great film has Nicholson's private eye being told to abandon all thoughts of sorting out the squalid mess he'd got involved in: "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown."
At the end of all this, Polanski may wish he had received the same advice.
2005-07-10 Paul Harris. Spielberg's take on terrorism outrages the critics observer.guardian.co.uk
Production has already started on the film - still untitled - which chronicles a bloody series of assassinations carried out by Israeli secret agents against the Palestinian terrorists responsible for the 1972 killings.
The incident is one of the most controversial issues in modern Israeli and Jewish history. The series of assassinations ended in scandal when it was revealed that Mossad agents had murdered an innocent Moroccan waiter in Norway after a case of mistaken identity.
Spielberg's project has been surrounded in secrecy, mindful of the dangerous territory the film will touch on and nervous of being seen either to condone or condemn the Israeli action. In a carefully worded statement released by his studio last week, Spielberg said the film would look at '...a defining moment in the modern history of the Middle East'.
The movie marks a deliberate step away from the more family-friendly blockbusters that Spielberg has been known for in recent years. Films such as War of the Worlds and Minority Report were special effects-laden science fiction, while The Terminal was a wholesome drama.
But the film will place Spielberg firmly back on the rocky ground he tackled with Schindler's List. It will also thrust him into the political spotlight as the film will be seen to deal with the moral issues of how a country responds to a terrorist attack. There will be obvious parallels with current US policy towards al-Qaeda terrorists and especially the use of assassinations and torture in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.
Spielberg himself hinted at the inevitable rows that will dog the film from now until it is released at the end of the year, just in time for Oscar season. 'By experiencing how the implacable resolve of these men to succeed in their mission slowly gave way to troubling doubts about what they were doing, I think we can learn something important about the tragic stand-off we find ourselves in today,' Spielberg said.
Such comments have already outraged some conservative columnists in America, who see Hollywood as a bastion of liberalism. Debbie Schlussel, a right-wing pundit, has blasted Spielberg for being too soft on terrorism and dubbed the project a 'Stockholm Syndrome' movie. 'We don't need more psychobabble about understanding the terrorists and why they hate us. Who cares why they hate us?' she said.
2005-07-06 Mark Morford. The Great Tom Cruise Backlash. Will this annoying phase pass, or will Tom become the next super-rich, Mel Gibson-like nutball? sfgate.com
sfgate.com
Note to Tom Cruise: You are maxing out. Wearing out the welcome. Becoming less the tolerable and moderately talented and mildly likable megastar and more like an itchy boil on the deranged ferret of popular culture, requiring lancing.
The signs are all in place. The crazy ranting, the jumping on couches, the crazed grins, the enormous piles of money, the incessant photos of you sucking the face off your new and bewildered and child-like fiancee, the weird diatribes about psychiatry and mental health, the relatively common knowledge that you are super-seriously involved at the highest levels with one of the creepier money-hungry pseudo-religions in the nation.
Also: the assigning of a "handler" from said cult to tag along with your new bewildered young fiancee everywhere she goes to "keep her on the path" and make sure she doesn't, I don't know what. Talk about the nightmares? Break down in a heap and confess that it's all a staged setup? Reveal your true lizard identity?
Yes, Tom Cruise is getting weirder, more annoying than ever. Or maybe he was already deeply weird and we just didn't know it because he was famously tight-lipped in interviews and was never much of a deep thinker and wasn't all that articulate and no one really paid much attention because, well, who really cares?
Rumors persist that Tom's Scientology-rich pseudo-love somehow convinced Katie that she must immediately dump her longtime, beloved manager and agent switch to his. And she is rumored to be disassociating with old friends and not communicating with her close family (cult behaviors, all) -- and did we mention the part about how the Scientologists have allegedly assigned her a handler/new best friend to tag along wherever she goes and answer questions for her and coach her on how to behave and speak when asked about their "religion"?
But Katie Holmes, she's not like them. She's just a kid. She needs lots of creepy brainwashi... er, gentle religious coaching into the super-secret ways of the "church" of Scientology, with their incredibly vicious army of lawyers who attack anyone who says anything at all negative about their cult... er, religion.
One thing the weird TomKat relationship is not, we can be reasonably sure, is a publicity stunt designed to lure more fans to "War of the Worlds" and "Batman Begins." Reason: Tom Cruise does not need the money. As Edward Jay Epstein points out in his excellent Slate piece, Tommy raked in well over $120 million on the first two "Mission: Impossible" movies alone, and stands to make easily that much from "War of the Worlds" and the forthcoming "M:I-3" and he is quickly accumulating more power and money than God or than the giddy accountants over at the bizarre Scientology compound outside Hemet, Calif., ever wet-dreamed.
2005-07-03 Alex Massie. Never mind the world, can Tom save Hollywood? news.scotsman.com
WHAT'S the matter with Hollywood? Things just aren't what they used to be in Tinseltown. A string of box office flops this year has produced the worst slump in a generation and left studio executives wondering what they can do to recapture the movie-going public's imagination and interest. For its part, the public simply wonders if Hollywood can still produce movies worth seeing.
"It's too early to say if this [slump] is something endemic. The most apparent answer still seems to be the movies themselves have lacked the same excitement, to put it mildly," said Brandon Gray, president of Box Office Mojo, an online site that tracks movie grosses. "But the audience is still there, as evidenced by Revenge of the Sith breaking nearly every record in its first week. If Hollywood builds it, audiences will come. But Hollywood hasn't been building it lately."
Anybody who has wasted an evening at the cinema recently knows this is true. Ridley Scott's epic about the crusades, Kingdom of Heaven cost $130m to make but has brought in just $47m at the box office, while Russell Crowe's boxing movie Cinderella Man cost $88m and has taken just $50m at the American box office.
Last year's box office revenues were boosted by a string of major hits such as Spider Man 2, Shrek 2, the latest Harry Potter instalment and the success of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Thus far no comparable hits, apart from George Lucas's final Star Wars film, have emerged. Now the industry believes Stephen Spielberg's Tom Cruise vehicle The War of the Worlds must break records if it is to be lifted out of its current funk. Never mind saving planet Earth, Cruise has a more important job: saving planet Hollywood.
So why are the studios seemingly so bereft of imagination? The short answer is that it pays them to be. Odd though it may seem, it is often cheaper for a Hollywood studio to make a big-budget blockbuster such as The Day After Tomorrow than it is to produce a lower budget movie such as Sideways or Lost in Translation.
Disgruntled movie fans can partly blame the Germans for this sorry state of affairs. Generous German tax shelters help studios produce blockbuster drivel at almost no financial risk to themselves. For example, the 2001 Angelina Jolie picture, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, had a paper budget of $94m but actually cost Paramount just $7m to make once German tax breaks, and the $64m sale of the film's foreign rights had been counted. Filming some scenes in Britain and employing British actors and crew also allowed the company to claim $12m in tax breaks under Section 48 rules of the British tax system. As a result, anything the film made in the United States would be pure profit.
This sort of financing is increasingly common and conspires against smaller, more intellectual studio films such as Sideways (which cost $16m to make) that do not have an internationally recognisable star and cannot be sold internationally before their release.
The real money-spinners are franchises aimed at children, such as Harry Potter, which are essentially licences to print money. The first Harry Potter film has so far earned more than $1.25bn.
2005-06-25 Richard Leiby. A Couch Tom Cruise Won't Jump On washingtonpost.com
Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt: Tom Cruise tells "Today" show host Matt Lauer how much he doesn't know about Adderall and Ritalin
Anybody who watched the actor's performance on NBC's "Today" show yesterday witnessed an unsettling transformation. The movie star, who has long embraced Scientology, launched a full-bore assault on the psychiatric profession, sticking to a script that his church (founded, mind you, by a hack science fiction writer) has been promoting for decades.
"Psychiatry is a pseudoscience," he told host Matt Lauer, later saying: "You don't know the history of psychiatry. I do."
On "Today," Cruise also raged against Adderall and Ritalin, often prescribed to treat hyperactivity and attention-deficit disorder in children. "Do you know what Adderall is? Do you know Ritalin? Do you know now that Ritalin is a street drug? Do you understand that?"
The interview (which Lauer told viewers would continue on Monday -- oh, goody) is pegged to Cruise's role in the film "War of the Worlds," which opens Wednesday. But every interview with Cruise lately has seemed to revolve around the twin suns of Scientology and Katie Holmes, his new fiancee and a recent initiate to the church.
2005-06-20 Woodie Allen: 'Nothing Pleases Me More than Being Thought of as a European Filmmaker' service.spiegel.de
2005-06-18 Ali Mohammad Taha. After Salahuddin arabnews.com
2005-06-17 Actor Tom Cruise proposes to girlfriend Katie Holmes at Eiffel Tower canada.com
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images.chron.com
Actor Tom Cruise said he and girlfriend Katie Holmes are engaged, after he popped the question early Friday morning atop the Eiffel Tower.
Cruise, speaking at a Paris news conference with Holmes, said: "Yes, I proposed to her."
The couple often shared smiles and blushes as Cruise turned to look at her, with a massive diamond ring on her finger.
Asked why he chose the famed Paris landmark, he said: "I've never been to the Eiffel Tower. It's Paris, it's a beautiful city, it's very romantic."
Cruise, 42, was in Paris to promote the French release of the Steven Spielberg film War of the Worlds next month. He and 26-year-old Holmes went public with their romantic relationship in April.
2005-06-08 Tom Goeller. TV show depicts 9/11 as Bush plot washtimes.com
A fictional crime drama based on the premise that the Bush administration ordered the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Washington aired this week on German state television, prompting the Green Party chairman to call for an investigation.
Sunday night's episode of "Tatort," a popular murder mystery that has been running on state-run ARD-German television for 35 years, revolved around a German woman and a man who was killed in her apartment.
According to the plot, which was seen by approximately 7 million Germans, the dead man had been trained to be one of the September 11 pilots but was left behind, only to be tracked down and killed by CIA or FBI assassins.
The woman, who says in the program that the September 11 attacks were instigated by the Bush family for oil and power, then is targeted, presumably to silence her. The drama concludes with the German detectives accepting the truth of her story as she eludes the U.S. government hit men and escapes to safety in an unnamed Arab country.
As ludicrous as it may sound to most Americans, the tale has resonance in Germany, where fantastic conspiracy theories often are taken as fact.
2005-05-28 Oliver Stone Faces Drug, DUI Investigation sfgate.com
Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone was arrested on suspicion of drug possession and driving while intoxicated, police said Saturday.
Stone, 58, was arrested Friday night at a police checkpoint on Sunset Boulevard after showing signs of alcohol intoxication, police Sgt. John Edmundson said.
A search of his Mercedes turned up drugs, Edmundson said. He did not specify what kind.
Stone was released Saturday morning after posting $15,000 bail.
2005-05-27 Yoel Sano. The Force is with the conservatives atimes.com
2005-05-16 A.O. SCOTT. Some Surprises in That Galaxy Far, Far Away movies2.nytimes.com
Natalie Portman as Padme Amidala, Hayden Christensen as Anakin
his is by far the best film in the more recent trilogy, and also the best of the four episodes Mr. Lucas has directed. That's right (and my inner 11-year-old shudders as I type this): it's better than "Star Wars."
"Revenge of the Sith," which had its premiere here yesterday at the Cannes International Film Festival, ranks with "The Empire Strikes Back" (directed by Irvin Kershner in 1980) as the richest and most challenging movie in the cycle. It comes closer than any of the other episodes to realizing Mr. Lucas's frequently reiterated dream of bringing the combination of vigorous spectacle and mythic resonance he found in the films of Akira Kurosawa into American commercial cinema.
To be sure, some of the shortcomings of "Phantom Menace" (1999) and "Attack of the Clones" (2002) are still in evidence, and Mr. Lucas's indifference to two fairly important aspects of moviemaking - acting and writing - is remarkable.
"This is how liberty dies - to thunderous applause," Padmé observes as senators, their fears and dreams of glory deftly manipulated by Palpatine, vote to give him sweeping new powers. "Revenge of the Sith" is about how a republic dismantles its own democratic principles, about how politics becomes militarized, about how a Manichaean ideology undermines the rational exercise of power. Mr. Lucas is clearly jabbing his light saber in the direction of some real-world political leaders. At one point, Darth Vader, already deep in the thrall of the dark side and echoing the words of George W. Bush, hisses at Obi-Wan, "If you're not with me, you're my enemy." Obi-Wan's response is likely to surface as a bumper sticker during the next election campaign: "Only a Sith thinks in absolutes."
2005-05-16 Erik Kirschbaum. American way of life attacked in films at Cannes reuters.myway.com
he dark underside of the United States has taken center stage in several films at Cannes this year, capped on Monday with a scathing attack of past and present racism in America by Danish director Lars von Trier.
"Manderlay," about a fictional Alabama plantation where people are living in 1933 as if slavery were never abolished, staggered festival-goers with a disturbing portrayal of America that fails, even today, to come to terms with its racist past.
There are a number of other films that examine dark and depressing aspects of the United States and "American Dream" losers, filled with violence, drugs and alcohol abuse. They were made by directors from the United States, Canada and Europe.
The films, screening at the world's most important festival here, also feed off a lingering anti-American sentiment prevailing in Europe over the Iraq war. Michael Moore won the festival's top award last year for his film "Fahrenheit 9/11."
Von Trier, whose fear of flying has prevented him from visiting the United States, won thunderous cheers at the world premiere and a news conference, where he said he enjoyed bashing America on screen because it invades his life even in Denmark.
"The Power of Nightmares" is a powerful British documentary about U.S. President George W.. Bush's use of fear and illusions to rally support for his war on terror.
But von Trier, whose equally bleak America story "Dogville" starring Nicole Kidman was also at Cannes in 2003, said he would be happy to watch a film slamming his home country of Denmark.
2005-05-15 Charlotte Higgins. Final Star Wars bears message for America film.guardian.co.uk
The republic is crumbling under attack from alien forces. Democracy is threatened as the leader plays on the people's paranoia. Amid the confusion it is suddenly unclear whether the state is in more danger from insurgents, or from the leader himself.
It sounds more like a Michael Moore polemic than a Star Wars movie. But George Lucas, speaking as his latest epic was given its world premiere at Cannes yesterday, confirmed that Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, could be read as a parable about American politics.
He found historical echoes down the ages. "I looked at ancient Rome, and how, having got rid of kings, the Senate ended up with Caesar's nephew as emperor ... how democracy turns itself into a dictatorship. I also looked at revolutionary France ... and Hitler.
"It tends to follow similar patterns. Threats from outside leading to the need for more control; democracy not being able to function properly because of internal squabbling."
2005-05-15 Eugene Hernandez]. Lucas Talks "Sith": Tragedy of Vader Parallels History blogs.indiewire.com
"If you're not with me, you are my enemy," threatens Hayden Christensen, as the newly christened Darth Vader in "Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith". "Only a Sith deals in absolutes," responds Ewan McGregor coolly as the betrayed mentor, Obi-Wan. Such a line, not to mention the film's story of a growing empire that is transformed from a democracy into a dictatorship, has stirred some of the film's first viewers to question filmmaker George Lucas about the political context of the film.
"This really came out of the Vietnam era," Lucas said today of his six-part story about the transformation and rise of Darth Vader. But he admitted during this afternoon's press conference here in Cannes that there are parallels between Vietnam and Iraq and added that such themes have recurred throughout history. But, he feels that "Star Wars" is especially relevant today. "When I wrote Star Wars, Iraq didn't exist. We were just funding Saddam Hussein and giving him weapons of mass destruction, we weren't worried about him."
"I didn't think it was going to get quite this close," he said during the crowded session with the select press, "I hope this doesn't become true in our country. Maybe the film will wake people to see how easily a democracy can be subverted."
"This is not the fun, happy go lucky movie that some of the others were," George Lucas explained at the press conference. Then, asked if this is really the end of the saga, Lucas put to rest any rumors of more "Star Wars" films (other than an animated TV series about the Clone Wars and a live-action TV series about minor characters).
"This is about the tragedy of Darth Vader, it starts when he is 9 years old and ends when he dies," Lucas explained. "There really isn’t any more story."
Lucas added that in time, he hopes viewers will see the six films as one movie. Rejecting criticism of the recent two chapters, he said, "I see it all as one movie, I don’t pay attention to how people like one chapter or another chapter." He explained that those over 25 years old favor the first trilogy and those under 25 "fanatically adore" the recent episodes. "The devotion for each group is pretty much equal," Lucas said, reiterating his hope that in a decade, "I hope they are remembered as one movie."
2005-05-14 Charlotte Higgins. Pro-war film spotted on Croisette film.guardian.co.uk
George Bush and Tony Blair will whoop for joy. A strongly pro-war film has been premiered at the Cannes film festival - and it comes from Iraq.
The main part of Hiner Saleem's Kilomètre Zéro, premiered in competition for the Palme D'Or, is set in 1988 against the backdrop of the deaths of thousands of Iraqi Kurds at the hands of Saddam's cousin, "Chemical" Ali Hassan al-Majid.
"The problem with Iraq is that it was not born of the will of a single people, but because Churchill wanted it. Power went to the people who had the most Kalashnikovs."
The story is set during the Iran-Iraq war. Ako, an Iraqi Kurd, goes out one morning in his pyjamas to buy bread. He is arrested by the Iraqi military and sent to fight on the dusty, brutal Iranian front in Basra.
One day he is ordered to accompany the body of a dead soldier as it is returned to the family. So he and an Iraqi Arab driver set off together across the unremitting landscape.
The film, partly funded by the Kurdistan regional government and partly from France, reads as a strong political statement of Kurdish identity.
Some also see it as anti-Arab, accusing it of presenting the driver as dimwitted and dominated by naive religious feeling.
Saleem responded: "The Arabs don't know the Kurds well. They forced us to study Arab history and culture. But they know nothing of our history, culture, sensibilities, dreams. An effort must be made by them to understand us."
He denied that the film was overtly political in its message: "You don't produce a film to draw people's attention to politics. I wanted to show the hills of Kurdistan, the faces of the people. I don't think I have produced a military or political film.
Saleem, who has lived in France since the early 1980s and whose previous work includes Vodka Lemon, said the film was based on real events that happened to his brother.
The making of the film, he said, presented enormous practical difficulties. Because of the lack of indigenous film culture ("except for a few propaganda films"), technicians, crew and equipment had to be brought from France.
"It was a nightmare to get the cameras and crew to Kurdistan and even harder to get them back. We seriously thought of contacting the smugglers on the borders to help."
2005-05-12 Stuart Jeffries. The film US TV networks dare not show film.guardian.co.uk
Last year, Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore's documentary, described by the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw as a "barnstorming anti-war/anti-Bush polemic tossed like an incendiary device into the crowded Cannes festival", won the Palme d'Or. This year something more discreet, but perhaps no less incendiary, is go ing to go off at Cannes in the form of Curtis's Bafta-winning documentary. Like Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith and Woody Allen's Match Point, Curtis's film is not in competition, but it is nonetheless this year's Fahrenheit 9/11, shaking festival-goers out of their aesthetic reveries with a political analysis of the causes and consequences of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
Curtis does not care for the Moore parallel. "Moore is a political agitprop film-maker. I am not - you'd be hard pushed to tell my politics from watching it. It was an attempt at historical explanation for September 11. You see, up to this point nobody had done a proper history of the ideas and groups that have created our modern world. It's weird that nobody had done before me."
His documentary took as its starting point the year 1949, when two men who would prove massively influential to the establishment of Islamic terror groups and to the neo-Conservative American tendency that now dominates Washington were both in the US. One was an Egyptian school inspector called Sayyid Qutb whose ideas would directly inspire those who flew the planes on the attacks of September 11. Qutb's summer visit to Colorado revolted him so much - he could see nothing there but decadent materialism - that he went home thinking that modern liberal freedoms were eroding society's bonds and that only a radical Islam could prevent its destruction. Meanwhile, in Chicago, an obscure political philosopher called Leo Strauss was developing a similar critique of western liberalism (though without the Islamic answer to individualism's purported ills). He called on conservative politicians to invent national myths to hold society together and stop America in particular from collapsing into degraded individualism. It was from such Straussian reflections that the idea that the US's national destiny was to tilt against seeming foreign evils - be they the Soviet bloc or, later, fundamentalist Islam - was born.
The Power of Nightmares will be shown in three-hour form on al-Jazeera tonight, and at Cannes on Saturday.
2005-05-11 Dilshad D.Ali. Crusades Film Depicts Muslims Positively islamonline.net
"To kill an infidel is not murder. It is the path to Paradise."
With this advice given to Christians joining the Crusades to defend their hold on Jerusalem, one may think that the opposing Muslim army is being set up as a murdering, marauding lot of barbarians. But in Ridley Scott’s new film, Kingdom of Heaven, nothing could be further from that.
Scott has made a career out of putting his "action movie with a conscience" spin on historical events - from the incident of a 1993 downed US helicopter in Somalia in Black Hawk Down to the downfall of early Texan fighters in The Alamo. And so he strives again to preach a message, to show what should be between faiths with Kingdom of Heaven.
By focusing on the Third Crusade in the 12th century, when Christian armies who held Jerusalem sought to expand their base at the expense of the treaty their king had with Muslim leader Saladin’s vast army, Scott draws a direct correlation between the events of then and the political and religious troubles of now.
In fact, the film is such an obvious parable for the present world situation that it belies the need for depth. You don’t have to search for the symbolism nor do you need to figure out what Scott feels about the emptiness and ludicrousness of religious fanaticism juxtaposed against a war mired in material greed.
So who’s the victor in this film? History is shown accurately with Saladin and his vast army winning Jerusalem at the end. More importantly, the mercy of Islam is shown as Saladin allows the Christians of the city safe passage back to Christian lands. But it would be asking too much to have Saladin be the victor of this film.
Thus Scott is careful to place the shining light on his hero, Balian. This is the man we should be hoisting up. Scott took a gamble in choosing Bloom, in his first leading role, to carry the film. Bloom tries hard—he is as noble, honorable, and just as he can be. But he does not have the stature to carry the film. Why are all the other characters magnetically drawn to him? How did he become so worthy of respect? It is a mystery.
In choosing Russell Crow as Maximus to carry his film Gladiator, Scott guaranteed a true financial and emotional success. But with Bloom as Balian in Kingdom of Heaven, success is much more shaky. And will American audiences flock to a film heavy with didactic lessons for today’s world? I hope so, but I doubt it. The box office will provide the end to this story.
2005-05-09 Muslim groups praise Crusades film english.aljazeera.net
A new epic film about the Crusades has struck a chord in the Arab world, where cinemagoers say it has challenged the Hollywood stereotype of Arabs and Muslims as terrorists.
Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, which depicts a 12th century battle for Jerusalem between Muslims and Crusaders, is also a welcome message of support for those who back moderation over extremism in managing ties between Islam and the West.
"The film goes against religious fanaticism very clearly. All that goes against hatred, fanaticism and systematic opposition between those two worlds is welcome," Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, author of The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, said.
"The aim of the film is to heal wounds, not reopen them," Egyptian film critic Tariq al-Shinnawy said.
But Scott's efforts have not won universal praise among Middle Eastern viewers.
US-based Lebanese academic Asad Abu Khalil objected to a scene where the lead character, a Crusader called Balian and played by Orlando Bloom, appeared to show Arab peasants how to dig wells to irrigate farm land.
"I was ... most unhappy, when the hero of the movie ... took over his estate, and with typical Western 'genius' taught those inferior Arabs how to dig for water, as if they had not been doing that for centuries," Abu Khalil said on his website.
"This is akin to the Western myth of Zionist immigration causing the "desert to bloom" in Palestine."
2005-05-08 Vanessa Thorpe. Native New Yorker Woody Allen flies flag for Britain at Cannes observer.guardian.co.uk
Woody Allen, the director until now heavily associated with stories of life in his native New York City, will be flying the Union flag when the annual festivities begin on Wednesday.
His new film, Match Point, a dark thriller set in London high society, is to be premiered there and features chiefly British actors - alongside a big Hollywood name. The film, part-funded by BBC Films, stars Scarlett Johansson and Emily Mortimer, and is something of an homage to Alfred Hitchcock's suspenseful masterpieces. Match Point is about a young tennis instructor who coaches a member of a rich family and is drawn into an upper-class world and a dangerous romantic involvement with two women. Starring with Johansson and Mortimer are Allen himself and the British actors Brian Cox and James Nesbitt.
Allen's decision to hold the premiere at Cannes is a sign not only of the established French appetite for his films, but also of the director's growing disaffection with the United States.
His last film to be released, Melinda and Melinda, is doing fairly badly at the American box office although well in Europe, and the director has since announced, to the surprise of the film world, that he will make his next film in London, returning to Britain for the second summer in a row.
His sister and producer, Letty Aronson, has said it is too soon for Allen to give up his citizenship or his Knicks baseball tickets in favour of a Chelsea season ticket. 'But it is different in Europe, where they have higher regard for film-makers and where they don't have a studio system,' she added.
2005-05-03 Cahal Milmo. The Crusades: A wound that has lasted 900 years enjoyment.independent.co.uk
In the opening minutes of Kingdom of Heaven, the father of the hero, Balian of Ibelin, tells his son what to expect in the Holy Land: "A kingdom of conscience; peace instead of war, love instead of hate. That is what lies at the end of Crusade."
For Sir Ridley, knighted two years ago for services to film, the desire to depict the 200-year struggle between the Christian and Islamic faiths for primacy over the spiritual treasures of Jerusalem and the Holy Land has been a 30-year dream.
Among the claims made for the production - featuring the full panoply of costume drama eye-candy from vast battle scenes and a shipwreck to dashing knights and a leprous king - are that it is "historically accurate" and designed to be "a fascinating history lesson".
Critics, ranging from some of Britain's leading academics to Islamic terror groups, have rounded on Sir Ridley and his film for distorting the reality of complex Christian and Muslim relations in the years preceding the 12th-century Third Crusade.
Among the more temperate language used about the film have been the words "rubbish", "ridiculous", "complete fiction" and "dangerous". To add an extra twist, Sir Ridley has been accused of stealing the plot from an American researcher's work.
Indeed, the 65-year-old British director faces much adversity in his self-proclaimed mission to rectify Western perceptions of Islam and "challenge extremism of all kinds". Speaking to the BBC yesterday, he said: "[The film] is a very good discussion and balanced on those tricky subjects: politics and religion. There's no black and white in a discussion of these particular worlds. It's a minutiae of grey areas."
During filming in Morocco last year, more than a dozen death threats were issued by fundamentalists, forcing King Mohammed VI to offer 1,000 soldiers to guard the set in the Sahara.
Moderate politicians in the country accused the film, financed by the Fox studio, of being part of an American propaganda campaign for "legitimacy in the crusade against the Arab world" - a reference to George Bush's spontaneous use of the word "crusade" when launching his War on Terror in the wake of the 11 September attacks in 2001.
But while some Muslim scholars have denounced the film as "anti-Islamic", debate among Western historians has focused on concern that it confuses historical events and ultimately goes too far in portraying the Crusaders as bearded brutes and romanticising the Muslim warriors, in particular Saladin, as munificent foes bent on enlightening the lobster-coloured invaders.
Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, Britain's leading historian of the crusades, has led the criticism, saying the film presents "Osama bin Laden's version of history".
The Cambridge academic has accused Sir Ridley of relying on the Victorian view of the crusades as portrayed in Sir Walter Scott's account of the conflict in his book, The Talisman. "It sounds absolute balls," Professor Riley Smith said. "It's rubbish. It's not historically accurate at all. They refer to The Talisman, which depicts the Muslims as sophisticated and civilised and the Crusaders are all brutes and barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality."
Balian finds a city ruled by a Christian king, Baldwin IV, who as well as suffering leprosy has forged a fragile peace to keep Saladin's army at bay and allow the three major faiths - Islam, Christianity and Judaism - to worship alongside each other.
It is only after the death of Baldwin and his succession by his brother-in-law, Guy de Lusignan, that the baddies of the piece, the warrior monks of the Knights Templar arrive to disrupt the inter-faith panacea and declare war anew. The result is the Battle of Hattin on the plains 60 miles south west of Damascus in July 1187 in which the Crusader army, successfully outmanoeuvred by Saladin and deprived of water, was slaughtered by the Muslims.
Under Sir Ridley's direction, a nihilistic Balian ultimately finds himself the defender of Jerusalem against Saladin's vast army before negotiating a civilised surrender.
According to the film's critics, this compelling yarn is a strange mixture of historical figures and events with interpretations of the Crusader story that bear little relation to reality.
Historians have particularly quibbled with the notion of a peaceful confraternity in Jerusalem under Baldwin IV and the view that Guy de Lusignan and his lieutenants were untrammelled savages outwitted by the urbane Saladin.
Ironically, the only evidence for a friendship between the Crusader knights and their enemies is a contemporary chronicler who shares his first name with the West's current number one bogeyman.
Usama ibn Munqidh, who wrote before the Battle of Hattin, expressed admiration for some of the Crusader leaders. But experts point out that this was driven by the assimilation of the Western invaders.
"The idea that the Crusades were about constant warfare and set-piece battles is also wrong. This was a struggle over 200 years with long periods of detente punctuated by heightened tension and conflict. There were sieges and raids but big battles were a rarity."
But while showing mercy to some, Saladin, whose other champions have included Saddam Hussein, was ruthless with others. After the Battle of Hattin, he personally undertook the execution of Reynald of Chatillon, a leader of the Crusader army who had attacked pilgrims on the Muslim Haj, and ordered the execution of the Knights Templar.
Professor Hillenbrand said: "Saladin even had his own spin-doctors, two contemporary biographers who portrayed him as a jihad or holy warrior. The truth is he was just as interested in personal power, family power and territorial ambition. He was capable of acts of great generosity but he was also responsible for what can be described as the grim acts of war. The realities of war were on both sides in the Crusades."
Rifaat Ebied, the Egyptian-born professor of Semitic studies at Sydney University, said: "My instinct tells me that this film will be another point of view about the Crusades. It will not be definitive. Instead, we should realise that even at the time of greatest tension between the West and the Arab worlds, there has always been dialogue between both sides."
2005-04-18 Catriona Davies. Genghis the good guy telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
Of all the images the name Genghis Khan brings to mind, that of a visionary who brought literacy, law and culture to his people rarely springs to mind.
His name is usually synonymous with evil, his image that of a brutal barbarian who slaughtered millions in his quest for power.
Yet a BBC drama-documentary is aiming to change the reputation of one of the world's most notorious warlords to that of a heroic figure who achieved greatness against all odds.
"Genghis Khan is right up there with the likes of Hitler and Attila the Hun as one of the bogeymen of history," said Ed Bazalgette, the programme's producer.
"We hear the phrase 'somewhere to the Right of Genghis Khan'. Everyone has heard the name yet few people know much about his story.
"It is one of the great untold stories of history and we wanted to get behind the myths. No one is suggesting that he was a benign individual but his history was written by those he defeated.
Genghis the Lefty telegraph.co.uk
It is a glorious, if unintentional, display of Beebthink. "Genghis Khan is up there with the likes of Hitler and Attila the Hun as one of the bogeymen of history," says the producer of a forthcoming documentary about the Mongol chief. "We hear the phrase 'slightly to the Right of Genghis Khan'." In the BBC's world, being called Right-wing is every bit as injurious to your good name as being thought to be a genocidal monster.
But does Genghis really deserve his conservative reputation? After all, he had pretty radical ideas about social reform. When he conquered a new tribe, it was his custom to liquidate the aristocracy and assimilate the lower orders: "providing opportunities for the many and not the few", as it were. Where modern socialists are sometimes accused of cutting high achievers down to size, Genghis did this literally, ordering the execution of all Tatars over a certain height. He was a great believer in state power, replacing Mongolia's clan system with a rudimentary bureaucracy.
2005-04-08 Crusades film 'will help Muslims' news.bbc.co.uk
Two Arabic actors starring in a Hollywood film about the Crusades say it will improve Western understanding of Muslim world.
Kingdom of Heaven depicts a 12th century Muslim-Christian battle for Jerusalem during the Third Crusade.
Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud, who plays the Muslim leader Saladin, said the film would not reinforce old stereotypes as some had feared.
The Ridley Scott-directed movie also stars Orlando Bloom and Liam Neeson.
Big budget
Massoud also said Kingdom of Heaven would show the US the benefits of diplomacy over war in resolving Middle East crises.
"Saladin fights battles, but he also enters into dialogue. We want to show that dialogue can be much better than war," he said.
"Today, America has overwhelming force but it is as if they don't want to build a dialogue."
Kingdom of Heaven, with a budget estimated at $130m (£69m), is being tipped as one of the summer's biggest film releases.
2005-03-16 Mel's Passion blamed for rise in anti-semitic attacks film.guardian.co.uk
Jim Caviezel as Jesus:image.guardian.co.uk
A report by a Jewish advocacy group has cited Mel Gibson's controversial The Passion of the Christ as the cause of a sharp rise in the number of anti-semitic attacks in Canada last year.
According to the League for Human Rights of B'nai Brith's 2004 audit of anti-semitic attacks in Canada, media coverage of Gibson's film - and its apparent suggestion that the role of Jews in the crucifixion should be emphasised over that of the Romans - led to an upsurge in attacks against the Canadian Jewish community.
The audit recorded 32 "incidents which had religious connotations to the story of Jesus's death" in 2004, up dramatically from the nine recorded in 2003. Of the 2004 incidents, nine were recorded during the time of the film's opening in February, and a further 15 in the three months following its release.
The incidents cited by the audit ranged from a phone call to a Jewish organisation in which the caller said, "We don't need Mel Gibson's film to hate you!" to a minister alleging that there was a "Jewish plot for world control" on TV.
2005-03-13 "Meet the Parents" Actress Nicole DeHuff Dies at 30 washingtonpost.com
Actress Nicole DeHuff, who memorably took a volleyball in the face from Ben Stiller in the 2000 hit movie "Meet the Parents," died of complications from pneumonia. She was 30.
DeHuff had twice visited a hospital shortly before her death Feb. 16 but was sent home both times, the E! Network's E! Online Web site reported Friday.
"Meet the Parents" was DeHuff's first film. A bumbling Stiller, who is dating her sister, accidentally breaks her nose during a volleyball game on the eve of her wedding. The action is one of many that estrange Stiller from DeHuff's menacing father, played by Robert De Niro.
Meet the Parents
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2005-03-10 Lucas Says New 'Star Wars' May Rate PG-13 abcnews.go.com
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George Lucas says the newest and final installment of his "Star Wars" films may get a PG-13 rating.
"We're going to watch him make a pact with the devil," says the director. "The film is more dark - more emotional. It's much more of a tragedy."
2005-02-28 Hank Stuever, William Booth. At the Oscars, a 'Baby' Boom washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
"Million Dollar Baby," Clint Eastwood's taut, small film about the determination of a woman boxer and her gruff trainer, won Best Picture at the 77th annual Academy Awards. Eastwood also won Best Director, while Hilary Swank took Best Actress and Morgan Freeman took Best Supporting Actor for their roles in the film.
It is the most major awards (a category encompassing Best Picture, Director and the four acting awards) for one film since 1992, when "The Silence of the Lambs" won four.
Jamie Foxx, as expected, won Best Actor for his portrayal of R&B legend Ray Charles in "Ray."
"Let's live this African American dream," Foxx said, thanking his managers, but he was also speaking broadly about the Oscars themselves, and Hollywood culture.
"The Aviator," director Martin Scorsese's epic story of the highs and lows of billionaire Howard Hughes, took five awards -- the most for any movie this year -- including cinematography, art direction, costume design and editing. Cate Blanchett won Best Supporting Actress for playing Katharine Hepburn in the film, but it failed to garner awards for its director or its star, Leonardo DiCaprio.
2005-02-26 Sally Quinn. Sideways' Logic: Please, Spare Us The Slob Story washingtonpost.com
Imagine, if you can, a movie about two unattractive, gross women slobs going on a week-long spree and ending up with Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck. Imagine that becoming a hit, nominated for five Academy Awards, acclaimed by critics.
Wait, don't even try. It ain't gonna happen.
"Sideways," the low-budget Oscar contender, is a guys' movie that celebrates a certain cultural fantasy: Set off on a drinking-carousing-debauching adventure for a week with your buddy, seduce two great-looking girls and then dump them and go home. What fun!
The reviews were fabulous, and then Charles Krauthammer wrote a whole column about it on the op-ed page, calling it "sublime . . . intelligent . . . clever, funny, moving." He concluded, "Trust me on this one. See it."
I did. I hated it. And it wasn't just me. Most of the women I know feel the same way.
There are two great-looking women in "Sideways," played by Sandra Oh and Virginia Madsen. They are treated badly by the two jerks, who were freshman roommates and have apparently never gotten past a freshman state of mind. Miles, the middle-aged Giamatti character, even steals money from his mother. On a visit home, he slips upstairs, leaving her with his boorish friend, and takes a wad of cash from her dresser drawer. This guy has no shame.
While the single mother played by Oh, flirtatious and desperate for a dad for her kid, might possibly fall for the former soap star Jack (Church), it is inconceivable that the Madsen character, named Maya, would ever look twice at a creep like Miles.
Okay, they share a love of the grape. But Miles, it becomes clear, is also an alcoholic. Just another reason Maya would not be attracted to him.
At the end of the movie, Miles begins a correspondence with Maya in which he bares his soul and confesses what a loser he is. He confesses everything except that he stole money from his mother. Then, in a burst of courage, he jumps in his car, speeds up the coast to the wine country and in the final scene, we see him pounding on Maya's door.
It was all I could do not to shout, "Don't answer it, Maya! For God's sake, don't answer it!"
But we know she will. She'll open the door and fall into his arms.
I propose another ending: a gooey lemon meringue pie right in the kisser.
C.Krauthammer. Discoveries, real and imagined jewishworldreview.com
2005-02-03 Star Trek: Enterprise to end in May canada.com
After four years, the mission is over for Star Trek: Enterprise.
The prequel to the original Star Trek science fiction series will air its final episode May 13, UPN and Paramount Network Television announced Wednesday. The series will get a send-off that "salutes its contributions to the network and satisfies its loyal viewers," said UPN Entertainment president Dawn Ostroff. She didn't disclose details.
Star Trek: Enterprise debuted in September 2001. Scott Bakula stars as Capt. Jonathan Archer, along with John Billingsley, Jolene Blalock, Dominic Keating, Anthony Montgomery, Linda Park and Connor Trinneer.
The series has been sold into rerun syndication and is set for debut this fall.
Its end means that, for the first time in 18 years, no first-run Star Trek series will be airing. The franchise included Star Trek (1966-69); Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94, syndicated); Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1992-99, syndicated); Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001, UPN); and Star Trek: Enterprise.
2005-01-29 Jacques Peretti. Oo-er missus film.guardian.co.uk
Robin Askwith in Confessions of a Driving Instructor
It's 1970, England have been knocked out of the World Cup; the Beatles are wearing beards and kaftans, shortly to go the way of Busted. And the British film industry has collapsed, largely because a small group of greedy Saudi Arabian men have decided to hike up the worldwide price of oil, so forcing the big American studios to withdraw their co-production wad. Overnight, a raft of distinguished actors, writers and directors are out of work: people desperate to stay in movies in order to pay the mortgage (no matter how bad these movies might be).
Only one thing can save the film industry. Porn. But not, y'know, porn that's really pornographic. No, British porn. Porn that Celia Imrie can star in. Or Captain Birds Eye. Or Olive from On The Buses. Porn with a flash of tit and arse, a twang of a G-string and The Sweeney's Dennis Waterman burning his cock on a hot-water bottle.
So was born the sex comedy. The most tragic episode in British cinema, but also, weirdly, the most memorable. Movies with strange and fantastically mundane titles like Confessions Of A Window Cleaner and Adventures Of A Taxi Driver, shot in glamorous locations like an out-of-season Butlins or a driving school in Cheam. Sex comedies lasted just 10 years, from 1970 to 1980, and disappeared as quickly as they'd first appeared. Yet the amazing thing is that these cheap, ridiculous movies saved the British film industry, at their height grossing more than the Bond or Carry On films, of which they were a raunchier, infinitely more surreal offshoot.
Against all (low) expectations, these films began doing incredibly well at the box office.
The don of sex comedies was Robin Askwith in the Confessions films. The plot was often written in the back of the transit van on the way to the shoot, and the same every... single... time. Cheeky cockney virgin (Robin) gets a job (say a window cleaner, or a taxi driver) allowing him to ogle and/or fondle as many birds as possible. A chance encounter with an older ie experienced woman (usually on a washing machine or in a Mini) educates Robin in the ways of un-doing bras and he journeys forth to pleasure the female world, with hilarious comic consequences for absolutely no one.
. . .we just watched in horrified fascination at the unfolding weirdness. Old men in goofy teeth and stained pyjamas ran across fields after naked girls, Benny Hill-style; sheds exploded with Y-fronts cascading down from the heavens; women sprayed whipped cream on their breasts while some ageing queen in a kimono watched on, applauding.
2005-01-17 David Germain. 'Aviator,' DiCaprio Fly High at Golden Globes washingtonpost.com
Leonardo DiCaprio
The Golden Globes shared the wealth Sunday, with the Howard Hughes epic "The Aviator" the big winner, taking the best-drama prize and two other awards -- but five films splitting the key acting honors.
The road-trip romp "Sideways" won for best comedy, while lead-actor prizes went to Jamie Foxx of the Ray Charles film biography "Ray," Hilary Swank of the boxing saga "Million Dollar Baby," Annette Bening of the showbiz comedy "Being Julia" and Leonardo DiCaprio of "The Aviator." "The Closer" won both supporting-actor prizes.
The Globes boost the winners' odds at the Academy Awards on Feb. 27.
2005-01-15 Adam Curtis. The Power of Nightmares antiwar.com
informationclearinghouse.info
-- Part I: Baby It’s Cold Outside
-- Part II: The Phantom Victory news.bbc.co.uk
-- Part III: The Shadows In The Cave news.bbc.co.uk
2004-12-31 Peter Bradshaw. Alexander film.guardian.co.uk
(2 stars of 5)
...the cringe-making final speech that a tearful Alexander must give at the bedside of his gravely ill friend Hephaistion, defiantly proclaiming his vision of a noble empire in which conquered peoples are brought together and educated in Hellenic values. If there is a message here for modern audiences doubting the Pax Americana in the Persian Gulf, it is annulled by an awful clunk of bathos. The camera looks back at Hephaistion's face, immobile in death, glassy-eyed and faintly slack-jawed as if someone had snuck in and hit him over the head with a frying pan. Alexander orders the doctor to be executed. The acting coach seems to get off lightly.
Stone's Alexander has got plenty of oomph in its battle scenes and a strong, ambitious sense of geo-political sweep. Fortune favours the bold, as the movie never ceases to remind us, and fortune has favoured Stone with some success here. But the intimate story of Alexander the man is fumbled. Farrell's king is not allowed to mature or develop; his devastation at not begetting a son - surely a vital part of his human make-up - is glossed over, lost in the clash of swords, the pounding of hooves, the thunder of martial glory. With a soldier's misplaced loyalty, Stone protects Alexander from the character-building experiences of failure.
2004-12-24 C.Krauthammer. Discoveries, real and imagined jewishworldreview.com
Sally Quinn. Sideways' Logic: Please, Spare Us The Slob Story washingtonpost.com
I picked something I had never heard of, "Sideways," playing at the local art house. The theater is just about empty. The movie is sublime, all the richer for being a surprise from beginning to end.
My first reaction upon seeing it is gratitude. With so many mindless movies around, one is simply grateful for any movie this intelligent. And this one is at once clever, funny, moving - a tightly scripted four-actor ensemble framed, improbably and brilliantly, by meditations on wine.
It does subtle, it does slapstick, with equal ease and command. "Sideways" is so delightful at every turn that you wish you could see it fresh - and be surprised again like the first time. That being impossible, I did the next best thing. I started proselytizing. First I took my wife, then friends, vicariously reveling in their surprise and delight.
I began noticing something: The theater was filling up. Originally near-empty, it was half-full my second time, sold out my third. That is when I realized how out of it I was. My little secret movie then is named best picture of the year by the New York and Los Angeles film critics and receives more Golden Globe nominations than any other movie.
Some secret. Once again, there will be no molybdenum play for me. Just a nice holiday treat for you. You realize that I told you very little about "Sideways." I want you to see it fresh and be surprised. Don't read up on it. Trust me on this one. See it.
2004-12-17 Kate Brumback. Stone confidant Europe will embrace 'Alexander' ancienthistory.about.com
Director Oliver Stone says he's optimistic that his historical epic "Alexander" will do well in Europe after getting off to a disappointing start at home. The film opens Jan. 5 in France.
"People in America are apathetic to ancient history - they are," Stone told reporters Thursday in Paris. "They don't study the classics like they do in Europe, so there is a significant difference in reaction. I know this because I've been in 12 foreign countries in the last month, to 12 openings."
The director noted that his film - based on the life of Alexander the Great - was No. 1 in about 18 countries, including Greece. He said he's happy just to share the story of Alexander.
Stone said he's disappointed in the focus in America on Alexander's sexuality, which has also preoccupied Greek moviegoers.
A group of Greek lawyers, who deny that Alexander had male lovers as the film purports, briefly considered taking Stone to court to ask that a disclaimer be shown before the filming warning audiences it wasn't historically accurate.
2004-12-16 Harrison Ford signs for Iraq war film film.guardian.co.uk
image.guardian.co.uk
Harrison Ford is to star in what will be Hollywood's first feature about the current Iraq war.
Producers Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher have bought the option for No True Glory: The Battle for Fallujah, a non-fiction written by Slate reporter Bing West.
The book is due to be published in May and tells the story of an assault on Iraqi insurgents in Falluja, from the perspective of US marines.
It is probable that the film will strike a different tone to the only major feature about the US's previous war in Iraq, 1999's Three Kings, which told the story of a group of cynical, self-serving US soldiers. West's coverage of the war has tended to side with US troops.
2004-12-09 Jonathan Freedland. A very Jewish villain film.guardian.co.uk
image.guardian.co.uk
Is Shylock, the Jewish moneylender who demands a "pound of flesh" from a debtor, a villain or a victim? Every time The Merchant of Venice is staged, the debate is restaged along with it. Does Shakespeare's play merely depict anti-semitism, or does it reek of it? Is the Bard describing, even condemning, the prevalent anti-Jewish attitudes of his time - or gleefully giving them an outlet? The papers of a million A-level students are marked forever with such questions.
Yet now they have a new force. Because the Merchant is playing in a new medium, making its debut as a full-length, big-budget feature film - complete with a top-drawer Hollywood star, Al Pacino, in the de facto lead.
It's clear that director Michael Radford does not want to make an anti-semitic film. But he has big two problems. The first is the play. The second is the medium.
Start with the play. We may want it to be a handy, sixth-form-friendly text exposing the horrors of racism, but Shakespeare refuses to play along. As the great critic Harold Bloom has declared, "One would have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to recognise that Shakespeare's grand, equivocal comedy The Merchant of Venice is nevertheless a profoundly anti-semitic work."
There is no getting away from it: Shylock is the villain, bent on disproportionate vengeance. Crucially, his villainy is not shown as a quirk of his own, individual personality, but is rooted overtly in his Jewishness.
Thus, he is shown as obsessed by money, a man who dreams of moneybags, whose very opening words are "three thousand ducats". When his daughter betrays him and flees with a Christian lover, it is her theft of his money which is said to trouble him as much as the loss of a child. "As the dog Jew did utter in the streets/'My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!' "
Radford can dress his film up as prettily as he likes - and the costumes, Rembrandt lighting and Venetian locations certainly ensure that his Merchant is lovely to look at. But he can't dodge this hard, stubborn fact. Shylock's villainy is depicted as a specifically Jewish villainy. "And by our holy Sabbath have I sworn/To have the due and forfeit of my bond." Macbeth's murderousness is not a Scottish trait, nor is Hamlet's indecision a Danish one. But Shylock's wickedness is Jewish.
When Shylock acts badly, Shakespeare suggests he is fully in accordance with Jewish tradition. Shylock plots Antonio's downfall with his friend Tubal, promising to continue their dark talk "at our synagogue".
So the film-maker has a problem with the play he has chosen. But - and this may be the bigger surprise - he has deepened his trouble by making a film.
For the very nature of the medium aggravates the traditional dilemmas of staging The Merchant of Venice. We may want to dismiss Portia and friends as ghastly airheads, in contrast with weighty Shylock, but that's tricky when they are played by beautiful A-list film stars, in gorgeous locations accompanied by delightful music. How can we do anything but sympathise with Antonio, when he's played by Jeremy Irons - exposing his chest to Shyock's knife in an almost Christlike pose?
The result is that stories of anti-Jewish hatred take on an almost allegorical quality - as if they are not about Jews at all, but are, instead, parables for racism or intolerance in general. (Radford has hinted that his film should be understood in the light of the current collision between Islam and the west.)
This might work if Shylock was, say, an Inca, or a Minoan - if, in other words, the Jews were no longer around. But Jews are still around - and so, unfortunately, is anti-semitism.
2004-11-02 Gunman kills Dutch film director news.bbc.co.uk
newsimg.bbc.co.uk
Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh, who made a controversial film about Islamic culture, has been stabbed and shot dead in Amsterdam, Dutch police say.
Police arrested a man in a nearby park after an exchange of gunfire.
Van Gogh, 47, had received death threats after his film Submission, on violence against women in Islamic societies, was shown on Dutch TV.
Eyewitnesses quoted by Radio Netherlands said Van Gogh was attacked while cycling by a man dressed in a traditional Moroccan jallaba.
Both the suspect and a policeman suffered bullet wounds and are now in hospital.
Van Gogh - who was related to the famous Dutch painter - had also been making a film about Pim Fortuyn, the populist right-wing, anti-immigration politician assassinated in May 2002.
The film Submission told the story of a Muslim woman forced into an arranged marriage who is abused by her husband and raped by her uncle. It triggered an outcry from Dutch Muslims.
In one scene the film showed an actress in see-through garments with Koranic script written on her body, which also bore whip marks.
The Netherlands is home to nearly one million Muslims or 5.5% of the population.
Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said "it is unacceptable if expressing your opinion would be the cause of this brutal murder".
And Queen Beatrix said she was shocked and appalled at the killing, AFP news agency reported.
2004-10-27 John Lichfield. 'French' war film takes flak for US funding news.independent.co.uk
A long-awaited new film by the most successful French director-and-actress team for decades reaches the screens in France today. But is it a French film?
Un Long Dimanche de Fiançailles features the director and actress who made Amélie a global triumph in 2001. The movie is about the First World War and its aftermath. It stars Audrey Tautou (ex-Amélie ) as Mathilde, a young woman who refuses to believe the official story that her fiancé was killed "on the field of honour" in January 1917.
For the first time in French cinematic history, the film tackles desertion and self-mutilation among soldiers of the Great War - the subject of a Stanley Kubrick film, Paths of Glory (1957), which was banned in France until 1975.
But most of the €45m (£31m) needed to make the film, including some of the most horrifically realistic battle scenes ever filmed, came from Warner Brothers in Hollywood.
Can the film also qualify for a €3.6m subsidy from the national agency that supports film making, partly by imposing a tax on cinema entrance tickets?
The Centre National de la Cinématographie says it can. The film was made in French, in France, with a French director, mostly French actors and French technicians. But a group of French film-making companies have brought a legal action to block the subsidy payment.
2004-09-17 Ian Kershaw. The human Hitler film.guardian.co.uk
Of course, until I had seen the film I could not be absolutely sure - but I doubted it very much. It seemed like a typical case of German angst - understandable, but exaggerated - about the Nazi past and its relationship to the present. I took the view that it was absolutely legitimate to make the film. It was, after all, not the first time that the bunker story had been filmed; merely the first time by a German cast.
I had often thought that it was no more than a matter of time before Germany produced a feature film about Hitler. Only a few years ago, this would probably still have seemed too daring. But making such a film is a part of the continuing, gradual, but inexorable process of seeing the Hitler era as history - even more important, feeling it to be history. The dictator has always, understandably and rightly, tormented German historical consciousness, and still does. What happened under his rule and in his name has, perhaps permanently, destroyed any possible positive relationship to the past in Germany. And it might be added that the way the country has struggled to cope with its troubled past has often been commendable. But distant events necessarily become viewed differently over time. They become a part of history. This is the case in all societies. It will be the case even for Germans.
Eichinger was helped by an outstanding cast. Juliane Köhler is splendid, if perhaps a little too vivacious, as Eva Braun. Ulrich Matthes and Corinna Harfouch are suitably sinister as Joseph and Magda Goebbels - horrifyingly so in the harrowing scene when Magda kills her children. Above all, Bruno Ganz is superb as Hitler. The decrepit individual shuffling through the bunker rooms, his mood ricocheting unpredictably from bleak resignation to wildly unreal flurries of optimism, is brilliantly played. The towering outbursts of white-hot rage, subsiding into pathetic self-pity, the fury directed at the alleged "betrayal" of generals who had strained every sinew to fulfil his commands; his cold indifference to the fate of the German people; his last wishes to continue the fight against the Jews; this portrayal by Ganz is Hitler much as I envisaged him when writing the final chapter of my biography. Of all the screen depictions of the Führer, even by famous actors such as Alec Guinness or Anthony Hopkins, this is the only one which to me is compelling. Part of this is the voice. Ganz has Hitler's voice to near perfection. It is chillingly authentic.
I left the cinema gripped by the film. As a production, it is a triumph - a marvellous historical drama. As I made my way home, ready to congratulate Eichinger on his brilliant achievement, it crossed my mind that the success of Der Untergang might prompt a new type of Hitler-Welle (Hitler wave), this time in feature films. I hope not. Apart from the likelihood that they will not all match Eichinger's high standards, films dealing with earlier episodes of Hitler's life may well have greater difficulty in avoiding trivialisation and moral insensitivity. I am, of course, not suggesting that there should be a veto or censorship on the making of such films - Germany is a mature and stable enough democracy to put up with them. But are they needed? Will they bring new insights? Will it become any clearer why the people of a highly advanced, politically pluralistic, economically advanced, modern society thought, threequarters of a century ago, they had found national salvation in Hitler? Does German need this type of reminder of its past in order not to forget it?
Der Untergang (The Downfall) went on general release in Germany yesterday. Ian Kershaw's latest book about Hitler, Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and the Roots of Appeasement, is published on October 7 by Allen Lane
2004-08-30 Star Trek's Scotty, James Doohan, honoured at fundraiser for Alzheimer's canada.com
James Doohan
James Doohan beamed his way through the first of a series of events honouring him in what are expected to be his final public appearances.
The 84-year-old actor who played Scotty on Star Trek laughed and smiled throughout a Hollywood tribute Saturday night featuring fellow cast members and about 600 guests.
Doohan was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease several months ago and the event at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel served as a fundraiser for an Alzheimer's research foundation.
Doohan, whose character was Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott of "Beam me up, Scotty" fame, was also appearing Sunday on a stage with the entire surviving cast of the original sci-fi series, including William Shatner (Capt. Kirk) and Leonard Nimoy (Mr. Spock). He is getting a star Tuesday on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The events are expected to be the final public appearances for Doohan, who also suffers from Parkinson's disease and diabetes.
2004-08-24 Kate Connolly. Germany breaks the Hitler taboo telegraph.co.uk
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A decades-long taboo was broken in Germany yesterday with the launch of a feature film in which Adolf Hitler appears for the first time in a central role, not as a ranting demagogue but as a soft-spoken dreamer.
The Downfall is a huge shift from the previous tendency in German cinema to show Hitler only as a background figure or a character who does not appear on camera at all.
It tells the story of the last 12 days of Hitler's life in his 25ft-deep bunker in Berlin - including his suicide alongside his new wife Eva Braun on April 30, 1945 - while advancing Soviet troops pulverise the city with shellfire.
The production by Bernd Eichinger, a respected director, is likely to cause controversy when it opens in German cinemas next month. It depicts the Fuhrer as an avuncular character with a penchant for chocolate cake, who slides into madness when his lifelong dream of a 1,000-year reich slips from his grasp.
Hitler is convincingly played by Germany's star actor Bruno Ganz, who once acted the part of an angel in the award-winning German film Wings of Desire.
Until he starts having hysterical fits, Ganz's Hitler talks in a soft, melodic Austrian accent, far different from the barking tone he adopted for his mass rallies. The director said the voice was copied from the single recording which exists of Hitler talking in normal tones.
But the tabloid Bild yesterday posed the question that an increasing number of critics will no doubt ask: "Should a monster be portrayed as a human being?"
Eichinger, the 55-year-old son of a Wehrmacht soldier who fought on the eastern front, said he believed the film would offer an "emotional release" for many Germans still traumatised by the Second World War, even though only one in five living Germans experienced it.
2004-08-18 Mercano, el Marciano gazeta.ru
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2004-07-26 Prepare for Revenge of the Sith film.guardian.co.uk
he new Star Wars film will be called Revenge of the Sith, producers announced at the weekend.
The sixth and (for the time being) final film in George Lucas's space opera will be released on May 19 next year and will feature the transformation of Anakin Skywalker, protagonist of the recent prequels, into Darth Vader, the villain of the three earlier films.
The Sith of the title are the sworn enemies of the heroic Jedi knights. Lucasfilm has already announced that Hayden Christensen will return as Anakin, with Ewan McGregor reprising his role as Jedi knight Obi-Wan Kenobi.
George Lucas brought his famous franchise back to life in 1999 with The Phantom Menace, following it up in 2002 with Attack of the Clones. Both fared well at the box office but neither was a hit with the critics and fans complained of script limitations and wooden acting.
2004-07-23 Dan Glaister. From hit to miss film.guardian.co.uk
America's Heart and Soul, a patchwork of moving and heartwarming vignettes of regular American eccentrics, was released in the US by Disney on July 2, just one week after Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 had been put out by an independent group set up by the Disney employee and Miramax chairman Harvey Weinstein.
Inspired by the success of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, a strategy was set to bring the film to the heartlands. More than 500 screenings were arranged for community groups, political groups, religious groups, cookie-baking groups - any gathering that might feel some affinity with the film. The International Federation of Bike Messengers, based in San Francisco, was given a special screening. (Its interest was guaranteed by a segment of the film that follows a New York cycle courier as he careers through the city's streets.) The American Association of People with Disabilities in Washington DC got another, its interest guaranteed by the story of a blind mountain climber. The Sierra Club, the biggest environmental pressure group in the US, got a screening, its interest guaranteed by the breathtaking landscapes and idolising of mother nature in the film.
But it wasn't just screenings. Emails were sent, websites primed. All bases were covered as Disney deployed its marketing know-how, not just its money, to persuade enough people to see a film that echoed the sentiments on which the company had built its reputation.
Even the story behind the film-making had the sort of lone-man-against-the-odds ethic that was sure to inspire audiences. Louis Schwartzberg, a first-time director and renowned cinematographer, had spent years making the film. What started off as outtakes from the commercials he was shooting grew into a series of brief portraits, which he decided to make into a feature-length film. In true Hollywood style, he saw it rejected by the major studios, only for Disney to offer to release it. Disney put $1m into the film, including spending $400,000 on print advertising. For its outlay, according to John Horn of the LA Times, the studio would be gratified if the film took $10m.
Which is where things came unstuck. Almost four weeks after its July 2 release on 98 screens, America's Heart and Soul has taken $311,572. This week it was showing on just 13 screens in the entire US mainland. Someone, somewhere, misjudged the mood.
2004-07-02 SIMON JENKINS. Alas, Michael Moore is an unguided missile timesonline.co.uk
MICHAEL MOORE’S blockbuster, Fahrenheit 9/11, is the worst good film I have seen. Opening in Britain after breaking box-office records in America, it ranks among the most savage and sensational antiwar movies. Though I agree with its thrust, the depiction of George Bush over Iraq is flawed. Don’t miss it, but turn off your brain first.
Moore’s thesis is simple. For more than a decade the Saudi aristocracy invested deeply in Bush family interests in Texas. They wanted to keep close to Washington out of self-protection, as they kept close to the Taleban. After 9/11 George W. Bush was appalled that his Saudi friends might be threatened by the catastrophe. He smuggled them out of the country, played down bin Laden’s role and devoted all his efforts to blaming Saddam Hussein for 9/11.
The trouble with Moore is that much of his targetry is no more accurate than Rumsfeld’s. I do not believe Bush went to war to protect his family’s Saudi oil interests.
Their Iraq war is not about oil but about the agenda of a small group of Washington ideologues, whom they hold as traitors to the American conservative tradition.
This group’s seizure of Washington (and London) after 9/11 makes a fascinating study in power. Known colloquially as the Vulcans, they embraced Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and the Pentagon architect of the Iraq occupation, Douglas Feith. Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush were their front men. Their first commitment was to the defence of Israel. The neocons were prominent advisers to the right-wing Israeli Binyamin Netanyahu, and opposed all Middle East "peace processes". Having distrusted Nixon as soft on communism they distrusted Reagan as soft on Israel.
One mystery remains. By what act of self-delusion, by what lunacy, did a Labour government and a chunk of the British Establishment sign up to this clique, this aberration? What possessed them? That requires another film, another book.
Jonathan Clarke, Stefan Halper. America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order tinyurl.com
2004-06-29 Armond White. FILM OF THE FASCIST LIBERAL nypress.com
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Before Quentin Tarantino and his fellow Cannes jurors passed judgment on President Bush by awarding Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 the Palme d'Or (thus inflating the film's importance), they should have queried themselves: Have they done anything in their own films to tame the arrogance of a man, a moviegoer, like Bush? Not much in the careers of American jurors Tarantino, Kathleen Turner and Jerry Schatzberg encourages audiences to think or behave politically. American cinema in the Tarantino years has pandered to violence, racism, greed and self-satisfaction. It's not impossible that the torturers at Abu Ghraib - including even Saddam Hussein's own precedent-setting torturers - were inspired by the torture scene in Reservoir Dogs. QT made sadism hip and sent it 'round the world. Now we're stuck in the middle of a global crisis for which neither he, nor Michael Moore, have an answer.
To pretend that Fahrenheit 9/11 is a work of art is disingenuous. Moore himself is part of the punditocracy that, like unscrupulous politicians, solicits trite sentiment. His exploitative title doesn't measure temperature; it disgraces that sorrowful date just to inflame liberal guilt. For Moore, guilt covers everything that stemmed from Bush's election and is only eased by blame. Moore doesn't separate the election from the terrorists' attacks or from the war on Iraq. As in Bowling for Columbine, he lines up unrelated points for a domino effect of dissatisfaction. This is not historical context; it's a harangue.
The orgy of self-congratulation at Cannes proved film culture has lost the imperative of humane understanding. The lunacy was repeated stateside with local acclaim for Jehane Noujaim's specious Control Room. Apparently, the double whammy of 9/11 and the Iraq War has so rattled modern moral conscience that American self-hatred is the new documentary mode. No one required Noujaim to trace the history of Al Jazeera or examine its standard content. Her celebration of Al Jazeera (as opposition to any media representing American interests) was carelessly praised as some kind of palliative: "The number one must-see film of the summer." "An essential movie [that] not only goes through the looking glass, but turns the mirror back on us."
Jean-Luc Godard once famously said, "Every edit is a political act." But Godard's denunciation of Fahrenheit 9/11 was ignored by a U.S. media fawning over its Cannes victory (the latest Harvey Weinstein promotional stunt, facilitated by stooge Quentin). No major American media outlets quoted Godard: "Moore doesn't distinguish between text and image. He doesn't know what he's doing."
Fahrenheit 9/11 and Control Room leave viewers susceptible to the deceptions of politicians and media charlatans. Exploiting the Iraq invasion and American political distress is a form of war profiteering. Documentaries this poor are no better than pulp fiction.
2004-06-14 Kirsty Scott. Movie rottweiler turns on Blair film.guardian.co.uk
He's been given a kicking at the local elections and was last night facing a bloody nose at the European polls. So it's just the kind of cheerful news Tony Blair needs now: that the cinematic equivalent of a rottweiler, Michael Moore, is contemplating making the prime minister his next victim.
Fresh from savaging President George Bush in the critically acclaimed Fahrenheit 9/11, the filmmaker is now thinking about making a movie about Mr Blair and Britain's role in the war on Iraq.
"I personally hold Blair more responsible for this war than I do George Bush. The reason is, Blair knows better," Moore said in an interview with the Reuters news agency. "Blair is not an idiot. What is he doing hanging around this guy?"
America has been bracing itself for the release of Fahrenheit 9/11, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival. There has even been speculation that the film could help to tip the November US presidential election in favour of Mr Bush's rival, John Kerry.
2004-06-09 Charlotte Higgins. Von Trier pulls out of the Ring guardian.co.uk
The Danish film-maker Lars von Trier has thrown Bayreuth into confusion. Not by his outrageous take on the operas of Richard Wagner, nor by spectacular fallouts with divas - but by admitting that he is not up to the job of directing the festival's forthcoming Ring cycle.
A statement from the festival said the sudden resignation by Von Trier, the director of Dogville and The Idiots, stemmed from his conviction that "the Ring would clearly exceed his powers, and that therefore he would not be able to fulfil his ambitions of his own high standards and the special standards of the Bayreuth festival".
The commissioning of Von Trier shocked traditionalists when it was announced in 2001. The invitation to direct a Wagner Ring cycle at Bayreuth Festspielhaus - the theatre built by Wagner, and the living monument to the composer's monumental musical and theatrical ambitions - is one of the most high-profile jobs in opera. Yet Von Trier, who had avowed his love of the composer, saying that to film Wagner would be the "ultimate goal of my life", meaning that he could "die happy", has no professional opera or even theatre experience.
The films are also notoriously intense in the making. During the six-week filming of Dogville, Von Trier and Kidman would reportedly vanish into the Swedish woods regularly to shout at each other to let off steam.
After the completion of Dancer in the Dark, he and its lead, the singer Bjork, were no longer on speaking terms. His methods have been described as "sadistic manipulations"; the director, on the other hand, says that his technique is "almost like therapy: it can be a little tough, but it is good for the patient". Quite how his approach would have played out among the egos of top opera singers - arguably even more delicate than the sensibilities of the stars of Hollywood - can only be imagined.
Von Trier's resignation will come as a blow to Bayreuth's 84-year-old artistic director, Wolfgang Wagner. The grandson of Richard Wagner, Wolfgang has run the festival solo since 1966 and before that jointly with his late brother Wieland since 1951. But it has been a rocky road: bitter family battles have frequently dogged his reign.
2004-06-06 Alain Finkielkraut. Enough of this evil maarivintl.com
I just saw Mel Gibson’s "The Passion of Christ", and was stunned by the never-ending torture it portrays. In a laudatory critique published in "Le Figaro", Rene Gerard wrote about the "realism" of the film: "Gibson showed us the beating and the crucifixion, all of those terrible things, as if we were actually present ourselves, without adding to it and without taking away from it". Gerard is wrong. Gibson had to add on to it, to bang the drums so that the crucifixion would touch us, because we live in a world that has lost its innocence.
In the distant past, when the existence of God was accepted, the scandal of the crucifixion arose out of the fact that a God was put to death. Nowadays, the human world is left without a supreme being. The double nature of Jesus is a matter, perhaps, of faith, but not part of the sensitivities of the era. What moves us when we see Jesus dead on the crucifix is the suffering of man. How to turn this death into the specific death of Jesus, a death beyond belief, a death that is beyond those of all others, and not just another tortured being? Gibson’s way was not by realism, but rather by "hyper-realism". Not just a record of what happened, but rather two hours of insufferable horrors.
But the hyper-realism does not touch the Romans alone. The Jews are also a part of it. And if Gibson used the Nazi image to present the militant character of the Romans, he uses the anti-Semitic image, ubiquitous under the Nazi regime, in everything that had to do with the portrayal of the angry Jewish mob in the film. The tone is set by the intolerable scene of Judas’ tears of blood. In the scene, we see the high priests, with their crooked noses and beady, vengeful look, throwing a sack of gold to the traitor, which rings out as it hits the windowsill of the sacred temple: It’s a scene that looks as if it was lifted straight from the pages of "Der Strumer".
Although the French newspapers reacted strongly to the film, as was expected, the damage has already been done. Many people have already seen the film, and the popular newspapers that I flipped through came out with decidedly positive reviews of the film.
Most notable, however, is the remarkable success the film has had in the Arab world, and it's not too difficult to imagine why this Hollywood farce is so successful in countries awash in propaganda. All that is important to them, in those countries, is the fact that the Jews are portrayed as a lynch mob.
2004-05-22 Boris Horvat. 'Fahrenheit 9/11' wins top honor at Cannes film usatoday.com
festival-cannes.fr
American filmmaker Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, a scathing indictment of White House actions after the Sept. 11 attacks, won the top prize Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival.
Fahrenheit 9/11 is the first documentary to win Cannes' prestigious Palme d'Or since Jacques Cousteau's The Silent World in 1956.
"What have you done? I'm completely overwhelmed by this. Merci," Moore said after getting a standing ovation from the Cannes crowd.
Fahrenheit 9/11 won the top award from sharply divided Cannes moviegoers, who found a solid crop of good movies among the 19 entries in the festival's main competition but no great ones that rose to front-runner status.
Fahrenheit 9/11 is the first documentary to win Cannes' prestigious Palme d'Or since Jacques Cousteau's The Silent World in 1956.
"What have you done? I'm completely overwhelmed by this. Merci," Moore said after getting a standing ovation from the Cannes crowd.
Fahrenheit 9/11 won the top award from sharply divided Cannes moviegoers, who found a solid crop of good movies among the 19 entries in the festival's main competition but no great ones that rose to front-runner status.
The best-actress award went to Maggie Cheung for her role in Clean as a junkie trying to straighten out her life and regain custody of her young son after her rock-star boyfriend dies of a drug overdose.
Fourteen-year-old Yagira Yuuya was named best actor for the Japanese film Nobody Knows, in which he plays the eldest of four sibling raised in isolation, who must take charge of the family when their mother leaves.
The directing and writing prizes went to French filmmakers. Tony Gatlif won the directing honor for Exiles, his road-trip about a couple on a sensual journey from France to Algeria.
Agnes Jaoui and her romantic partner, Jean-Pierre Bacri, won the screenplay award for Look at Me, their study in self-image centering on an overweight young woman who feels neglected by loved ones. Jaoui and Bacri also co-star.
2004-05-17 Charlotte Higgins. Fahrenheit 9/11 could light fire under Bush guardian.co.uk
Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is without doubt the most flaming-hot ticket at the Cannes film festival. And with good reason: Moore hopes that it will bring down the US government.
The American film-maker has hitherto kept a tight lid on the contents of the documentary, saying only that it includes evidence of alleged links between the Bush and Bin Laden families. However, in two appearances in Cannes at the weekend before its premiere today, he revealed that the movie contains shocking footage from Iraq.
Yesterday he said: "When you see the movie you will see things you have never seen before, you will learn things you have never known before. Half the movie is about Iraq - we were able to get film crews embedded with American troops without them knowing that it was Michael Moore. They are totally fucked."
Moore was unequivocal about his desire to do everything in his power to help oust President George Bush in this November's elections.
"We thought, 'We cannot leave this to the Democrats this time to fuck it up and lose.'" He wants, he said, to "inspire people to get up and vote in November."
There has already been a complicated saga over the distribution of the film. At the start of the month it became clear that Disney, the parent company of Miramax - which made Fahrenheit 9/11 - was refusing to distribute it in the US.
The film currently has distribution, according to Moore, in every other country except Taiwan.
"The past year we knew that Michael Eisner [CEO of Disney] was not happy about Miramax making the film but they kept on sending the money every month," Moore said on Saturday. "At the end of April they sent an executive to look at the film. They had a board meeting and five days later they decided not to distribute it, because of its political content."
Yesterday he said: "That's the reason for the blocking: so that Americans don't see it before the election."
The contract between Disney and Miramax states that Disney can refuse to distribute a film in certain cases, for instance if it has an NC-17 rating - the US equivalent of an 18 certificate. Under such circumstances Miramax has in the past found alternative distribution - for Dogma, a 1999 satire on the Catholic church, and Larry Clark's Kids, eventually released in 1995, which shocked many with its frank depiction of sex among teenagers.
Moore's position has not met with universal sympathy. A piece in the Los Angeles Times last week accused his last film, Bowling for Columbine, of being "a torrent of partial truths, pointed omissions and deliberate misimpressions" and called him a "virtuoso of fictions".
But Moore has no plans to shut up shop just yet. He is planning films "on the Israelis and Palestinians, and the oil industry and lack of oil we are going to be faced with".
2004-05-17 Ian Youngs. Review: Fahrenheit 9/11 news.bbc.co.uk
Transcript
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Starting with the presidential election in 2000, it firmly plants the idea that Bush's election - thanks to just 537 votes in Florida - was not exactly free and fair.
The first conspiratorial link comes when he identifies the Fox News Channel employee who took the decision to report that Bush had won Florida on election night - when all other channels were reporting an Al Gore win - as Bush's first cousin.
If true, it is an interesting piece of trivia - but hardly proof of a family plot to steal the presidency.
He introduces 11 September with a blank screen and chilling audio of planes hitting the Twin Towers and the cries of those on the ground.
Moore also has footage of Bush sitting in a school classroom, reading a children's book with pupils, for more than 10 minutes after being told the second plane had hit.
One of Moore's chief accusations is Bush allowed planes to pick up 24 members of the Bin Laden family and fly them out of the US in the days following the attacks - when all other aircraft were grounded.
To back this up, he shows a document that seems to list them - and uses it as a base from which to explore the relationships between the Bush and Bin Laden dynasties.
Moore asserts that prominent Saudis invested in Bush's ailing companies to get access to his father, the former US president. But aside from the original military records, there is little proof to firm up links Moore goes on to make.
The result is the oil and arms companies the Saudis invested in, and the Bush family and their inner circle have interests in, profited from the aftermath of 11 September, Moore says.
The Afghanistan section - including a screen shot of a BBC News Online story - is a claim that the military action in Afghanistan was really about laying a natural gas pipeline across the country.
But the Iraq section is more substantial, and changes the film's direction - using interviews with US soldiers, footage of civilian suffering and highly moving testimony from bereaved parents of US servicemen.
The film shows graphic footage of corpses of US soldiers being burnt, dragged behind a truck and strung up, and a scene of US soldiers apparently mistreating Iraqi prisoners.
2004-05-12 BILL ZWECKER. 'Full Measure' to be third film for Kerry's daughter suntimes.com
Since this column was the first to spotlight the budding film career for potential first daughter Alexandra Kerry, it seems appropriate to tell you about her latest effort.
Presidential contender John Kerry's offspring next will be seen in "The Last Full Measure," a film directed by Shekhar Kapur ("Elizabeth," "The Four Feathers") -- based on a true story. Considering all the current focus on Sen. Kerry's Vietnam service, it's intriguing that "The Last Full Measure" is about a girl and her father -- a Vietnam vet, shortly after he returned from fighting in Southeast Asia.
Alexandra Kerry, who already has appeared in two films directed by Chicago native David Mamet ("State & Main" and "Spartan"), tells W magazine that the Kapur movie is about the returning soldier's "acclimation back into this somewhat complicated WASP-y family." At 30, the actress is the elder of Kerry's two daughters by his first marriage to Julia Thorne.
Ms. Kerry will host a screening of the film at the Cannes Film Festival, which opens today.
Alexandra Kerry, the 30-year-old daughter of US Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry,shows up at the 57th Cannes Film Festival, France, May 15, 2004. She will be showing a short film entitled The Last Full Measure at the festival.
Alexandra Kerry, the 30-year-old daughter of US Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry,shows up at the 57th Cannes Film Festival, France, May 15, 2004. She will be showing a short film entitled The Last Full Measure at the festival:
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2004-04-29 Iran ahead to Gibson's "Passion" reuters.co.uk
Authorities in Iran, where few U.S. films make it past the country's zealous censors, have given the go-ahead for cinemas to screen Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ", newspapers report.
Permission was granted to show the film uncut with Persian subtitles by the Culture and Islamic Guidance Ministry after it was studied by a panel of experts, the newspapers said.
Islam prohibits the flesh-and-blood portrayal of holy figures and says Jesus was not crucified nor is he the Son of God.
Kuwait and Bahrain have banned the film and only one cinema has agreed to air it in Israel. But in most other Middle Eastern countries it has been a huge hit.
In Iran, The Passion will face stiff competition from "The Lizard" an award-winning Iranian comedy satirising the country's conservative clerics which is smashing box office records.
2004-04-07 Jonathan Gorvett. Film to revive glory of Troy english.aljazeera.net
english.aljazeera.net english.aljazeera.net On the shores of the northern Aegean, many Turks are hoping that a movie about a war fought 3500 years ago will inspire a new invasion - this time of tourists rather than ironclad warriors. In May, Warner Bros will be releasing its blockbuster Troy, with an all-star cast including Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, Peter O'Toole and Sean Bean. Publicised as an action adventure, the film will be a Hollywood version of Homer’s Iliad. And perhaps rather optimistically, Turks in the town of Canakkale, the nearest city to the site of ancient Troy, have been campaigning to have the premier of the movie, bright lights, shining stars and all, held there. A problem that Turkey has always had with the legend of Troy is that few know the site of the ancient city is in Turkey, as many associate it with Greece. The original excavator of the site in western Turkey, the German Heinrich Schliemann, apart from causing untold damage to the ruins with his haphazard methods, smuggled most of his finds out of Ottoman Turkey over a period of 15 years in the late 19th century. Among these was what the amateur archaeologist described as the treasure of King Priam, the ruler of Troy at the time of the legendary 10-year siege. The collection of jewellery, which Schliemann liked to bedeck his young Greek wife with, was later displayed with other finds in a Berlin museum. In 1945, the Trojan hoard, along with much else, disappeared from Berlin with the entry of the Russian army, not to resurface for more than 50 years. It was not until 1998 that Moscow admitted that its Soviet predecessor had looted the Berlin museum which had housed the collection, and then stored it in St Petersburg. Having admitted guilt, the Russians then flaunted it by putting the Trojan artefacts on display in Moscow's Pushkin museum, where they remain despite repeated requests from Ankara for their return. Gila Benmayor, a Turkish journalist who has campaigned to have the Trojan hoard returned, is just one of many who feel strongly on the subject. "The Trojan treasure belongs neither to Russia or Germany," she said. "The asset is ours; they cannot share it between themselves. We should reclaim the Trojan treasure and build the museum to house it." A strategy Turkey has to recover the Trojan jewels and the other pieces still in Germany, and one backed by Professor Manfred Korfmann, in charge of the present excavation work at Troy, is for the construction of a modern museum on the site of the excavation, a case of build it and it will come.
2004-04-01 Charles Levinson. Arab censors giving 'Passion' wide latitude sfgate.com
Arab governments across the Middle East are bending or breaking their own censorship rules for "The Passion of the Christ,'' the Mel Gibson film that sparked fears of anti-Semitism when it was released in the West.
In Egypt, where the film opened to large crowds Wednesday, "it's getting a very special treatment," said Mustafa Darwish, a film critic and former president of the Egypt Censorship Authority.
So far, the film has been released uncensored in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.
Across the region, the film is packing movie theaters. Lebanese President Emile Lahoud has seen the movie, as has Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who called it "moving and historical.'' An aide to Arafat compared the pain Jesus endured to the suffering Israel has inflicted on Palestinians.
More than 142,000 people saw the movie during its first 11 days in Lebanon, shattering previous records set by "Titanic" and the James Bond movie "Die Another Day."
Lebanon is 30 percent Christian, which may help to explain the film's success there. But in predominantly Muslim Qatar, Syria and Jordan, the movie is also attracting unprecedented crowds. In Qatar, it is being shown on seven screens four times a day.
"We have broken all records," said Berthe Zeeni, marketing director for Prime Pictures, the film's Middle East distributor.
In Qatar, any movie showing a cross around an actor's neck was banned throughout the 1990s. So when the tiny Persian Gulf monarchy approved "The Passion," Mohsem al-Mokadem, the general manager of the Qatari Cinema Co., was shocked. "It is the first time that such a film has been released anywhere in the gulf," said al-Mokadem, who was a member of Qatar's censorship authority from 1980 to 1992.
Salwa el-Badrawi, a stooped elderly woman in an Islamic headscarf who attended a pre-release screening, said she hoped the movie would bring religions closer together rather than drive a wedge between them.
"It shows that there is tolerance and tenderness in all religions," she said. "The movie shows Jews who sympathized with the Christ, while we Muslims also had a Christian person who helped the prophet Mohammed," referring to Waraqah, his wife's Christian cousin, who helped Mohammed interpret his revelations.
2004-03-16 Passion actor Caviezel meets Pope news.bbc.co.uk
newsimg.bbc.co.uk The actor who plays Jesus in the controversial The Passion of the Christ had an audience with the Pope on Monday, the Vatican confirmed. Jim Caviezel, 35, had a brief meeting with Pope John Paul II who then blessed the devoutly Catholic actor. Caviezel's wife and parents-in-law were also present at the Vatican meeting. While in Rome, Caviezel attended a private screening at the Legionaries of Christ, a conservative Catholic group. The actor has been hailed for his performance as Jesus in the film, which tells the story of the Crucifixion.
2004-03-01 Tim Dowling. What's popcorn in Aramaic? film.guardian.co.uk
B-kheeruut re'yaaneyh laa kaaley tsuuraathaa khteepaathaa, ellaa Zaynaa Mqatlaanaa Trayaanaa laytaw!
It may be uncompromising in its liberal use of graphic violence, but Lethal Weapon II it ain't.
Da'ek teleyfoon methta'naanaak, pquud. Guudaapaw!
Please turn off your mobile phone. It is blasphemous.
Shbuuq shuukhaaraa deel. Man ethnaggad udamshaa?
Sorry I'm late. Have I missed any scourging?
Aykaa beyt tadkeetha? Zaadeq lee d-asheeg eeday men perdey devshaanaayey haaleyn!
Where is the loo? I need to wash my hands of this popcorn.
Een, Yuudaayaa naa, ellaa b-haw yawmaa laa hweeth ba-mdeetaa.
Yes, I'm Jewish, but I wasn't there that day.
Demketh! Udamaa lemath mtaynan b-tash'eetha d-khashey?
I fell asleep! What station of the cross are we up to?
Ma'hed lee qalleel d-Khayey d-Breeyaan, ellaa dlaa gukhkaa.
It sort of reminds me of Life of Brian, but it's nowhere near as funny.
Ktaabaa taab hwaa meneyh.
It's not as good as the book.
Etheeth l-khubeh 'almeenaayaa d-Maaran Yeshu Msheekhaa, ella faasheth metool Moneeqaa Belluushee!
I came for the everlasting love of our Lord Jesus Christ, but I stayed for Monica Bellucci.
Aamar naa laak dlaa yaada' naa haw gavraa. B-aynaa feelmaa hwaa?
I tell you I do not know the man. What's he been in?
Feelmaa haanaa tpeelaw! Proo' lee ksef dmaa!
This film is terrible. I want my blood-money back.
D-tetbuun deyn men yameen u-men semaal, la hwaat deel l-metal, ellaa l-ayleyn da-mtaybaa.
To sit at my right or my left is not for me to grant; it is for those to whom it has already been assigned.
Saabar naa da-mhaymen beh, ellaa la haymneth b-haw meemsaa d-beh.
I suppose I believe in Him, but I didn't believe him in it.
Saggee shapeer! Laa tsaabey naa d-esakkey l-mapaqtaa trayaanaaytaa.
Brilliant! I can't wait for the sequel (second coming).
Eeth lee 'ayney, ellaa layt lee d-ekhzey la-kteebaataa takhtaayaataa. Neqruuv leh?
I have eyes but I cannot see the subtitles. Can we sit closer?
Ayleyn enuun Oorqey?
Which ones are the Orcs?
Laa, haw Shem'uun Qooreenaayaa eethaw! Ezdar!
No, that's Simon of Cyrene! Pay attention!
Waay! Haw 'aalmeenaayaa hwaa!
Well, that was eternal.
Lebba deel daaleq, ellaa teezaa deel daamek.
My heart is on fire, but my bum is asleep.
Enaa mqatreg naa l-Ruumaayey.
I blame the Romans.
Tev attuun men qdaamaa!
Down in front!
B-zabnaa d-qeenduunos, tayyeb lkuun uurkhaa d-mapaqtaa.
In case of emergency, prepare ye the way of the exit.
Laa baakey naa-eeth gelaa b-'ayna deel.
I'm not crying; I've just got a mote in my eye.
Spreet mets'aayaa deelaak huu. [Or, if addressed to a woman, Spreet mets'aayaa deelek huu!]
Thine is the medium Sprite.
Peletaa kuullaah da-Qraabay Kawkbey.
It's all an allegory of Star Wars.
Shluukh kleelaa d-kuubayk, pquud. Laa meshkakh naa d-ekhzey l-ketaan tsuur- aathaa.
Could you take off your crown of thorns, please? I can't see the screen.
Baseem, ellaa saabar naa d-etstebeeth yateer b-Lebeh d-Gabaaraa!
Not bad, but I think I preferred Braveheart.
2004-02-27 George Wright. Hit film gets lost in racism row film.guardian.co.uk
A US anti-racism group is hoping that its campaign against hit film Lost in Translation, which it claims is guilty of a stereotypical portrayal of the Japanese, will ensure that the film finishes empty-handed on Oscar night.
Asian Mediawatch, which has been urging members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to vote against the film, says that the "Asian-American community is abuzz with concerns that the movie's critical acclaim legitimises a film that mocks the Japanese people.
2004-02-27 Geza Vermes. Celluloid brutality film.guardian.co.uk
I am still in a state of shock having sat through two hours of almost uninterrupted gratuitous brutality, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. I hope
I will never be obliged to see something as dreadful again. Gibson's Jesus is a noble figure and Pontius Pilate a well-intentioned weakling. The Roman soldiers, who do most of the violence, are pictured as sadistic beasts and the Jewish chief priests as self-satisfied smugs who enjoy the humiliation of Jesus. Gibson says his is a correct representation of the Passion and that his movie has been "directed by the Holy Ghost".
The four Gospels do not agree. The traditional picture of the Passion, which underlies the film, has resulted from a selective reading of them. In the first three Gospels, all the events happen on the feast of Passover, a most unlikely situation; in John (with greater probability) on the previous day. In John there is no trial at all, only an interrogation of Jesus by a former high priest, Annas, with no sentence pronounced. By contrast, Mark and Matthew speak of a night session of the Sanhedrin at which Jesus is found guilty of blasphemy by Caiaphas and condemned to death. But a court hearing in a capital case on a feast day is contrary to all known Jewish law.
The Gospels postdate the events by 40-80 years. They were all compiled after the fall of Jerusalem in AD70. By then the large majority of the readers envisaged by the evangelists were non-Jews. After their revolt against Rome (AD 66-73/4), antipathy towards the Jews grew in the Roman empire, and this affected the depiction of Jesus for new non-Jewish Christians. To admit to them that Rome was fully to blame for the death of the crucified Jewish Christ would have made the fresh converts politically suspect. Christians were an unpopular sect. Hence outside Palestine the Gentile-Christian spin doctors moved in and played down the Jewishness of Jesus and his original disciples. He and his apostles were no longer considered as Jews.
We find also an obvious effort to exonerate Pilate. The New Testament portrait of a vacillating governor of Judea is totally at odds with the historical truth. The real Pilate could not be bullied by the Jewish high priest. He was his boss and could sack him at will. All the reliable first-century sources depict Pilate as a tyrant who was guilty of numerous executions without trial and unlawful massacres. He was justly dismissed from office and banished by the emperor Tiberius.
As for the condemnation of Jesus for blasphemy, no Jewish law would qualify someone a blasphemer simply for calling himself the Messiah or the like. So the death sentence pronounced on Jesus by Caiaphas was an error in law. There are strong arguments in favour of the claim (against John's assertion of the contrary) that first-century Jewish courts could carry out capital sentences for religious crimes without Roman consent. Even Roman citizens risked instant execution if caught by Jews in the Temple.
The abandonment of the case for blasphemy and its replacement by a charge of rebellion is left unexplained in the Synoptic Gospels. But the reasoning that underlies the political accusation is easy to understand. It was the duty of the Jewish leadership, Caiaphas and his council, to maintain order in Judea. Caiaphas imagined that Jesus was a potential threat to peace. Jerusalem, filled with pilgrims at Passover, was a powderkeg. A few days earlier, Jesus had created a commotion in the merchants' quarter in the Temple, when he overturned the stalls of the moneychangers. He could do it again. Jesus had to be dealt with in the interest of the whole nation in order to forestall massive Roman retaliation. Caiaphas and his council had the power to punish him, but passed the buck. They therefore bear the blame for surrendering Jesus to the Romans, a fact attested by all four Gospels and confirmed by the first-century Jewish historian Josephus. The Roman writer Tacitus also asserts that Jesus was crucified by the procurator Pontius Pilate. Hence the responsibility for the crucifixion was Pilate's, and ultimately that of the Roman empire he represented.
So, can the New Testament as such be blamed for fomenting anti-semitism? A nuanced reply is that its stories about Jesus were not originally conceived as anti-Jewish: they were meant to describe a family row between various Jewish groups. But in non-Jewish surroundings they were liable to receive an anti-Jewish interpretation. Anti-semitism is not in the New Testament text, but in the eyes and in the minds of some of its readers.
Geza Vermes is emeritus professor of Jewish Studies at Oxford University. His latest book is The Authentic Gospel of Jesus
2004-02-03 Trek star's space travel unease news.bbc.co.uk
newsimg.bbc.co.uk The actor who plays the captain on TV's Star Trek has said he thinks resources spent on sending people into space should be used on "getting this place right first". Patrick Stewart said Earth should be our focus rather than other planets. "I'm a bit of a wet blanket when it comes to the whole business of space travel," he said in a BBC interview. As commander of the USS Enterprise on the show, his character Captain Jean-Luc Picard is an avid space traveller. In an interview with BBC World Service radio, Stewart said he backed unmanned missions such as Nasa's Mars rover Opportunity and the UK's Beagle 2 mission.
2004-01-31 TIM RUTTEN. Gibson Asked to Add Note To Film theledger.com
The leader of one of two Jewish organizations that condemned Mel Gibson's forthcoming film, "The Passion of the Christ," as an incitement to antiSemitism said last week that his organization is preparing an 11th-hour appeal for a cinematic postscript to the movie.
Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in an interview that he has all but given up hope Gibson's final cut of the film will omit problematic material from the Gospels. Some Catholic and Protestant scholars believe some material, particularly quotations and chronologies drawn from the Gospel attributed to Matthew, is not only inaccurate but also a provocation to hatred of Jews.
Foxman said he is preparing a letter asking the filmmaker, who self-financed the $25-million "Passion," to append a personal statement to the version scheduled for release Ash Wednesday (Feb. 25) in which Gibson would condemn any bigoted interpretation of his Passion narrative.
Foxman -- who like other ADL officials has been barred by Gibson from screenings of "The Passion" -- finally managed to see a version last week by surreptitiously entering a gathering of Protestant ministers in Orlando, where it was being shown by the filmmaker.
Foxman and Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor, the ADL's interfaith consultant, registered as pastors with the fictitious "Church of Truth" in Brooklyn, N.Y. After the film, Foxman said the film's portrayal of Jews was "painful to watch."
What Foxman saw, he said, "was a film that portrayed Jews as blood-thirsty and unambiguously responsible for the death of Christ. I now understand why Mr. Gibson didn't want us to see it."
A statement from Gibson's company accused the two men of "deceit." John Maxwell, chairman of the Global Pastors Network that sponsored the convention, said, "I am disappointed they lied to get in."
Foxman said he had no choice but to lie. "I am sorry we had to engage in stealth tactics, but only because he (Gibson) forced us to," he told the Orlando Sentinel.
Elcott, too, noted the film's revival of anti-Semitic stereotypes and drew particular attention to Gibson's decision to include Matthew 27:25, in which the group of Jews present when the Roman governor Pontius Pilate condemned Jesus to death is supposed to have said, "His blood be upon us and upon our children."
Since his youth, Foxman has enjoyed an unusually close relationship with the Catholic Church. As a Jewish child in wartime Poland, he was separated from his parents and saved by his nanny, who had him baptized and raised him as a Catholic. After the war, he was reunited with his parents and returned to Judaism.
"I have," he said, "a tremendous love and respect for the church that gave me life again. Forty years ago, we in the ADL helped the bishops to write those guidelines that permit artists to be honest about their faith without being hateful in their work. What Mel Gibson is doing is as much an attack on the Catholic Church and the Second Vatican Council as it is anything else.
2004-01-24 Kiku Day. Totally lost in translation guardian.co.uk
Film reviewers have hailed Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation as though it were the cinematic equivalent of the second coming. One paper even called it a masterpiece. Reading the praise, I couldn't help wondering not only whether I had watched a different movie, but whether the plaudits had come from a parallel universe of values. Lost in Translation is being promoted as a romantic comedy, but there is only one type of humour in the film that I could see: anti-Japanese racism, which is its very spine.
In the movie, Bill Murray plays the alienated Bob, a middle-aged actor shooting whisky commercials in Tokyo. He meets the equally alienated Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson, a Yale graduate accompanying her fashion photographer husband. The film is billed as exploring their disconnection from the country they are visiting and from their spouses, and how they find some comfort in one another through a series of restrained encounters.
But it's the way Japanese characters are represented that gives the game away. There is no scene where the Japanese are afforded a shred of dignity. The viewer is sledgehammered into laughing at these small, yellow people and their funny ways, desperately aping the western lifestyle without knowledge of its real meaning. It is telling that the longest vocal contribution any Japanese character makes is at a karaoke party, singing a few lines of the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen.
kday@mills.edu
2003-12-27 Kate Winslet has son in New York news.bbc.co.uk
newsimg.bbc.co.uk Actress Kate Winslet has become a mother for the second time after giving birth to a son, her agent has said. It is the Oscar-winning actress's first child with her second husband, the film director Sam Mendes, who was in New York on 22 December for the birth. Winslet, 28, and Mendes, 38, have named their son, who weighed in at 3.5kg (7lbs13oz), Joe. The couple married in secret in the West Indies in May and announced they were expecting a child in July. Winslet already has a three-year-old daughter, Mia, from her first marriage to British film director Jim Threapleton. Threapleton and Winslet split after reports in the press of arguments, while family members said the demands of the actress' career had put an impossible strain on the relationship. The star of the film Titanic began a relationship with the Oscar-winning American Beauty director soon after her divorce from Threapleton in December 2001.
2003-09-25 Filmmaker Yuri Senkevich Dies at Age 66 miami.com
Yuri Senkevich, a documentary filmmaker and host of Russia's longest running TV show, died Thursday. He was 66.
Senkevich collapsed from heart failure at his studio, lawmaker and longtime friend Artur Chilingarov said.
Senkevich hosted "Traveler's Club," a travel program that aired for more than 40 years, taking him around the world and into the homes of millions of Russians.
The son of a military doctor, Senkevich was born in 1937 in Mongolia and received a medical degree from the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg.
In 1962, he was assigned to the biomedical-research institute that monitored the health of cosmonauts. His scientific background and appetite for adventure took him on a trip to Antarctica in 1968 to study the effects of long-term isolation.
2003-09-16 BRITISH HISTORY RE-WRITTEN sky.com
Tom Cruise is set to star in a movie re-run of the Battle of Britain that suggests an American had a lot to do with winning it.
Cruise will play US airman Billy Fiske in the new film, which, to the fury of RAF veterans, bears the provisional title of The Few.
The script has him lead the Allies to victory over the Luftwaffe, despite the fact that the real Fiske only ever flew three combat missions.
One of just 12 Americans involved in the World War II battle, Fiske never downed a German plane and was killed when he crash-landed his aircraft.
An industry insider told the Daily Star the film would never sell if a Briton had the starring role.
"The hero must be American. The public wouldn't have it any other way. To get bums on seats the writers twist the facts."
Hollywood has been making a habit of rewriting history in favour of the Americans.
Saving Private Ryan scarcely mentioned the British and Canadian contribution to D-Day and U-571 had the US - not the Royal - navy capture the Nazis' Enigma codebook.
2003-09-10 Cynthia Grenier. In defense of Mel Gibson worldnetdaily.com
Nominally, we are supposed to be this Christian country, although even a glancing look over some of the media's recent treatment of religious themes in popular culture does make you wonder. Right now, Mel Gibson's getting it in the neck for, as Time Magazine of Sept. 1 refers to it, his "eccentric film project" - the "eccentric" project being of course, "The Passion," the filmed recounting of the last day in the life of Jesus Christ.
You get the feeling from the venomous tone of many of the articles written so far about the Gibson film (a number in the New York Times), many of those writing can't forgive him his Christian fervor, and his conservatism, which rather indeed sets him apart from many of his fellows in Hollywood.
I like best the biblical scholar who found the film - judging from film clips - as too graphically violent. What else is a crucifixion other than graphic and violent, I would like to know?
2003-09-10 VATICAN THUMBS UP ON MEL GIBSON'S CHRIST MOVIE drudgereport.com
An influential Vatican cardinal is about to endorse Mel Gibson's PASSION, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.
The controversial Mel Gibson-directed drama about the last 12 hours of the life of Jesus Christ will be praised -- unconditionally -- by Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, the prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy.
The endorsement may pit the Vatican against the Anti-Defamation League, which expressed concerns that scenes depicting Jesus' crucifixion at the hands of Jews and others will fuel anti-Semitism.
"Gibson s artistic choices make the film faithful to the meaning of the Gospels, as understood by the Church," says Cardinal Hoyos in an interview set for release in Italy.
2003-09-09 Obituary: Leni Riefenstahl news.bbc.co.uk
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Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda films for the Nazi Party in the 1930s brought her praise for their beauty and power, but she spent her life defending her artistic association with Adolf Hitler.
Born in Berlin in 1902, Leni Riefenstahl was a dancer with Max Reinhard's Deutsches Theater until a knee injury forced her to change career.
Dr Arnold Fanck, a leading German director, took her on, and she was soon established as one of Germany's leading ladies.
She also ran her own production company and, when Hitler and the Nazis came to power the following year, Riefenstahl attracted the admiration of both the Fuehrer and his propaganda chief, Josef Goebbels.
Her film, Triumph of the Will, its title coined by Hitler, is a visually stunning document of the Nazi Party's rally at Nuremberg in 1934.
Goebbels ordered Riefenstahl to play down the achievements of non-Aryan athletes but she faithfully chronicled victories by all races, including those of the film's "star", black US sprinter Jesse Owens.
Owens' four gold medals and two world records shattered the myth of Hitler's master-race.
Leni Riefenstahl was tried after the war. Though she was cleared of being a Nazi , her film career was nevertheless over.
She turned to Africa and still photography. She spent years photographing the Nubas of the Sudan, a tribe as physically imposing as Hitler's finest.
She produced a critically acclaimed book of colour photographs, entitled Die Nuba.
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Later, in her seventies, she took up scuba diving and underwater photography as well as photographing subjects as diverse as the 1972 Munich Olympics and Mick Jagger for London's Sunday Times.
Luis Bunuel said of Leni Riefenstahl's earlier films that, "they were ideologically repugnant but fantastically made. Impressive".
She herself blamed a gaggle of "opinion formers" and "left-wing intellectuals" for her continued artistic isolation and craved the opportunity to be reassessed in a wider context, not purely as a Nazi propagandist.
Even as late as 2002, German prosecutors dismissed, through lack of evidence, charges that she lied about the fate of more than 100 gypsies who were taken from Salzburg and Berlin concentration camps between 1940 and 1942 to be used as extras in her film Tiefland.
But, despite her insistence to the contrary, it was her films for Hitler for which Leni Riefenstahl will be remembered: a remarkable, if flawed, achievement, and one for which she never apologised.
It's too bad that, during his press conference on Monday afternoon, Von Trier side-stepped questions about the film's unmistakably anti-American bent, declaring at one point that he himself feels "like an American". (Of course he does; if you ascribe to his view of US cultural imperialism, how could you avoid it?) There are plenty of Americans who appreciate Von Trier's point of view. And they might have appreciated hearing him back it up.
It's somewhat ironic that a film festival featuring Von Trier's very pointed drama would also include Time magazine critic Richard Schickel's documentary about Charlie Chaplin, and have as its closing night film Chaplin's 1936 masterpiece Modern Times. Chaplin seems a classic example of the outsider who comes to America, makes mighty contributions to his new country and delights the US public only to have it turn on him.
For more mainstream American audiences, it'll be too obscure in its meaning to generate either interest or outrage. Von Trier, unfortunately, will be preaching to the choir.
The Dogville townsfolk are basically a mob, kept on a leash by boredom, poverty, provincialism and children. Their worldview is nil (no news reaches Dogville, which may explain their antiquated diction). Their self-interest is not enlightened, and they may have been inspired by a line out of Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy: "The more I see of men, the more I admire dogs."
The men who were originally chasing Grace are gangsters, but they include her mob-chief father (James Caan, in a cute bit of casting). Given the power by him to destroy the town, Grace seizes it, has the population machine-gunned and the place burned to the ground.
Call her a terrorist, because that's what she is. But that's not what she was - she initially fled the terrorists, her own people as it were, seeking what she thought would be a better life, based on seeing the best in people. Those people, whose village should have provided a safe haven for someone like Grace, instead exploited and abused her.
For any American, seeing such nakedly hateful sentiments expressed by a filmmaker such as Von Trier should be as terrifying as a replay of those jets ploughing into the World Trade Centre. It is equally terrifying to think that those sentiments will be dismissed, la Variety, as "anti-American" in the sense that they are a fad, or a stage the rest of the world is passing through. Von Trier may be displaying a fascist instinct in Dogville, but he is not without a sense of history, be it political, religious or revolutionary. And history would seem to be on his side.
John Anderson is chief film critic for Newsday.
2003-09-09 Polanski finally receives 'Pianist' Oscar hollywoodreporter.com
Roman Polanski finally took home his Academy Award statue for best director this weekend, nearly six months after winning for "The Pianist." Harrison Ford, a friend of Polanski and the star of his 1988 movie "Frantic," handed the director the prize Sunday at the Deauville film festival. Ford also had announced Polanski's win at the March 23 ceremony in Los Angeles, which the director didn't attend. Polanski faces arrest in the United States since pleading guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl. He was charged with rape and five other felonies in 1977. As part of a deal with prosecutors, Polanski pleaded guilty to having unlawful sex with a minor, then fled Los Angeles for Paris in 1978 to evade sentencing. The 70-year-old is presiding over the jury at Deauville, on the Normandy coast.
2003-08-28 Liz Trotta. Jewish leaders condemn film washingtontimes.com
A group of Jewish leaders yesterday condemned Mel Gibson's yet-to-be-released movie, "The Passion," and sought to hinder its distribution, saying its depiction of Jesus' final 12 hours will endanger Jews around the world.
"This film can potentially lead to violence directed against the Jewish community," said Assemblyman Dov Hikind, an Orthodox Jew and Democrat from Brooklyn.
"It will result in anti-Semitism and bigotry. It really takes us back to the Dark Ages ... the Inquisition, the Crusades, all for the so-called sin of the Crucifixion of Jesus."
Mr. Hikind, who said he had seen only a seven-minute clip from the film, staged his protest with about 25 Jewish leaders and local politicians in front of the midtown offices of the Fox News Corp., the parent company of 20th Century Fox film studio, which has first rights to distribution.
2003-08-05 High Noon: the presidents' choice film.guardian.co.uk
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BOSLEY CROWTHER
The 1952 western High Noon is the favourite film of US presidents, according to a new documentary about the viewing habits of the White House occupants.
The story of Gary Cooper's sheriff confronting criminals when no one else will back him presumably has easily-imagined effects on presidential egos.
The programme, All the President's Men, says that Bill Clinton has seen the movie 20 times, that Eisenhower screened it three times at the White House and that the present incumbent has also had it shown there.
The documentary, which is being shown on US cable channel Bravo, centres around the revelations of former White House projectionist Paul Fisher, who manned the reels at Pennsylvania Avenue from 1953 to1986.
Bill Clinton apparently had more catholic tastes than most of his predecessors, enjoying Baz Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom and Jane Campion's The Piano - though after watching the latter he was moved to enquire: "What was that all about?"
2003-07-15 Hugh Davies. Hollywood set for row over satire on US army dailytelegraph.co.uk
Buffalo Soldiers depicts rampant heroin use and trafficking by bored soldiers in Germany and the theft of lorryloads of Pentagon property, including guns that are sold off to gangsters.
A poster advertising the film shows Joaquin Phoenix, playing an army "spiv", in combat fatiques with an ammunition belt wrapped around his neck, saying: "Steal all you can steal."
The film has earned favourable comparisons to the military satires Catch 22 and M*A*S*H, but this is an uneasy time in America, with rising concern at US casualties in Iraq.
The Los Angeles Times said the film "is to military service what One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest was to mental health."
The film, which also stars Ed Harris and Scott Glenn, was well-received at Robert Redford's Sundance festival, although one person threw a plastic bottle at the director, Gregor Jordan.
Jordan, an Australian, said: "After September 11 it would have been the wrong time to release it. But now the film's become even more topical than when we first made it.
"I hope it'll work the same way as M*A*S*H did in the Vietnam war and provoke a bit of thought and create a bit of controversy."
2003-07-09 THOMAS WHITAKER. Hulk doll's monster willy thesun.co.uk
images.thesun.co.uk images.thesun.co.uk SHOCKED six-year-old Leah Lowland checked out a mystery bulge on her Incredible Hulk doll - and uncovered a giant green WILLY. Curious Leah noticed a lump after winning the monster, catchphrase "You wouldn t like me when I m angry," at a seaside fair. And when she peeled off the green comic-book character s ripped purple shorts, she found the two-inch manhood beneath them. Horrified Leah immediately ran to mum Kim and reported the find. And last night Kim called for a ban on the saucy toy. She said: A hulk with a bulk like this just shouldn t be allowed. Considering the doll is only 12-inches tall it s amazing how big his willy is. And it s definitely not an extra piece of material left on by mistake. Kim, of Biggin Hill, Kent, said the toy was one of several prizes she could choose after Leah knocked down cans with bean bags at the fair on Brighton Pier. Kim chose the doll because she thought Leah would like it amid publicity about the new Hulk movie, to be released in the UK on July 18. The toy s Spanish makers Play by Play - based in Valencia - claimed on their packaging that it was merchandise to coincide with the release of the film. Bosses were unavailable for comment last night.
2003-06-14 'City of God' star caught robbing news.bbc.co.uk
One of the principal actors in a hit film about life in Brazil's crime-ridden shantytowns has been caught stealing a woman's handbag.
Rubens Sabino - who played a drug-runner in the surprise Brazilian blockbuster Cidade de Deus (City of God) - snatched the bag off a woman on a bus in Rio de Janeiro's well-off South Zone.
A long chase ensued, and police eventually caught him when he fell and split his lip.
Sabino said he was hungry, and though his teeth were rotting he didn't have enough money to buy a toothbrush.
While he was being processed by police, he telephoned Fernando Meirelles, director of City of God, newspaper Jornal do Brasil reported.
"The film made millions but I never received a single penny. Now I want Fernando to help me," the paper quoted him as saying.
He said Sabino, who reportedly had no previous criminal record and was apparently unarmed, could face up to four years in jail.
Meirelles, who spoke to Jornal do Brazil, said he tried to help the amateur actor find work after his appearance in the film.
But Sabino had found it impossible to hold down a job and had disappeared, he said.
Sabino, who played Neguinho (Blacky) in the film, has spent much of his life living on the streets.
2003-06-11 Woody Allen promotes France news.bbc.co.uk
newsimg.bbc.co.uk Allen and his wife Soon Yi: newsimg.bbc.co.uk Director Woody Allen has said he will eat French fries and French kiss his wife as part of a video he is fronting to promote France in the US. The video, called Let's Fall in Love Again, comes in the wake of the recent US-led war with Iraq, which failed to gain backing from France. Other stars appearing in the video include actor Robert De Niro, jazz musician Wynton Marsalis and the writer George Plimpton. Right-wing French opponents rallied behind the phrase "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" to describe the French, a line coined in animated comedy The Simpsons. Let's Fall in Love Again is being played to travel journalists at lunches in the US in an effort to boost the numbers of Americans visiting France. The number of US visitors to France has dropped 15% since the war in Iraq. At last year's Cannes Film Festival he defended French culture and countered claims from US Jewish groups that the country was prone to anti-Semitic feeling.
2003-05-31 Archbishop Defends Mel Gibson's 'Passion' newsmax.com
Though Mel Gibson's latest film "The Passion" isn't scheduled to appear in theaters for eight months, it is already arousing heated debate.
This week Archbishop Charles Chaput devoted his column in the Denver Catholic Register to defending Gibson's movie from those who charge that a cinematic portrayal of Christ's passion and death could stir up flames of anti-Semitism.
"I find it puzzling and disturbing that anyone would feel licensed to attack a film of sincere faith before it has even been released," Archbishop Chaput writes. "When the overtly provocative 'The Last Temptation of Christ' was released 15 years ago, movie critics piously lectured Catholics to be open-minded and tolerant. Surely that advice should apply equally for everyone."
2003-05-25 School shooting film wins at Cannes news.bbc.co.uk
Gus Van Sant: newsimg.bbc.co.uk Samira Makhmalbaf: newsimg.bbc.co.uk Nicole Kidman: newsimg.bbc.co.uk Gus Van Sant's film Elephant, based on the 1999 Columbine school shootings, has won the Palme d'Or prize and best director honour at Cannes film festival. Van Sant, who also directed the Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting, used high school students rather than actors in his film. "Thank you very much, from the bottom of my heart. For years, I tried to bring one of my films to the Cannes festival. Vive la France!" he said. The director beat other favourites for the prize including Dogville, starring Nicole Kidman, and Clint Eastwood's star-studded Mystic River, both of which left empty-handed. Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf, 23, won the Grand Jury prize for At Five in the Afternoon (Panj E Asr), which looks at the plights of surviving post-Taliban Afghanistan. She also used a cast of amateurs in her low-budget film which focuses on an Afghan woman, Nogreh, who is desperate to shake off the constrictions of the old regime in a cash-starved land. The competition selection this year has proved disappointing, with Screen Daily's Allan Hunter saying the "choices were considered the worst in living memory".
2003-05-20 Fiachra Gibbons. On a high note, Kidman says it's time to quit film.guardian.co.uk
Nicole Kidman is planning to quit acting, after giving the performance of her life in Lars von Trier's Dogville - a work yesterday pronounced a masterpiece by many at the Cannes film festival.
The manner in which the most sought-after leading lady in the world said she wanted "another life" was as elegiac and surprising as the film, set in a dying US mining township during the Depression. Having asked for a cigarette from co-star Stellan Skarsgard, Kidman said she wanted to "fall in love and then ... just slowly dwindle away".
But it is the maverick Danish director's comments on the soul of America, which led yesterday to one US critic accusing him to his face of "Taliban thinking", as much as Kidman's statement of intent, which will make headlines on the other side of the Atlantic.
Dogville is the first of a trilogy of apparently damning parables of how the nation's founding ideals have been corrupted, called U, S and A.
Although Von Trier, who has never visited the US, at first denied attacking America, US critics thought otherwise.
The director later seemed to confirm that impression. "I would love to start a Free America campaign, because we have just had a Free Iraq campaign. You could say I'm a communist, but I'm not. I want to free America because, from over here, I see a lot of shit in America. Maybe -this idea- comes to me from journalists who are lying.
"I would love to go there, but I am afraid to go. It could be a wonderful place, but I can't go there right now because America is not how it should be. If you don't like what I'm saying, I'm sorry, you can just forget it."
Desson Howe of the Washington Post said: " I don't buy all this reflex anti-Americanism, and I am not sure that is what it is about. But it is a work of art."
John Anderson of New York's Newsday said: "It is a work of genius. My question is, will anyone in the US go to see it? Despite what Von Trier says, it is a total indictment of American global culture.
Gerald Peary of the Boston Phoenix, who raised the spectre of the Taliban, however, excoriated Von Trier for his treatment of woman characters. "Since Breaking the Waves you have made three movies where in the last act your actresses are either tortured, killed, raped, or humiliated. Why do you do this to women?"
"Because", replied Von Trier, "I don't think it's that exciting when men are tortured. But that's a personal thing."
Kidman, who divorced her Scientologist husband, Tom Cruise, 18 months ago, confessed she was "raw" inside when she turned up at a bare studio in Sweden to work with Von Trier (who has a reputation for reducing actors to quivering wrecks) on a sound stage without sets. "The first week was tricky," she confessed, but a three-hour walk in the woods cleared the air.
She confirmed she would play the character in the other two parts of the trilogy, Manderay and Alabama, which is dedicated to the British actor Katrin Cartlidge, who starred in Breaking the Waves and died suddenly last year.
2003-03-24 OSCAR AWARDS 2003 oscar.com
ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE Adrien Brody THE PIANIST
ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE Chris Cooper ADAPTATION
ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE Nicole Kidman THE HOURS
ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE Catherine Zeta-Jones CHICAGO
ANIMATED FEATURE FILM SPIRITED AWAY Hayao Miyazaki
ART DIRECTION CHICAGO John Myhre (Art Direction); Gordon Sim (Set Decoration)
CINEMATOGRAPHY ROAD TO PERDITION Conrad L. Hall
COSTUME DESIGN CHICAGO Colleen Atwood
DIRECTING THE PIANIST Roman Polanski
FILM EDITING CHICAGO Martin Walsh
FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM NOWHERE IN AFRICA Germany Directed by Caroline Link
WRITING (ADAPTED SCREENPLAY) THE PIANIST Screenplay by Ronald Harwood
WRITING (ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY) TALK TO HER Written by Pedro Almod var
2003-03-24 War bruises Oscar ratings money.cnn.com
With the conflict in Iraq weighing heavily on the minds of Americans, the subdued 75th anniversary edition of the Academy Awards entered the record books on Monday as the least watched Oscar telecast ever.
ABC's 3 1/2-hour live broadcast of the ceremony, notable for its rolled-up red carpet and abundance of stars wearing toned down clothing, drew a household rating of 20.4, the lowest level going back to the very first televised Oscar show in 1953, according to figures from Nielsen Media Research.
Sunday night's Nielsen score for the Oscars was down nearly 20 percent from last year's previous all-time low, a 25.4 rating. Each rating point equals 1 percent of the estimated 106.7 million U.S. homes with television sets.
In terms of actual viewers, the Oscar telecast, hosted by comedian Steve Martin, drew an average audience of 33.05 million, the smallest for the Oscars since 1974, the first year for which average audience figures are available.
2003-03-22 Andrew Gumbel. Doubts over Oscars as stars get cold feet at last minute news.independent.co.uk
A big question is hanging over tomorrow night's Oscars ceremony in Hollywood, and it has nothing to do with speculation over which film will end up carrying off the largest clutch of golden statuettes. The question is whether the event will take place at all. And, if it does, whether any celebrities will want to show up.
But the organisers concede that if events in Iraq become so momentous as to overshadow everything else, they may have to admit that the world has more important things to worry about than whether Julianne Moore, Ren e Zellweger or Nicole Kidman deserves the accolade of best actress for 2002.
2003-03-22 Hanks skips the Oscars thisislondon.com
Hollywood celebrities, including two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks and Ali star Will Smith, announced they would not attend Sunday's 75th Academy Awards.
Best Actress nominee Nicole Kidman may also skip the event and designer Georgio Armani has already cancelled a trip to Hollywood to dress the leading actors.
Some Hollywood stars are reportedly concerned that attending the Oscars would be in poor taste because of the war on Iraq.
The event itself is being given a sober makeover - most noteably the absence of the perennial red carpet.
2003-03-08 David Gritten. The morals of King George telegraph.co.uk
G.Clooney: www.telegraph.co.uk Solaris, a cerebral thriller set in space, died in America, costing $47 million, and grossing just $15 million. "It's a polarising film," he says. "Fox agreed to make it but didn't commit to the idea of how to sell it. They sold it as a space film, which it isn't, and I was in the trailer naked. The people who did see it hated it. So we were playing to the wrong audience, that's what that tells you."
2003-02-24 Duncan Campbell. Polanski's victim urges Oscar jury to ignore past film.guardian.co.uk
The woman who, as a schoolgirl, was the victim of a statutory rape by Roman Polanski has told academy members they should feel free to give him an Oscar.
Polanski, who fled the US in 1977 and is still on the wanted list, has been nominated for the best director award at next month's Oscars.
Samantha Geimer, now 38 and living in Hawaii with her husband and three sons, made her plea in an article in the Los Angeles Times in which she urged academy voters to choose Polanski and his film, The Pianist, as Oscar winners despite his crimes. She said that what the Polish director did to her 25 years ago should not affect their judgment.
Geimer was 13 when Polanski, then 44, told her mother he wanted to take pictures of her for a French magazine at a photo session in Los Angeles. He gave her champagne and a drug that causes drowsiness, then had sex with her at a house on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles.
"It was not consensual sex by any means," wrote Geimer in her article. "I said no repeatedly but he wouldn't take no for an answer. I was alone and I didn't know what to do. It was very scary and, looking back, very creepy."
Polanski was arrested and charged with a number of sex offences. He was detained in a secure unit for psychiatric evaluation. Eventually, the district attorney, his lawyers and Geimer's lawyers reached an agreement whereby he would enter a guilty plea and be sentenced to time he had already served. However, just before sentencing, the trial judge indicated he had changed his mind and hinted that he might jail Polanski for up to 50 years. The director fled and has never returned to the US. He now lives in France.
She added: "I don't have any hard feelings toward him, or any sympathy either. He is a stranger to me."
The LA district attorney is less forgiving. A spokeswoman said: "As far as we are concerned, Mr Polanksi is still a fugitive and he would be treated as such if he ever tried to return."
Polanksi has declined to discuss the issue and made it clear he has no intention of returning for the ceremony in Hollywood on March 23. The academy will not set up a satellite link so that he can participate from Paris although the Directors Guild of America is doing so for its ceremony this Saturday when he is also nominated.
2003-02-23 A.O. SCOTT. The Critical Gaze nytimes.com
Susan Sontag: graphics7.nytimes.com
Susan Sontag's new book, ''Regarding the Pain of Others,'' an extended essay on the documentary imagery of war, is a reminder that whatever else she is -- best-selling novelist, political polemicist, director of films and plays -- Sontag is one of our most powerful critics of photography. She also happens to be among the most photographed of critics.
Her most identifiable public image remains that of an icon of seriousness, the embodiment of the intellectual in a culture pathologically ambivalent about the very category. Which means that she has been revered for her range and erudition, and also attacked for arrogance and irresponsibility. Her brief essay about media and political responses to the 9/11 attacks caused a squall of rage and ridicule far out of proportion to her arguments themselves, which in retrospect seem tone-deaf and insensitive but not altogether wrong. ''Let's by all means grieve together,'' she wrote. ''But let's not be stupid together.''
The assumption of general stupidity, and the implication of her own superiority, were no doubt part of what infuriated her critics. But her vilification as an avatar of the ''anti-American left'' also seemed to involve a settling of old scores, left over from the late 1960's, when she argued that America was ''doomed'' and far inferior to the North Vietnamese model of social organization. Since then, however, her politics have shifted, more or less in line with the rest of the international literary and artistic class. She annoyed many former allies when, in 1982, she identified communism as ''fascism with a human face'' and, in the 1990's, called for Western intervention against Serbian aggression in Bosnia and Kosovo.
With some adjustment of pronouns, the end of Sontag's essay on Benjamin might serve as a caption: ''At the Last Judgment, the Last Intellectual -- that Saturnine hero of modern culture, with his ruins, his defiant visions, his reveries, his unquenchable gloom, his downcast eyes -- will explain that he took many 'positions' and defended the life of the mind to the end, as righteously and inhumanely as he could.''
2003-02-23 Baftas give Nicole Kidman her finest hour timesonline.co.uk
images.thetimes.co.uk NICOLE KIDMAN arrives at last night s Bafta awards in London where she stole the limelight by being named best actress for her portrayal of the writer Virginia Woolf in the film The Hours. The Australian actress won her first major award for her powerful portrayal of the writer s fight against insanity. The prosthetic nose, wig and dowdy dresses she wore for the part made her unrecognisable from the woman walking up the red carpet in Leicester Square in a vintage Ungaro ivory satin dress. Catherine Zeta-Jones, who is currently embroiled in a privacy case at the High Court, won the award for best supporting actress for her role as Velma Kelly in the musical Chicago.
2003-02-23 Polanski takes top Baftas news.bbc.co.uk
Adrien Brody accepted an award for Polanski: newsimg.bbc.co.uk Roman Polanski's The Pianist has taken the best picture and best director award at the 54th Baftas. The film's success comes a day after it won six awards at France's annual film ceremony, the Cesars. The win was unexpected, as top honours were thought to be going to either musical Chicago and epic Gangs of New York, which both had 12 nominations, or drama The Hours, which had 11. Polanski himself was not there to collect the awards, but his lead actor Adrien Brody accepted the best director award on his behalf. "It's been such a tremendous honour to work with Roman," he told the audience. Pedro Almodovar won best foreign film and best original screenplay with Talk To Her, the movie the Spanish turned down as their Oscar entry. He chose the moment to read what he said was a passage from a French newspaper that he had seen which criticised plans for war against Iraq. Pedro Almodovar: newsimg.bbc.co.uk Number of Baftas The Two Towers: 3 The Pianist: 2 The Hours: 2 Chicago: 2 Road to Perdition: 2 Talk to Her: 2 The Warrior: 2 Gangs of New York: 1
2003-02-13 Geoff Andrew. Again, with 20% more existential grief film.guardian.co.uk
Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney: 'No, he didn't direct. Let's face it, I did this all by myself.' image.guardian.co.uk
Steven Soderbergh: Well, I guess memory was an issue that I dealt with a couple of times before and this seemed to be a very interesting way of talking about memory - having a character that was a physical manifestation of someone's memory seemed like a very intriguing idea to me. And I wasn't at all of a mind that the Tarkovsky film could be improved upon; I thought there was a very different interpretation to be had. The analogy that I use was that the Lem book, which was full of so many ideas that you could probably make a handful of films from it, was the seed, and that Tarkovsky generated a sequoia and we were sort of trying to make a little bonsai. And that was really what we were doing - I took a very specific aspect of the book and tried to expand Rheya's character and bring her up to the level of Kelvin.
George Clooney: I'm full of grief and confusion myself. There's a bunch of reasons: first, because I read the script and let's face it, you get to the position I'm in and read the amount of screenplays that I do, there aren't that many good screenplays out there. First and foremost as an actor, you want to work with a good screenplay. Then also, you feel like it's a really uncompromising film that's got to be done within a studio. We've been trying to push our involvement within the studio system, sort of push the things that we've learned from foreign and independent films through the 80s and push those things back into the studio system. Like Out of Sight isn't your standard studio film by any means; Three Kings wasn't the standard Warner Bros kind of film. And this one seemed like it was really going to push it.
2003-01-10 Jonathan Freedland. Visions of hell film.guardian.co.uk
film.guardian.co.uk How can it avoid trivialising tragedy? Doesn't the very act of depicting horror lessen it? To take one basic, practical matter: how could actors ever mimic the starved, cadaverous faces and skeletal bodies of Auschwitz? How can any movie ever come close to the dread reality? For years, film-makers preferred not to try. Partly scared off by the weight of the material, they chose for decades to steer round this single, gravest event of modern times. No longer. Like a star whose light is seen long after it has died, the Holocaust looms larger in the cultural firmament now than ever. The further away from it we get, the more we seem to gaze at it. So cinemagoers are bracing themselves for Roman Polanski's The Pianist, a magnificent film that tells the true story of Wladislaw Szpilman, a Jewish musician who defied every possible mortal threat to survive the Warsaw ghetto, somehow clinging to life there until the very end. (A story with enough similarities to Polanski's own experience as a child survivor of the Krakow ghetto to make The Pianist feel like an autobiographical work by proxy.) In a remarkable, transfixing performance by Adrien Brody, we see one man's journey from besuited Warsaw sophisticate and charmer to feral, wild-eyed scavenger - a virtual animal, equipped only with hunger and the instinct to survive. But we also see an unflinching account of the gradual, systematic process by which the Nazis waged their war against the Jews. The humiliations, restrictions on movement and eventual ghettoisation are laid out step by step, as seen through the eyes of Szpilman and his family. All of them, save him, are taken to the death camps, but the film stays behind - to bear witness to the last days of Warsaw. In the immediate aftermath of the modern era's greatest calamity, the moviemen were all but silent. There are several explanations for this reticence. For one thing, a kind of cordon was thrown around the entire event, making it artistically taboo. "Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," argued Theodor Adorno, which soon became "No poetry after Auschwitz", finally understood as "No poetry on Auschwitz". To attempt to make art from horror was callous. What would you do: starve the actors, build a gas chamber on a film set? As Auschwitz survivor and Nobel peace prize laureate Elie Weisel declared: "Everything that touches this event defies the imagination. In this domain, art is doomed to fail...To imagine Auschwitz is almost blasphemous." In a remarkable scene, the pianist emerges from a bombed-out ruin, having survived everything the Nazis could do to destroy him - only to face an attack from his fellow Poles. "I'm Polish," he cries out, again and again. "I'm Polish."
2003-01-08 Gangs of New York premiere film.guardian.co.uk
2002-12-17 NY film critics honour Far From Heaven canada.com
Far From Heaven, Todd Haynes' sumptuous homage to the Technicolor melodramas of the 1950s, was the big winner Monday at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, taking honours for best film and best director.
The movie also won in the categories of best supporting actor (Dennis Quaid), best supporting actress (Patricia Clarkson) and cinematography (Edward Lachman). Daniel Day-Lewis, who stars as the villainous Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, won the best actor award.
In a somewhat surprising choice, Diane Lane was named best actress for playing a wealthy suburban housewife who has an affair with a younger man in Unfaithful. Lane was the subject of a retrospective last week at New York's Lincoln Center.
2002-12-08 S. Lem. The Solaris Station cyberiad.info
After the premiere of this remake of the Tarkovski movie I read a number of critical reviews, which appeared in American press. The divergence of opinions and interpretations was enormous. The Americans in a somewhat childish manner "grade" films just like children's papers in school. Hence there were critics who gave Soderbergh's Solaris an "A", the majority agreed on a "B" and some gave it a "C".
Some reviewers, like the one from the "New York Times", claim the film was a "love story" - a romance set in outer space. I have not seen the film and I am not familiar with the script, hence I cannot say anything about the movie itself except for what the reviews reflect, albeit unclearly - like a distorted picture of one's face in ripply water. However, to my best knowledge, the book was not dedicated to erotic problems of people in outer space...
Summing up, as Solaris' author I shall allow myself to repeat that I only wanted to create a vision of a human encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner perhaps, but cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images. This is why the book was entitled Solaris and not Love in Outer Space.
2002-11-15 Gloria Goodale. Interview with Atom Egoyan, director of 'Ararat' csmonitor.com
Genocide is not a topic that any filmmaker would undertake lightly. But Armenian-Canadian director Atom Egoyan felt driven by his personal history to make "Ararat," a film about the massacre of Armenians that began in 1915 as the Ottoman Empire dissolved into present-day Turkey.
Armenians say 1.5 million of their people were killed over the following four years, and the man who later wrote the protocol on genocide for the United Nations said the slaughter is the seminal example of genocide. The episode continues to generate controversy, however, because the Turkish government to this day denies that what happened qualifies as genocide, stating that atrocities occurred on both sides.
Indeed, the Turkish government threatened to block "Ararat" at the Cannes Film Festival this past spring. The director says he made the film to deal with what he calls the consequences of denial.
The technique he employs has several modern-day families playing roles in a feature film being made about the Armenian genocide. All the families have a connection to the film being made by an Armenian filmmaker (played by Charles Aznavour).
Events switch back and forth between modern times and the epic film about the brutal destruction of a people nearly a century ago. The families are trying to come to terms with events in their own past. Egoyan, whose previous films ("The Sweet Hereafter," "Exotica") have been on a smaller scale, says his concerns remain the same.
Egoyan's wife, Arsin e Khanjian, plays an art historian who has written a book about Armenian artist Arshile Gorky. Her husband died trying to assassinate a Turkish diplomat, and she has a difficult relationship with their son, who is trying to understand why his father died.
Throughout Egoyan's film, all the characters try to distinguish truth from personal and political lies.
Several politicians who attended the screening supported his cause, he says. "If my film can help create a sense of urgency about this issue," he adds, "then I will have done something important."
2002-11-11 SARAH BOXER. So, Woody, Do You Feel Like Talking About It? nytimes.com
"...What about dream scenarios in your films? the analyst persisted. "You're muffled on the microphone," the patient said. So began an unlikely conversation on Thursday night: Woody Allen discussing himself and psychotherapy onstage in front of an audience at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan with a New York psychoanalyst, Gail Saltz.
Why are your movie sex scenes so full of argument and interruption? "It would not be any fun if lovers, you know, go into the bedroom and everything just goes smoothly," Mr. Allen said. "Who cares?" Fifty years ago there was no sex in the movies. "Couples slept alone." And if they started kissing, there would always be a fade-out. "You had the impression that if you had sex, you were going to fade out."
I don't really have a particular view of psychoanalysis in my films." If it's funny or dramatic in the movie for "the analyst to be insightful and noble and inexpensive, that's what I do."
"If the analyst is a murderer, that's fine too," he said. "It's completely what's expedient."
As a child were you confident or shaky? "I was not confident," Mr. Allen said. "But nobody has ever been able to figure out why. I was a popular kid, a very, very athletic kid. I was always the first one chosen for teams. I had no reason to be fearful and insecure, but I was." Where could that have come from? "My mother used to say I was a sweet kid for the first four years of my life. Very sweet and then I turned sour...."
Then came questions from the audience. (The performance was broadcast in 10 Jewish community centers and 2 psychoanalytic societies across the country.) One person from northern Virginia asked whether "Crimes and Misdemeanors" was critical of Jews or Judaism. No, he said, neither. "I have no interest in the subject," Mr. Allen said. "I find it as interesting as Pennsylvania real estate." No interest in religion? "I'm deeply interested in religion. I'm not interested in the religions that we have. I'm not interested in Judaism, Catholicism or Protestant religion." There is of course still existential curiosity: "Why are we here? Is there more? Is there a greater power out there?" But these questions, he said, are "unsolvable and unsatisfying and ultimately depressing."
Favorite movies? ...Then there are his all-time favorites: "Bicycle Thief," "Grand Illusion," "The Seventh Seal," "Rashomon," "Wild Strawberries," "Rules of the Game," "The 400 Blows."
"The only thing standing between me and greatness is me."
2002-11-03 Jay Rayner. Through the past darkly observer.co.uk
A couple of years ago, in one of those celebrity questionnaires so beloved of glossy magazines, Vanity Fair asked Roman Polanski whom he most despised. It was a more intriguing question than most, because the film director has a lengthier list of hate figures to choose from than most. There are the Nazis who stole his childhood, marched his parents off to the death camps and murdered his mother; there is the Manson Family, which murdered his eight-months pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, their unborn child, and four of their friends; there is the media, which, taking their cue from Polanski films such as Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown, subsequently contrived to portray him as somehow complicit in the Manson crimes because of the darkness of the movies he had made.
The director chose none of these. Instead he said simply: 'All my unauthorised biographers.'
'Yes, I have known violence and there is violence in some of my films,' he told another, 'but the two are not connected. My art is fiction.'
This month sees the British premiere of The Pianist, Polanski's latest film. It is the true story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish-Jewish composer who escaped the deportations from the Warsaw ghetto and managed to survive, first hidden away by non-Jewish Poles, later by scavenging alone through the ruins of the deserted, war-sick city. The film is significant partly because it marks a return to form for Polanski, after a series of flops. It was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival this year, and there are mutterings of Oscar recognition next, despite his inability to set foot in Los Angeles, due to his infamous conviction for having sex with an underage girl there in the late Seventies.
The Pianist is an unusual Holocaust memoir because it was written in 1945, directly after the events it describes. Most worthwhile accounts of the Shoah - and not all are worthwhile, however grotesque and terrifying the experiences that underpin them - emerged years later, a dam-burst of emotion and narrative. Perhaps because of that immediacy, the lack of time to ponder and embroider, Szpilman's style is remarkably cool and objective. He tells it as if he were simply a reporter.
And then, when the war ended, he -Szpilman- went back to playing the piano on Polish radio. He became famous in Poland not for how he escaped death but for how he lived, as a composer of great classical works and great popular songs.
As conditions for the Jews worsened his -Polanski's- father made arrangements for his son to be looked after by non-Jewish Poles should anything happen to him. When the deportations to the camps began his father pushed him out through the fence and told him to run. Polanski went to the address he had been given but nobody was there. He returned to the ghetto just as his father was being marched off. Trying to keep up with the column of men he explained his predicament but his father simply told him to 'shove off'. Polanski was alone.
Eventually he found the family that had been paid to look after him. For a while he stayed in Krakow before being sent out to an impoverished farming family who lived in almost serf-like conditions. Here he remained for the rest of war, cold and lonely, wondering what the hell had become of his parents. At the end of the conflict, he discovered his pregnant mother had been murdered in the camps, but he was re-united with his father.
At war's end Polanski had become part of an extended family unit in Krakow of displaced aunts, uncles, cousins and family friends. Within it he formed a triumvirate of three children who ran wild about the city, one of whom was Horowitz, the son of friends of his fathers and one of the youngest children to survive Auschwitz. (Along with his parents, Horowitz had been saved by Oskar Schindler; his character appears in Spielberg's film, Schindler's List, hiding from camp guards in a latrine up to his neck in shit.)
Today Horowitz is, like Polanski, hugely successful in his own field. He is a multi-award-winning New-York-based photographer, famous for absurdist and surreal images much loved by the advertising industry. They have both travelled the same journey, from Poland to America, from brutalism to survival, from destitution to wealth.
His decision to flee the United States in 1977 to avoid a jail sentence for having sex at Jack Nicholson's house with a teenage girl (to which he claimed she had consented) looks not just like a flight from justice but from attention too.
The problem for Polanski is that, however insistent he is that people look only at his work in the present, his films always seem to lead back to his past. In 1970, for example, only a few months after Tate's death, he began work on his adaptation of Macbeth. It includes the scene when Macduff, away from home, discovers his whole family has been slaughtered: 'My wife kill'd too.
Put most simply, Polanski needs to appropriate other people's stories for his own, as Ryszard Horowitz testifies. 'One night in the Eighties, when he was making Frantic in Paris, I was at a dinner party with Roman and Harrison Ford and his wife,' Horowitz says. 'All of a sudden he starts telling these stories about me, about my life in the concentration camps. Showing off. He's making a show of it. The thing is, he would never talk about himself in a traumatic situation in the Holocaust.' Polanski would, says Horowitz, only do it through someone else. And now, with Wladyslaw Szpilman and The Pianist, he is doing it again.
In the way of famous Poles, Polanski had met Szpilman long before the book came out, once in Los Angeles in the late Sixties when he was touring with the Warsaw Quintet and once in the Eighties in Warsaw at a dining club for artists. 'But neither of them talked about the past then.'
Polanski obtained the rights to The Pianist in 2000 after he had been passed a copy by his British lawyer, and had no trouble obtaining finance. It is a mark of the director's continued standing in Europe that he was able to raise a monumental budget, through a complex web of pan-European pro duction companies headed by the French Canal Plus, that topped out at $41 million, making it one of the largest European productions ever. The idea of Polanski and the Holocaust was clearly seen as a winner. Not that this was the first Holocaust project that had come his way; Steven Spielberg asked him to direct Schindler's List , but he declined, saying that, because it involved the Krakow ghetto, it would be too close to him.
He was excluded from the biggest movie city in the world. The big prizes passed him by. 'But when I ask him if he will return, he grins and says he doesn't know.' His lawyers say that nothing has changed legally in the past 25 years and he cannot return. The only thing Polanski himself has said is in a letter to Vanity Fair , which had suggested he was 'exiled' from the US. He pointed out that he was born in Paris, that he had French nationality and lived there now with his wife of 18 years, the actress Emmanuelle Seigner, and their two children.
Others see it as his attempt to make peace with the country of his birth. The final scene of the film was shot in the Warsaw Philharmonic Hall, with Szpilman at the piano in front of a full orchestra, the war a memory. It is a scene that celebrates survival.
When the final scene played, the film's audience - among them the President of Poland and most of the government - became one with Szpilman's audience. The standing ovation for Roman Polanski that followed went on for 15 minutes.
2002-10-01 CHRISTY LEMIRE. Iranian film director denied U.S. visa canoe.ca
NEW YORK -- Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami failed to obtain a visa in time to attend the New York Film Festival because of heightened security after last year's terrorist attacks.
Kiarostami went to the U.S. Embassy in Paris to apply for a visa and waited several days before learning he'd been turned down, said Richard Pena, chairman of the festival's selection committee and program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
The festival tried to help him get his visa, along with Harvard University and Ohio State University. Kiarostami had planned to visit both schools during a nine-day trip to the United States.
Kiarostami applied about a month ago, leaving insufficient time for an extensive security check to be carried out before the film festival, the State Department said.
The director was to have introduced his film Ten, which screened Sunday and will be shown again Tuesday. The movie, which takes place entirely in a car, is about a woman who shuttles passengers from one side of Tehran to another over several days.
The 60-year-old filmmaker won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997 for The Taste of Cherry. He's been to the New York Film Festival twice, and was the subject of a retrospective in 1996.
A second director with a film at the festival, Aki Kaurismaki of Finland, refused to come to the United States in a show of solidarity.
"Under the circumstances I, too, am forced to cancel my participation -- for if the present government of the United States of America does not want an Iranian, they will hardly have any use for a Finn, either," he said in a statement.
2002-07-21 Paul Reynolds. Chaplin knighthood blocked news.bbc.co.uk
Confidential Foreign Office papers just released by the Public Record Office reveal how for years Charlie Chaplin was denied a knighthood.
They include a hostile report on Chaplin by the Foreign Office research department in 1956.
This drew attention to his "communist" sympathies and to his morals - his marriages included two to girls aged sixteen and he had once lost a paternity suit.
Chaplin was eventually knighted in 1975.
The episode shows the deep sensitivity of the issue, with views being sought from the British ambassadors in Washington and Switzerland (where Chaplin, still a British citizen, moved to in 1952 after leaving the United States).
The report points out: "Mr Chaplin managed to shock even the more broad-minded in the 1920s - e.g. his two marriages to 16-year-olds. Nor has the press allowed its readers to forget the Joan Barry paternity suit, the lurid details of which dominated headlines in 1943 and 1944 before Mr Chaplin was finally declared the legal father of Miss Barry's child."
In 1972, Charlie was given a special Oscar.
The long delayed knighthood came three years later, just two years before Chaplin died.
2002-06-05 ANDY NEWMAN, COREY KILGANNON. Curse of the Jaded Audience: Woody Allen, in Art and Life nytimes.com
A grand total of eight people showed up yesterday for the matinee of Woody Allen's latest movie, "Hollywood Ending," one month out of the box and now playing in exactly one theater in Manhattan, a $4.95-a-ticket discount house in Times Square.
Downtown, Mr. Allen's real-life courtroom drama - he is suing his former producer and friend Jean Doumanian for $12 million - wasn't proving a much better draw. The house was heavily papered with reporters and lawyers, but the few civilians who poked their heads into Room 242 at State Supreme Court in Manhattan were still able to find a seat.
At the height of the Soon-Yi backlash, though, in 1993, Mr. Allen could at least jam a courtroom, as he did during his bitter custody battle with his longtime lover, Mia Farrow, the adoptive mother of Soon-Yi Previn, who is now Mr. Allen's wife. That trial featured news conferences at the Plaza Hotel, nude photographs of the future Mrs. Allen, and Mr. Allen cracking jokes on the stand about Mia Farrow's mental stability.
In the courtroom yesterday, Mr. Parcher, in the course of trying to show that Mr. Allen is owed nowhere near what he claims for his mostly unsung movies of the 1990's, said that even Mr. Allen's major movies in the 1980's made little if any profit.
Mr. Allen filed a civil lawsuit last year against Ms. Doumanian and her partner and companion, Jaqui Safra. He claims that their Sweetland Films production company cheated him out of money for the seven movies he made for them beginning in 1993.
He said he had intended that he and Ms. Doumanian would remain friends and actually enjoy the lawsuit, like playful adversaries in a Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn film. He said he thought that she would find the suit "amusing" and that they would be "having dinner at night at Le Cirque and facing each other by day."
"I think Woody better win this case," Mr. Brown said. "He needs the money."
2002-06-04 CALEV BEN-DAVID. Yes you Cannes, Woody jpost.com
When I first learned that one local chapter of the American Jewish Congress had taken out an ad urging Woody Allen to boycott this year's Cannes Film Festival, I thought: That can't be right.
After all, what has the Cannes Film Festival ever done against Israel or the Jewish people?
Surely it would have been more appropriate for the AJC to call on the organizers of Cannes to boycott Woody, who has spent a good part of his career mocking his own people, and whose only public statement on the subject of Israel was his notorious 1988 New York Times op-ed piece condemning the Israeli response to the intifada ("I am appalled beyond measure by the treatment of the rioting Palestinians by the Jews... Are these the people whose money I used to steal from those little blue-and-white cans, after collecting funds for a Jewish homeland?")
After all, asking Woody Allen to boycott the French is like asking him to date women his own age or even more ridiculous, like asking New York Jews to boycott The New York Times!
I can't help thinking of that classic Jackie Mason bit mocking status-conscious American Jews who, upon finding the cost of a Mercedes Benz a little too pricy, suddenly discover a moral objection to German-made goods. "Everything in their house is German," noted Mason, "but when it comes to paying for a Mercedes, all of sudden it's 'I'm not driving a Nazi car!'"
But tell you what: Given Woody Allen's recent behavior, I have decided to boycott paying for his films in the theaters, including Hollywood Ending. Fortunately, it's a boycott I've already been observing retroactively for the past few years. But don't worry, Woody you'll always have Paris.
2002-05-16 Jonathan V. Last. The Case for the Empire weeklystandard.com
STAR WARS RETURNS today with its fifth installment, "Attack of the Clones." There will be talk of the Force and the Dark Side and the epic morality of George Lucas's series. But the truth is that from the beginning, Lucas confused the good guys with the bad. The deep lesson of Star Wars is that the Empire is good.
It's a difficult leap to make--embracing Darth Vader and the Emperor over the plucky and attractive Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia--but a careful examination of the facts, sorted apart from Lucas's off-the-shelf moral cues, makes a quite convincing case.
Like the United Nations, the Republic has no armed forces of its own, but instead relies on a group of warriors, the Jedi knights, to "keep the peace." The Jedi, while autonomous, often work in tandem with the Senate, trying to smooth over quarrels and avoid conflicts. But the Jedi number only in the thousands--they cannot protect everyone.
What's more, it's not clear that they should be "protecting" anyone. The Jedi are Lucas's great heroes, full of Zen wisdom and righteous power. They encourage people to "use the Force"--the mystical energy which is the source of their power--but the truth, revealed in "The Phantom Menace," is that the Force isn't available to the rabble. The Force comes from midi-chlorians, tiny symbiotic organisms in people's blood, like mitochondria. The Force, it turns out, is an inherited, genetic trait. If you don't have the blood, you don't get the Force. Which makes the Jedi not a democratic militia, but a royalist Swiss guard.
With one or two notable exceptions, the Jedi we meet in Star Wars are full of themselves. They ignore the counsel of others (often with terrible consequences), and seem honestly to believe that they are at the center of the universe. When the chief Jedi record-keeper is asked in "Attack of the Clones" about a planet she has never heard of, she replies that if it's not in the Jedi archives, it doesn't exist. (The planet in question does exist, again, with terrible consequences.)
Lucas wants the Empire to stand for evil, so he tells us that the Emperor and Darth Vader have gone over to the Dark Side and dresses them in black.
But look closer. When Palpatine is still a senator, he says, "The Republic is not what it once was. The Senate is full of greedy, squabbling delegates. There is no interest in the common good." At one point he laments that "the bureaucrats are in charge now."
Palpatine believes that the political order must be manipulated to produce peace and stability. When he mutters, "There is no civility, there is only politics," we see that at heart, he's an esoteric Straussian.
Make no mistake, as emperor, Palpatine is a dictator--but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet. It's a dictatorship people can do business with. They collect taxes and patrol the skies. They try to stop organized crime (in the form of the smuggling rings run by the Hutts). The Empire has virtually no effect on the daily life of the average, law-abiding citizen.
Also, unlike the divine-right Jedi, the Empire is a meritocracy. The Empire runs academies throughout the galaxy (Han Solo begins his career at an Imperial academy), and those who show promise are promoted, often rapidly. In "The Empire Strikes Back" Captain Piett is quickly promoted to admiral when his predecessor "falls down on the job."
Which makes the rebels--Lucas's heroes--an unimpressive crew of anarchic royals who wreck the galaxy so that Princess Leia can have her tiara back.
I'll take the Empire.
2002-01-29 Cruise beats hobbits at box office news.bbc.co.uk
Tom Cruise's latest film, Vanilla Sky, has stormed to the top of the UK and Ireland box office charts, ending the five-week reign of The Fellowship of the Ring.
The opening is the biggest for a Cruise vehicle in the UK, with the exception of his two Mission Impossible films.
2002-01-21 'A Beautiful Mind,' 'Moulin Rouge' Lead Golden Globe Winners washingtonpost.com
The uplifting drama about a schizophrenic genius, "A Beautiful Mind," led winners at Sunday's Golden Globes with four awards, including best drama and best actor for star Russell Crowe. The hyperkinetic musical "Moulin Rouge" claimed three awards including best musical or comedy, and best musical actress for Nicole Kidman. Robert Altman took the directing honor for his murder-mystery satire "Gosford Park," which chronicles the scandals of aristocrats through the eyes of their servants. Sissy Spacek was named best dramatic actress for the dark drama "In the Bedroom." Gene Hackman, who couldn't make it to the ceremony, earned the comedy actor Globe for his performance as the conniving head of a family of former child prodigies in "The Royal Tenenbaums." Bosnia's "No Man's Land" received the foreign language film Globe. Sting was the victor in the movie song category for his romantic waltz "Until ...," from the comedy "Kate & Leopold." ***Also: List of Winners at the 59th Annual Golden Globes Awards, www.washingtonpost.com
2002-01-21 Cruise and Cruz set for premiere news.bbc.co.uk
Vanilla Sky, starring Tom Cruise and his girlfriend Penelope Cruz, receives its London premi?re on Monday evening.
It was while making this film last year that Cruise petitioned former wife Nicole Kidman for divorce, falling in love with co-star Cruz, 27.
Tom Cruise has said: "It's a very ambitious movie with a lot of different layers. It's a thriller and a love story and a pop culture ride with a lot of questions about life mixed in."
The star also described it as a "very personal movie" for director Cameron Crowe.
Crowe himself has commented that the film crew felt protective of Cruise, then under the full glare of the media over his break-up with Nicole Kidman, during the shooting of the film in New York.
"Some days I would worry for Tom but never because of anything he said or did.
"We were working together, we were friends and then after the movie, with time, it became something else. But I always had a good communication with him," Cruz told BBC entertainment correspondent Tom Brook.
2002-01-11 Lynch heads Cannes judges news.bbc.co.uk
Lynch, whose latest film Mulholland Drive has divided critics, said he was nervous about his appointment.
2002-01-02 Kandahar star accused of terrorism film.guardian.co.uk
An actor in the acclaimed Iranian film Kandahar is an Islamic terrorist responsible for the assassination of a political dissident, it has been alleged. Officials in the US say the man credited in the film as Hassan Tantai is actually David Belfield, prime suspect in the murder of former Iranian diplomat Ali Akbar Tabatabai.
2001-06-02 Jonah Goldberg. As Voyager Boldly Goes tinyurl.com
For the first time in over a decade there is no first-run Star Trek series on TV. I never thought I would say this but.that's good news. The final episode of Star Trek Voyager, which aired last week, was a perfect example of how far Trek has wandered from it's original sci-fi goodness.
Here is the story arc of the full Trek series. In the beginning, there was a ship looking for adventure in places where no "man" has gone before. Despite some interesting ethical and philosophical debates, it wasn't in much dispute that human (read: American) civilization was superior to all but a handful of cultures encountered on their "wagon train" through space.
Captain Kirk obeyed the Prime Directive ("Thou Shalt Not Back-Seat Drive the Alien Civilizations") when the aliens were doing just fine. He ignored it whenever the aliens were about to screw up.
Then, a generation later came Jean-Luc Picard's USS Enterprise (proof of purchase number NCC-1701-D). Unlike Kirk, Picard was no cowboy. It was as if he read Warren Christopher's opus Diplomacy: The Forgotten Imperative. This of course made sense to the extent that Picard was a Frenchman. Indeed, under his example, it is a wonder that the Romulans didn't end up sitting in our Terran caf s while our brave human resistance boldly urinated in their wine.
Still, if the first Trek was - as a zillion underemployed academics have pointed out - the apotheosis of American Cold War chauvinism (Kennedy's New Frontier was an explicit inspiration for Gene Roddenberry), then The Next Generation reflected a more "mature" embrace of, shall we say, United Nations values ("We can't do that! The Organian Peace Treaty forbids it!").
Nonetheless, the new Star Trek still remained loyal to the idea that humanity should "boldly go where no one had gone before" (the switch from "man" to "one" for a society comprised of millions of non-human races always seemed eminently reasonable to me). And, with a few dismaying exceptions, STNG reflected the early Roddenberry's optimism about the future.
That changed with Deep Space 9. In this series, there was very little exploring. This was Fort Apache: The Bronx moved to the Delta Quadrant border. Exploring was replaced with military sorties and internal intrigues. Now, because I always savored glimpses into the politics of the Trek universe, I was pretty fond of DS9, but mostly because I am an in-the-tank Trek geek. DS9's later reliance on Klingons and space battles made the show thoroughly enjoyable for anyone who loves that stuff.
But, if you take a step back and look at the big picture, DS9 was more than a small failure. First of all, Benjamin Sisco was one angry dude. Avery Brooks is a wonderful actor. But he is wonderful at acting like an angry black man (he was great as Hawk in the Spenser for Hire series).
Picking up on themes laid down in Next Generation, DS9 focused more and more on the shortcomings of the Federation. It wasn't quite "Blame humanity first," but there was a steady drumbeat of episodes about the failings of the Federation and the less altruistic nature of humanity. Quark, a Ferengi, lectured us about how his planet never had racism or slavery (of course, they keep their women naked and locked up at home, but let's not quibble). As a conservative, I concede this was an overdue dose of realism, but it was also a crisis of confidence in Roddenberry's optimistic vision of the future.
How many episodes seemed to be inspired by the Iran-Contra affair? Twenty-fourth-century Oliver Norths were constantly freelancing Federation policy, subverting the law and cutting ethical corners. In a sense, the guys who acted like Captain Kirk were now the villains of the series.
Indeed, what began as an intriguing twist and a bit of realism in the Next Generation became an indispensable theme in DS9: open rebellion within the Federation.
The rebellious Maquis were largely comprised of renegade Federation officers. But unlike the Kirk-like Oliver North cowboys, these renegades were often heroes (and we need not dwell on the fact that the French underground called itself the Maquis during World War Two; and after WWII millions of Frenchmen who spent the war cooking breakfast for German houseguests, said they were members of it). Whereas the Kirks had imperialistic motives, wanting to make the Federation a military hegemon. The Maquis were the Greenpeacers, trying to thwart the federation's cruel ambitions.
And then there was Voyager. Captained by a chick - to the requisite huzzahs from people who care about such things - Voyager was hurled into an unknown and very distant quadrant of the galaxy in the first episode. Due to circumstances too stupid to recount in detail here, the ship was equally manned by members of the Maquis and loyal members of the Federation. Of course, it's a good thing the ship is run by a woman, because they are so much better at reaching consensus.
2001-03-04 The Lone Gunmen xfiles.stylicious.com
They realize that the airplane will be remote controlled, just like Bert's car was. Talking by phone to the Gunmen's office, Byers asks Langly and Frohike to hack into the aircraft controls. They do and discover that the plane is programmed to crash into the World Trade Center. Bert enters the cockpit and tries to warn the aircrew, but they don't believe him. Making a lunge, he deactivates the autopilot and the crew realizes that they are not in control. They have 22 minutes before they hit the building. Langly can't break the encryption on the aircraft control system --- his computer doesn't have the processing power and the computer keeps freezing. Frohike slips next door to the firing range and finds Yves there. He needs the Octium but she is not impressed by the need to save people's lives. Frohike points out that her name is an anagram for "Lee Harvey Oswald" and says he knows who she is. She uses the Octium in her laptop to somehow assist Langly break the encryption and give the pilots control of the aircraft again. The plane barely misses the skyscraper.
FOX TV show depicts a U.S. government plot to crash a hijacked Boeing into the WTC six months before 9/11! thewebfairy.com
1999-05-14 Anne Applebaum. Playing at Survival in Warsaw anneapplebaum.com
At first glance, everything about Wladyslaw Szpilman speaks of a certain kind of Central European comfort, of a pleasantly uneventful, bourgeois life. Dressed in a tweed jacket and tie, speaking of popular music and songs, Szpilman himself initially gives off the air of someone who has lived all of his 87 years in civilised surroundings. Then, effortlessly, he moves from the familiar to the horrific.
Wladyslaw Szpilman, already a famous musician and composer when the war broke out - Poles of a certain generation still know the words to his popular songs - was rescued not only by a German but by a Jewish policeman, who pulled him out of a queue of people boarding trains for Treblinka; by his talent, which kept him alive in the starving Warsaw Ghetto; and by, in his own estimate, no less than 20 Poles who smuggled him out of the Ghetto and then hid him in their flats, knowing that they and their families could be sentenced to death for helping a Jew.
Ideology, nationality and religion, he says now, had nothing to do with anyone's wartime behaviour: "One of the Poles who helped me first told me, `I was an anti-Semite, but not any more.' Then he went on to risk his life by hiding me."
Szpilman tried once or twice to have the book republished, but didn't push. He was more interested in his music, didn't consider himself a writer, and most of all had no interest in politics of any kind. "Three times they asked me to join the Communist Party, but I always said no," he says now.
Only the efforts of his son, who lives in Germany, ensured that the book was published there two years ago, where it became a best seller, and now in Britain.
Szpilman's story did have some unexpected effects. Among other things, it led him, through a series of chance meetings, to Frau Hosenfeld, the wife of his good German. She wrote to him in 1950, when her husband was dying in a Soviet prison camp, asking for help. Szpilman did what he could.
"I went," he says grimly, "to see Jakub Berman."
Berman was the head of the Polish secret police, and, in Szpilman's words, a criminal whom no decent person in Poland would speak to. Being a celebrity himself, Szpilman simply rang up Berman's office and said he wanted to meet him on a private matter. They met, Berman listened. Nothing came of it. Captain Hosenfeld died in his Soviet prison camp, having been tortured for claiming to have saved a Jew.
And not just one: over the years, it has emerged that Captain Hosenfeld served as guardian angel for a whole group of people, including others Jews, as well as a Polish priest. His son has been to visit Szpilman: the two of them went together to the building, now rebuilt, where the Wehrmacht officer brought bread to the Jew in hiding. Standing there on the street, the younger Hosenfeld had what Szpilman can only describe as "an attack of hysteria."
1971-06-07 Marcel Ophuls. The Sorrow and the Pity eserver.org
The Sorrow and the Pity is not only the greatest documentary film ever made, but also one of the greatest films of any kind.
The Sorrow and the Pity is, as its subtitle reminds us, a "chronicle of a French city under the Occupation," the Occupation in question being that of France by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. The director, Marcel Oph?ls, is the son of the famed German director Max Oph?ls, who was known for the elegant camerawork of classics such as The Earrings of Madame de .... Marcel himself began making conventional movies in France in the early 60s like Banana Peel with Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo, but soon moved to documentaries. The Sorrow and the Pity was his first great success; made for French television but deemed too controversial to show there, the film was released world-wide and received an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature of 1971, losing to a little-remembered film about the battle between men and insects called The Hellstrom Chronicle.
The subject matter of The Sorrow and the Pity is simple: life during the Occupation, focusing on the small city of Clermont-Ferrand. The resultant film is transcendent. A straightforward description of the film seems to promise limitless boredom: more than four hours of talking-head interviews in at least three different languages, blended with old wartime footage and occasional clips from the likes of Maurice Chevalier.
Ophuls' argument here is that the Resistance wasn't nearly as widespread in France as the country would like to believe. His larger question asks what any of us might do in such a situation. The crucial underlying historic point is that France's Vichy government, collaborating with the Nazis, was morally and ethically different than other countries that were overrun by the Nazis during the war. The sad fact of collaboration makes France a different sort of history lesson, one that many Frenchmen apparently did not want to consider thirty years ago when the film was first released.
• Apocalypse Now film.tierranet.com
Transcript: film.tierranet.com
• British dogs quiz guardian.co.uk
• Daniel Mendelsohn. A Little Iliad. Troy, a film directed by Wolfgang Petersen nybooks.com
• Enemy at the gates. The Stalingrad battle movies.yahoo.com
• Gillo Pontecorvo
Wiki on Gillo Pontecorvo
Gillo Pontecorvo
IMDB. La Battaglia di Algeri
IF BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925) is the most celebrated work of propaganda in the history of cinema, then Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) is certainly the most watchable.
Ideology and entertainment rarely mix well in film, which probably explains why the picture was the only one made by the unashamedly political Pontecorvo that enjoyed any success. The odds were even against that happening when he first took on the proposal of the newly independent Algerian Government to tell the story of the country’s liberation from French colonial rule.
The subject matter was potentially powerful, but Pontecorvo dismissed the suggested source material - the prison memoirs of one of the leaders of the revolt - as being too subjective, and fretted about the film’s financing by the Algerians and the difficulty of generating audience sympathy for characters deeply implicated in acts of terror.
It took several years of careful planning before he arrived at a solution, which was to shoot the film in a neorealist documentary style, and without using professional actors. The result is a masterpiece of compelling story-telling that depicts a spiral of violence which ultimately overwhelms all its initiators, in particular the French forces, whose use of torture only fans the flames of rebellion.
The film, which benefits from Marcello Gatti’s cinematography and a score by Ennio Morricone, is surprisingly even-handed, but was immediately banned in France. It gained recognition, however, at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion, and in America, where it was nominated for three Oscars, including Best Foreign Language Film
Gilberto Pontecorvo was born into an affluent Jewish family in Pisa in 1919. One of ten children, as a child he was overshadowed by the intellect of several of his brothers. The most noted of these was Bruno, who was to shock Western Europe in 1950 when he voluntarily moved to the Soviet Union, taking with him his knowledge of atomic physics.
Gillo Pontecorvo studied chemistry at Pisa University, but when racial laws were implemented against the Jews by Mussolini he fled to Paris, where he found work as a correspondent for several left-leaning Italian newspapers. When the Germans arrived, he moved to St Tropez, where he supported himself by giving tennis lessons. All his life, Pontecorvo had the reputation of being something of an idler.
In 1941, however, he joined the Italian Communist Party and returned home to fight with the partisans. After the war, having been strongly impressed by the polemical films of Rossellini, notably Paisa (1946), he took up first acting and then directing, initially as an assistant to Mario Monicelli, the maker of Italy’s equivalent of such Ealing comedies as The Ladykillers.
After shooting a number of documentaries, Pontecorvo’s first outing as a director was La grande strada azzurra (1957), a rather earnest tale of the struggles of a humble fisherman and his wife, improbably played by the decidedly grand Yves Montand and Alida Valli. He followed this with Kapo (1960), a story of the Holocaust, which attracted much controversy both for the rhetorical manner of its staging and Pontecorvo’s rather too blatant politicising.
They were faults which were to mar the only other two films he was to make after the acclaim given to The Battle of Algiers. On the back of it, he was invited to Hollywood to shoot a picture with Marlon Brando. Like its star, Queimada (1969), also known as Burn!, looked handsome enough, but its confused and allegorical plot about colonialism in the Caribbean blighted its chances at the box office.
It was another ten years before Pontecorvo got behind the camera again, this time to make a film about the Basque campaign for self-rule and the assassination in 1973 of Franco’s mooted successor Admiral Carrero Blanco. Ogro (Operation Ogre, 1979) flopped, however, and thereafter Pontecorvo retreated to Rome.
From time to time he would give out that he was working on a project - a biopic of Archbishop Romero, a film about Christ - but nothing materialised. The timing, it seemed, was never quite right.
It thus came as a surprise when, in 1992, Pontecorvo accepted the offer to run the Venice Film Festival, and even more so when he made a success of it. Astutely mixing controversial selections with big American draws, in his four years in charge he managed to revive much of the festival’s fading lustre, though afterwards he could not do the same for Cinecittà, the Rome film studios of which he was president.
He is survived by his wife, Picci, and their three children.
• Movie controversy film.guardian.co.uk
Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 rides into town this week on a Harley Davidson of hype, trailing a sidecar of controversy. How much do you know about these other films that caused a stink?
• Polanski Named in Rape Charge. Originally published in The Washington Post, 1977/03/13 vachss.com
Polish film director Roman Polanski, widower of murdered actress Sharon Tate, was free on bond today on charges of luring a 13-year-old girl to the home of Jack Nicholson under the pretext of photographing her, then drugging and raping her.
Polanski, 43, was arrested by police to Beverly Wilshire Hotel Friday night following the incident Thursday night at Nicholson's Bel Air home.
In addition to the rape charges, Polanski also was booked on suspicion of sodomy, child molestation and furnishing dangerous drugs to a minor. He was released on $2,500 bond pending his arraignment March 18.
Nicholson was reportedly out of town at the time. A spokesman for the district attorney's office told reporters that Polanski recently met the girl's mother and arranged for the girl to pose for some photographs for the French edition of Vogue magazine.
He said Polanski took some pictures at a first photographic session two weeks ago, and among these pictures was one of the girl nude from the waist up.
He said the mother became angry when she saw the picture and questioned her daughter when she returned home from the second photographic session Thursday night. Officers said the girl told her mother that Polanski had given her a tablet of the powerful tranquilizing drug Quaalude.
The director then raped the girl and forced her to commit various sex acts with him, police said.
• Ruthless Reviews: FIRST BLOOD ruthlessreviews.com
• Steven Spielberg. Jaws imdb.com
Richard G. Fernicola. Twelve Days of Terror: A Definitive Investigation of the 1916 New Jersey Shark Attacks: tinyurl.com In July 1916, a time of record-setting heat and a raging polio epidemic, beachgoers along the New Jersey shore confronted a greater terror still: lurking in the water swam a shark, or perhaps several sharks, that had apparently developed a taste for human flesh. Within less than two weeks, the offending fish killed four swimmers and badly injured another, setting off a wave of panic that kept visitors well out of the water and threatened the state's thriving tourist economy. Officials were quick to react. President Woodrow Wilson, himself from New Jersey, sought and received $5,000 from Congress to eradicate the villain. Unsure of which species was to blame, commercial fishermen and state police alike destroyed every shark they encountered, while some conspiracy-minded journalists hinted that the attacks had somehow been triggered by German U-boats plying the waters off New Jersey. Those strange events of 1916 are not much remembered today, except, perhaps, by fans of Peter Benchley's novel Jaws, whose origin lies in the attacks. Richard Fernicola revives the incident with this thoroughgoing investigation, which offers solid information on the natural history and behavior of the many shark species that populate the Atlantic, and which hazards educated guesses as to which kind of shark did the fatal mischief--and why. --Gregory McNamee
• Tarantino vists Pasternak's grave 1tv.ru
• Titanic voted worst film ever ananova.com
Titanic, the biggest box office hit in history and winner of 11 Oscars, has been voted the worst film ever.
The blockbuster came ahead of other big-budget but little-loved movies AI and Pearl Harbor in the poll of viewers of BBC One's Film 2003.
Titanic, released in 1997 starring Leonardo DiCaprio, has made £1.1 billion at global box offices - almost twice as much as its nearest rival.
Film 2003 host Jonathan Ross said: "May I commend the nation on its choice."
The show received viewers' comments such as: "My father fell asleep after 20 minutes. He was lucky. It was only his snoring that kept me awake."
Another said: "It sank. There. I've saved you three hours of your life.
• William KAREL. THE WORLD ACCORDING TO BUSH imdb.com
flachfilm.com
Trailer
No thriller or political fiction screenplay could have imagined the workings of such an intricate plot. Unfortunately, its actors are not fictional characters but, on the contrary, a man and a team who hold the fate of the world in their hands. For the first time in the political history of the USA, a small group of people, working together for thirty years, has more or less taken over American foreign policy and totally overhauled it, silencing all opposition. Behind the proclaimed global strategy, we find not only considerable economic interests but also a possibly more disturbing aspect, a religious project that George W. Bush identifies with completely, initiated by extremists who are part of the President’s direct entourage. Religion has taken on an all-important role since his arrival at the White House.
Never before in the history of the world’s democracies have one man and his team acted with such arrogance and impunity, defying international law and creating an unprecedented grouping of interests: the project blends politics and personal interests in an atmosphere of total cynicism. The latest war against Iraq, with its totally unforeseeable consequences, hides another danger, that of seeing America launch further "civilizing" operations of a similar type, imposed by force, fired by ideas that are at best naïve and at worst totally hypocritical, calculated over a dangerously short term.
