Day: June 5, 2017

Wonder Woman was even mightier than expected. Warner Bros. has revised the film’s weekend estimate up to $103.1 million.

The studio on Monday said the tickets sold on Sunday turned out to be even higher than it estimated over the weekend. Warner Bros. previously had announced a $100.5 million North American haul.

The nearly $3 million swing, Warner Bros. said, was due to an unusually small drop in audience from Saturday to Sunday. That indicates that the well-reviewed film’s strong word of mouth is giving Wonder Woman more momentum than usual.

The Patty Jenkins-directed film became the biggest opening for a film directed by a woman and, by the far, the most successful female-led superhero release.
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In the three weeks since St. Nicholas came to Moscow, more than 300,000 people have stood in huge lines for up to 10 hours to visit a gilded ark thought to carry his bone fragments. Yet the queues stretching down the Moscow River embankment from Christ the Savior Cathedral are something of their own marvel.

 The massive turnout to see the saint’s relics, which are on loan from their home in Bari, Italy for the first time, underline how strongly the Orthodox Church has become a part of Russians’ sense of themselves a quarter-century after the collapse of the officially atheist Soviet Union.

“It was tough, but you got a chance to think about your life, all the problems and the sins you have committed,” economist Svetlana Dzhuma, 24, said after exiting the cathedral in a state of elation.

President Vladimir Putin, who says he was secretly baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church as an infant, paid his respects to the relics on the day they arrived in Moscow, where photos of him kissing the ark were widely featured in Russian media.

Although Russians remain predominantly secular and have opposed church-backed initiatives such as a ban on abortions or public school classes on Orthodox Church teachings, the overwhelming majority of them strongly identify as Russian Orthodox.

Christian revival

Nicholas, who died in 343, never set foot in the territory that became Russia. But he has become the Russian Orthodox Church’s most popular saint, credited with miracles and with preventing catastrophes in Russia. His prominence in the church has made the relics something of a must-see even for people who are not regular church-goers.

Russia has witnessed a Christian revival since the crumbling Soviet state began to loosen its grip on religious life in the late 1980s. The percentage of Russians calling themselves Christian Orthodox shot up from 17 percent to around 77 percent, Lev Gudkov, director of the independent Levada Center polling and research organization, said.

Stable 7 percent

However, roughly 40 percent of those who identify as Orthodox Christians say they do not believe in God or eternal life, and the number of churchgoers who take communion is stable at around 7 percent.

Gudkov described the thinking as “a very superficial change in identity: I’m a Russian, therefore Orthodox. It’s a change from the Soviet identity to an ethnic Russian and religious one.”

Putin in his third term as president has evoked Russia’s Christian roots and relied on the church to provide the ideological backing for his policies at home and abroad. Among his justifications for Russia annexing Crimea from Ukraine was that the ancient settlement of Chersonesus there is as important to Russians as Jerusalem’s Temple Mount is to Jews, Muslims and Christians.

The Orthodox Church got permission to host the St. Nicholas relics after Patriarch Kirill met with Pope Francis last year in the first such meeting between the leaders of the two religions since the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches split about a millennium ago. The ark will be on display, first in Moscow and later in St. Petersburg, until the end of July.

Resurgence of faith

Speaking after a prayer celebrating the relics’ arrival, Kirill referred to the crowds of believers waiting to see the relics as a sign of the resurgence of faith.

“If someone has the energy to stand seven, eight hours or longer on the street, in the heat, in the cold, under the rain, it speaks of a very strong faith,” he said.

Yulia Kamolova, a 34-year-old accountant, got up at 5 a.m. and stood in line for nine hours to see the relics “to cleanse myself” and to show them to her 12-year-old son. Retired pharmacist Svetlana Timonina said Nicholas, known in Russia as “the wonderworker,” was her favorite saint and that he had answered her prayers in the past.

Many in the line spoke of the miracles for which they prayed. Andrei Olenko, 52, said he traveled from Crimea hoping for a turnaround for the former farming collective where he works.

“Our farm is falling apart, and we would like (St. Nicholas) to help the farm,” Olenko said.

Blind faith

The Levada Center’s Gudkov said “this craving for a miracle, craving for a cure,” is becoming noticeable as the country’s disillusioned people have started pinning their hopes for a better future to a blind faith in the supernatural instead of on the ideal of a democratic government.

“People were waiting for a miracle, that once they gave up the Soviet ideology and Soviet state they will get prosperous — and then it didn’t happen,” he said.

Xenia Loutchenko, a Moscow-based commentator on church affairs, said it would be an oversimplification to dismiss those lined up to visit the relics as ignorant or superstitious, as many of Moscow’s atheists have.

What fuels this craving for a miracle is that with standards of living falling, Russians have little faith in a positive change from social institutions or the government.

“The thing is, people don’t have much to hope for with the current state of our health care, what people hear from doctors and bureaucrats: They have nothing else to rely on, other than to go and pray.”

 
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More than a decade after Bill Cosby invited a college basketball manager to his home to discuss her career, the 79-year-old comedian goes on trial on Monday in a sexual assault case that is sure to define his legacy.

Cosby’s image as a father and family man, on screen and off, helped fuel his extraordinary 50-year career in entertainment. He created TV characters, most notably Dr. Cliff Huxtable, with crossover appeal among blacks and whites, young and old, rich and poor. His TV shows, films and comedy tours earned him an estimated $400 million.

Then a deposition unsealed in 2015 revealed an unsavory private life marked by a long history of sexual liaisons with young women. Dozens came forward to say he had drugged and assaulted them.

The trial involves just one of those complaints, that of the former Temple University basketball staffer. Andrea Constand, 44, of the Toronto area, will take the stand in suburban Philadelphia this week and tell her story in public for the first time.

Holding a wooden cane, Cosby got to the courthouse around 8:40 a.m. Monday, amid a heavy media presence. He chatted amiably with actress Keshia Knight Pulliam, who played his youngest daughter on The Cosby Show, and they walked together past dozens of cameras and into the courthouse. Cosby smiled but said nothing when someone asked how he was feeling.

Celebrity attorney Gloria Allred, who showed up for the first day of the trial, told reporters she’s hopeful “there will be justice in this case.”

Allred represents several of Cosby’s accusers, including a woman who worked for the comedian’s agent at the William Morris agency. She will be the only other accuser allowed to testify for the prosecution.

“I’m not going to predict what the outcome is,” Allred said. “We’ll see what the evidence is. But this case is not going to be decided on optics, it’s going to be decided on the evidence, and finally, it’s Mr. Cosby who’s going to have to face that evidence and confront the accusers who are against him.”

Media influence

Montgomery County Judge Steven T. O’Neill hopes to keep the media frenzy from influencing the case as it did at O.J. Simpson’s murder trial. The cameras that dominated Simpson’s trial aren’t allowed in Pennsylvania courtrooms, but scores of photographers will be lined up outside the courthouse. Like the Simpson case, the jury will be sequestered.

“We’ve had an O.J. hangover for many years,” said Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson. “What you worry about as the judge is that the lawyers don’t showboat, the evidence gets presented fairly, and that you have a jury that does its job and is not being thrown into the whole milieu of the trial outside the courtroom.”

Accusations

Constand filed a police complaint in 2005 over the night a year earlier, when, she says, Cosby drugged and molested her at his estate near Philadelphia. Cosby had beaten back rumors about his conduct before, at least once by giving an exclusive interview to a tabloid to squelch a woman’s story.

Cosby and his agents offered Constand money for school when her mother, Gianna, called to confront him in January 2006.

“She said your apology is enough,” Cosby later said in a deposition . “There’s nothing you can do.”

Constand’s complaint was referred to Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, where the district attorney found the case to be too weak to prosecute.

Constand instead sued Cosby for sexual battery. Thirteen women signed on to support her lawsuit, saying Cosby also had molested them. But Cosby avoided a trial — after giving four days of deposition testimony — by negotiating a confidential settlement with Constand in 2006.

The issue died down until 2014, when comedian Hannibal Buress called Cosby out as a rapist, leading dozens of new accusers to come forward. Months later, a federal judge granted an Associated Press motion to unseal parts of his deposition.

In one of the more explosive revelations, Cosby said he had gotten quaaludes in the 1970s to give women before sex. The news put a halt to his planned TV comeback and led networks to stop airing Cosby reruns.

Cosby’s lawyers have spent the past 18 months trying to have the criminal case thrown out. They say Cosby testified only after being promised he could never be charged. And they argue the delayed prosecution makes the case impossible to defend, given that witnesses have died, memories have faded and Cosby, they say, is blind.

Lead defense lawyer Brian McMonagle hopes to call a memory expert to challenge accusations he calls “nothing more than vague recollections.”

District Attorney Kevin Steele will be allowed to call one other accuser to suggest Cosby’s conduct with Constand was part of a “signature” crime pattern. She worked for Cosby’s agent at the William Morris Agency and says Cosby drugged and assaulted her in 1996 at a Los Angeles hotel.

Cosby and his family, ahead of the trial, have suggested the charges are fueled by racism. Some of his accusers, including the former William Morris employee, are black.

The AP does not typically identify people who say they are sexual assault victims unless they grant permission, which Constand has done.
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