Month: September 2017

Movie fans attending a special screening of the movie It in Bangor, Maine, got a bonus: Author and local resident Stephen King joined them.

King’s radio station, WKIT-FM, sponsored the special showing Wednesday night, and King received a standing ovation. He told the moviegoers: “You’re going to be scared out of your seats anyway, so you might as well sit down.”

It is based on King’s book about a sewer-dwelling, homicidal clown in Derry, Maine. King has said the fictionalized town is based on Bangor.

The new adaptation of King’s novel will be previewed in many select theaters Thursday before it opens nationwide Friday.
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As new smartphones hit the market month in month out, one Slovak technology buff is offering visitors to his vintage cellphone museum a trip down memory lane – to when cellphones weighed more than today’s computers and most people couldn’t afford them.

Twenty-six year-old online marketing specialist Stefan Polgari from Slovakia began his collection more than two years ago when he bought a stock of old cellphones online. Today, his collection boasts some 1,500 models, or 3,500 pieces when counting duplicates.

The museum, which takes up two rooms in his house in the small eastern town of Dobsina, opened last year and is accessible by appointment.

The collection includes the Nokia 3310, which recently got a facelift and re-release, as well as a fully functional, 20-year old, brick-like Siemens S4 model, which cost a whopping 23,000 Slovak koruna – more than twice the average monthly wage in Slovakia when it came out.

“These are design and technology masterpieces that did not steal your time. There are no phones younger than the first touchscreen models, definitely no smartphones,” said Mr Polgari.

“It’s hard to say which phone is most valuable to me, perhaps the Nokia 350i Star Wars edition,” said Mr Polgari – who uses an iPhone in his daily life.
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Kate Millett, the activist, artist and educator whose best-selling “Sexual Politics” was a landmark of cultural criticism and a manifesto for the modern feminist movement, has died. She was 82.

Millett died of a heart attack while on a visit to Paris on Wednesday, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the family. The publishing house that carried her books in French also confirmed the death but provided no details.

“Sexual Politics” was published in 1970, in the midst of feminism’s so-called “second wave,” when Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Millett and others built upon the achievements of the suffragettes from a half-century earlier and challenged assumptions about women in virtually every aspect of society. Millett’s book was among the most talked-about works of its time and remains a founding text for cultural and gender studies programs.

Millett chronicled millennia of legal, political and cultural exclusion and diminishment, whether the “penis envy” theory of Sigmund Freud or the portrayals of women as disrupters of paradise in the Bible and Greek mythology. She labeled traditional marriage an artifact of patriarchy and concluded with chapters condemning the misogyny of authors Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer, but also expressing faith in the redemptive power of women’s liberation.

“It may be that a second wave of the sexual revolution might at last accomplish its aim of freeing half the race from its immemorial subordination — and in the process bring us all a great deal closer to humanity,” she wrote.

While countless women were radicalized by her book, Millett would have bittersweet feelings about “Sexual Politics,” which later fell out of print and remained so for years. She was unhappy with its “mandarin mid-Atlantic” prose and overwhelmed by her sudden transformation from graduate student and artist to a feminist celebrity whose image appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Amused at first by her fame, she was worn down by a “ruin of interviews, articles, attacks.”

“Soon it grew tedious, an indignity,” she wrote in the memoir “Flying,” published in 1974.

She was dubbed by Time “the Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation,” and rebutted by Mailer in his book “The Prisoner of Sex,” in which he mocked her as “the Battling Annie of some new prudery” Meanwhile, she faced taunts from some feminists for saying she was bisexual (she was married at the time), but not gay. During an appearance by Millett at Columbia, an activist stood up and yelled, “Are you a lesbian? Say it. Are you?”

“Five hundred people looking at me. Are you a Lesbian?” Millett wrote. “Everything pauses, faces look up in terrible silence. I hear them not breathe. That word in public, the word I waited half a lifetime to hear. Finally I am accused. ‘Say it. Say you are a Lesbian!’

“Yes, I said. Yes. Because I know what she means. The line goes, inflexible as a fascist edict, that bisexuality is a cop-out. Yes I said yes I am a lesbian. It was the last strength I had.”

Millett’s books after “Sexual Politics” were far more personal and self-consciously literary, whether “Flying” or “Sita, ” a memoir about her sexuality in which she wrote of a lesbian lover who committed suicide; or “The Loony Bin Trip,” an account of her struggles with manic depression and time spent in psychiatric wards.

“There is no denying the misery and stress of life,” she wrote. “The swarms of fears, the blocks to confidence, the crises of decision and choice.”

The daughter of Irish Catholics, Millett was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and was long haunted by her father, an alcoholic who beat his children and left his family when Millett was 14. She attended parochial schools as a child and studied English literature at the University of Minnesota and St Hilda’s College, Oxford, from which she graduated with honors.

For a couple of years, Millett lived in Japan, where she met her future husband and fellow sculptor Fumio Yoshimura (they divorced in 1985). They moved to Manhattan in 1963, and Millett embraced the political and artistic passions of the city. She joined the National Organization for Women and began attracting a following for her sculpture, which appeared in Life magazine and has been exhibited worldwide. Through her own Women’s Liberation Cinema production company, she directed the acclaimed feminist documentary “Three Lives.” She also founded the Women’s Art Colony Farm in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Millett taught at several schools, including the University of North Carolina and New York University. In 1968, she was fired from her job as an English lecturer at Barnard College, a decision that stemmed at least in part from her support of student protests against the Vietnam War. The extra free time did allow her to complete “Sexual Politics,” which began as her doctoral thesis at Columbia University.

Less known to younger feminists than Steinem or Friedan, she was honored several times late in life. In 2012, she was given the Pioneer Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation and the same year was presented a Courage Award for the Arts prize by her longtime friend Yoko Ono. Millett was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2013 and, in her acceptance speech, reflected on her years as an activist.

“The happiness of those times,” the joy of participation, the excitement of being part of my own time, of living on the edge, of being so close to events you can almost intuit them. To raise one’s voice in protest, just as the protest is expressed in life, in the streets, in relationships and friendships,” she said.

“Then, in a moment of public recognition, the face of the individual becomes a women’s face. ”

 
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Former pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shkreli has put the only known copy of a Wu-Tang Clan album he bought for $2 million in 2015 up for sale on eBay.

In the auction listing for “Once Upon A Time in Shaolin,” Shkreli writes that he has “not carefully listened to the album.” He adds that he purchased the double album “as a gift to the Wu-Tang Clan for their tremendous musical output,” but instead “received scorn” from one of the members of the group. Ghostface Killah mocked Shkreli in a video last year, calling him “the man with the 12-year-old body.”

The top bid for the album stood at just less than $1 million early Thursday.

“Pharma Bro” Shkreli was convicted last month of deceiving investors in a pair of failed hedge funds.
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Getting the approval of a parole panel was the easy part for Leslie Van Houten, the youngest of Charles Manson’s murderous followers.

Between her and her release stands a governor who has shown zero willingness to allow anyone involved in the Manson killings to go free.

Van Houten, now 68, was found suitable for parole by the two-person state panel after a hearing on Wednesday.

Now, she must still be approved by the state Parole Board, which is likely, but then must hope Gov. Jerry Brown won’t block her release as he did last year.

In blocking her release then, as he has with several would-be parolees from the Manson “family,” Brown said Van Houten had failed to adequately explain to the panel how a model teenager from a privileged Southern California family who had once been a homecoming princess could have turned into a ruthless killer by age 19.

On Wednesday, the panel grilled her for two hours on how she could address those concerns.

“I’ve had a lot of therapy trying to answer that question myself,” she said.

“To tell you the truth, the older I get the harder it is to deal with all of this, to know what I did, how it happened,” added Van Houten, now a frail-looking 68-year-old who appeared before the panel on crutches, her gray hair pulled back in a bun.

Her attorney, Rich Pfeiffer, said after the hearing that he believes Van Houten addressed the concerns the governor had when he denied her parole last year.

“My hope is he’s going to follow the law and let his commissioners do their job,” he said.

He added his client was relieved by Wednesday’s ruling, adding he believes she will be released eventually.

“I’m getting her out of here. That’s not an issue. The question is when,” he said.

No one who took part in the Manson clan’s two-night killing rampage has been released from prison so far.

Van Houten told the panelists she was devastated when her parents divorced when she was 14. Soon after, she said, she began hanging out with her school’s outcast crowd in the Los Angeles suburb of Monrovia. She started smoking marijuana and graduated to LSD at 15. When she was 17, she and her boyfriend ran away to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury District during San Francisco’s summer of love.

When they returned, she said, she discovered she was pregnant. When her mother found out, she ordered her to have an abortion and bury her fetus in their backyard.

Soon after, she was traveling up and down the California coast, trying to find peace within herself when acquaintances led her to Manson, who was holed up at an old abandoned movie ranch on the outskirts of Los Angeles where he had recruited what he called a “family” to survive what he insisted would be a race war he would launch by committing a series of random, horrifying murders. His disaffected youthful followers became convinced that the small-time criminal and con man was actually a Christ-like figure and believed him.

Van Houten went on to candidly describe how she joined several other members of the “Manson Family” in killing Los Angeles grocer Leno La Bianca and his wife, Rosemary, in their home on Aug. 9, 1969, carving up La Bianca’s body and smearing the couple’s blood on the walls.

She was not with Manson followers the night before when they killed pregnant actress Sharon Tate and four others during a similar bloody rampage.

On the night of the second attack she said she held Rosemary La Bianca down with a pillowcase over her head as others stabbed her dozens of times. Then, ordered by Manson disciple Tex Watson to “do something,” she picked up a butcher knife and stabbed the woman more than a dozen times.

“I feel absolutely horrible about it, and I have spent most of my life trying to find ways to live with it,” she added quietly.

Relatives of the La Biancas didn’t believe her. They spoke emotionally as they pleaded with the commission to reject her parole bid.

“No member of the Manson family deserves parole, ever,” nephew Louis Smaldino said. “She is a total narcissist and only thinks of herself and not the damage she has done.”

The voice of the La Biancas’ oldest grandson, Tony LaMontagne, broke as he noted he’s about to turn 44, the same age his grandfather was when he was killed.

“Please see to it that this fight doesn’t have to happen every year for the rest of our lives,” he said of Van Houten’s nearly two dozen parole hearings.

Family members left before the panel announced its decision.

In reaching it, Parole Commissioner Brian Roberts and Deputy Commissioner Dale Pomantz said they took into account Van Houten’s entire time of incarceration. During those years she has earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in counseling, been certified as a counselor and headed numerous programs to help inmates.

“You’ve been a facilitator, you’ve been a tutor and you’ve been giving back for quite a number of years,” Roberts said.

Still, he warned her that if she is released that living in society again will not be easy. He noted parole officials have heard from “tens of thousands” of people who don’t want her released. But others, he added, including many who have known her since childhood, spoke up for her, saying they’ve seen her mature in prison and become a different person.

“So with that we’d like to wish you good luck,” he said.

 
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With daring filmmakers, untold stories and entertainment-starved young people, Saudi Arabia has all the makings of a local movie industry — except for theaters.

As the traditionally austere kingdom cautiously embraces more forms of entertainment, local filmmakers are exploring a new frontier in Saudi art, using the internet to screen films and pushing boundaries of expression — often with surprise backing from top royals.

“Saudi Arabia is the future of filmmaking in the Gulf,” said Butheina Kazim, co-founder of Dubai’s independent cinema platform “Cinema Akil,” pointing to a crop of Saudi films that have emerged in recent years.

Kazim screened three Saudi short films to audiences in Dubai last month, including one called “Wasati,” or moderate in Arabic. The movie is based on a real-life event that took place in the mid-1990s when a group of ultraconservatives rushed the stage during a play in Saudi Arabia and shut it down. The incident dampened theater in Saudi Arabia for years.

The film by Ali Kalthami was screened in Los Angeles last year, and was shown for one night in June at Riyadh’s Al Yamamah University — in the same theater where the play was shut down two decades ago.

One of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent film pioneers, Kalthami is co-founder of C3 Films and Telfaz11, a popular YouTube channel that has amassed more than 1 billion views since it was launched in 2011.

His movie “Wasati” was one of several Saudi shorts produced last year with funding from the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, an initiative named after the founder of the kingdom by Saudi Arabia’s state-oil company Aramco. Kalthami said it was the first time he’d ever received funding for a film from a state-linked entity.

“I think because of the history we made online… they trusted we could tell wonderful stories, human stories in Saudi,” he said.

By using the internet to show films, Telfaz11 and other Saudi production houses have managed to circumvent traditional distribution channels and make do without cinemas. Even so, Saudi filmmakers have to contend with how to tell their stories within the bounds of the kingdom’s ultraconservative mores and its limits on free speech.

It wasn’t always like this. There used to be movie theaters across Saudi Arabia from the 1960s through the 1980s, until religious hard-liners were given greater sway over public life. In the years that followed, Saudis could rent movies from video stores, though scenes of lovemaking and cursing were edited out. Saudis also had access to movies on satellite channels.

Nowadays, Saudis can stream movies online — where Telfaz11 has partnered with YouTube.

Some of the local films being produced are purely for entertainment, while others wade into the myriad everyday challenges people in Saudi Arabia face.

The film “Wadjda” made history in 2013 by becoming the first Academy Award entry for Saudi Arabia, though it wasn’t nominated for the Oscars. The movie follows the story of a 10-year-old girl who dreams of having a bicycle just like the boys in her ultraconservative neighborhood, where men and women are strictly segregated and where boys and girls attend separate schools. The film was written and directed by Saudi female director Haifaa al-Mansour, who shot the film entirely in the kingdom.

Saudi Arabia is vying again this year for an Oscar in the foreign-language film category. The film “Barakah Meets Barakah,” by director Mahmoud Sabbagh, made its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. The movie, which has been called the kingdom’s first romantic comedy, tells the story of a civil servant who falls for a Saudi girl whose Instagram posts have made her a local celebrity.

Though four years apart, the two films tackle the issue of gender segregation in Saudi Arabia, which remains strictly enforced.

The emergence of a Saudi film scene is happening as the kingdom begins to loosen the reins on fun and entertainment after nearly two decades without cinemas or concerts.

Saudi Arabia’s 31-year-old heir to throne, Mohammed bin Salman, is set to inherit a nation where more than half of the population is under 25, and most are active on social media, where they can access the world beyond the reach of state censors.

The crown prince is behind an ambitious blueprint to transform Saudi Arabia’s economy and society. He wants to encourage Saudis to spend more of their money locally, including doubling what Saudi families spend on entertainment in the kingdom.

While Saudi Arabia’s influential clerics and many citizens consider Western-style entertainment sinful, the prince’s backing means there could soon be cinemas in the kingdom. Prince Mohammed’s nonprofit, MiSK, sponsored a screening in August of an Arabic 3D action film in the capital, Riyadh. There have been other similar screenings in the coastal city of Jiddah.

The government has also backed a Saudi film festival that’s taken place for the past few years in the eastern city of Dhahran. This year, some 60 Saudi films were screened.

After watching the Saudi shorts in Dubai’s Cinema Akil and meeting the filmmakers, aspiring filmmaker Lamia al-Shwwier, who’s just graduated with a master’s degree from the Los Angeles campus of the New York Film Academy, said she felt confident about the prospects of a Saudi film industry.

“We have so many incredible stories to tell, whether they are stories of success or challenge. Our society is rich in stories and ideas,” she said.
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Few institutions in cinema can match the teeming, overwhelming Toronto International Film Festival as a conversation-starting force. It simply has a lot of movies worth talking about.

And this year, many of the films that will parade down Toronto red carpets will hope to shift the dialogue not just in terms of awards buzz, but in other directions, too: equality in Hollywood; politics in Washington; even about the nature of the movies, themselves. At TIFF, expect debate.

That’s what the filmmakers behind “The Battle of the Sexes,” one of the anticipated films heading to TIFF in the coming days, are hoping for. After the festival opens Thursday with another tennis movie, the rivalry drama “Borg/McEnroe,” Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (the directing duo who helmed 2006’s “Little Miss Sunshine”) will premiere their drama about the 1973 showdown between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.

The movie, starring Emma Stone and Steve Carell, holds obvious parallels for a movie industry with its own issues of gender equality, in both pay disparity and directing opportunity. For others, it will recall issues that dominated last year’s U.S. presidential campaign. But “Battle of the Sexes” may surprise moviegoers in its broad sympathies on both sides of the net.

“The one thing we didn’t want to have happen was this polarizing political document,” said Dayton. “Right now, there’s enough of that in the world. We wanted to tell a more personal story and keep it from becoming too binary.”

The filmmakers say they are expecting “a variety of opinions in any one audience.”

“It’s really the best way to release a film, at a festival like Telluride or Toronto,” said Faris. “It’s a great way to get the word out about a film. It’s a great thing for the filmmakers to have what is usually a pretty film-oriented, film-loving audience. It gives you hope that they’re still out there.”

The Toronto International Film Festival comes right on the heels of the Venice and Telluride festivals, but the size and scope of Toronto has long made it the centerpiece of the fall movie season. It’s where much of the coming awards season gets handicapped, debated and solidified. It’s also a significant market for new films, and this year several intriguing films — “I, Tonya,” with Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding, and “Hostiles,” a brutal Western with Christian Bale — are on the block.

But most eyes will be on the gala premieres of the fall’s biggest films, including Alexander Payne’s “Downsizing,” Guillermo Del Toro’s “The Shape of Water,” George Clooney’s “Suburbicon,” and maybe the most explosive movie of the season, Darren Aronofsky’s mystery-shrouded allegorical thriller “mother!”

It can be a competitive landscape, with dozens of daily premieres and their respective parties, all trying to stand out. But several first-time directors may end up stealing the spotlight. Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird” will sail into Toronto on waves of rave reviews from Telluride. Aaron Sorkin, arguably the top screenwriter in Hollywood for two decades, will present his directorial debut, “Molly’s Game.”

Sorkin didn’t initially anticipate he’d direct his script. But he became, he says, obsessed with the story of Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain), the former elite skier who was indicted for running a high-stakes poker game in Los Angeles. It’s a potentially career-redefining movie for Sorkin — and he’s appropriately anxious.

“I’d feel the same way if we were launching it in Wyoming. I’m nervous because other than test audiences, this will be the first time people see it,” said Sorkin. “The Toronto Film Festival is a very prestigious place to debut a film, so I’m aware of the company I’m in and what’s expected in the movie. It will be up to others to decide if it delivered.”

“The Disaster Artist” poses a similar turning point for its star and director, James Franco. It’s about the making of what’s widely considered one of the worst movies ever made — the cult favorite “The Room,” by Tommy Wiseau. Franco, who plays Wiseau, considers it a new step for him as a filmmaker, and says the film’s parody is laced with affection.

“The characters are outsiders. They are weirdos,” said Franco. “But everybody can relate to having a dream and trying to break into this incredibly hard business.”

The film will premiere to a surely raucous audience at a midnight screening. Franco, who first saw “The Room” with an especially excitable Vancouver audience, expects it to be the perfect debut for his film: “Canadians know how to do ‘The Room.”’

“The Disaster Artist,” which A24 will release in December, might give TIFF what “La La Land” did last year — a happily escapist movie about Hollywood. Other films will tackle less comic real-life tales, including Angelina Jolie’s searing Cambodia drama “First They Killed My Father,” the Winston Churchill biopic “Darkest Hour,” with Gary Oldman; and the documentary “The Final Year,” about the last year of Barack Obama’s administration.

Cameron Bailey, artistic director of the festival, said Trump’s presidency “was not a factor in the films we selected,” though he expects it to color the reception of many.

“Some of them will be received with the current political climate in mind,” said Bailey. “One of the things I think you learn from films like (the Watergate drama) ‘Mark Felt’ and (the Ted Kennedy drama) ‘Chappaquiddick’ and others that we have here is that the process of politics is not a pretty one. It involves a lot of conflicted motives, shall we say.”

And who better to make sense of the current political landscape than Armando Iannucci (“Veep,” “The Thick of It”), the master of rapid-fire political farce. In his second feature film, “The Death of Stalin,” he travels back to 1950s Russia only to find an expectedly timely tale of the madcap machinations of political power.

“It is bizarre, isn’t it? When I started showing it to people in January and February earlier this year, people said it resonated with Trump and Putin and fake news,” said Iannucci. “It is about autocracy. It is about what happens when democracy falls apart and one person decides everything. I’m kind of glad it does resonate now. But am I pleased?”
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Donald Sutherland, the star of “MASH,” “The Hunger Games” and more than 140 other movies, is to get a lifetime achievement Oscar, along with Belgian director Agnes Varda, Oscar organizers said on Wednesday.

Sutherland and Varda will be joined by African-American indie film director Charles Burnett and cinematographer Owen Roizman in receiving honorary Oscars at a ceremony in Los Angeles in November, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said in statement.

Academy president John Bailey said the honorees reflect “the breadth of international, independent and mainstream filmmaking, and are tributes to four great artists whose work embodies the diversity of our shared humanity.”

Canadian actor Sutherland, 82, has a career spanning five decades starting with his 1967 breakthrough in “The Dirty Dozen.” He went on to play wisecracking army surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in the 1970 movie version of “MASH,” as well as roles in thriller “Don’t Look Now” and “Klute.”

Sutherland, the father of “24” actor Kiefer Sutherland, played President Snow in all four of the recent “Hunger Games” young adult movie franchise. He has never been Oscar nominated.

Belgian-born Varda has experimented with shorts, documentaries and feature films during her more than 60-year career. Called the mother of the French New Wave, her movies include “Cleo from 5 to 7,” “Le Bonheur,” and “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t.”

Burnett is an independent filmmaker whose work, including “America Becoming,” has been praised for its portrayal of the African-American experience.

Roizman has five Oscar nominations for his work as a cinematographer on movies including “The French Connection,” “Tootsie” and “Network.”

The honorary Oscars will be presented at a gala dinner on Nov. 11.
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