Day: May 7, 2018

Lin-Manuel Miranda and the producers of his hit Broadway musical “Hamilton” are bringing an exhibit to Chicago about the musical’s Founding Father namesake.

“Hamilton: The Exhibition” will be an immersive, interactive exhibit about Alexander Hamilton and the founding of the United States, The Chicago Tribune reports. The exhibit will start November 17 in a temporary structure the size of a football field on Northerly Island, a peninsula on Chicago’s lakefront.

Miranda created and starred in the original “Hamilton” production. He’ll provide a voice narration for the tour and be featured in video form.

“People want to learn more,” Miranda said. “It seems that two hours and 45 minutes of a musical were just not enough for them.”

The project will be directed creatively by David Korins, who designed the set for the musical. The exhibit will feature a series of rooms and scenes that will recreate important moments in Hamilton’s life, starting with his childhood in the Caribbean Island of St. Croix to his death in New Jersey during a duel.

“In the theater,” Miranda said, “I had to take a lot of liberties with history to get you out of there before 11 o’clock. Now we can have a theatrical experience with historical rigor.”

The exhibit will address questions that the musical doesn’t have time to address, said Jeffrey Seller, a Broadway producer who’s in charge of the project overall.

Chicago was chosen in part because of its support of the musical, Seller said. It’s had a sold-out run since opening in Chicago in October 2016.

The exhibit will likely stay for about six months before moving to other cities, Seller said. Ticket prices have yet to be finalized, but would likely be about $25 for children and $35 for adults, he said.
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Cannes opened its doors on Monday for a festival that will show the new “Star Wars” spinoff but welcome fewer stellar names than usual.

Critics have said a jury including Cate Blanchett, Kristen Stewart and Lea Seydoux has more A-list acting talent than the films — many from lesser-known European, Asian and African filmmakers — vying for the Palme d’Or.

“Solo: A Star Wars Story,” will be the only Hollywood blockbuster screened during the fortnight, and even that will have already premiered in Los Angeles.

Netflix, which brought a raft of A-listers last year, is boycotting Cannes due to French rules that would stop it streaming movies for three years after a cinema release.

This will also be the first festival in years without Harvey Weinstein, the movie mogul once famous on the Riviera for his lavish parties, but now the subject of sexual assault allegations that have shaken the global film industry.

Weinstein has denied all allegations of non-consensual sex.

Festival director Thierry Fremaux denied that the lack of U.S. movies indicated Cannes was losing its appeal in Hollywood, where studios increasingly release big films late in the year to get visibility in the run-up to the Oscars, which are awarded in late winter.

“You should never judge on one year,” he told a news conference, while adding that the perhaps the famously harsh press corp at Cannes — where movies are often booed during media screenings — might be “scaring certain productions” away.

Hollywood Reporter critic Scott Roxborough said Cannes remained “the number one film festival for quality cinema worldwide” and that its selection of less commercial movies showed “Cannes is going back to its roots.”

“It’s the only place really you can have an unknown film … that within a hour of being shown everybody is talking about it … within a day, a week, it’s the biggest name in arthouse cinema,” he told Reuters.

There are 21 films in the main competition and dozens more vying for other prizes and screening out of competition. Here are a handful of the most hotly anticipated:

Everybody Knows (Todos lo Saben)

The festival opens with this Spanish-language family drama starring Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem. The writer-director is the Iranian Asghar Farhadi who won foreign language Oscars for “A Separation” and “The Salesman”, taut character-driven realist movies that explore the divisions imposed by social class and national boundaries. “Everybody Knows” is competing for the Palme d’Or.

The House That Jack Built

Danish provocateur Lars von Trier returns after being ejected from the festival in 2011 for telling a news conference he was a Nazi who sympathized with Adolf Hitler — comments he later said were taken out of context.

Matt Dillon stars as a serial killer of women. “We experience the story from Jack’s point of view, while he postulates each murder as an artwork in itself,” according to notes in the festival’s program.

Hollywood Reporter critic Roxborough said the film, screening out of competition, is one of his top-three must-sees, calling it: “a movie that could almost be seen as an answer to the MeToo movement, in a really nasty way.”

BlacKkKlansman

Spike Lee returns to Cannes almost 30 years after “Do the Right Thing” was tipped for, but failed to get, the Palme d’Or.  [“He said he was robbed, I agree with him],” said Roxborough.

“BlacKkKlansman,” the true story of an African-American police officer who infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan, stars John David Washington (son of Denzel) and Adam Driver.

Lee says the story, set in the 1970s, is more relevant than ever in President Donald Trump’s America.

“Agent Orange refused to repudiate the Klan, the alt-right and the Nazis,” he told Hollywood Reporter. “‘There’s good people on both sides.’ That’s going to be on his gravestone.”

In competition for the Palme d’Or, “BlacKkKlansman” will open in U.S. cinemas on Aug. 10, one day before the anniversary of the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia where counter-protester Heather Heyer was killed by a car driven into the crowd.

The Man who Killed Don Quixote

Terry Gilliam’s two-decade struggle to make this film has entered movie folklore. An initial version, starring Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis, was dumped after a series of calamities meant shooting had to stop.

Finally finished, it remains to be seen if this version, with “Brazil” star Jonathan Pryce as the Spanish knight who tilts at windmills, can be shown at Cannes due to a last-minute legal challenge from a movie producer who says he has the rights over it.

“It’s taken him so long to make this movie I think we all owe it to the man to go and check it out,” said Roxborough of the film that should, but may not, close the festival, out of competition, on May 19.

A Paris court on Monday heard an application for an injunction on showing the film, but will not rule until Wednesday.

Leto (The Summer)/ 3 Faces

Two films in the main competition will screen without the presence of their directors – both prevented from traveling by national authorities in their home countries.

Leto, about the Leningrad rock music scene in the latter years of the Soviet Union, is directed by Kirill Serebrennikov who is under house arrest pending a fraud case his supporters say is part of a government crackdown on artistic freedoms.

Iranian director Jafar Panahi was arrested in 2010 and banned from making films, but has continued to work, to international acclaim. Like his 2015 film “Taxi,” “3 Faces” features Panahi playing himself on screen.

The Cannes Film Festival runs from May 8 to May 19.
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Tiaras encrusted with thousands of diamonds, emeralds and rubies. Papal cloaks and vestments with golden embroidery so fine they took 16 years to produce.

If you’re going to wield power, you need to dress the part — and it seems few have understood that better than the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church through the centuries. That’s one of the key takeaways from the latest mega-exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, a look at the influence of Catholicism on fashion. It opens Thursday and runs through Oct. 8.

If you’re looking for modern examples of the relationship between the two, consider that they called Pope Benedict XVI the “Prada Pope,” based on rumors — urban legend, it turns out — that his stylish red loafers were from the storied fashion house. They weren’t, and actually his predecessor, John Paul II, had a similar pair, now on display at the Met — part of a long papal tradition. That didn’t stop Benedict from being named Esquire’s 2007 Accessorizer of the Year.

But examples go back earlier — WAY earlier, according to “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” the Met’s annual spring fashion exhibit and the biggest one yet, spanning a full 25 galleries and stretching from the Metropolitan on Fifth Avenue to its Cloisters branch in upper Manhattan. As always, the show makes its debut at the star-studded Met Gala on Monday night. Will the celebrity bling match the Vatican bling? Not likely.

Take, for example, just one stunning tiara that glimmers in the Institute’s galleries, a three-tiered concoction that gleams with 19,000 gems — 18,000 of them diamonds, along with rubies, sapphires and emeralds. It was a gift from Queen Isabella of Spain to the 19th-century Pope Pius IX, who wore it at Christmas Mass in 1854.

Or a huge white-and-gold papal mantle — a voluminous cape of taffeta embroidered with gold metal thread, tinsel and paillettes. A set of 12 such vestments took 15 workers some 16 years to complete, the museum says.

They are just a few of the 42 items that curator Andrew Bolton, who has become known for his blockbuster Met exhibits, brought back from the Sistine Chapel’s sacristy at the Vatican. Bolton made 12 trips over two years to secure the items, many which had never been outside the Vatican; in an interview this weekend in the galleries, he described hunching over to get through “an itty bitty door” at the edge of the chapel, where inside, untold treasures awaited.

Each time he looked in the labyrinthine sacristy, he would see more tantalizing items. “I asked for six,” he says. “I ended up with 42.” The Vatican’s only condition was that its works be exhibited on their own, separate from the fashion part of the show. The Vatican collection even has its own separate volume in the show’s huge catalog.

Bolton says he realizes people may think there’s something unseemly about connecting the commercial theme of fashion with lofty theme of religion. But, as he writes in the catalog, “Dress is central to any discussion about religion: it affirms religious allegiances and, by extension, asserts religious differences.” And, he points out, he always wants to confront timely cultural issues in his exhibitions.

He was backed up on Monday morning by none other than Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, who greeted the crowd at the official press preview by saying, “You may be asking, what’s the Church doing here?” He explained that the Catholic imagination embodied not only truth and goodness but beauty, too. “The truth, goodness and beauty of God is revealed all over the place, even in fashion,” he said. Cameras clicked furiously as the cardinal left the event with Donatella Versace, one of the chief funders of the show along with Christine and Stephen Schwarzman.

Almost all the designers included in the show have some relationship to Roman Catholicism, even if they were just born into Catholic families, Bolton says. They include names like Gianni Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, Christian Lacroix, Valentino, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Cristobal Balenciaga, the iconic Spanish designer who, Bolton says, was deeply religious. Some designers initially told Bolton that their work wasn’t influenced by religion, but later emailed upon realizing that, in fact, it played a role in their creative imaginations. “I never thought one’s religious upbringing could have such an influence,” he says.

After viewing the Vatican collection in the Anna Wintour Costume Center, one can wind one’s way upstairs to the Met’s Byzantine and medieval rooms, home to many religious objects. Garments have been strategically placed to show the relationship between, say, a 12th-century gem-studded cross and a long-sleeved ensemble by Lacroix, emblazoned with a similar cross, this one studded with multicolored crystals.

There’s an 11th-century gilded cross that appears to inspire a spectacular Versace evening gown of gold metal mesh, glass crystals and silk charmeuse. There’s also a gleaming Versace bridal mini-dress, in gold and silver mesh, with a bridal veil emblazoned with a cross, and a black silk mini-skirt topped with a shiny, halter-style bodice that depicts the Madonna and child in brilliantly colored crystals.

If Dolce & Gabbana is more your style, there’s a series of gleaming crystal and bead-encrusted gowns and dresses that look just like Byzantine mosaics from Sicily. Balenciaga is also represented with a red-and-black reversible coat resembling that of a cardinal. On a balcony are 21 original white robes that he made for a local church choir.

Another section features designer gowns that recall paintings by Fra Angelico, the Italian Renaissance painter, including a series of filmy gowns by Rodarte, Lanvin and others. The faces of the made-to-order mannequins match those of famous religious works that inspired Bolton.

While the Met’s Fifth Avenue museum focuses on the pageantry and public side of the church, the Cloisters section focuses on the more reflective, contemplative side. Bolton says his original idea was to have a multi-religion exhibit. That may happen one day, but he found so much material relating to Catholicism that he decided to focus on that.

And what of the celebrities who will be interpreting the dress code on Monday night? They were advised that the theme was “Sunday Best.”

“It’s an implicit plea to dress somewhat more modestly,” Bolton quips.
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They are producers, directors, editors, and actors. But what they share in common is their continent of birth – Africa. Once a month, they meet to share their experiences in Hollywood and work together to raise their profile in the competitive movie industry. VOA’s Arzouma Kompaore went to Hollywood and filed this report.
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They are producers, directors, editors, and actors. But what they share in common is their continent of birth – Africa. Once a month, they meet to share their experiences in Hollywood and work together to raise their profile in the competitive movie industry. VOA’s Arzouma Kompaore went to Hollywood and filed this report.
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The movie industry must use this week’s Cannes Film Festival to “liberate and listen to women’s voices” if it is to stamp out sexual harassment, the French minister for gender equality said.

From a hotline to report harassers at the event to flyers urging participants to behave properly, Marlene Schiappa hopes to use the glitz and glamour of Cannes to ramp up the pressure.

The movie industry “has to be part of the solution”, Schiappa told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an email ahead of this year’s festival, which she said should be the “basis for liberating and listening to women’s voices.”

“The fact that the festival’s presidents decided to fight with us against sexual harassment for not just actresses but also workers and spectators at the festival … is unprecedented and a great step forward,” Schiappa said.

The 71st Cannes Film Festival will run from May 8-19 and follows allegations of sexual misconduct against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein that sparked last year’s #MeToo campaign, in which women and men shared their experiences of harassment.

Once one of Hollywood’s most powerful figures, Weinstein has been accused by more than 70 women of sexual misconduct, including rape.

He has denied having non-consensual sex with anyone. In April, Schiappa launched a campaign with the festival organizers to tackle sexual harassment.

Initiatives include a hotline and flyers reading “correct behavior required” and “don’t ruin the party, stop harassment!” with the hashtag #nerienlaisserpasser (“don’t let anything pass”).

Celebrities have used previous film awards this year including Britain’s BAFTA and the Golden Globes in Los Angeles to wear black outfits in a gesture of protest and badges name-checking the “Time’s Up” campaign against sexual harassment.

Australian movie star Cate Blanchett, who also took part in Time’s Up, will chair this year’s event, becoming the 11th woman to do so in the Cannes festival’s history.

Rachel Krys, co-director of End Violence Against Women Coalition, welcomed the Cannes hotline. But she said that “the system which supports and protects powerful men, rather than helping victims, also has to be dismantled.”

The movie industry should also “call time on films which fetishize violence against women and promote a toxic version of masculinity, and instead create art which challenges gender stereotypes and shifts social norms,” she said by email.
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