Month: September 2018

The response to Bradley Cooper’s romantic saga “A Star Is Born” has been intense. Critics have boasted of crying uncontrollably. Fans outside theaters have swooned for its star, Lady Gaga. Words like “glorious,” “rapturous” and, of course, “gaga” are running rampant.

“Having been on the other side of it, when you do something that doesn’t do well, people tend to avoid you,” Cooper said in an interview alongside his co-star. “I don’t see people, like, going the other way as I’m walking down the street.”

Quite the contrary. Since making landfall at the Toronto International Film Festival, “A Star Is Born” has provoked the kind of mania rarely seen in even the feverish realm of a film festival. It’s been hailed as “a transcendent Hollywood movie” (per Variety) and “damned near perfect” (per Rolling Stone).

And it has predictably flown to the top of Oscar prediction lists in just about every category, including its original songs. It’s a breakthrough for Cooper, directing for the first time, and Gaga, who’s leading a movie for the first time.

“I have been trying not to read any reviews. But every once in a while, my friends will read over and go (shoving phone in face): ‘You have to see this!'” says Gaga. “But I have to say truly, I feel like an audience member now. Watching the film back, it really impacts me on a deep emotional level.”

And it seems to be impacting those in the audience similarly. Even its trailer, watched by millions on YouTube, has sparked a rare eagerness. Anthony Ramos, who plays a friend of Gaga’s character in the film, said he’s been constantly harangued about details making the film.

“It’s lighting in a bottle, man,” said Ramos. “From the moment I stepped on set, the way Bradley works and the way Stefani works, I was like, ‘This could be crazy.’ And sure enough, here we are and people are buggin’ out.”

Acclaim hasn’t been universal for “A Star Is Born,” which stars Cooper as the seasoned rock star Jackson Maine and Gaga as a struggling artist he falls in love with. Its sheer popularity is certain to engender the kinds of waves of backlash that are typical of any big cultural force parading through Oscar season.

Warner Bros. will release the film Oct. 5 and is planning a sizable awards campaign. It’s the third remake of the original 1937 film, following the 1954 version with Judy Garland and James Mason, and the more rocking 1976 version, with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson.

This remake was initially developed with Clint Eastwood directing and Beyonce potentially starring. Cooper first discussed the role with Eastwood, his “American Sniper” director, before ultimately taking the directing reins himself. In a gesture of encouragement, Eastwood visited the set the first day of shooting.

For Lady Gaga, the experience was transformational. She dyed her hair her natural color. She and Cooper performed songs live.

“There can be a 100 people in the room and 99 don’t believe in you, and just one does. And it can change everything,” Gaga said at the press conference. “I wouldn’t be here if Bradley didn’t believe me. My dad, and also Bradley.”

“I wanted to give everything that I had, every last drop of blood, all my fear, all my shame, all my love, all my kindness,” she added. “I wanted to give it to him.”
…

Larry Probst will step down as chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee, exiting with a complicated legacy that includes restoring the federation’s international reputation while leaving it saddled with as many problems on the home front as he faced when he arrived.

Probst, who announced his departure Monday, will step down at the end of the year, to be replaced by Susanne Lyons, a board member who recently finished serving as interim CEO following the resignation of Scott Blackmun in February.

Lyons and new CEO Sarah Hirshland are tasked with restoring credibility to a federation that has been widely criticized for its slow response to a mushrooming sex-abuse scandal in Olympic sports.

“I became chairman at a difficult time for the USOC and worked diligently with my colleagues here in the U.S., and around the world, to change the USOC for the better,” Probst said. “It’s now time for a new generation of leaders to confront the challenges facing the organization, and I have the utmost confidence in Susanne’s and Sarah’s ability to do just that.”

The 68-year-old Probst, a longtime executive at video-game behemoth Electronic Arts, spent hundreds of days overseas during his 10 years at the helm, helping repair badly fractured international relationships that stemmed from decades’ worth of financial disagreements with the IOC, to say nothing of the sometimes-curt style of his better-known predecessor, Peter Ueberroth.

Probst’s work helped bring the 2028 Olympics to Los Angeles, giving America a win after a number of embarrassments, including Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Games, and the mistaken, and ultimately aborted, choice of Boston as a candidate for 2024; both debacles came on Probst’s watch.

Probst also earned a highly coveted spot on the International Olympic Committee — a position that gave him insider status in the decision-making process. But critics said he didn’t use the position to advocate for U.S. athletes, especially on matters concerning Russian doping, where he rarely broke ranks with IOC president Thomas Bach, who supported Russia’s return to the Olympic fold despite solid evidence of wrongdoing.

In the United States, doping has been overshadowed of late by the sex-abuse scandal.

The USOC has gotten some credit for creating the U.S. Center for SafeSport to serve as a clearinghouse for all Olympic-related sex-abuse cases. But it has been criticized — and sued — for not acting quickly enough, or taking its share of responsibility. That played a part in Blackmun’s departure, and it’s no surprise to see Probst, whose greatest successes came with Blackmun at his side, follow him out shortly after.

Blackmun helped stabilize the federation after Probst and his board surprisingly dismissed CEO Jim Scherr following a successful 2008 Olympics and replaced him with Stephanie Streeter, whose short tenure was a complete failure. Many viewed Scherr’s firing as a self-inflicted mistake, and Probst was forced to spend a large part of his tenure rebuilding trust on both the domestic and international levels.

Among his successes were establishing a charitable foundation that raises multiple millions for Olympic athletes, the settling of a controversial revenue-sharing agreement with the IOC, and improving an already healthy financial situation under the tenure of Chief Marketing Officer Lisa Baird. (Baird left the Olympic movement last month.)

The U.S. also stayed atop the medals table in the Summer Games, and had largely successful Winter Olympics under Probst’s watch, though the U.S. team’s total of 23 in Pyeongchang earlier this year — its lowest haul in 20 years — raised some eyebrows.

That disappointing showing came as the Larry Nassar scandal was turning into front-page news, and one of the most-repeated critiques of the USOC was that its leaders cared about medals more than the people who won them.

The delicate task for Lyons and Hirshland will be to make sure the USOC keeps winning, while also changing the culture in their own organization, as well as in the various sports that make up the Olympics.

“I wish Susanne and Sarah the best of luck in handling the very complex and difficult scenario they find themselves in,” Scherr said.
…

A new Indian movie about human trafficking starring Freida Pinto and Demi Moore is to be screened in towns and villages around the country to raise awareness of a crime that affects millions.

“Love Sonia,” which traces the journey of a young girl trafficked from rural India into the global sex trade, hits cinemas in the country this week after screenings on the international festival circuit.

Director Tabrez Noorani said he wanted to champion “hope and courage” and raise awareness of trafficking around the world.

“I want to show that the crime of trafficking is not restricted to, say, India or China. It’s a global problem,” Noorani told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

“Everyone has to be aware … that it’s happening in their backyard,” he said.

India is home to at least 8 million slaves, according to the latest figures from the Australian-based Walk Free Foundation. 

Government figures show the country recorded more than 8,000 human trafficking cases in 2016, 20 percent higher than the previous year, although rights activists say many cases go unreported.

Many victims are from rural areas and are often lured with promises of jobs in cities. Instead they are forced to work in brick kilns or farms, enslaved in homes as domestic workers, or sold to brothels.

The founder of anti-trafficking charity Shakti Vahini said movies were an effective way to raise awareness in rural areas — particularly if they featured major stars.

“We go out and do a lot of lectures. But when they see it in a movie, they see the danger as more real,” said Ravi Kant.Other films to have been used in this way include “Mardaani,” a 2014 film i

n which a woman police officer takes on a child trafficker.

“Mardaani” director Pradeep Sarkar said it was important to show traffickers were “regular, normal people living next door.”

“Love Sonia” is the directorial debut of Noorani, a veteran producer whose credits include “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Life of Pi”, and stars the acclaimed Indian actor Rajkummar Rao alongside Moore and Pinto.

Noorani said he wanted to make an “authentic film” on an issue he has worked on for many years as a board member of the Los Angeles-based Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking.

“The film heroes hope and courage,” Noorani said. “Education is the best way to fight human trafficking. People will hopefully walk out of theatres eyes wide open.”
…

The short story that begat Angie Thomas’ breakthrough young adult novel The Hate U Give was inspired by the shooting of Oscar Grant III, the Oakland, Calif., African-American 22-year-old who was shot by a white transit police officer in 2009.

In the years that followed, more shootings followed and Thomas kept on writing. Now, a year and a half after The Hate U Give became a bestselling phenomenon, Thomas’ book has been adapted to the big screen by director George Tillman Jr. from a screenplay by Audrey Wells with just as much honesty and urgency as were in Thomas’ first pages. And the tale’s timeliness has painfully persisted.

“This film will empower a lot of people and give them hope,” said Thomas in an interview shortly after the film’s Toronto International Film Festival premiere. “It’s going to explain some things to people who don’t get it. I think it’s going to open a lot of eyes and change a lot of perspectives, and hopefully help people understand why we say ‘black lives matter’ so that eventually we won’t have to say it. It’ll be understood.”

In a wave of films, including a number at the Toronto Film Festival, the kinds of police brutality-inflicted tragedies that gave birth to the Black Lives Matter movement are being filtered into fiction film with anguished and stirring passion. They aren’t the first movies to delve into such stories; Ryan Coogler, for one, told the story of Grant in 2013’s Fruitvale Station.

But many more filmmakers are seeking to capture the humanity beneath the headlines, explicitly confronting the racial fissures in American society while channeling the sorrow and outrage of generations of black Americans.

Reinaldo Marcus Green’s Monsters and Men, which played at Toronto before opening in theaters later this month, has similarities to the killing of Eric Garner, the Staten Island man who was choked and killed by New York police after being approached on suspicion of selling single cigarettes. Green’s film, set in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood, is about a Nuyorican teenager who witnesses a police officer kill an unarmed man selling loose cigarettes on the street. 

Released this summer, Carlos Lopez Estrada’s Blindspotting stars Daveed Diggs as an Oakland mover who, while stopped at a red light, watches a black man gunned down by a police officer. While deciding to come forward, he’s racked by nightmares and arresting visions, like of a cemetery populated by hooded black men standing over their graves.  

Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk, is a period film, adapted from James Baldwin’s novel and set in Harlem in the early 1970s. But its intimate tale of two black lovers, Tish and Fonny, whose young lives are wrecked by a racist police officer who frames Fonny for rape, has obvious reverberations today.

“Right now we’re living in a time and a moment where so many things he was writing about are incredibly relevant to the American soul,” said Jenkins in an interview ahead of the film’s Sunday premiere in Toronto. “There’s an ecstatic quality to the way Baldwin writes love, but yet there’s this permanent dread that hovers around them because of the situation they find themselves in. But also, too, because of what Baldwin is saying about the condition of black folks in America at the time he wrote this.”

Other films have come under criticism for not fitting with the times. Some questioned whether Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, about a hellacious night of police-inflicted torture during the Detroit riots, was the ideal filmmaker to tell that story. Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, about a black police officer who infiltrates a Ku Klux Klan chapter in 1970s Colorado, drew raves for its timely story about race and white supremacy. But it was criticized by Sorry to Bother You director Boots Riley for, at this moment, making a police officer “the protagonist in the fight against racist oppression.”

“It’s being put out while Black Lives Matter is a discussion, and this is not coincidental,” argued Riley. He questioned the film’s historical accuracy, claiming that its real-life police detective, Ron Stallworth, was really a “villain,” since he may have helped destabilize black radical groups, not topple the KKK.

Real life also intruded on The Hate U Give. One of its young white actors, Kian Lawley, was replaced by K.J. Apa after a video surfaced of Lawley using the n-word and making racist jokes. And while it was being prepped, Philando Castile, a 32-year-old black American, was pulled over while driving in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, and killed in a remarkably similar manner.

But part of what makes The Hate U Give so powerful is the way it takes such debate and disagreement around Black Lives Matter and compassionately distills it into a story about a 16-year-old girl (Amandla Stenberg) whose childhood best friend (Algee Smith) is shot and killed for reaching for a hairbrush after he’s pulled over for not signaling a turn. The subsequent fallout is seen through the prism of family (it opens with a father’s firm instruction on how motionless to act around police) and a community. It reserves empathy for all, while not minimizing fury over such injustice.

“I really just want people to take a moment and just feel again. Everybody. We’ve become a cynical society. We’ve lost the idea of human interaction, communicating with each other,” said Russell Hornsby, who memorably plays the father in the film. “I hope that people get that through this movie. And they can feel. However it pierces your heart, let it out. We’re in a pressure-cooked society right now and I feel like, just for a moment, that this movie represents a release valve.”
…

When Chilean air force jet engines arrived for repair at a Rolls-Royce factory in Scotland in 1974, inspector Bob Fulton swiftly decided he would not touch them.

The World War II veteran had been shaken by images thousands of miles away in Santiago of Hawker Hunter jets bombing La Moneda presidential palace in the Sept. 11, 1973, military coup that toppled democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende.

Despite risking his job, Fulton refused to let the engines through maintenance and, with fellow trade union workers, led an act of international solidarity against the coup and ensuing dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Documentary Nae Pasaran, meaning “they shall not pass,” takes a look at the boycott of Chilean air force engines by the engineers in East Kilbride and the impact it had.

“It’s very rare … for anyone … to find out decades later that something you’ve done … actually pays off and affects positively the lives of others,” film director Felipe Bustos Sierra told Reuters.

The son of an exiled Chilean journalist living in Belgium, Bustos Sierra said he first heard of the Scottish workers’ actions as a child.

“I suppose as I got older that story stuck with me because it connects directly with the most iconic image of the coup in Chile, which is the Hawker Hunters flying low over Santiago, and firing … into the palace,” he said. “The idea that Scottish workers on the other side of the world had managed to, I suppose, dent that image in some ways was quite incredible.”

The workers labeled the engine parts “black,” meaning they would not be touched on the factory assembly line for months.

They were then put and left outside, until they disappeared in 1978. The workers were told they had gone back to the Chile.

“That’s the only information they got … for years until we started making this film,” Bustos Sierra said.

Nae Pasaran shows Fulton, now in his 90s, and colleagues, who were honored by the Chilean government in 2015, look back on their actions and hear stories from Chileans jailed after the coup. A Pinochet-era general is also interviewed.

The documentary, which got an ovation at a festival in Glasgow and is to be released in Britain in November, has yet to be screened in Chile, where Bustos Sierra said he had seen positive comments on social media about it and some who thought the story was “science fiction.” He hopes for a 2019 cinema release there.

“I think somebody taking that sort of action today would probably be in more jeopardy than Bob was back then,” he said, when asked if such defiance was still possible. “But I think the idea of a peaceful civil disobedience still stands today.”
…