Sholom aleichem!" said Shiva Shapiro in a heavy Yiddish accent to her visitors.As she deftly stuffed cabbage leaves with rice and stewed tomatoes, and displayed other dishes she has made on her 1900 Beauty Hub coal stove, Shapiro drew her guests into her life.
"This is 1919," she said."Last year was the end of the influenza epidemic and the end of the war to end all wars. We're a Jewish family and we're keeping kosher in our home. I don't read English, only Yiddish and Hebrew. My daughter Mollie learned about bananas at school. I think that bananas are mushy, but I take her to buy a hand of bananas for 25 cents."
Shapiro is actually Barbara Ann Paster, one of the actors here at the Strawbery Banke restoration, a living museum in which over 350 years of Portsmouth homes,stores, churches and history have been preserved. It is in Puddle Dock, which was a decrepit neighbourhood destined to be razed under urban renewal until a campaign in the 1950s and '60s led by the town librarian saved 42 houses on 10 acres to create the museum.
The area was first settled in 1695 by the English,who found a profusion of strawberries there. By the turn of the 20th century Italians, Irish, English, FrenchCanadians and East European Jews had come here to find work. Although most immigrants at that time settled in large cities, some settled directly in smaller towns like Portsmouth. By 1919, 152 Russian Jews made up about a quarter of the immigrant population of Puddle Dock and 18 of them were Shapiro relatives,according to the museum.
As Shapiro, the wife of a pawnbroker with a 9-yearold daughter, Paster cooks dishes that follow the rhythm of the seasons, and the Jewish calendar.
She may make strawberry jam for her strudel in June, or pickle cucumbers with dill from her garden,or put up Reliance peaches with brandy in August.
For Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, she excitedly pinched rolled-out strips of pasta dough into bowtie noodles to use with leftover kasha stuffing from her roast chicken, and made traditional honey and poppy seed cakes.
Paster,61, has been portraying Shapiro since the Shapiro house opened in 1997."My entire life was made for this job," Paster said with a laugh."I married an Orthodox man. I'm Jewish from Russia, so I know the rules of kashrut and family purity. I am also a storyteller."
The real Mrs Shapiro immigrated from Anapol,Ukraine, in 1904 with other family members to meet her future husband, Abraham, also from Anapol, in Portsmouth, where he went to work in a shoe factory and later became the president of Portsmouth's synagogue, Temple of Israel.
At Strawbery Banke, visitors encounter Shiva Shapiro as a 34-year-old woman whose time is spent in her kosher kitchen with its coal stove and icebox."I get 50 pounds [23kg] of ice for 25 cents [8 baht] every other day and I can keep kosher meat for up to three days,"she said."There is hardly a time when I would need to keep it so long as there are two kosher butchers with delivery: Jacob Segal in a horse and buggy and Harry Liberson, who came here from an advertisement looking for a butcher in The Jewish Messenger out of New York and has stayed for 65 years."
Holidays were at the centre of the Shapiro family's life, and the museum staff took great pains to ensure the historical accuracy of the foods prepared and the items the family had available.
"To authenticate the Shapiro house," said Michelle Moon, director of education for the museum,"the curatorial staff interviewed 30 people from the neighbourhood and took pollen and seed analyses to determine what grew and was eaten in their home."
Shapiro's grandson, Burt Wolf,75, recalls picking seed pods for poppy seed cake or filling for his grandmother's holiday strudel.
In 1919 it was still too early for standard East European ingredients like kasha, poppy seeds and kale to be in mainstream cookbooks like "Fanny Farmer", which Mollie translated for her mother. Even Florence Greenbaum's International Jewish Cookbook (1918)had only one recipe for mohn (poppy seed) roly polys and none for kale or kasha.
But immigrants brought seeds of their traditional foods, like yellow Ukrainian carrots, kale and parsnips.Shapiro bought harder-to-save seeds like beets in Jackson's hardware store.
"Mr Wolf and many older immigrants told us that they ate yellow Ukrainian tomatoes, which we know Mrs Shapiro was growing in her garden," said John Forti, curator of culinary historic landscape for the museum. The red tomatoes were canned.
Forti found a Reliance peach tree growing out of the compost pile in the Shapiro's garden. Seed catalogues from that time included climbing Russian cucumbers and Zubrinski yellow potatoes, which are planted there now.
Stoneware crock shards found in the yard were a clue for the staff."Mrs Shapiro was putting up the food in the old style as well as using canning jars," he said."We found kale seeds in the walls of another immigrant's house."
Jewish truck farmers in the neighbouring town of Greenland grew buckwheat for kasha, an East European staple, used at that time in America only for buckwheat pancakes.
Recipes were handed down orally, at least in the East European immigrant communities, and they also travelled between neighbours."Whenever Camilla Pento comes to the house she points to the mandelbrot and says 'biscotti'," Shapiro said."She came to my house one day to show me how to make her biscotti. Nothing wrong with her recipe but in order for my family to eat it, we need to make it here so it's kosher. I made my mandelbrot and poppy seed cake and she her biscotti and pizzelles with a brand new pizzelle iron."
The Sabbath and holidays were the center of Shapiro's world and they also meant a lot of work for the Shapiro matriarch. Visiting just before Rosh Hashana, the first in the Jewish High Holy Days, I spoke with Elaine Kraskar, Shapiro's great-niece,82, who was a prominent Democratic state legislator for 16 years. Kraskar remembers going with her grandparents to farms to get chickens for holidays and the Sabbath.
"We would put them in a burlap sack and bring them to be ritually slaughtered by Mr Liberson," she said."My grandmother would singe the feathers, pluck and clean out the chickens. Everything was used. The intestines were cleaned and stuffed. We roasted chicken stuffed with kasha. Rosh Hashana was a special time,a time for families to be together."
Although Kraskar gave the museum her grandfather's safe, a Victrola with Yiddish records, and a nightie her grandmother made for her, she couldn't give up her rolling pin or scrub board.
"I put the scrub board up on the wall in my laundry room," she said,"to remind me how hard life was for her and how much easier it is today."NYT NEWS SERVICE
CRISPY KALE Time:
Adapted from the Strawbery Banke Museum 20 minutes / Serves 6 to 8 as a finger food, snack or side dish Ingredients: Preparation:
1bunch of kale,(about 450g), cored, leaves rinsed and thoroughly dried 3 to 4 Tbsp olive or vegetable oil 3 to 4 cloves garlic, minced Kosher salt, to taste 1. Preheat oven 260กC. Meanwhile, flatten kale leaves and use the point of a knife to remove tough center ribs. Stack leaves and roll them together, then slice crosswise into chiffonade strips 1in. to 1in. wide.2. Place kale in a medium bowl. Toss with olive oil, garlic and salt, making sure leaves are well coated with oil. Spread evenly across a large baking sheet.3. Bake, tossing once or twice, until leaves are crispy but not burned, about 5 minutes.Serve as is as a finger food or snack, or top with poached eggs as a breakfast or lunch dish.
KASHA-STUFFED ROAST CHICKEN Adapted from Elaine Kraskar Time:2 hours / Serves 6 to 8Ingredients: Preparation: 4 Tbsp chicken fat or vegetable oil, plus additional for greasing pan 3onions,1 diced and 2 coarsely chopped 1large egg 1cup dry kasha 2cups chicken broth or water 12cup diced celery 1cup sliced mushrooms, optional 2 Tbsp finely chopped fresh parsley 1 Tbsp finely chopped fresh sage 1roasting chicken,1.8kg to 2kg 3cloves garlic, minced 450g whole, unpeeled,small potatoes 3tart apples, quartered and cored 4carrots, peeled and cut into 3- to 4in.chunks 4parsnips, peeled and cut into 3- to 4in.chunks 1 Tbsp chopped fresh rosemary leaves Salt and freshly ground black pepper 1. Preheat oven to 190กC. Grease a roasting pan and set aside. In a skillet over medium heat, heat 2 tablespoons of chicken fat or oil,and saute diced onion until golden. Remove from heat and set aside.2. In a small mixing bowl, beat egg lightly and stir in kasha. Mix well to coat all grains.Place a dry heavy skillet over high heat.When it is hot, add egg-coated kasha and stir with a wooden spoon to flatten it and break up any lumps. Continue to stir until egg has dried and kernels are browned and mostly separated. Add broth or water, and season with salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a boil.Add cooked onions, celery, mushrooms (if using), parsley and sage. Simmer, covered,stirring occasionally, until kasha is tender,about 15 minutes.3. Rub exterior of chicken with 1 tablespoon of remaining chicken fat or oil and garlic.Season with salt and pepper to taste. Stuff both cavities of chicken with kasha mixture.(Excess kasha may be baked in an ovenproof dish, during last 30 minutes of roasting time.)4. In bottom of roasting pan, combine potatoes,apples, carrots, parsnips and chopped onions.Add remaining 1 tablespoon chicken fat or oil, and rosemary, and toss well to coat.Gently place chicken on top of vegetables and bake until golden and cooked through,about 11
2hours. To serve, carve chicken as desired and serve each portion with some of vegetables and apples.
POPPY SEED CAKE Adapted from Strawbery Banke Museum
Time:90 minutes / Serves 12 Ingredients: Preparation:
1cup poppy seeds 1cup milk or soy milk 1cup (225g) unsalted butter or pareve margarine, plus more for greasing pan 2cups all-purpose flour, plus additional for dusting pan 2cups sugar 3large eggs, separated 2 Tsp vanilla extract 12tsp salt 21
2tsp baking powder Confectioners sugar, for dusting 1. In a small saucepan, combine the poppy seeds and milk. Bring to a boil, remove from heat, and allow to rest until cool, about 20 minutes.2. Preheat oven to 176กC and prepare a large loaf or tube pan by greasing it with margarine and lightly flouring the inside of the pan.3. In bowl of an electric mixer with a paddle attachment, cream together butter or margarine and sugar. Add egg yolks, vanilla, and poppy seed-milk mixture, and beat until smooth. Gradually add 2 cups flour, salt and baking powder. Mix well; remove bowl from mixer and set aside.4. Place a clean bowl in mixer, with a whisk attachment, and whisk egg whites until stiff but not dry. Gently fold into batter. Scrape into pan, and bake until a knife inserted into the cake comes out clean, about 1 hour. Cool on a rack. When cool, dust cake with confectioners sugar.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Period films easier to get past censors
Chinese film-makers are addressing modern social woes by setting their movies in the past to avoid censorship,Wheat director He Ping said at the Toronto film festival.
For decades the Chinese have sought to get around censorship by using old poems or literature as allegories for modern situations.
An international audience is now being acquainted with this tradition, carried on in film. He Ping's satirical film,screened here for the first time outside of his homeland, is set in the Warring States era from 476 BC to the unification of China by the Qin Dynasty in 221 BC.
It depicts the struggles of women left behind when men go off to war and the way they remain happy - by believing in the lie that their loved ones will return to them once the conflict ends.
The film could easily have been set in modern times, he said."But if you tell a critical story in a contemporary Chinese setting, it can be a much more sensitive issue. The reality for Chinese film-makers is that if you set a film that blasts current goings-on in a contemporary setting, it may not pass the censors," he said.
Tian Zhuang Zhuang's film The Warrior and the Wolf , adapted from a short story by Japanese author Yasushi Inoue,is also set in the period of Warring States.
And director Lu Chuan travelled back almost 80 years for his film City of Life and Death , about the infamous massacre in Nanjing during the 1937 fall of the then-capital to the Japanese army.
He Ping is careful to point out that his film targets Chinese society and not China's Communist regime.
"China has made a lot of progress of late, but there is still a lot of truth being covered up," he said."Chinese people are living a much happier life than at any point in their history, but they are still living a lie."
He points out that a series of deadly coal mine accidents and a recent contaminated milk scandal only became known when "tragedy struck",adding that he fears much worse remains hidden.
Lu Chuan's movie deals in gruesome detail with the killing of what China says were 300,000 defenseless civilians and prisoners of war by Japanese invaders. But it also portrays the Japanese soldiers as ordinary people caught up in the tragedy of war, rather than the bloodthirsty monsters that they are often
depicted as in China.
This is unforgivable in the eyes of some ultranationalists and Lu has already received at least one death threat.
Lu says he was driven to "adopt the point of view of a Japanese soldier" to show the truth, and to counterbalance the "excessive" way the massacre has been dealt with in China in the past.
For decades the Chinese have sought to get around censorship by using old poems or literature as allegories for modern situations.
An international audience is now being acquainted with this tradition, carried on in film. He Ping's satirical film,screened here for the first time outside of his homeland, is set in the Warring States era from 476 BC to the unification of China by the Qin Dynasty in 221 BC.
It depicts the struggles of women left behind when men go off to war and the way they remain happy - by believing in the lie that their loved ones will return to them once the conflict ends.
The film could easily have been set in modern times, he said."But if you tell a critical story in a contemporary Chinese setting, it can be a much more sensitive issue. The reality for Chinese film-makers is that if you set a film that blasts current goings-on in a contemporary setting, it may not pass the censors," he said.
Tian Zhuang Zhuang's film The Warrior and the Wolf , adapted from a short story by Japanese author Yasushi Inoue,is also set in the period of Warring States.
And director Lu Chuan travelled back almost 80 years for his film City of Life and Death , about the infamous massacre in Nanjing during the 1937 fall of the then-capital to the Japanese army.
He Ping is careful to point out that his film targets Chinese society and not China's Communist regime.
"China has made a lot of progress of late, but there is still a lot of truth being covered up," he said."Chinese people are living a much happier life than at any point in their history, but they are still living a lie."
He points out that a series of deadly coal mine accidents and a recent contaminated milk scandal only became known when "tragedy struck",adding that he fears much worse remains hidden.
Lu Chuan's movie deals in gruesome detail with the killing of what China says were 300,000 defenseless civilians and prisoners of war by Japanese invaders. But it also portrays the Japanese soldiers as ordinary people caught up in the tragedy of war, rather than the bloodthirsty monsters that they are often
depicted as in China.
This is unforgivable in the eyes of some ultranationalists and Lu has already received at least one death threat.
Lu says he was driven to "adopt the point of view of a Japanese soldier" to show the truth, and to counterbalance the "excessive" way the massacre has been dealt with in China in the past.
Watching a nation fall apart, entertainingly
"A merica unravelling in different ways."That's how Thom Powers, the documentary programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival,put it. It was Tuesday night, six days into the 34th edition of this annual cinematic convocation, and Powers had just bluntly identified a trend that had become apparent from my sampling of more than two dozen fiction and nonfiction movies laden with doomsday predictions, conspiracy theories (and facts), grim statistics, alarming charts,dire projections and shrieking, whimpering and failing men and women.
During its 10 days, this sprawling,homey event takes over Toronto,attracting locals as well as journalists and industry insiders from around the world. This is where professional festivalgoers catch up on films they missed at Cannes and Venice and preview scores of other new titles.
It's where George Clooney (here with Up in the Air and Men Who Stare at Goats ) and Oprah Winfrey (fronting for the Sundance hit Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire ) sell the celebrity goods, giving journalists 10 minutes of face time and sidelined fans high-wattage smiles. It's also where Werner Herzog unveiled one of the best movies of his career (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans ) and one of the worst (My Son,My Son, What Have Ye Done?).Trying to locate an overarching theme in a festival as large as Toronto - this year, there are 335 movies from 65 countries - is usually either an exercise in futility or a critical contrivance. Even so, Powers had acknowledged something that was difficult to avoid and not just among the documentaries: Along with the rest of the world, film-makers are casting a hard, sober, often alarmed eye at the US.
These days even a documentary about bees and beekeeping skews apocalyptic:Witness Colony , an examination of what's been labelled colony collapse disorder,the mysterious phenomenon that has,over the past few frightening years, wiped out about a third of the US honeybee population.
Backed with Irish money (we liked it,a producer explained),Colony was jointly directed by Carter Gunn (the Irishman who edited it) and Ross McDonnell (the US man who shot its pretty digital images). Working under the obvious influence of Errol Morris - notable in their attention to beauty, interview style and even pacing - they shift seamlessly from macro-images of the swarming bees to close-ups of their fretting keepers who are struggling with the devastation,including one large California family that is unwisely compared to a hive. Although they could have dug deeper and incorporated more of a global perspective (colony collapse disorder reaches to Europe), their movie constitutes a satisfying addition to the blooming, buzzing field of social issue documentary.
Rather less happy is Michael Moore's latest,Capitalism: A Love Story , a soft look at our hard times that opens on Wednesday in the US. Off screen, at least, Moore was in fine form at his premiere last week, fielding questions from the volubly adoring audience and joking about the less welcome critical reception he expects back home. He also introduced some striking steelworkers and reminded Powers to tell us that Capitalism is eligible for an award from Cadillac, a festival sponsor.(Cadillac, of course, is owned by General Motors,whose former chief executive Roger Smith was the subject of Moore's Roger & Me .)I kept wondering how the award fits in with GM's restructuring plan.
More bad news was delivered in the far more elegantly structured if not unproblematic documentary Collapse ,from Chris Smith. A US film-maker who occasionally delves into fiction (The Pool and so forth), Smith trains his intelligent, focused attention on just one man in this compelling curiosity: Michael C. Ruppert, who discourses or, more precisely, disgorges, on everything from the intrigues of Dick Cheney to the dangers of corn.
In a different age Ruppert, a chain smoker with the crumpled face and wary gaze of the cop he once was, might have alarmed and entertained from the Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park in London,famed for prophets and fools. Now he spreads the gloom via (of course) his blog fromthewilderness.com.
For much of Collapse Ruppert sits in a wooden chair in an anonymous brickface room and talks and talks and talks,very much a man cinematically and existentially alone.
He derives much of his information from news reports, which he combs through to uncover what he believes to be the truth. Although some of what he says sounds reasonable (his harangue about declining petroleum reserves, for one), I wish Smith, who never appears on screen but whose presence is felt in all his film-making choices, had approached his subject more aggressively.
As in any large festival, the fiction titles ranged far and wide across genres and themes, with a familiar smattering of downer dramas and melancholic melodramas.
(I'm dysfunctional, you're dysfunctional, we're all dysfunctional!) In Love and Other Impossible Pursuits Don Roos attempts, with mixed results, to show what a real family looks like, much as he did in the more successful Happy Endings . Although he tries hard to create a sense of actual if cosseted Manhattan life - gustily insisting for instance that his star Natalie Portman, as a grieving mother, remain unlikable - Roos overworks his material into a sudsy pulp.Most of the characters might be in need of therapy, but Roos' screenplay has already been therapeuticised, with every angle, emotion, feeling spelled out.
It's not immediately clear what ails Ryan Bingham ( Clooney) in Up in the Air , about a lone wolf who tirelessly crisscrosses the country firing employees for cowardly or indifferent bosses. Based on the Walter Kirn novel of the same title and smoothly directed by Jason Reitman (Juno and Thank You for Smoking ),Up in the Air starts as a comedy only to metamorphose into tragedy as this one-dimensional corporate assassin makes a mid-life run for happiness with another high flier (Vera Farmiga, a charmed match for Clooney).
Over a meet-and-greet dinner Reitman explained that one of his inspirations was Shampoo , Robert Towne and Hal Ashby's 1975 masterpiece about a Beverly Hills hairdresser that ends on a similarly ambiguous image of terminal aloneness.
Reitman doesn't reach the sublime heights of Shampoo or tap into the haunted US soul as deeply as About Schmidt , which limned comparable terrain. But he's taken significant steps forward with Up in the Air and without the self-conscious cutesy dialogue of Diablo Cody, who wrote Juno . Ms Cody,meanwhile, fizzled early at the festival with Jennifer's Body , a horror throwaway starring Megan Fox as a cannibalistic hottie.
Like the pitiful stick figures who inhabit Life During Wartime , Todd Solondz's hateful, would-be comedy, the middleclass characters in Jennifer's Body are nothing more than fodder for the filmmakers, which wouldn't be such a problem if all the bile and cheap laughs in both movies were accompanied by ideas,politics, a little heart, anything.
Among the worthier titles that will or should be coming to a cinema or cable channel near you are films such as City of Life and Death , a fictional re-creation of the Japanese conquest of Nanking in 1937. Directed by Lu Chuan (Mountain Patrol: Kekexili ), one of the most talented Chinese film-makers to emerge in recent years, and shot in widescreen black and white,City of Life and Death opens just as the Japanese overrun Nanking.
What follows is a phantasmagoric vision in which decapitated heads swing from ropes like pendulums in front of mountains of rubble and billowing smoke. Lu smartly toggles between the prisoners and their captors, a strategy that helps humanise the invaders, giving a face to evil.
My favourite discovery at Toronto,however, is the deliriously unhinged Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans ,which was met with laughter and audible gasps during its initial press screening.Although it bears some resemblance to the original Bad Lieutenant , Abel Ferrara's 1992 grungy classic about a drug-addled cop, Herzog's redo is its own beast.Nicolas Cage, delivering his loosest,twitchiest, most furiously engaged performance since Vampire's Kiss (1988),in which he swallowed a cockroach for his art, plays the title character, a detective who's badder and madder than most.
Written by William Finkelstein, a veteran television writer (L.A. Law ), the plot hinges on familiar dirty business (a multiple murder, drug deals) that becomes increasingly irrelevant as the mood and film-making heat up.
In this brightly lighted nightmare, a post-Katrina New Orleans that might have been conceived by Hieronymus Bosch but could come to the screen only through the feverish imaginings of Herzog, a dead man's soul dances near his body and googly-eyed iguanas trade seemingly knowing looks with the popeyed lieutenant.
To watch Cage melt with pleasure as he lights up his "lucky crack pipe" or seize up with spasmodic giggles, is to understand that Herzog has again found a performer as committed to representing unspeakable human will as Klaus Kinski,the star of Herzog masterworks like Aguirre, the Wrath of God . Here Cage and Herzog take you into a hell that leads straight to movie heaven.
During its 10 days, this sprawling,homey event takes over Toronto,attracting locals as well as journalists and industry insiders from around the world. This is where professional festivalgoers catch up on films they missed at Cannes and Venice and preview scores of other new titles.
It's where George Clooney (here with Up in the Air and Men Who Stare at Goats ) and Oprah Winfrey (fronting for the Sundance hit Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire ) sell the celebrity goods, giving journalists 10 minutes of face time and sidelined fans high-wattage smiles. It's also where Werner Herzog unveiled one of the best movies of his career (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans ) and one of the worst (My Son,My Son, What Have Ye Done?).Trying to locate an overarching theme in a festival as large as Toronto - this year, there are 335 movies from 65 countries - is usually either an exercise in futility or a critical contrivance. Even so, Powers had acknowledged something that was difficult to avoid and not just among the documentaries: Along with the rest of the world, film-makers are casting a hard, sober, often alarmed eye at the US.
These days even a documentary about bees and beekeeping skews apocalyptic:Witness Colony , an examination of what's been labelled colony collapse disorder,the mysterious phenomenon that has,over the past few frightening years, wiped out about a third of the US honeybee population.
Backed with Irish money (we liked it,a producer explained),Colony was jointly directed by Carter Gunn (the Irishman who edited it) and Ross McDonnell (the US man who shot its pretty digital images). Working under the obvious influence of Errol Morris - notable in their attention to beauty, interview style and even pacing - they shift seamlessly from macro-images of the swarming bees to close-ups of their fretting keepers who are struggling with the devastation,including one large California family that is unwisely compared to a hive. Although they could have dug deeper and incorporated more of a global perspective (colony collapse disorder reaches to Europe), their movie constitutes a satisfying addition to the blooming, buzzing field of social issue documentary.
Rather less happy is Michael Moore's latest,Capitalism: A Love Story , a soft look at our hard times that opens on Wednesday in the US. Off screen, at least, Moore was in fine form at his premiere last week, fielding questions from the volubly adoring audience and joking about the less welcome critical reception he expects back home. He also introduced some striking steelworkers and reminded Powers to tell us that Capitalism is eligible for an award from Cadillac, a festival sponsor.(Cadillac, of course, is owned by General Motors,whose former chief executive Roger Smith was the subject of Moore's Roger & Me .)I kept wondering how the award fits in with GM's restructuring plan.
More bad news was delivered in the far more elegantly structured if not unproblematic documentary Collapse ,from Chris Smith. A US film-maker who occasionally delves into fiction (The Pool and so forth), Smith trains his intelligent, focused attention on just one man in this compelling curiosity: Michael C. Ruppert, who discourses or, more precisely, disgorges, on everything from the intrigues of Dick Cheney to the dangers of corn.
In a different age Ruppert, a chain smoker with the crumpled face and wary gaze of the cop he once was, might have alarmed and entertained from the Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park in London,famed for prophets and fools. Now he spreads the gloom via (of course) his blog fromthewilderness.com.
For much of Collapse Ruppert sits in a wooden chair in an anonymous brickface room and talks and talks and talks,very much a man cinematically and existentially alone.
He derives much of his information from news reports, which he combs through to uncover what he believes to be the truth. Although some of what he says sounds reasonable (his harangue about declining petroleum reserves, for one), I wish Smith, who never appears on screen but whose presence is felt in all his film-making choices, had approached his subject more aggressively.
As in any large festival, the fiction titles ranged far and wide across genres and themes, with a familiar smattering of downer dramas and melancholic melodramas.
(I'm dysfunctional, you're dysfunctional, we're all dysfunctional!) In Love and Other Impossible Pursuits Don Roos attempts, with mixed results, to show what a real family looks like, much as he did in the more successful Happy Endings . Although he tries hard to create a sense of actual if cosseted Manhattan life - gustily insisting for instance that his star Natalie Portman, as a grieving mother, remain unlikable - Roos overworks his material into a sudsy pulp.Most of the characters might be in need of therapy, but Roos' screenplay has already been therapeuticised, with every angle, emotion, feeling spelled out.
It's not immediately clear what ails Ryan Bingham ( Clooney) in Up in the Air , about a lone wolf who tirelessly crisscrosses the country firing employees for cowardly or indifferent bosses. Based on the Walter Kirn novel of the same title and smoothly directed by Jason Reitman (Juno and Thank You for Smoking ),Up in the Air starts as a comedy only to metamorphose into tragedy as this one-dimensional corporate assassin makes a mid-life run for happiness with another high flier (Vera Farmiga, a charmed match for Clooney).
Over a meet-and-greet dinner Reitman explained that one of his inspirations was Shampoo , Robert Towne and Hal Ashby's 1975 masterpiece about a Beverly Hills hairdresser that ends on a similarly ambiguous image of terminal aloneness.
Reitman doesn't reach the sublime heights of Shampoo or tap into the haunted US soul as deeply as About Schmidt , which limned comparable terrain. But he's taken significant steps forward with Up in the Air and without the self-conscious cutesy dialogue of Diablo Cody, who wrote Juno . Ms Cody,meanwhile, fizzled early at the festival with Jennifer's Body , a horror throwaway starring Megan Fox as a cannibalistic hottie.
Like the pitiful stick figures who inhabit Life During Wartime , Todd Solondz's hateful, would-be comedy, the middleclass characters in Jennifer's Body are nothing more than fodder for the filmmakers, which wouldn't be such a problem if all the bile and cheap laughs in both movies were accompanied by ideas,politics, a little heart, anything.
Among the worthier titles that will or should be coming to a cinema or cable channel near you are films such as City of Life and Death , a fictional re-creation of the Japanese conquest of Nanking in 1937. Directed by Lu Chuan (Mountain Patrol: Kekexili ), one of the most talented Chinese film-makers to emerge in recent years, and shot in widescreen black and white,City of Life and Death opens just as the Japanese overrun Nanking.
What follows is a phantasmagoric vision in which decapitated heads swing from ropes like pendulums in front of mountains of rubble and billowing smoke. Lu smartly toggles between the prisoners and their captors, a strategy that helps humanise the invaders, giving a face to evil.
My favourite discovery at Toronto,however, is the deliriously unhinged Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans ,which was met with laughter and audible gasps during its initial press screening.Although it bears some resemblance to the original Bad Lieutenant , Abel Ferrara's 1992 grungy classic about a drug-addled cop, Herzog's redo is its own beast.Nicolas Cage, delivering his loosest,twitchiest, most furiously engaged performance since Vampire's Kiss (1988),in which he swallowed a cockroach for his art, plays the title character, a detective who's badder and madder than most.
Written by William Finkelstein, a veteran television writer (L.A. Law ), the plot hinges on familiar dirty business (a multiple murder, drug deals) that becomes increasingly irrelevant as the mood and film-making heat up.
In this brightly lighted nightmare, a post-Katrina New Orleans that might have been conceived by Hieronymus Bosch but could come to the screen only through the feverish imaginings of Herzog, a dead man's soul dances near his body and googly-eyed iguanas trade seemingly knowing looks with the popeyed lieutenant.
To watch Cage melt with pleasure as he lights up his "lucky crack pipe" or seize up with spasmodic giggles, is to understand that Herzog has again found a performer as committed to representing unspeakable human will as Klaus Kinski,the star of Herzog masterworks like Aguirre, the Wrath of God . Here Cage and Herzog take you into a hell that leads straight to movie heaven.
Song and dance promo
As the autumn television season begins,and new and returning shows jostle one another to remind easily distracted viewers that they exist, there are many routes TV series can take to promote themselves. Some buy print ads and rent billboards; others use internet banners and viral videos. But probably only one is sending its cast on the road to perform a live musical.
For the past several days the stars of the irreverent FX comedy It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia have been readying for a six-city tour. They will act, sing and karate kick their way through The Nightman Cometh , an original stage work taken from a recent episode of the show. Costumes and sets have been packed up, a tour bus has been prepared, and a few days ago some of the cast members even got together to rehearse for,like, four hours.
Asked recently if he had the musical theatre background to pull this off, Rob McElhenney,the show's creator and co-star, gave a long, nervous laugh."No," he said."No. No, I don't. I don't really have any comedy background. This show is the first comedy I've done.
"Now we're doing it in front of 4,000 people at a clip. It's going to be pretty interesting."
This ad hoc, see-what-happens strategy has defined Always Sunny since FX signed McElhenney and two equally untested friends, Charlie Day and Glenn Howerton, to produce and star in a series about a group of mates who run an Irish pub in South Philadelphia.
Since its 2005 debut the show has developed a deliberately grimy, lowbrow comic sensibility consisting of naughty words, sexual innuendos and casual references to drug and alcohol abuse,as well as plots about get-rich-quick schemes,pranks gone wrong and internal rivalries.
Following a third season story in which the tried fruitlessly to start a rock band, a fourth season episode revived one of their songs for a musical performed by the full Always Sunny cast, including Kaitlin Olson (who plays Howerton's sister) and Danny DeVito (who plays the siblings' father).
In the context of the show this production is composed by Day's character, ostensibly telling the story of a boy who is transformed into a man by his love for a woman, and by the molestations of a bedroom invader called the Nightman.
In real life it was written by McElhenney, Day and Howerton, with some musical help from a friend, the actor and musician Cormac Bluestone.McElhenney described the musical as "profound in its own sort of innocent ridiculousness".
"We had never seen anything like that in a comedy before," he said,"possibly for good reason. But we decided to go for it anyway."
In April the cast was invited by another musician friend, Don McCloskey, to sing some of the Nightman Cometh songs as part of his show at the Troubadour nightclub in West Hollywood.But when event listings mistakenly said that the actors would be performing the entire musical - and two shows quickly sold out, based on this premise - the Always Sunny team agreed to give its devotees what they expected.
Critics were sceptical that they could pull it off. Previewing the Troubadour shows for LA Weekly , Nicole Campos wrote that the cast of the "cranktastic" show "usually can't be bothered to take a spare breath when they aren't shouting put-downs at one another" and asked,"How would they stand still long enough to hit the high notes?"
The actors recall these performances as scary and a bit sloppy but ultimately successful."As soon as you start singing in front of an audience full of fans," Olson said,"they're singing and screaming with you, so you can't really hear yourself. That was terrifying." But the overall production, she said, was "so stupid to me that it's fun".
It also attracted the attention of the concert promoter Live Nation, which offered to take the show on a 22-city tour. This was not quite compatible with the schedule of the Always Sunny crew, which is still editing the final episodes of its coming season. But an abbreviated run was worked out, which began in Boston.
The musical backgrounds of the Always Sunny stars are wildly disparate. Day's parents both hold doctorates in musicology, and his sister has a doctorate in choral conducting. Howerton, a Juilliard-trained actor, performed musical theatre in high school and college, while DeVito once serenaded Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie Twins .Still, the performers agree that the road show is not only a great excuse to travel in a tour bus and fulfil their rock star fantasies, but also a validation of their series' unexpected success.
"The whole thing is a total fluke," Howerton said."The first script I ever wrote in my life was an episode of the first season. Now all of a sudden we're writing a musical, and all because we talked some people into letting us do something that we didn't even totally know how to do."
When the tour is complete, the cast will get a one-month break. Then the team must figure out how to top this stunt in future episodes of Always Sunny , which FX has renewed for two more seasons.
For the past several days the stars of the irreverent FX comedy It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia have been readying for a six-city tour. They will act, sing and karate kick their way through The Nightman Cometh , an original stage work taken from a recent episode of the show. Costumes and sets have been packed up, a tour bus has been prepared, and a few days ago some of the cast members even got together to rehearse for,like, four hours.
Asked recently if he had the musical theatre background to pull this off, Rob McElhenney,the show's creator and co-star, gave a long, nervous laugh."No," he said."No. No, I don't. I don't really have any comedy background. This show is the first comedy I've done.
"Now we're doing it in front of 4,000 people at a clip. It's going to be pretty interesting."
This ad hoc, see-what-happens strategy has defined Always Sunny since FX signed McElhenney and two equally untested friends, Charlie Day and Glenn Howerton, to produce and star in a series about a group of mates who run an Irish pub in South Philadelphia.
Since its 2005 debut the show has developed a deliberately grimy, lowbrow comic sensibility consisting of naughty words, sexual innuendos and casual references to drug and alcohol abuse,as well as plots about get-rich-quick schemes,pranks gone wrong and internal rivalries.
Following a third season story in which the tried fruitlessly to start a rock band, a fourth season episode revived one of their songs for a musical performed by the full Always Sunny cast, including Kaitlin Olson (who plays Howerton's sister) and Danny DeVito (who plays the siblings' father).
In the context of the show this production is composed by Day's character, ostensibly telling the story of a boy who is transformed into a man by his love for a woman, and by the molestations of a bedroom invader called the Nightman.
In real life it was written by McElhenney, Day and Howerton, with some musical help from a friend, the actor and musician Cormac Bluestone.McElhenney described the musical as "profound in its own sort of innocent ridiculousness".
"We had never seen anything like that in a comedy before," he said,"possibly for good reason. But we decided to go for it anyway."
In April the cast was invited by another musician friend, Don McCloskey, to sing some of the Nightman Cometh songs as part of his show at the Troubadour nightclub in West Hollywood.But when event listings mistakenly said that the actors would be performing the entire musical - and two shows quickly sold out, based on this premise - the Always Sunny team agreed to give its devotees what they expected.
Critics were sceptical that they could pull it off. Previewing the Troubadour shows for LA Weekly , Nicole Campos wrote that the cast of the "cranktastic" show "usually can't be bothered to take a spare breath when they aren't shouting put-downs at one another" and asked,"How would they stand still long enough to hit the high notes?"
The actors recall these performances as scary and a bit sloppy but ultimately successful."As soon as you start singing in front of an audience full of fans," Olson said,"they're singing and screaming with you, so you can't really hear yourself. That was terrifying." But the overall production, she said, was "so stupid to me that it's fun".
It also attracted the attention of the concert promoter Live Nation, which offered to take the show on a 22-city tour. This was not quite compatible with the schedule of the Always Sunny crew, which is still editing the final episodes of its coming season. But an abbreviated run was worked out, which began in Boston.
The musical backgrounds of the Always Sunny stars are wildly disparate. Day's parents both hold doctorates in musicology, and his sister has a doctorate in choral conducting. Howerton, a Juilliard-trained actor, performed musical theatre in high school and college, while DeVito once serenaded Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie Twins .Still, the performers agree that the road show is not only a great excuse to travel in a tour bus and fulfil their rock star fantasies, but also a validation of their series' unexpected success.
"The whole thing is a total fluke," Howerton said."The first script I ever wrote in my life was an episode of the first season. Now all of a sudden we're writing a musical, and all because we talked some people into letting us do something that we didn't even totally know how to do."
When the tour is complete, the cast will get a one-month break. Then the team must figure out how to top this stunt in future episodes of Always Sunny , which FX has renewed for two more seasons.
"MAD MEN", "30 ROCK" RECLAIM EMMYS
Mad Men and 30 Rock led a pack of Emmy winners who successfully defended their titles at Sunday's, while Australian Toni Collette of Showtime's United States of Tara was honoured as best lead actress in a comedy series for her role as a mother with multiple personalities."Wow, this is insanely confronting," said a beaming Collette.She thanked series creator Diablo Cody, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Juno .AMC's glossy 1960s Madison Avenue saga Mad Men , which last year became the first basic cable show to win a top series award, won the best drama trophy for a second time.
"It is an amazing time to work in TV," said Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner."And, I know that everything is changing, but I'm not afraid of it because I feel like all these different media is just more choice and more entertainment. It's better for the viewers in the end and I'm glad to be a part of it."
NBC's 30 Rock , a satirical take on life inside a TV variety show, was honoured for the third time as best comedy series, while star Alec Baldwin won his second award as best comedy actor.
"We want to thank our friends at NBC for keeping us on the air ... even though we are so much more expensive than a talk show," said 30 Rock creator and star Tina Fey, referring to Jay Leno's new daily prime-time comedy show, which NBC likes to note is cheaper to produce than a scripted series.
Baldwin, accepting his acting trophy for 30 Rock from Brothers & Sisters star Rob Lowe, joked,"I'll be honest with you. I'd trade this to look like him."
Glenn Close's performance as a ruthless trial attorney on Damages and Bryan Cranston's turn as a meth-making, cancer-stricken teacher on Breaking Bad were honoured with the top drama series acting Emmys, the second consecutive trophies for both.
Iranian Shohreh Aghdashloo won for her role in HBO's House of Saddam .Aghdashloo won best supporting actress in a TV movie or miniseries for playing Saddam's wife Sajidah Khairallah Tulfah.
The BBC's Dickens adaptation Little Dorrit , co-produced with PBS's Boston affiliate WGBH, won for best miniseries as well as awards for cinematography,art direction, casting and costumes.
Ireland was well represented as Irish actress Dearblha Walsh won for directing Little Dorrit and Irish actor Brendan Gleeson won for playing Winston Churchill in the HBO miniseries Into the Storm .Australian Hugh Jackman won for his opening musical performance for the Oscars awards show.
Collette's victory deprived Fey of 30 Rock of winning a second consecutive award in the category. But Fey took the stage a few moments later to acknowledge a guest actor award she received for her Sarah Palin impersonation on Saturday Night Live .Close called it a "huge privilege" to be part of entertainment community,then tweaked her show's writers.
Her role is "maybe the character of my lifetime, depending on what they do this season," Close said.
Michael Emerson, who plays the cruelly devious Ben on Lost , and Cherry Jones, the stalwart US president on 24 , were honoured as best supporting actors in drama series.
"Wowza," Jones said. Emerson accepted his award for what he called "the role of my lifetime".
Kristin Chenoweth of Pushing Daisies and Jon Cryer of Two and a Half Men won supporting acting Emmys for their comedies and proved that acceptance speeches can be entertaining.
"I'm not employed now so I'd like to be on Mad Men . I also like The Office and 24 ," said Chenoweth, alternating between tears and smiles as she accepted for her cancelled ABC series."Thank you so much to the academy for recognising a show that's no longer on the air."
Backstage, the Tony Award-winning Chenoweth noted that she is appearing on an upcoming episode of Fox's show Glee , has shot two movies and is doing a series of concerts.
Cryer, whose series is the most-watched comedy on TV, brought a wry tone to his speech.
"I used to think that awards were just shallow tokens of momentary popularity, but now I realise they are the only true measure of a person's worth as a human being," Cryer said.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart won the trophy for best variety, music or comedy series, its seventh in a row.
Grey Gardens , the story of a reclusive mother and daughter who were relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, won for best TV movie.
Neil Patrick Harris, the show's host as well as a nominee, lost to Cryer for his role on How I Met Your Mother but won on-stage accolades for his emcee work, including a heartfelt compliment from Jon Stewart.
Harris, who moved the show along with good-natured humour, started the evening on a lively note, performing Don't Touch That Remote , a custommade tune from Broadway composers Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman of Hairspray fame. Harris implored viewers to stay glued to the show and called attention to some of the stars in the house.
"I see legends galore, Lange, Barrymore," Harris sang to Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore, later adding,"But like next season on Idol I'm not seeing Paula Abdul." Meanwhile, the camera panned to an empty seat at the Nokia Theatre.
Harris' winning turn as host also was lauded by Jeff Probst, honoured as best reality show host for CBS'Survivor . Probst was one of the five reality hosts who emceed the Emmys last year and received scathing reviews.
"Neil Patrick Harris, this is how you host the Emmys. Nice job," Probst said, pointing his Emmy toward him.
The Amazing Race won its seventh consecutive Emmy in the outstanding reality-competition category, once again turning top-rated American Idol into an also-ran.
An exception to the upbeat mood came in clips from
animated series Family Guy , which showed the dog character Brian beaten bloody, followed by a reality show snippet with barely concealed swearing.
In a bid to give viewers reasons to stick with the show,CBS put advisories on-screen of upcoming moments,including Justin Timberlake's appearance as a presenter.
The TV academy, meanwhile, hoped to avoid an unwanted rerun at the 61st Annual Primetime Emmy Awards: paltry
viewership. The 2008 ceremony was the least-watched
ever with an audience of 12.3 million.
Acclaimed but low-rated series such as Mad Men are seen as one reason viewers bypassed the awards, so
major categories were expanded to increase the odds for
more popular fare. There were as many as seven nominees per category, compared with the traditional five.
Harris and Emmy executive producer Don Mischer promised to keep the scheduled three-hour ceremony snappy, but they had less room to manoeuver than planned. A TV academy proposal to pre-tape some acceptances and show them in a truncated version - gaining time for something
more entertaining than speeches - was quashed by industry
opposition.
Harris also was a supporting actor nominee for How I Met Your Mother .HBO went into the ceremony as the awards leader after last weekend's Creative Arts Primetime Emmys ceremony for technical
and other achievements. The channel earned 16 trophies, followed
by NBC with 11 and Fox and ABC with eight awards each. CBS,
PBS and Cartoon Network had six each.
After Sunday, HBO emerged with a leading 21, followed by NBC with 16, ABC with 11 and Fox with 10. CBS and PBS had nine each.
"It is an amazing time to work in TV," said Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner."And, I know that everything is changing, but I'm not afraid of it because I feel like all these different media is just more choice and more entertainment. It's better for the viewers in the end and I'm glad to be a part of it."
NBC's 30 Rock , a satirical take on life inside a TV variety show, was honoured for the third time as best comedy series, while star Alec Baldwin won his second award as best comedy actor.
"We want to thank our friends at NBC for keeping us on the air ... even though we are so much more expensive than a talk show," said 30 Rock creator and star Tina Fey, referring to Jay Leno's new daily prime-time comedy show, which NBC likes to note is cheaper to produce than a scripted series.
Baldwin, accepting his acting trophy for 30 Rock from Brothers & Sisters star Rob Lowe, joked,"I'll be honest with you. I'd trade this to look like him."
Glenn Close's performance as a ruthless trial attorney on Damages and Bryan Cranston's turn as a meth-making, cancer-stricken teacher on Breaking Bad were honoured with the top drama series acting Emmys, the second consecutive trophies for both.
Iranian Shohreh Aghdashloo won for her role in HBO's House of Saddam .Aghdashloo won best supporting actress in a TV movie or miniseries for playing Saddam's wife Sajidah Khairallah Tulfah.
The BBC's Dickens adaptation Little Dorrit , co-produced with PBS's Boston affiliate WGBH, won for best miniseries as well as awards for cinematography,art direction, casting and costumes.
Ireland was well represented as Irish actress Dearblha Walsh won for directing Little Dorrit and Irish actor Brendan Gleeson won for playing Winston Churchill in the HBO miniseries Into the Storm .Australian Hugh Jackman won for his opening musical performance for the Oscars awards show.
Collette's victory deprived Fey of 30 Rock of winning a second consecutive award in the category. But Fey took the stage a few moments later to acknowledge a guest actor award she received for her Sarah Palin impersonation on Saturday Night Live .Close called it a "huge privilege" to be part of entertainment community,then tweaked her show's writers.
Her role is "maybe the character of my lifetime, depending on what they do this season," Close said.
Michael Emerson, who plays the cruelly devious Ben on Lost , and Cherry Jones, the stalwart US president on 24 , were honoured as best supporting actors in drama series.
"Wowza," Jones said. Emerson accepted his award for what he called "the role of my lifetime".
Kristin Chenoweth of Pushing Daisies and Jon Cryer of Two and a Half Men won supporting acting Emmys for their comedies and proved that acceptance speeches can be entertaining.
"I'm not employed now so I'd like to be on Mad Men . I also like The Office and 24 ," said Chenoweth, alternating between tears and smiles as she accepted for her cancelled ABC series."Thank you so much to the academy for recognising a show that's no longer on the air."
Backstage, the Tony Award-winning Chenoweth noted that she is appearing on an upcoming episode of Fox's show Glee , has shot two movies and is doing a series of concerts.
Cryer, whose series is the most-watched comedy on TV, brought a wry tone to his speech.
"I used to think that awards were just shallow tokens of momentary popularity, but now I realise they are the only true measure of a person's worth as a human being," Cryer said.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart won the trophy for best variety, music or comedy series, its seventh in a row.
Grey Gardens , the story of a reclusive mother and daughter who were relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, won for best TV movie.
Neil Patrick Harris, the show's host as well as a nominee, lost to Cryer for his role on How I Met Your Mother but won on-stage accolades for his emcee work, including a heartfelt compliment from Jon Stewart.
Harris, who moved the show along with good-natured humour, started the evening on a lively note, performing Don't Touch That Remote , a custommade tune from Broadway composers Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman of Hairspray fame. Harris implored viewers to stay glued to the show and called attention to some of the stars in the house.
"I see legends galore, Lange, Barrymore," Harris sang to Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore, later adding,"But like next season on Idol I'm not seeing Paula Abdul." Meanwhile, the camera panned to an empty seat at the Nokia Theatre.
Harris' winning turn as host also was lauded by Jeff Probst, honoured as best reality show host for CBS'Survivor . Probst was one of the five reality hosts who emceed the Emmys last year and received scathing reviews.
"Neil Patrick Harris, this is how you host the Emmys. Nice job," Probst said, pointing his Emmy toward him.
The Amazing Race won its seventh consecutive Emmy in the outstanding reality-competition category, once again turning top-rated American Idol into an also-ran.
An exception to the upbeat mood came in clips from
animated series Family Guy , which showed the dog character Brian beaten bloody, followed by a reality show snippet with barely concealed swearing.
In a bid to give viewers reasons to stick with the show,CBS put advisories on-screen of upcoming moments,including Justin Timberlake's appearance as a presenter.
The TV academy, meanwhile, hoped to avoid an unwanted rerun at the 61st Annual Primetime Emmy Awards: paltry
viewership. The 2008 ceremony was the least-watched
ever with an audience of 12.3 million.
Acclaimed but low-rated series such as Mad Men are seen as one reason viewers bypassed the awards, so
major categories were expanded to increase the odds for
more popular fare. There were as many as seven nominees per category, compared with the traditional five.
Harris and Emmy executive producer Don Mischer promised to keep the scheduled three-hour ceremony snappy, but they had less room to manoeuver than planned. A TV academy proposal to pre-tape some acceptances and show them in a truncated version - gaining time for something
more entertaining than speeches - was quashed by industry
opposition.
Harris also was a supporting actor nominee for How I Met Your Mother .HBO went into the ceremony as the awards leader after last weekend's Creative Arts Primetime Emmys ceremony for technical
and other achievements. The channel earned 16 trophies, followed
by NBC with 11 and Fox and ABC with eight awards each. CBS,
PBS and Cartoon Network had six each.
After Sunday, HBO emerged with a leading 21, followed by NBC with 16, ABC with 11 and Fox with 10. CBS and PBS had nine each.
"TRAVIATA" TRIUMPHS
The massed talents of Ekaterinburg do much to lift the rainy gloom
Her Majesty the Queen's esteemed presence at "La Traviata", the opening show in the Bangkok International Festival of Dance and Music on September 7, boded well for an event now in its 11th year and still buoyant amid the economic and political gloom.
The festival's latest marketing strategy seems to have paid off in better advance ticket sales and, on opening night, the house was nearly full as the Ekaterinburg Opera Theatre returned to Bangkok after two years.
As Violetta, young soprano Natalia Starkova was the star of this memorable evening, blending her alluring voice with dextrous acting. It was a diva-esque performance effortlessly delivered by a non-diva, a rising star, something rarely seen in Bangkok.
She was well supported and matched by the young tenor Dmytry Kuzmin, as Alfredo Germont, and the seasoned Yuri Devin, with great command of the role of Giorgio Germont.
Additional delights resulted from the visual components, being the stage decor that, unlike many opera productions previously seen in the festival, smartly fit into the wide and tall frame of the threatre, and the costumes whose colours and designs were carefully honed.
Most viewers would agree that "La Traviata" was indeed a fitting curtain raiser. And this was perhaps notwithstanding the fact that the same opera, by the same company with some cast differences, was already presented here - the kind of programming choices that raises doubts in a country where fewer than 10 opera productions are staged each year.
Two evenings later, the same company's "Tosca" was, unfortunately, a slight letdown.
It was not until the second act that I started to empathise with Ekaterina Neyzhmak's portrayal of the title character and Mikhail Vishniak's of Mario Cavaradossi, and that's just in time for their tragic end.
Another odd artistic choice was Petr Tolstenko, as Baron Scapia, who was one of the stiffest villains I have witnessed on stage.
Besides that, the set design was not intended for this larger theatre. I was informed later that the orchestra pit had been raised from where it was for "La Traviata", and this might explain why singing voices were drowned out during some key moments, due in part to our Cultural Centre's not-so-perfect acoustics.
On Thursday it was rain - and the resulting traffic chaos - that prevented many people from arriving in time for the first part of the concert by Ekaterinburg Symphony Orchestra.
Those who made it were treated to a musically enchanting evening of Brahms' "Symphony No 4" and Rachmaninov's "Symphony No 2", thanks in part to the strongly commanding and highly animated guest conductor Fabio Mastrangelo.
As content as I was, I could not help comparing this experience to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's performance of Mahler's "Tragic Symphony" conducted by Bernard Haitink at the Hong Kong Arts Festival this past February.
After all these years, I think Bangkok audiences are ready for, and entitled to, such an extraordinary programme.
Now that the classical component from Eastern Europe is finished, the organiser - International Cultural Promotions - is set to take us into slightly more artistically challenging, aesthetically adventurous, and dramatically less predictable, routes.
Coming up are more contemporary works, as already evident in teh Kiev Modern Ballet Theatre's "Carmen TV" and "La Forza del Destino" last week.
COME RIDE A CLOUD
- The International Festival of Dance and Music cointinues until October 17 at the Thailand Cultural Centre.
- Tonight and tomorrow bring the Bangkok debut of Taiwan's renowned Cloud Gate Dance Theatre. Asia's most acclaimed choreographer, Lin Hwai-Min, will give a talk tomorrow afternoon.
- For more details, visit www.BangkokFestivals.com or call (02) 204 2394.
- Tickets are available at ThaiTicketMajor, and students can pick up free tickets one working day ahead of the shows at the Siam Cement Group Foundation.
Her Majesty the Queen's esteemed presence at "La Traviata", the opening show in the Bangkok International Festival of Dance and Music on September 7, boded well for an event now in its 11th year and still buoyant amid the economic and political gloom.
The festival's latest marketing strategy seems to have paid off in better advance ticket sales and, on opening night, the house was nearly full as the Ekaterinburg Opera Theatre returned to Bangkok after two years.
As Violetta, young soprano Natalia Starkova was the star of this memorable evening, blending her alluring voice with dextrous acting. It was a diva-esque performance effortlessly delivered by a non-diva, a rising star, something rarely seen in Bangkok.
She was well supported and matched by the young tenor Dmytry Kuzmin, as Alfredo Germont, and the seasoned Yuri Devin, with great command of the role of Giorgio Germont.
Additional delights resulted from the visual components, being the stage decor that, unlike many opera productions previously seen in the festival, smartly fit into the wide and tall frame of the threatre, and the costumes whose colours and designs were carefully honed.
Most viewers would agree that "La Traviata" was indeed a fitting curtain raiser. And this was perhaps notwithstanding the fact that the same opera, by the same company with some cast differences, was already presented here - the kind of programming choices that raises doubts in a country where fewer than 10 opera productions are staged each year.
Two evenings later, the same company's "Tosca" was, unfortunately, a slight letdown.
It was not until the second act that I started to empathise with Ekaterina Neyzhmak's portrayal of the title character and Mikhail Vishniak's of Mario Cavaradossi, and that's just in time for their tragic end.
Another odd artistic choice was Petr Tolstenko, as Baron Scapia, who was one of the stiffest villains I have witnessed on stage.
Besides that, the set design was not intended for this larger theatre. I was informed later that the orchestra pit had been raised from where it was for "La Traviata", and this might explain why singing voices were drowned out during some key moments, due in part to our Cultural Centre's not-so-perfect acoustics.
On Thursday it was rain - and the resulting traffic chaos - that prevented many people from arriving in time for the first part of the concert by Ekaterinburg Symphony Orchestra.
Those who made it were treated to a musically enchanting evening of Brahms' "Symphony No 4" and Rachmaninov's "Symphony No 2", thanks in part to the strongly commanding and highly animated guest conductor Fabio Mastrangelo.
As content as I was, I could not help comparing this experience to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's performance of Mahler's "Tragic Symphony" conducted by Bernard Haitink at the Hong Kong Arts Festival this past February.
After all these years, I think Bangkok audiences are ready for, and entitled to, such an extraordinary programme.
Now that the classical component from Eastern Europe is finished, the organiser - International Cultural Promotions - is set to take us into slightly more artistically challenging, aesthetically adventurous, and dramatically less predictable, routes.
Coming up are more contemporary works, as already evident in teh Kiev Modern Ballet Theatre's "Carmen TV" and "La Forza del Destino" last week.
COME RIDE A CLOUD
- The International Festival of Dance and Music cointinues until October 17 at the Thailand Cultural Centre.
- Tonight and tomorrow bring the Bangkok debut of Taiwan's renowned Cloud Gate Dance Theatre. Asia's most acclaimed choreographer, Lin Hwai-Min, will give a talk tomorrow afternoon.
- For more details, visit www.BangkokFestivals.com or call (02) 204 2394.
- Tickets are available at ThaiTicketMajor, and students can pick up free tickets one working day ahead of the shows at the Siam Cement Group Foundation.
Marvel rights issues give Disney headache
Walt Disney's proposed $4 billion acquisition of Marvel Entertainment may come with a headache: newly filed claims challenging Marvel's long-term rights to some of its superhero characters.
Heirs to the comic book artist Jack Kirby, a creator of characters and stories behind Marvel mainstays like "X-Men"and "Fantastic Four," last week sent 45 notices of copyright termination to Marvel and Disney, as well as Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures and other companies that have been using the characters.
The notices expressed an intent to regain copyrights to some of Kirby's creations as early as 2014, according to a statement disclosed Sunday by Toberoff & Associates, a law firm in Los Angeles that helped win a court ruling last year returning a share of the copyright in Superman to heirs of one of the charac-ter's creators, Jerome Siegel.
Reached by telephone on Sunday,Marc Toberoff, the firm's founding partner, declined to elaborate on his firm's statement. A spokeswoman for Marvel had no comment.
Disney said in a statement,"the notices involved are an attempt to terminate rights seven to 10 years from now, and involve claims that were fully considered in the acquisition."
Fox, Sony, Paramount and Universal had no comment.
Marvel's management agreed to sell the company to Disney last month,though the deal still requires the approval of Marvel's shareholders.
Even before the Kirby family sent its notices, Disney was facing criticism from some Wall Street analysts who expressed concern that Marvel's complex web of copyright agreements might prevent Disney from capitalising on some Marvel assets.
Sony has the film rights to SpiderMan in perpetuity, for instance, while Fox has the rights to X-Men and Fantastic Four. Paramount has a distribution agreement for a few movies that Marvel is producing on its own, including a second "Iron Man" film.
Hasbro has rights to produce certain toys, and Universal holds Florida theme park rights to Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, among other characters.
Kirby, who died in 1994, worked with the writer and editor Stan Lee to create many of the characters that in the last decade have become especially valuable to Hollywood.
Kirby was involved with the Incredible Hulk, the Mighty Thor, Iron Man and the Avengers, among other characters that have been adapted for the screen since his death.
The window for serving notice of termination on the oldest of the properties opened several years ago, and will remain open for some time under copyright law.
But Disney's pending purchase of Marvel has given anyone with possible Marvel claims more reason to pose a challenge.
Under copyright law, the author or his heirs can begin a process to regain copyrights for a period of time after the original grant.
If Kirby's four children were to gain the copyright to a character he helped create, they might become entitled to a share of profits from films or other properties using it.
They might also find themselves able to sell rights to certain characters without consent from Marvel, Disney or the various studios that have licensed the Marvel properties for their hit films.
In July, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that Warner Bros and its DC Comics unit had not violated rights of the Siegel heirs in handling internal transactions related to Superman. But an earlier ruling had granted the heirs a return of their share in the copyright.
Copyright matters have become increasingly tangled for Hollywood, as it continues to trade on characters and stories that were created decades ago but are now subject to deadlines and expiration dates under federal copyright law.
Heirs to the comic book artist Jack Kirby, a creator of characters and stories behind Marvel mainstays like "X-Men"and "Fantastic Four," last week sent 45 notices of copyright termination to Marvel and Disney, as well as Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures and other companies that have been using the characters.
The notices expressed an intent to regain copyrights to some of Kirby's creations as early as 2014, according to a statement disclosed Sunday by Toberoff & Associates, a law firm in Los Angeles that helped win a court ruling last year returning a share of the copyright in Superman to heirs of one of the charac-ter's creators, Jerome Siegel.
Reached by telephone on Sunday,Marc Toberoff, the firm's founding partner, declined to elaborate on his firm's statement. A spokeswoman for Marvel had no comment.
Disney said in a statement,"the notices involved are an attempt to terminate rights seven to 10 years from now, and involve claims that were fully considered in the acquisition."
Fox, Sony, Paramount and Universal had no comment.
Marvel's management agreed to sell the company to Disney last month,though the deal still requires the approval of Marvel's shareholders.
Even before the Kirby family sent its notices, Disney was facing criticism from some Wall Street analysts who expressed concern that Marvel's complex web of copyright agreements might prevent Disney from capitalising on some Marvel assets.
Sony has the film rights to SpiderMan in perpetuity, for instance, while Fox has the rights to X-Men and Fantastic Four. Paramount has a distribution agreement for a few movies that Marvel is producing on its own, including a second "Iron Man" film.
Hasbro has rights to produce certain toys, and Universal holds Florida theme park rights to Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, among other characters.
Kirby, who died in 1994, worked with the writer and editor Stan Lee to create many of the characters that in the last decade have become especially valuable to Hollywood.
Kirby was involved with the Incredible Hulk, the Mighty Thor, Iron Man and the Avengers, among other characters that have been adapted for the screen since his death.
The window for serving notice of termination on the oldest of the properties opened several years ago, and will remain open for some time under copyright law.
But Disney's pending purchase of Marvel has given anyone with possible Marvel claims more reason to pose a challenge.
Under copyright law, the author or his heirs can begin a process to regain copyrights for a period of time after the original grant.
If Kirby's four children were to gain the copyright to a character he helped create, they might become entitled to a share of profits from films or other properties using it.
They might also find themselves able to sell rights to certain characters without consent from Marvel, Disney or the various studios that have licensed the Marvel properties for their hit films.
In July, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that Warner Bros and its DC Comics unit had not violated rights of the Siegel heirs in handling internal transactions related to Superman. But an earlier ruling had granted the heirs a return of their share in the copyright.
Copyright matters have become increasingly tangled for Hollywood, as it continues to trade on characters and stories that were created decades ago but are now subject to deadlines and expiration dates under federal copyright law.
GRAFFITI IS GOOD, DRUGS ARE BAD
ThaiHealth is giving teens a chance to express themselves in cosplay and|B-Boy dancing
Graffiti and hip-hop gangs aren't synonymous with illegal drugs in the eyes of the Thai Health Promotion Foundation. ThaiHealth, as it's known, is using popular pastimes like these to reach out to youngsters at a free, three-day workshop next month in Phetchaburi.
The Healthy Youth project will involve classes in cosplay, creating graffiti and dancing in the B-Boy, hip-hop, K-pop and jazz styles.
It sounds like a lot of fun at Phetchaburi's Suan Buak Hat Cha-am Hotel from October 6 to 9.
"Some people may think these kind of activities are a waste of time, but they're not," says ThaiHealth's Manop Yam-utai.
With the right support, they're beneficial, both to the teens and society as a whole, he says.
"We should encourage them to pursue this sort of thing rather than drinking, taking drugs and otherwise wasting their time."
Good skillz
B-Boy dance instructor Chaiwat Sereebut sees nothing but good in the Healthy Youth project and points out that adults shouldn't ignore teenagers' interests.
B-Boy dancing isn't just something that street toughs do, he adds.
"Skills like these can make money and pave the way to a solid career," says project staffer Tik Mahesaka. And in the meantime, the kids will be networking with like-minded people.
Grade 11 student Chutima Sremkaw has signed up for the dance classes to keep fit.
"It looks cool, too," she says. "I've already talked to my parents about it and they have no objections."
It's the graffiti course that attracts Thanapong Onkeaw, 16.
"I really like drawing," he says. "It's a good way to express my feelings and ideas."
BOOK A SPOT
>> The classes are limited to 200 participants aged 12 to 18.
>> Write a bit about yourself and your interests and turn in your application to ThaiHealth at YoungProject.Hi5.com.
Graffiti and hip-hop gangs aren't synonymous with illegal drugs in the eyes of the Thai Health Promotion Foundation. ThaiHealth, as it's known, is using popular pastimes like these to reach out to youngsters at a free, three-day workshop next month in Phetchaburi.
The Healthy Youth project will involve classes in cosplay, creating graffiti and dancing in the B-Boy, hip-hop, K-pop and jazz styles.
It sounds like a lot of fun at Phetchaburi's Suan Buak Hat Cha-am Hotel from October 6 to 9.
"Some people may think these kind of activities are a waste of time, but they're not," says ThaiHealth's Manop Yam-utai.
With the right support, they're beneficial, both to the teens and society as a whole, he says.
"We should encourage them to pursue this sort of thing rather than drinking, taking drugs and otherwise wasting their time."
Good skillz
B-Boy dance instructor Chaiwat Sereebut sees nothing but good in the Healthy Youth project and points out that adults shouldn't ignore teenagers' interests.
B-Boy dancing isn't just something that street toughs do, he adds.
"Skills like these can make money and pave the way to a solid career," says project staffer Tik Mahesaka. And in the meantime, the kids will be networking with like-minded people.
Grade 11 student Chutima Sremkaw has signed up for the dance classes to keep fit.
"It looks cool, too," she says. "I've already talked to my parents about it and they have no objections."
It's the graffiti course that attracts Thanapong Onkeaw, 16.
"I really like drawing," he says. "It's a good way to express my feelings and ideas."
BOOK A SPOT
>> The classes are limited to 200 participants aged 12 to 18.
>> Write a bit about yourself and your interests and turn in your application to ThaiHealth at YoungProject.Hi5.com.
Caught between ice and a cold-blooded killer
The first thing Kate Beckinsale does in Whiteout is take a shower.This may be because her character,a US marshal named Carrie Stetko, needs to rinse off the grime of Antarctica, where she is stationed. Or, as seems more likely,it may be because the film-makers, realising that she would be spending most of the movie swaddled in thick parkas and layers of thermal protection, felt that some audience members might enjoy seeing Beckinsale in her underwear and then out of it behind a strategically fogged glass door.
Which is not to imply that the shower scene, interrupted by a knock at the door Im in the shower, Carrie cleverly replies is more contrived or absurd than anything else that happens in this studiously mediocre little thriller, which was directed by Dominic Sena.
In the opening sequence a Soviet transport plane crashes in the ice, and a half-century later bodies start turning up. Carrie, a few days before shes supposed to leave the research complex,investigates, menaced by an impending storm and interrupted by flashbacks to some bad stuff that went down, earlier in her career, in Miami.
Up there, by the way, she could work in a sleeveless T-shirt. At her current post, she loses two fingers to frostbite,gasps in surprise when something surprising happens, and takes turns with other characters at explaining what is happening. Were stuck! Its cold! Jelly beans!
The major question that keeps the movie moderately engaging is which of the men around Carrie will turn out to be one of the bad guys who go around hacking up geologists with an ice axe.Will it be the friendly pilot (Columbus Short), who accompanies her to remote encampments? Will it be the UN investigator (Gabriel Macht) who turns up at one of them? The kindly old doctor,known as Doc (Tom Skerritt)? That Australian guy (Alex OLoughlin)? Or that other guy (Shawn Doyle)?
No spoilers here! Though if you study the cast list you may develop an inkling.But the way Whiteout walks the line between implausibility and predictability is neither unusual nor in itself a problem.
The problem lies in the movies perfunctory, by-the-numbers approach to the story and its characters. That the climactic blizzard-obscured action sequence is tedious and confusing does not help.
And shouldnt there be penguins? I thought every movie about Antarctica had to have penguins. Has someone done market research proving otherwise?Is the whole penguin thing over? Or maybe the penguins read the script and told their agents to pass. Smart birds.
Which is not to imply that the shower scene, interrupted by a knock at the door Im in the shower, Carrie cleverly replies is more contrived or absurd than anything else that happens in this studiously mediocre little thriller, which was directed by Dominic Sena.
In the opening sequence a Soviet transport plane crashes in the ice, and a half-century later bodies start turning up. Carrie, a few days before shes supposed to leave the research complex,investigates, menaced by an impending storm and interrupted by flashbacks to some bad stuff that went down, earlier in her career, in Miami.
Up there, by the way, she could work in a sleeveless T-shirt. At her current post, she loses two fingers to frostbite,gasps in surprise when something surprising happens, and takes turns with other characters at explaining what is happening. Were stuck! Its cold! Jelly beans!
The major question that keeps the movie moderately engaging is which of the men around Carrie will turn out to be one of the bad guys who go around hacking up geologists with an ice axe.Will it be the friendly pilot (Columbus Short), who accompanies her to remote encampments? Will it be the UN investigator (Gabriel Macht) who turns up at one of them? The kindly old doctor,known as Doc (Tom Skerritt)? That Australian guy (Alex OLoughlin)? Or that other guy (Shawn Doyle)?
No spoilers here! Though if you study the cast list you may develop an inkling.But the way Whiteout walks the line between implausibility and predictability is neither unusual nor in itself a problem.
The problem lies in the movies perfunctory, by-the-numbers approach to the story and its characters. That the climactic blizzard-obscured action sequence is tedious and confusing does not help.
And shouldnt there be penguins? I thought every movie about Antarctica had to have penguins. Has someone done market research proving otherwise?Is the whole penguin thing over? Or maybe the penguins read the script and told their agents to pass. Smart birds.
Taiwan to screen film on Uighur leader
Taiwan's secondlargest city said yesterday it would show a film about Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer,further angering China which is still fuming about the Dalai Lama's recent visit to the island.
The documentary,The 10 Conditions of Love , will screen four times tomorrow and Wednesday ahead of an annual film festival in Kaohsiung whose mayor Chen Chu is backed by Taiwan's anti-China opposition party.
"To draw the curtains over this con-troversy as soon as possible, the film will be screened ahead of schedule,"the city said in a statement.
Chinese officials say that Ms Kadeer,a former businesswoman who now leads exile group the World Uighur Congress,orchestrated ethnic violence in July in Xinjiang, a largely ethnic Uighur region of northwest China, killing about 200 people.
She denies the allegation.China's state-run television said the government agency in charge of Taiwan affairs denounced the decision to show the film, which it said distorted the truth and sent the wrong message on terrorism.
"We urge Kaohsiung not to cling to this reckless decision and disrupt cross strait relations," it said in a report quoting the Taiwan Affairs Office.
Kaohsiung and several oppositionled Taiwan counties irked Beijing this month when they invited the Dalai Lama to pray for victims of typhoon Morakot,which killed up to 770 people, mostly in mudslides.
The documentary,The 10 Conditions of Love , will screen four times tomorrow and Wednesday ahead of an annual film festival in Kaohsiung whose mayor Chen Chu is backed by Taiwan's anti-China opposition party.
"To draw the curtains over this con-troversy as soon as possible, the film will be screened ahead of schedule,"the city said in a statement.
Chinese officials say that Ms Kadeer,a former businesswoman who now leads exile group the World Uighur Congress,orchestrated ethnic violence in July in Xinjiang, a largely ethnic Uighur region of northwest China, killing about 200 people.
She denies the allegation.China's state-run television said the government agency in charge of Taiwan affairs denounced the decision to show the film, which it said distorted the truth and sent the wrong message on terrorism.
"We urge Kaohsiung not to cling to this reckless decision and disrupt cross strait relations," it said in a report quoting the Taiwan Affairs Office.
Kaohsiung and several oppositionled Taiwan counties irked Beijing this month when they invited the Dalai Lama to pray for victims of typhoon Morakot,which killed up to 770 people, mostly in mudslides.
Prolific but popular
Movie stars. Cant live with them.Cant have a film festival without them.A slightly frantic army of studio executives, publicists and agents in Los Angeles was fretting through the intricacies of George Clooneys presence at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Would there be just one news conference, for his Overture Films movie, a paranormal comic thriller,Men Who Stare at Goats ? Or would there be a second,for his Paramount picture,Up in the Air , which was scheduled for a public screening the next day?
Would Clooney make the Overture party? Would there be time for reporters?Cast and crew dinners? Or just smiles on the red carpet and a few bows from the stage?
Somehow, it worked out. Because there was Clooney, flashing his Cary Grant grin for the media gaggle.
If he had a paranormal power in real life, asked one female reporter in the crowd of about 100, what would it be?
Im doing it right now, Clooney said with a leer.Wow! Congratulations!His right hand, he explained, was wrapped in a clump of white bandages because he had slammed a car door on it.
I probably should have known in my mind I would do that, he said.
If all goes according to plan, Clooney will go through the ringer again at a matching news conference for Up in the Air . That movie opens in cinemas on November 13, just a week after the commercial debut of Men Who Stare .Ostensibly, film festivals are all about films. But the big festivals, and Torontos is one of the biggest, get their energy from movie stars, the bigger the better.Yes, Vera Farmiga is here, doing her bit for both Up in the Air and The Vintner's Luck . Abbie Cornish made it in from the set of Sucker Punch , which is just starting production in Vancouver, to help plug her Bright Star . Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly, a husband-and-wife team,walked the red carpet before an openingnight presentation of their Charles Darwin movie,Creation .We did our make-up together, said Connelly, tossing off a tidbit for the video crews.
But nothing matches the excitement that comes with one of Hollywoods true royals, especially when he or she has a couple of pictures on the line.
And Clooney is actually stretched across three films this season.
Men Who Stare at Goats , which is directed by Grant Heslov, finds Clooney in character as Lyn Cassady, an operative of the First Earth Battalion of psychic warriors who try to kill goats just by staring at them.
The movie is darkly comic, as is Up in the Air , which is directed by Jason Reitman and has the spotlight. In that one Clooneys Ryan Bingham is a corporate consultant who builds a near-perfect life around firing people.
Also somewhat dark, and somewhat comic, is Clooneys voice work as Fox in the director Wes Andersons Fantastic Fox , an animal fable based on Roald Dahls childrens book of the same title.The film, from 20th Century Fox, is not screening in Toronto, but it is showing at a film festival with the other two in London and has added to the demand for Clooneys services at cinematic gatherings around the world.
Possibly the hardest thing for any star is to know when fans will have had enough, or, worse, a bit too much. That is an especially ticklish problem for Clooney, who is generally game when it comes to promoting his films, much like Brad Pitt, with whom he appeared here last year on behalf of Burn After Reading , or Matt Damon, who is on hand this year with The Informant!,directed by Clooneys old business partner, Steven Soderbergh.
The unusually long awards season,stretched by the Oscars move from late February to a March 7 broadcast date,will test the limit for any star. Last year Kate Winslet seemed on the verge of wearing out her audience with the constant appearances on behalf of Revolutionary Road and The Reader . But she came up with an Oscar for her performance as Hanna Schmitz, the former German camp guard, in The Reader . This year, with no film in contention, she has given it a rest.
I dont think thats really been planned yet, Reitman said of the long promotional haul that may lie ahead for both himself and Clooney this year.(Reitman is also a producer of Jennifer's Body and an executive producer of Chloe ,which are both screening in Toronto.)
When it came to shooting Up in the Air , said Reitman, working with Clooney actually was not much different from his experience with slightly less luminous stars like Aaron Eckhart on Thank You for Smoking and Ellen Page on Juno .But things do get brighter on the promotional side. On returning to Los Angeles from the Telluride Film Festival,Reitman said he was surprised to see a blazing electronic billboard for Up in the Air , with Clooneys name sparkling on top.
Ive never had an outdoor billboard for one of my movies, he said.
Would there be just one news conference, for his Overture Films movie, a paranormal comic thriller,Men Who Stare at Goats ? Or would there be a second,for his Paramount picture,Up in the Air , which was scheduled for a public screening the next day?
Would Clooney make the Overture party? Would there be time for reporters?Cast and crew dinners? Or just smiles on the red carpet and a few bows from the stage?
Somehow, it worked out. Because there was Clooney, flashing his Cary Grant grin for the media gaggle.
If he had a paranormal power in real life, asked one female reporter in the crowd of about 100, what would it be?
Im doing it right now, Clooney said with a leer.Wow! Congratulations!His right hand, he explained, was wrapped in a clump of white bandages because he had slammed a car door on it.
I probably should have known in my mind I would do that, he said.
If all goes according to plan, Clooney will go through the ringer again at a matching news conference for Up in the Air . That movie opens in cinemas on November 13, just a week after the commercial debut of Men Who Stare .Ostensibly, film festivals are all about films. But the big festivals, and Torontos is one of the biggest, get their energy from movie stars, the bigger the better.Yes, Vera Farmiga is here, doing her bit for both Up in the Air and The Vintner's Luck . Abbie Cornish made it in from the set of Sucker Punch , which is just starting production in Vancouver, to help plug her Bright Star . Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly, a husband-and-wife team,walked the red carpet before an openingnight presentation of their Charles Darwin movie,Creation .We did our make-up together, said Connelly, tossing off a tidbit for the video crews.
But nothing matches the excitement that comes with one of Hollywoods true royals, especially when he or she has a couple of pictures on the line.
And Clooney is actually stretched across three films this season.
Men Who Stare at Goats , which is directed by Grant Heslov, finds Clooney in character as Lyn Cassady, an operative of the First Earth Battalion of psychic warriors who try to kill goats just by staring at them.
The movie is darkly comic, as is Up in the Air , which is directed by Jason Reitman and has the spotlight. In that one Clooneys Ryan Bingham is a corporate consultant who builds a near-perfect life around firing people.
Also somewhat dark, and somewhat comic, is Clooneys voice work as Fox in the director Wes Andersons Fantastic Fox , an animal fable based on Roald Dahls childrens book of the same title.The film, from 20th Century Fox, is not screening in Toronto, but it is showing at a film festival with the other two in London and has added to the demand for Clooneys services at cinematic gatherings around the world.
Possibly the hardest thing for any star is to know when fans will have had enough, or, worse, a bit too much. That is an especially ticklish problem for Clooney, who is generally game when it comes to promoting his films, much like Brad Pitt, with whom he appeared here last year on behalf of Burn After Reading , or Matt Damon, who is on hand this year with The Informant!,directed by Clooneys old business partner, Steven Soderbergh.
The unusually long awards season,stretched by the Oscars move from late February to a March 7 broadcast date,will test the limit for any star. Last year Kate Winslet seemed on the verge of wearing out her audience with the constant appearances on behalf of Revolutionary Road and The Reader . But she came up with an Oscar for her performance as Hanna Schmitz, the former German camp guard, in The Reader . This year, with no film in contention, she has given it a rest.
I dont think thats really been planned yet, Reitman said of the long promotional haul that may lie ahead for both himself and Clooney this year.(Reitman is also a producer of Jennifer's Body and an executive producer of Chloe ,which are both screening in Toronto.)
When it came to shooting Up in the Air , said Reitman, working with Clooney actually was not much different from his experience with slightly less luminous stars like Aaron Eckhart on Thank You for Smoking and Ellen Page on Juno .But things do get brighter on the promotional side. On returning to Los Angeles from the Telluride Film Festival,Reitman said he was surprised to see a blazing electronic billboard for Up in the Air , with Clooneys name sparkling on top.
Ive never had an outdoor billboard for one of my movies, he said.
New freedoms of Palestinian TV
This Ramadan television season, one Palestinian show is boldly going where few sitcoms have gone before - poking fun at the people in charge, and on their very own station.
The absurdity of modern Palestinian life has become the grist of satire in Watan ala Watar ("Country on a String"), a sketch comedy show that has debuted on Palestine TV during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
In one episode, it is 500 years in the future and a man bearing a striking resemblance to Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas is determined to negotiate a Middle East peace deal with Israel.
In another, Hamas police officers with fake beards creep up to the border with Israel - not to fire rockets but to stop other militants from doing so in order to keep a truce with the Jewish state, their sworn enemy.
Across the Arab world political satire - though lively - usually takes place far from the ears of political and religious elites, but Watan ala Watar has broken new ground by mocking the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority on its own official network."We are in great need of this kind of media criticism," says Emad Farajin,one of the three actors and writers behind the show.
"There is no way for us as artists and people of culture to be silent about the state of division in which we live," he says.
In one episode Farajin plays a president like Abbas addressing his Fatah party's seventh convention in the year 2509- the sixth was held last month and the fifth convened 20 years earlier.
"I won't have any shooting," Abbas tells the delegates."I am for negotiations ... and then more negotiations ... and then more negotiations.And anyone who wants to shoot guns - we will shoot them!"
The delegates include Dahlan XIV and Abu Al-Wilaa XVI - the fictional heirs of senior Fatah leaders with similar names - a dig at the decadesold party that many Palestinians see as impervious to reform.
The Abbas character then looks around for his Palestinian ID and his Israeli travel permit the implication being that 500 years from now the Palestinians will be no closer to ending the Israeli occupation.
The actors behind the show, which has also mocked Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and other senior officials, say they have yet to run foul of the authorities.
"We [Palestinians] have always done satire with the understanding that we don't air our dirty laundry," says producer Emad al-Asfar.
"But now we live in a period of new freedom in Palestinian television, and this programme is part of that," he says.
The show is popular in cafes that broadcast soap operas in the occupied West Bank following the breaking of the fast during the month of Ramadan - with many viewers surprised at the novel approach.
"The first thing I thought about when I saw a TV programme criticising the Palestinian president is:'Are they going to be arrested'," said Khalil Ahmad,48, referring to the show's producers and actors.
Said Abed Karim, a 25-year-old student,admitted:"I was very surprised, because it's the first time that I saw Palestinian TV criticise Palestinian leadership, even in a funny way".
When an earlier show poked fun at the Hamas movement in Gaza for halting rocket attacks on Israel, critics accused it of serving the interests of the PA by making jokes about its Islamist rivals.
But since then the programme's popularity has grown as it has dished out the same treatment to elites in the West Bank, tapping into widespread Palestinian frustration with both parties and the internal political divide.
The two main movements have been bitterly divided for years but their conflict came to a head in June 2007 when Hamas seized power in Gaza, cleaving the Palestinians into hostile rival camps.
"It's interesting, especially as it actually criticises both Hamas and Fatah leaders," says Ghasan Sajdeyah,42.
One of the most glowing reviews of the show ironically came from one of its main targets,Mahmud Abbas himself.
"The president watched the episode [about the Fatah conference] and was very happy with it," said Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior official close to Abbas who also heads Palestine TV.
"The reality is that we have a high level of media freedom, and this programme is proof of that. What's needed now is to bring media freedom to the the level of politics, so we have political freedom."
The absurdity of modern Palestinian life has become the grist of satire in Watan ala Watar ("Country on a String"), a sketch comedy show that has debuted on Palestine TV during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
In one episode, it is 500 years in the future and a man bearing a striking resemblance to Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas is determined to negotiate a Middle East peace deal with Israel.
In another, Hamas police officers with fake beards creep up to the border with Israel - not to fire rockets but to stop other militants from doing so in order to keep a truce with the Jewish state, their sworn enemy.
Across the Arab world political satire - though lively - usually takes place far from the ears of political and religious elites, but Watan ala Watar has broken new ground by mocking the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority on its own official network."We are in great need of this kind of media criticism," says Emad Farajin,one of the three actors and writers behind the show.
"There is no way for us as artists and people of culture to be silent about the state of division in which we live," he says.
In one episode Farajin plays a president like Abbas addressing his Fatah party's seventh convention in the year 2509- the sixth was held last month and the fifth convened 20 years earlier.
"I won't have any shooting," Abbas tells the delegates."I am for negotiations ... and then more negotiations ... and then more negotiations.And anyone who wants to shoot guns - we will shoot them!"
The delegates include Dahlan XIV and Abu Al-Wilaa XVI - the fictional heirs of senior Fatah leaders with similar names - a dig at the decadesold party that many Palestinians see as impervious to reform.
The Abbas character then looks around for his Palestinian ID and his Israeli travel permit the implication being that 500 years from now the Palestinians will be no closer to ending the Israeli occupation.
The actors behind the show, which has also mocked Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and other senior officials, say they have yet to run foul of the authorities.
"We [Palestinians] have always done satire with the understanding that we don't air our dirty laundry," says producer Emad al-Asfar.
"But now we live in a period of new freedom in Palestinian television, and this programme is part of that," he says.
The show is popular in cafes that broadcast soap operas in the occupied West Bank following the breaking of the fast during the month of Ramadan - with many viewers surprised at the novel approach.
"The first thing I thought about when I saw a TV programme criticising the Palestinian president is:'Are they going to be arrested'," said Khalil Ahmad,48, referring to the show's producers and actors.
Said Abed Karim, a 25-year-old student,admitted:"I was very surprised, because it's the first time that I saw Palestinian TV criticise Palestinian leadership, even in a funny way".
When an earlier show poked fun at the Hamas movement in Gaza for halting rocket attacks on Israel, critics accused it of serving the interests of the PA by making jokes about its Islamist rivals.
But since then the programme's popularity has grown as it has dished out the same treatment to elites in the West Bank, tapping into widespread Palestinian frustration with both parties and the internal political divide.
The two main movements have been bitterly divided for years but their conflict came to a head in June 2007 when Hamas seized power in Gaza, cleaving the Palestinians into hostile rival camps.
"It's interesting, especially as it actually criticises both Hamas and Fatah leaders," says Ghasan Sajdeyah,42.
One of the most glowing reviews of the show ironically came from one of its main targets,Mahmud Abbas himself.
"The president watched the episode [about the Fatah conference] and was very happy with it," said Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior official close to Abbas who also heads Palestine TV.
"The reality is that we have a high level of media freedom, and this programme is proof of that. What's needed now is to bring media freedom to the the level of politics, so we have political freedom."
ROLLING WITH THE BEETS
Holland's Beets Brothers Quartet and Switzerland's Starch will fire up some European jazz for Bangkok next week
After rousing visits from American jazz artists Benny Golson and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Bangkok isn't about to let the groove slide. The Beets Brothers Quartet from the Netherlands will keep that rhythm flowing on October 1 as part of Bangkok's 11th International Festival of Dance and Music.
Appearing with the Beets at the Thailand Cultural Centre will be Starch, a Swiss outfit that blends funk, rock, jazz and hip-hop.
A drummer friend squares off the quartet, but the Beets Brothers - Marius, Alexander and Peter Beets - are the sons of a jazz-minded gynaecologist father and a classical-pianist mother.
From an early they underwent stern tutelage in classical music, training an hour a day, six days a week. Their father managed to inject some jazz into the proceedings.
The boys' initial objections to the tough regime soon yielded to the fun of playing together, and the Beets Brothers were born.
At first their stage was the family living room, which was quickly stocked with all sorts of instruments. Next came school concerts and performances on the local radio station, and then invitations to play at festivals and in competitions - which they regularly won.
The boys were already performing on a regular basis throughout their homeland and in Germany by the time Marius and Peter enrolled in the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. Both graduated with honours.
While sticking to mainstream jazz, the brothers created their own easily recognisable sound - a pronounced "tone-picture" superimposed on swinging rhythmic patterns. That, mixed with blistering energy, makes them a treat for the ears.
It's not so easy describing Starch.
The seven-member band's fusion of so many genres has been called "euphoric, crazy and full of artistic fantasy".
Founded as a funk crew, their music absorbed rock and jazz and later hip-hop. Simon P Winiger and Chris Raxx lead the band into innovative territory that's posted with signs saying things like "indie funk", "crazy cosmopolitan rap" and "dizzy energetic rock".
What do they call the sound? "Starch music!"
In their decade of performing, Starch have played the Montreux Jazz Festival and toured Europe. This year has seen their first venture outside Europe, a sweep through Australia and Asia.
The Bangkok audience will hear nine songs from their latest album, "Music", and their last, "Freak City".
Book seats at www.ThaiTicketMajor.com or (02) 262 3456. The International Festival of Dance and Music continues through October 17. See the details at www.BangkokFestivals.com.
Foremost in fado
Mariza, the world's leading exponent of the singing style called fado, returns to Bangkok once more for an October 8 show at the Thailand Cultural Centre, presented by the Portuguese Embassy.
Born Marisa dos Reis Nunes to a Portuguese father and African mother in Mozambique, when it was still Portuguese East Africa, Mariza describes fado as urban Portuguese blues, accompanied by the country's indigenous, sweet-sounding, 12-string guitar.
It's widely believed that the Portuguese royal court brought fado with it when it returned in the mid-19th century from a decade's exile in Brazil.
The lyrics embrace saudade (loosely translated as "nostalgia") and its nuances - longing, happiness, sadness, love and pain.
All of Mariza's albums, from "Fado em Mim" in 2001 through "Fado Curvo" and "Transparente" to "Concerto Em Lisboa" in 2006, earned platinum status.
Her latest, last year's "Terre", featured Dominic Miller, the British guitarist for Sting (with whom Mariza dueted at the opening of the Athens Olympics in 2004), and Spanish flamenco singer Concha Buika, who joined Mariza on "Pequenas Verdades".
After rousing visits from American jazz artists Benny Golson and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Bangkok isn't about to let the groove slide. The Beets Brothers Quartet from the Netherlands will keep that rhythm flowing on October 1 as part of Bangkok's 11th International Festival of Dance and Music.
Appearing with the Beets at the Thailand Cultural Centre will be Starch, a Swiss outfit that blends funk, rock, jazz and hip-hop.
A drummer friend squares off the quartet, but the Beets Brothers - Marius, Alexander and Peter Beets - are the sons of a jazz-minded gynaecologist father and a classical-pianist mother.
From an early they underwent stern tutelage in classical music, training an hour a day, six days a week. Their father managed to inject some jazz into the proceedings.
The boys' initial objections to the tough regime soon yielded to the fun of playing together, and the Beets Brothers were born.
At first their stage was the family living room, which was quickly stocked with all sorts of instruments. Next came school concerts and performances on the local radio station, and then invitations to play at festivals and in competitions - which they regularly won.
The boys were already performing on a regular basis throughout their homeland and in Germany by the time Marius and Peter enrolled in the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. Both graduated with honours.
While sticking to mainstream jazz, the brothers created their own easily recognisable sound - a pronounced "tone-picture" superimposed on swinging rhythmic patterns. That, mixed with blistering energy, makes them a treat for the ears.
It's not so easy describing Starch.
The seven-member band's fusion of so many genres has been called "euphoric, crazy and full of artistic fantasy".
Founded as a funk crew, their music absorbed rock and jazz and later hip-hop. Simon P Winiger and Chris Raxx lead the band into innovative territory that's posted with signs saying things like "indie funk", "crazy cosmopolitan rap" and "dizzy energetic rock".
What do they call the sound? "Starch music!"
In their decade of performing, Starch have played the Montreux Jazz Festival and toured Europe. This year has seen their first venture outside Europe, a sweep through Australia and Asia.
The Bangkok audience will hear nine songs from their latest album, "Music", and their last, "Freak City".
Book seats at www.ThaiTicketMajor.com or (02) 262 3456. The International Festival of Dance and Music continues through October 17. See the details at www.BangkokFestivals.com.
Foremost in fado
Mariza, the world's leading exponent of the singing style called fado, returns to Bangkok once more for an October 8 show at the Thailand Cultural Centre, presented by the Portuguese Embassy.
Born Marisa dos Reis Nunes to a Portuguese father and African mother in Mozambique, when it was still Portuguese East Africa, Mariza describes fado as urban Portuguese blues, accompanied by the country's indigenous, sweet-sounding, 12-string guitar.
It's widely believed that the Portuguese royal court brought fado with it when it returned in the mid-19th century from a decade's exile in Brazil.
The lyrics embrace saudade (loosely translated as "nostalgia") and its nuances - longing, happiness, sadness, love and pain.
All of Mariza's albums, from "Fado em Mim" in 2001 through "Fado Curvo" and "Transparente" to "Concerto Em Lisboa" in 2006, earned platinum status.
Her latest, last year's "Terre", featured Dominic Miller, the British guitarist for Sting (with whom Mariza dueted at the opening of the Athens Olympics in 2004), and Spanish flamenco singer Concha Buika, who joined Mariza on "Pequenas Verdades".
Long-time Walt Disney studio chief Cook steps down to move on to new adventures
A new era has begun for the Walt Disney Co following the abrupt resignation of long-time studio chief Dick Cook.
After nearly four decades with the company, Cook announced on Friday that he was stepping down immediately.
In a statement, Cook said, "I have been contemplating this for some time now and feel it's the right time for me to move on to new adventures and in the words of one of my baseball heroes, Yogi Berra, 'If you come to a fork in the road, take it'."
Cook, 59, joined Disney in 1971 and moved up the ranks, becoming president of Buena Vista Pictures distribution in 1988. he became chairman of the studio in 2002.
"I have loved every minute of my 38 years that I have worked at Disney, from the beginning as a ride operator on Disneyland's steam train and monorail to my position as chairman of the Walt Disney Studios," he said.
The studio's recent movies, like "Race to Witch Mountain," "Bedtime Stories" and "Confessions of a Shopaholic" were box-office disappointments, however, Cook said he believed the studio' slate of upcoming movies is the best in its history.
Bob Iger, president and chief executive officer of The Walt Disney Co., praised Cook's work for the studio.
"Throughout his distinguished 38-year Disney career, Dick Cook's outstanding creative instincts and incomparable showmanship have truly enriched this company and significantly impacted Disney's great legacy," Iger said. "We thank Dick for his tremendous passion for Disney, and his many accomplishments and contricutions to The Walt Disney Studios, including a very promising upcoming film slate."
It was not immediately known who would replace Cook.
Cook's departure comes just a few weeks after Disney agreed to buy Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year and marks Disney's biggest acquisition since it purchased Pixar Animation Studios Inc., the maker of "Up" and "Cars", for $7.4 billion in stock in 2006.
After nearly four decades with the company, Cook announced on Friday that he was stepping down immediately.
In a statement, Cook said, "I have been contemplating this for some time now and feel it's the right time for me to move on to new adventures and in the words of one of my baseball heroes, Yogi Berra, 'If you come to a fork in the road, take it'."
Cook, 59, joined Disney in 1971 and moved up the ranks, becoming president of Buena Vista Pictures distribution in 1988. he became chairman of the studio in 2002.
"I have loved every minute of my 38 years that I have worked at Disney, from the beginning as a ride operator on Disneyland's steam train and monorail to my position as chairman of the Walt Disney Studios," he said.
The studio's recent movies, like "Race to Witch Mountain," "Bedtime Stories" and "Confessions of a Shopaholic" were box-office disappointments, however, Cook said he believed the studio' slate of upcoming movies is the best in its history.
Bob Iger, president and chief executive officer of The Walt Disney Co., praised Cook's work for the studio.
"Throughout his distinguished 38-year Disney career, Dick Cook's outstanding creative instincts and incomparable showmanship have truly enriched this company and significantly impacted Disney's great legacy," Iger said. "We thank Dick for his tremendous passion for Disney, and his many accomplishments and contricutions to The Walt Disney Studios, including a very promising upcoming film slate."
It was not immediately known who would replace Cook.
Cook's departure comes just a few weeks after Disney agreed to buy Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year and marks Disney's biggest acquisition since it purchased Pixar Animation Studios Inc., the maker of "Up" and "Cars", for $7.4 billion in stock in 2006.
CINEMA OPERATORS HAVE MIXED EXPECTATIONS
The film-exhibition industry as a whole is expected to see solid growth this year, but individual firms are predicting mixed results, executives said.
Cinema multiplex operator Major Cineplex Group expects consolidated income from ticket sales and cinema advertising will be flat this year, said Anavach Ongvasith, chief cinema and bowling officer.
"We expect to sell about 30 million movie tickets this year, which is similar to last year. The local political unrest, economic difficulties and the outbreak of H1N1 influenza have affected our performance this year," he said.
Anavach said that digital cinema was the future of the industry, as operators look to reduce costs.
Digital cinema has some big economic advantages over film, Anavach said, explaining that the final movie can be distributed electronically and projected using a digital projector, instead of a conventional film projector. Digital cinema also has lower shooting and editing costs.
"We [Major Cineplex] operate 372 cinema screens in 46 different locations throughout the country. We have about 18 digital screens and our plan is to increase the number of digital cinemas significantly," Anavach said.
James R Dhiraputra, managing director of film distributor Columbia Tristar Buena Vista Films (Thailand), said the local film industry is expected to grow by 5 per cent this year from 2008 to see more than Bt3.4 billion in sales.
"It is the first time in the past four to five years that the local industry has experienced [this] level of growth," said Dhiraputra.
He said the growth had been encouraged by a strong line-up of both imported blockbusters and Thai films.
"We have seen growth in Thai films, which have increased their share of the local film market from between 10 per cent and 20 per cent six to seven years ago to about 45 per cent today," said Dhiraputra.
He added that between 40 and 50 Thai films were released to local theatres annually, and were earning higher ticket sales on average than were imported films. There are between 140 and 150 imported films screened in Thailand every year.
Suvit Thongrompo, managing director of SF Cinema City, was upbeat on the industry's performance.
"We are quite optimistic that the cinema business will record strong growth this year, thanks mainly to the blockbusters that hit local screens from the second quarter," he said.
SF Cinema City expected to achieve its sales-growth target of between 15 and 20 percent this year, he said.
"We do not expect issues such as the political turmoil or the influenza outbreak to have any significant impact on our performance," Suvit said.
Cinema multiplex operator Major Cineplex Group expects consolidated income from ticket sales and cinema advertising will be flat this year, said Anavach Ongvasith, chief cinema and bowling officer.
"We expect to sell about 30 million movie tickets this year, which is similar to last year. The local political unrest, economic difficulties and the outbreak of H1N1 influenza have affected our performance this year," he said.
Anavach said that digital cinema was the future of the industry, as operators look to reduce costs.
Digital cinema has some big economic advantages over film, Anavach said, explaining that the final movie can be distributed electronically and projected using a digital projector, instead of a conventional film projector. Digital cinema also has lower shooting and editing costs.
"We [Major Cineplex] operate 372 cinema screens in 46 different locations throughout the country. We have about 18 digital screens and our plan is to increase the number of digital cinemas significantly," Anavach said.
James R Dhiraputra, managing director of film distributor Columbia Tristar Buena Vista Films (Thailand), said the local film industry is expected to grow by 5 per cent this year from 2008 to see more than Bt3.4 billion in sales.
"It is the first time in the past four to five years that the local industry has experienced [this] level of growth," said Dhiraputra.
He said the growth had been encouraged by a strong line-up of both imported blockbusters and Thai films.
"We have seen growth in Thai films, which have increased their share of the local film market from between 10 per cent and 20 per cent six to seven years ago to about 45 per cent today," said Dhiraputra.
He added that between 40 and 50 Thai films were released to local theatres annually, and were earning higher ticket sales on average than were imported films. There are between 140 and 150 imported films screened in Thailand every year.
Suvit Thongrompo, managing director of SF Cinema City, was upbeat on the industry's performance.
"We are quite optimistic that the cinema business will record strong growth this year, thanks mainly to the blockbusters that hit local screens from the second quarter," he said.
SF Cinema City expected to achieve its sales-growth target of between 15 and 20 percent this year, he said.
"We do not expect issues such as the political turmoil or the influenza outbreak to have any significant impact on our performance," Suvit said.
Monday, September 21, 2009
HOW THE COLD WAR WAS WON...BY THE FRENCH
When a KGB colonel decided to pass on secrets that would devastate the Soviet Union he turned to Paris, a new film reveals By John Lichfield
James Bond and George Smiley can eat their hearts out. Who really won the Cold War for the democratic world? The French,naturellement . This rather startling claim is made in the publicity for a new brooding, brilliant, French spy movie.Although somewhat far-fetched, the boast that French intelligence "changed the world"does have some basis in fact.
The story of L'Affaire Farewell , how a French mole in the KGB leaked information so devastating that it hastened the implosion of the Soviet Union, is comparatively little known in the UK or even in France.
Due credit is given to the French, the once-reviled "surrender monkeys", by, of all sources, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The CIA's official website still carries a compelling essay, written soon after the affair was declassified in 1996, by Gus Weiss,the American official who ran the Washington end of the case. He concludes:"[The] Farewell dossier ... led to the collapse of a crucial [KGB spying] programme at just the time the Soviet military needed it. Along with the US defence build-up and an already floundering Soviet economy, the USSR could no longer compete."
The official version of events shows that the French taupe , or mole, was Colonel Vladimir Vetrov of Directorate T, the industrial spying arm of the KGB. In 1981-82, he gave French intelligence more than 3,000 pages of documents and the names of more than 400 Soviet agents posted abroad. The information, shared by Paris with its Nato allies,was deeply alarming but also hugely encouraging.
Col Vetrov, codenamed "Farewell" by the French, laid bare the successful Soviet strategies for acquiring, legally and illegally,advanced technology from the West. He also exposed the abject failure of the Communist system to match rapid Western advances in electronic micro-technology.
The case directly influenced President Ronald Reagan's decision to launch the "Star Wars" programme in 1983- a high-tech bluff that would drag the USSR into an unaffordable, and calamitous, attempt to keep up with the democratic world.
Raymond Nart, the French intelligence officer who handled the case from Paris,reported that Col Vetrov approached the French because he had once been stationed in Paris and loved the French language. His original contact was a French businessman in Moscow and then a French military attache and his wife. He passed on secrets by exchanging shopping baskets with the wife in a Moscow market.
The Russian never asked for money or for a new life in the West. He was an "uncontrollable man, who oscillated between euphoria and over-excitement", said Mr Nart.He appears to have been motivated by frustration with the Soviet system and, maybe, a personal grudge. He was eventually caught,and executed, after stabbing his mistress and killing a policeman in a Moscow park in February, 1982. The case remains deeply sensitive, and mysterious, in Russia and France. The democratic Russia of Vladimir Putin (ex-KGB) and Dimitry Medvedev brought pressure on a celebrated Russian actor, Sergei Makovetsky, to withdraw from the French film L'Affaire Farewell , which premiered last week at the Toronto film festival. A request to film in Russia was refused.
Former French intelligence officers came forward to try to sidetrack the film's director,Christian Carion (who made the Oscarnominated Joyeux Noel about fraternisation in the trenches in December,1914). The exagents told him that the Farewell case was not what it seemed. The whole affair, they said, had been concocted by the CIA to test the loyalty to the West of the Socialist president Francois Mitterrand after he was elected in May,1981. Even Mitterrand came to believe this version of events, and fired a senior French intelligence chief in 1985. These allegations, officially denied in Washington and Paris, are almost certainly driven by jealousy among competing French spy services. Farewell was "run"- at the mole's own insistence - by a relatively small, French counter-espionage agency, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), which was not supposed to operate abroad.
The former French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, a diplomatic adviser to President Mitterrand at the time, is in no doubt that Farewell existed."It was one of the most important spy cases of the 20th century," he said."At no other time since 1945 was the Soviet system exposed to the light of day so completely."
Mr Vedrine rejects the implication - in the publicity surrounding the film rather than the film itself - that the Farewell case caused the collapse of the Soviet Union. But he, like the senior US official Weiss, argues that the information provided by the KGB mole was one of the catalysts for the demise of the USSR, nine years later. By making it harder for the Soviets to compete with the West, the affair magnified tensions within the Communist hierarchy and assisted the rise, but also undermined the work, of the would-be reformer Mikhail Gorbachev.
The film L'Affaire Farewell , made in Russian,French and English, stars the Bosnian actor Emir Kusturica as the KGB mole and Willem Dafoe as the head of the CIA. To allow the researcher-scriptwriter, Eric Raynaud, cinematic licence with the story, Col Vetrov has been renamed Serguei Grigoriev. The French agents are telescoped into one man, a reluctant businessman-turned-spy called Pierre Froment, played by Guillaume Canet.
The film, which has received glowing advance reviews, is far from being a James Bond car-chase thriller. It is more like a Gallic John Le Carre - part historical essay, part psycho-drama about the relationship between professional Russian spy and amateur French agent. The director, Mr Carion, admits he has guillotined parts of the story. He left out the professional French agent and his wife and he left out Farewell's attempt to stab his mistress as "too confusing". The effect is to downplay Col Vetrov's murky side and make the story one of anguished heroism, on both sides.
Russia's refusal to co-operate in the making of the movie is easily explained, Mr Carion says. In 1983,47 Soviet diplomats and journalists, identified as spies by Farewell, were expelled from Paris. Among them was a young diplomat called Alexander Avdeev.
When the film was being planned, Mr Avdeev was back in Paris as the Russian ambassador. He has since returned to Moscow as Minister of Culture.
How significant was the Farewell affair?In the essay on the CIA website, Weiss, a member of Ronald Reagan's National Security Council in 1981, gives a lengthy account of its importance to the US. Weiss, who was put in charge of the US response to the Farewell leaks, was an intelligence officer for almost half a century. His words need to be treated with caution, but he suggests that Farewell played a pivotal role in the winning of the Cold War.
"Reading the material caused my worst nightmares to come true," he said. The Soviet Union, under the cover of detente, had extracted so many technical secrets from the West, openly and illegally, that in the 1970s "our science was supporting their national defence".
At the same time, the Farewell file revealed that the USSR was much further behind the West in computer technology than the CIA had believed possible. The US used the information to turn the tables, Weiss said,"and conduct economic warfare of our own".
Sabotaged pieces of technology were leaked to Moscow "designed so that they would appear genuine but would later fail";"contrived [unreliable] computer chips found their way into Soviet military equipment, flawed turbines were installed on a gas pipeline [which later exploded] and defective plans disrupted the output of chemical plants and a tractor factory".
The former French foreign minister, Mr Vedrine, believes that the Soviet empire was already close to collapse in the early 1980s.Its economic model was no longer working.
The Afghan war and military expenditure had crippled state finances. The value of oil exports had plummeted.
Farewell, he says, did not cause the end of the USSR, but it did "hasten the system towards its end".
Weiss reaches the same conclusion. Unlike Mr Vedrine, he will never see the cinematic version of events. He died in November,2003, in mysterious circumstances, officially classified as suicide. Weiss, who had split with the Bush administration over Iraq, fell from the windows of his apartment in Washington. The apartment was in the Watergate building.
James Bond and George Smiley can eat their hearts out. Who really won the Cold War for the democratic world? The French,naturellement . This rather startling claim is made in the publicity for a new brooding, brilliant, French spy movie.Although somewhat far-fetched, the boast that French intelligence "changed the world"does have some basis in fact.
The story of L'Affaire Farewell , how a French mole in the KGB leaked information so devastating that it hastened the implosion of the Soviet Union, is comparatively little known in the UK or even in France.
Due credit is given to the French, the once-reviled "surrender monkeys", by, of all sources, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The CIA's official website still carries a compelling essay, written soon after the affair was declassified in 1996, by Gus Weiss,the American official who ran the Washington end of the case. He concludes:"[The] Farewell dossier ... led to the collapse of a crucial [KGB spying] programme at just the time the Soviet military needed it. Along with the US defence build-up and an already floundering Soviet economy, the USSR could no longer compete."
The official version of events shows that the French taupe , or mole, was Colonel Vladimir Vetrov of Directorate T, the industrial spying arm of the KGB. In 1981-82, he gave French intelligence more than 3,000 pages of documents and the names of more than 400 Soviet agents posted abroad. The information, shared by Paris with its Nato allies,was deeply alarming but also hugely encouraging.
Col Vetrov, codenamed "Farewell" by the French, laid bare the successful Soviet strategies for acquiring, legally and illegally,advanced technology from the West. He also exposed the abject failure of the Communist system to match rapid Western advances in electronic micro-technology.
The case directly influenced President Ronald Reagan's decision to launch the "Star Wars" programme in 1983- a high-tech bluff that would drag the USSR into an unaffordable, and calamitous, attempt to keep up with the democratic world.
Raymond Nart, the French intelligence officer who handled the case from Paris,reported that Col Vetrov approached the French because he had once been stationed in Paris and loved the French language. His original contact was a French businessman in Moscow and then a French military attache and his wife. He passed on secrets by exchanging shopping baskets with the wife in a Moscow market.
The Russian never asked for money or for a new life in the West. He was an "uncontrollable man, who oscillated between euphoria and over-excitement", said Mr Nart.He appears to have been motivated by frustration with the Soviet system and, maybe, a personal grudge. He was eventually caught,and executed, after stabbing his mistress and killing a policeman in a Moscow park in February, 1982. The case remains deeply sensitive, and mysterious, in Russia and France. The democratic Russia of Vladimir Putin (ex-KGB) and Dimitry Medvedev brought pressure on a celebrated Russian actor, Sergei Makovetsky, to withdraw from the French film L'Affaire Farewell , which premiered last week at the Toronto film festival. A request to film in Russia was refused.
Former French intelligence officers came forward to try to sidetrack the film's director,Christian Carion (who made the Oscarnominated Joyeux Noel about fraternisation in the trenches in December,1914). The exagents told him that the Farewell case was not what it seemed. The whole affair, they said, had been concocted by the CIA to test the loyalty to the West of the Socialist president Francois Mitterrand after he was elected in May,1981. Even Mitterrand came to believe this version of events, and fired a senior French intelligence chief in 1985. These allegations, officially denied in Washington and Paris, are almost certainly driven by jealousy among competing French spy services. Farewell was "run"- at the mole's own insistence - by a relatively small, French counter-espionage agency, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), which was not supposed to operate abroad.
The former French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, a diplomatic adviser to President Mitterrand at the time, is in no doubt that Farewell existed."It was one of the most important spy cases of the 20th century," he said."At no other time since 1945 was the Soviet system exposed to the light of day so completely."
Mr Vedrine rejects the implication - in the publicity surrounding the film rather than the film itself - that the Farewell case caused the collapse of the Soviet Union. But he, like the senior US official Weiss, argues that the information provided by the KGB mole was one of the catalysts for the demise of the USSR, nine years later. By making it harder for the Soviets to compete with the West, the affair magnified tensions within the Communist hierarchy and assisted the rise, but also undermined the work, of the would-be reformer Mikhail Gorbachev.
The film L'Affaire Farewell , made in Russian,French and English, stars the Bosnian actor Emir Kusturica as the KGB mole and Willem Dafoe as the head of the CIA. To allow the researcher-scriptwriter, Eric Raynaud, cinematic licence with the story, Col Vetrov has been renamed Serguei Grigoriev. The French agents are telescoped into one man, a reluctant businessman-turned-spy called Pierre Froment, played by Guillaume Canet.
The film, which has received glowing advance reviews, is far from being a James Bond car-chase thriller. It is more like a Gallic John Le Carre - part historical essay, part psycho-drama about the relationship between professional Russian spy and amateur French agent. The director, Mr Carion, admits he has guillotined parts of the story. He left out the professional French agent and his wife and he left out Farewell's attempt to stab his mistress as "too confusing". The effect is to downplay Col Vetrov's murky side and make the story one of anguished heroism, on both sides.
Russia's refusal to co-operate in the making of the movie is easily explained, Mr Carion says. In 1983,47 Soviet diplomats and journalists, identified as spies by Farewell, were expelled from Paris. Among them was a young diplomat called Alexander Avdeev.
When the film was being planned, Mr Avdeev was back in Paris as the Russian ambassador. He has since returned to Moscow as Minister of Culture.
How significant was the Farewell affair?In the essay on the CIA website, Weiss, a member of Ronald Reagan's National Security Council in 1981, gives a lengthy account of its importance to the US. Weiss, who was put in charge of the US response to the Farewell leaks, was an intelligence officer for almost half a century. His words need to be treated with caution, but he suggests that Farewell played a pivotal role in the winning of the Cold War.
"Reading the material caused my worst nightmares to come true," he said. The Soviet Union, under the cover of detente, had extracted so many technical secrets from the West, openly and illegally, that in the 1970s "our science was supporting their national defence".
At the same time, the Farewell file revealed that the USSR was much further behind the West in computer technology than the CIA had believed possible. The US used the information to turn the tables, Weiss said,"and conduct economic warfare of our own".
Sabotaged pieces of technology were leaked to Moscow "designed so that they would appear genuine but would later fail";"contrived [unreliable] computer chips found their way into Soviet military equipment, flawed turbines were installed on a gas pipeline [which later exploded] and defective plans disrupted the output of chemical plants and a tractor factory".
The former French foreign minister, Mr Vedrine, believes that the Soviet empire was already close to collapse in the early 1980s.Its economic model was no longer working.
The Afghan war and military expenditure had crippled state finances. The value of oil exports had plummeted.
Farewell, he says, did not cause the end of the USSR, but it did "hasten the system towards its end".
Weiss reaches the same conclusion. Unlike Mr Vedrine, he will never see the cinematic version of events. He died in November,2003, in mysterious circumstances, officially classified as suicide. Weiss, who had split with the Bush administration over Iraq, fell from the windows of his apartment in Washington. The apartment was in the Watergate building.
Fresh stars try on a new title for "VH1 Divas"
A diva doesn't bow out gracefully, or quietly, which is why Paula Abdul, weeks after detaching herself from American Idol , found herself on a stage in Brooklyn, holding a series of microphones in the general area of her face,lip-synching a four-song medley of her 20-year-old hits.
It took gumption to do that, knowing full well that everyone who was to take the stage in the next two hours would be a vocal titan.(Well, almost everyone.)But above all, a diva makes a scene.
And while there was tremendous talent at this year's incarnation of VH1 Divas ,last Thursday night at the Howard Gilman Opera House of the Brooklyn Academy of Music and hosted by a loopy, manic Abdul, there wasn't much to see.
In prerecorded segments of the show,which was broadcast live on the VH1 network, each of the night's stars Adele, Kelly Clarkson, Miley Cyrus,Jennifer Hudson, Leona Lewis and Jordin Sparks - politely distanced herself from the diva stigma.(Well, almost everyone.)
But really, the word was unattainable,unless it now means "female singers who weren't otherwise occupied or stratospherically famous". Previous iterations of this concert, a franchise that had been abandoned in 2004, featured Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey,Celine Dion and Tina Turner, among others.
But Thursday night's diminished star power turned out to be an asset - there was no anticipation of petulance or disruption, just electric singing. Lewis delivered a stirring True Colors in a duet with Cyndi Lauper, her swoops a balance to Lauper's scrapes. Clarkson's Already Gone was winningly bitter. Sparks was joined by the country star Martina McBride for A Broken Wing , on which McBride was devastating.(An idea for next year:Country Divas , with McBride,Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert,Taylor Swift and several contrition interludes by Kanye West.)
Jennifer Hudson, one of four products of the Simon Cowell machine on the bill - along with Clarkson and Sparks, who both won American Idol , and Lewis, win-ner of the UK's X Factor - impressed the most.
Spotlight , from Hudson's 2008 selftitled debut album, was epic in a way the blithe recorded version never approached. And her duet with Stevie Wonder on All in Love is Fair was hefty - he in the full velvet of his voice, and she shamelessly jumping to the big notes.
Cyrus, the night's biggest draw, based on audience screams, was the exception to all rules here. The least gifted singer - on her duet with Sheryl Crow, she wrestled with the melody of If it Makes You Happy , only sometimes winning and the only one to see the "diva" tag as an opportunity, not a burden."I feel like I'm going to start bossing people around today," she said, joking during her taped intro.
But she had nothing on Abdul, who's been bossing people around for years,or at least guiding them irrationally. This month it was announced that Abdul's seat on American Idol would be filled by the affable, anodyne talk show host Ellen DeGeneres. DeGeneres will probably also take Abdul's place as the show's nurturer.(DeGeneres was the host of VH1 Divas in 2002; she won this trade.)
How's Abdul taking the news? Noisily.She fired off a few awkward Idol barbs on Thursday, but mid-show she displayed a brief flash of genius. After a commercial break, to the sounds of Pink's Get This Party Started , she appeared in one of the aisles dressed as DeGeneres - black suit and trainers, blonde wig - and mocking the signature dance moves DeGeneres does on each episode of her talk show.
If Abdul possesses a sort of intelligence,it is this - a gift for the kinesthetic. The mocking was brutal because it was so accurate, just a tweak of the awkward,tight shuffle invented by DeGeneres as a relatable anti-dance.
For Abdul, a better dancer and choreographer than singer orrealitycompetition judge, it must have been tough to move so stiffly.
After bopping her way to the stage,she tossed herself into a chair and mused,"Can't a girl try out a new job?" So long as it comes with the old attitude, no problem.AP
ON THEIR BEST BEHAVIOUR: Left to right, Miley Cyrus, Kelly Clarkson, Jordin Sparks, Paula Abdul, Jennifer Hudson, Adele and Leona Lewis close the "VH1 Divas" show in New York.
It took gumption to do that, knowing full well that everyone who was to take the stage in the next two hours would be a vocal titan.(Well, almost everyone.)But above all, a diva makes a scene.
And while there was tremendous talent at this year's incarnation of VH1 Divas ,last Thursday night at the Howard Gilman Opera House of the Brooklyn Academy of Music and hosted by a loopy, manic Abdul, there wasn't much to see.
In prerecorded segments of the show,which was broadcast live on the VH1 network, each of the night's stars Adele, Kelly Clarkson, Miley Cyrus,Jennifer Hudson, Leona Lewis and Jordin Sparks - politely distanced herself from the diva stigma.(Well, almost everyone.)
But really, the word was unattainable,unless it now means "female singers who weren't otherwise occupied or stratospherically famous". Previous iterations of this concert, a franchise that had been abandoned in 2004, featured Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey,Celine Dion and Tina Turner, among others.
But Thursday night's diminished star power turned out to be an asset - there was no anticipation of petulance or disruption, just electric singing. Lewis delivered a stirring True Colors in a duet with Cyndi Lauper, her swoops a balance to Lauper's scrapes. Clarkson's Already Gone was winningly bitter. Sparks was joined by the country star Martina McBride for A Broken Wing , on which McBride was devastating.(An idea for next year:Country Divas , with McBride,Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert,Taylor Swift and several contrition interludes by Kanye West.)
Jennifer Hudson, one of four products of the Simon Cowell machine on the bill - along with Clarkson and Sparks, who both won American Idol , and Lewis, win-ner of the UK's X Factor - impressed the most.
Spotlight , from Hudson's 2008 selftitled debut album, was epic in a way the blithe recorded version never approached. And her duet with Stevie Wonder on All in Love is Fair was hefty - he in the full velvet of his voice, and she shamelessly jumping to the big notes.
Cyrus, the night's biggest draw, based on audience screams, was the exception to all rules here. The least gifted singer - on her duet with Sheryl Crow, she wrestled with the melody of If it Makes You Happy , only sometimes winning and the only one to see the "diva" tag as an opportunity, not a burden."I feel like I'm going to start bossing people around today," she said, joking during her taped intro.
But she had nothing on Abdul, who's been bossing people around for years,or at least guiding them irrationally. This month it was announced that Abdul's seat on American Idol would be filled by the affable, anodyne talk show host Ellen DeGeneres. DeGeneres will probably also take Abdul's place as the show's nurturer.(DeGeneres was the host of VH1 Divas in 2002; she won this trade.)
How's Abdul taking the news? Noisily.She fired off a few awkward Idol barbs on Thursday, but mid-show she displayed a brief flash of genius. After a commercial break, to the sounds of Pink's Get This Party Started , she appeared in one of the aisles dressed as DeGeneres - black suit and trainers, blonde wig - and mocking the signature dance moves DeGeneres does on each episode of her talk show.
If Abdul possesses a sort of intelligence,it is this - a gift for the kinesthetic. The mocking was brutal because it was so accurate, just a tweak of the awkward,tight shuffle invented by DeGeneres as a relatable anti-dance.
For Abdul, a better dancer and choreographer than singer orrealitycompetition judge, it must have been tough to move so stiffly.
After bopping her way to the stage,she tossed herself into a chair and mused,"Can't a girl try out a new job?" So long as it comes with the old attitude, no problem.AP
ON THEIR BEST BEHAVIOUR: Left to right, Miley Cyrus, Kelly Clarkson, Jordin Sparks, Paula Abdul, Jennifer Hudson, Adele and Leona Lewis close the "VH1 Divas" show in New York.
YOU ARE WHAT YOU WATCH
Not unlike well-meaning mums and dads in Thailand, Vietnamese parents in the past often have their children strange or even ugly names to ward off bad luck. That's rarely the case now.
In Vietnam, though, one of the big trends to name a child after someone famous, and these aren't just nicknames.
Korean actors - even if they know how popular their TV shows and movies are in Vietnam - might never have imagined that their fans ther are recycling their names or those of characters they've played.
It's become the custom in the mountain villages of Quang Nam province's Tay Giang district.
Po Loong Huan was among the first big fans of Korean soaps when they first appeared on Vietnamese television more than 10 years ago. He loved "First Love" in particular, featuring brother San U (played by Sung Chan Woo) and San Oc (Sung Chan Hyuk) and teacher Lee.
So when Huan's first daughter was born, e surprised the local administrative officials by registering her name as Po Loong San U.
His second son was named Po Loong San Oc.
Huan's choice was both an expression of his love for the TV characters and a desire to give his kids unique names.
The custom caught on. Pregnant Zo Ram Thi Hong was captivated by the 2006 Korean film "Cinderella", particularly the female lead Xo Ra, and decided that was a lovely name for her daughter.
Her neighbour Agieng Hiep chose the name Su In from the same movie for his first daughter.
These days you'll find many local couples plucking names from the latest hit Korean shows and films.
The commune of A Tieng in Tay Giang has lots of families following the practice. Villages like Aching, Zo Ruot and A Hu have many "little Korean actors and actresses".
What about Bling Rain? "I find the name beautiful," says Little Bling's father, "and plenty of people are doing the same thing."
Beauty is in the ear of the beholder, and district authorities are encouraging people to stick to traditional names - but it's proving to be an uphill battle.
"Vietnamese law doesn't ban any children's names, so we can only encourage traditional names as a matter respect and to preserve our national character," says dicstrict chief Bhriu Liec.
Some parents did accede to the official prodding, but as long as television remains the primary form of entertainment in the mountains and it's full of Korean imports, that influence is unlikely to wane.
In Vietnam, though, one of the big trends to name a child after someone famous, and these aren't just nicknames.
Korean actors - even if they know how popular their TV shows and movies are in Vietnam - might never have imagined that their fans ther are recycling their names or those of characters they've played.
It's become the custom in the mountain villages of Quang Nam province's Tay Giang district.
Po Loong Huan was among the first big fans of Korean soaps when they first appeared on Vietnamese television more than 10 years ago. He loved "First Love" in particular, featuring brother San U (played by Sung Chan Woo) and San Oc (Sung Chan Hyuk) and teacher Lee.
So when Huan's first daughter was born, e surprised the local administrative officials by registering her name as Po Loong San U.
His second son was named Po Loong San Oc.
Huan's choice was both an expression of his love for the TV characters and a desire to give his kids unique names.
The custom caught on. Pregnant Zo Ram Thi Hong was captivated by the 2006 Korean film "Cinderella", particularly the female lead Xo Ra, and decided that was a lovely name for her daughter.
Her neighbour Agieng Hiep chose the name Su In from the same movie for his first daughter.
These days you'll find many local couples plucking names from the latest hit Korean shows and films.
The commune of A Tieng in Tay Giang has lots of families following the practice. Villages like Aching, Zo Ruot and A Hu have many "little Korean actors and actresses".
What about Bling Rain? "I find the name beautiful," says Little Bling's father, "and plenty of people are doing the same thing."
Beauty is in the ear of the beholder, and district authorities are encouraging people to stick to traditional names - but it's proving to be an uphill battle.
"Vietnamese law doesn't ban any children's names, so we can only encourage traditional names as a matter respect and to preserve our national character," says dicstrict chief Bhriu Liec.
Some parents did accede to the official prodding, but as long as television remains the primary form of entertainment in the mountains and it's full of Korean imports, that influence is unlikely to wane.
THAI'S STARRING ROLE IN HOLLYWOOD DRAMA
An international thriller with a touch of glamour, intrigue and a money trail
Two years after Americans Gerald and Patricia Green had taken over the running of the Bangkok International Film Festival (BKKIFF), Tourism Authority of Thailand governor Juthamas Siriwan had no doubts the Hollywood couple had transformed the backwater event into a glittering success.
Mrs Juthamas confidently predicted before the start of the 2005 festival that it would generate a record five billion baht in film distribution revenue and entice more foreign movie crews to shoot in Thailand.
But four years on, the Greens are facing jail terms of up to 10 years after a US court convicted them last Monday of paying $1.8 million in bribes to Mrs Juthamas to secure the festival and other lucrative TAT projects.
While the former tourism chief has strongly denied the charges in the past, media and friends were unable to contact her last week. The National Anti-Corruption Commission is now deciding whether there are grounds to charge Mrs Juthamas based on information from the trial in Los Angeles.
Gerald Green,77, and his wife Patricia,52, were found guilty of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), eight violations of the FCPA and seven acts of money laundering. In addition, Patricia Green was found guilty of two counts of falsely subscribing a US tax return.
While the Greens were on trial in a US jurisdiction, Mrs Juthamas' alleged role in the corruption was widely mentioned in press reports and official court documents tendered by the US government.
The US government's trial memorandum goes into details about the alleged intricate relationship between the Greens and Mrs Juthamas, how the payments were made, and how the former governor acted as an "adviser" to the TAT after she stood down once the claims became public.
It says the Greens arranged payments totalling $1.8 million from a group of Beverly Hills businesses they owned for the benefit of Mrs Juthamas over a four-year period which resulted in $14 million in revenue for the Greens' businesses.
"The corrupt payments took place by transfers into the overseas business accounts of Juthamas' daughter, Jittisopa Siriwan, aka Jib, Juthamas' friend,Kitti Chambundabongse, and occasionally by cash delivery to Juthamas in person. Defendants owed Juthamas these corrupt payments as a variable percentage on TAT-related contracts and subcontracts including, but not limited to, the Bangkok International Film Festival, the Thai Privilege Card,calendars, a book, a website, public relations consulting, a video and a logo."
Gerald Green was the one who knew Mrs Juthamas and negotiated with her on budgets and details of TAT contracts, including contracts where the Greens' businesses "took the role of subcontractor" to other companies that formally held the contract with TAT.
The document alleged the Greens "inflated the budgets of these budgets to allow for the payments to Juthamas,the official approving and promoting these same contracts".
Patricia Green was in charge of dayto-day business operations and implemented her husband's scheme to make the corrupt payments, according to the document.
"In planning and making the bribe payments for the benefit of Juthamas,defendants referred to them in discussions as 'commission' payments.When defendant Gerald Green instructed that it was time to make a 'commission' payment, defendant Patricia Green and another employee,Susan Shore, would look to see which of the businesses had the money available for any given payment. Defendant Patricia Green made all the 40 or more wire transfers and cashiers check transactions at the bank herself, and she planned and tracked these payments.These payments for Juthamas followed promptly upon the receipt into the Green businesses of TAT or TATrelated revenues."
The memorandum alleges that planning and budgeting for the payments to Mrs Juthamas was documented extensively in handwritten notes, memoranda, budget drafts and internal documents prepared by the Greens, Shore and other employees.
"The actual payments for Juthamas themselves were reflected in the Greens businesses' bank records and other accounting records, as well as in handwritten notes and schedules tracking amounts paid and still owing," the document says.
"Both defendants, as well as their co-conspirators Juthamas and Jittisopa, engaged in various patterns of deception to hide the bribery from others, including the Thai government and later the United States government."
The Greens hid the amount of business Mrs Juthamas was "corruptly directing" to them and evaded Thai government fiscal controls meant to check Mrs Juthamas' authority by splitting large contracts for the BKKIFF between their various businesses.
Despite having the misleading appearance of being distinct businesses,they shared the same dummy addresses, telephone numbers and nominee "directors" and "presidents" for use in communication with other TAT officials.
"In reality, all companies operated out of the same business offices with the same personnel," the document said.
To hide the extent of the corrupt business Mrs Juthamas was directing to the Greens, other contractors were also recruited who arranged referral fees to the Greens, part of which was paid to the former governor. A third party company was also used as a "billing conduit" for funds intended for the Greens' businesses.
The Greens transferred the bribes to overseas nominee bank accounts controlled by Mrs Juthamas in the United Kingdom, the Isle of Jersey and Singapore. Money from these accounts then flowed to accounts in Switzerland held in Ms Jittisopa's
name, but controlled by Mrs Juthamas.
"Neither Jittisopa nor Kitti had done any work as employees or contractors of (the) defendants' businesses on the TAT contracts that would explain why accounts in their names had received $1.8 million in the defendants' funds, which they concealed on their income taxes."
The memorandum says that after Mrs Juthamas stood down as TAT governor, the Greens stopped getting new TAT contracts and had difficulty collecting amounts they claimed they were owed for the 2007 BKKIFF.
It alleges that Mrs Juthamas acted as an "adviser" to the TAT and assisted in a plan to have TAT officials pay off the Greens' claim through a phoney third party transaction involving a Thai company.
After last Monday's ruling, attorneys for the Greens said they were disappointed by the verdict and were preparing to appeal. The couple are free on bond and sentencing is set for Dec 17.
"To me it's a case of circumstantial evidence," said Marilyn Bednarski,who represented Patricia Green. She added that "the people of Thailand were not victimised in any way" because the Greens provided "top notch services" for the festival.
But US assistant attorney Bruce H Searby, who prosecuted the case in Los Angeles, said:"There is no more concrete type of harm to the Thai people than taking money out of their treasury and sending it on a round trip through LA back to a government official."
While,Mrs Juthamas has maintained her silence on the allegations, in 2007, after she resigned as governor and as a member of the Puea Pandin Party, she threatened to sue the US Justice Department if it implicated her in the bribery scandal.
"All the procedures involving the case were done according to the regulations and with fairness and transparency among all agencies concerned," she said at the time.
"I have already contacted the company in Los Angeles and found that some employees were fired for unknown reasons. I believe those cases were caused by internal conflicts inside the company," she said, insisting it was a US matter that had no direct link to Thailand.
In the original FBI affidavit against the Greens, neither Mrs Juthamas'name nor the recipient of the alleged bribes were identified, but the term "the Governor" and "the Governor's daughter" were used.
Jerome Mooney, who represented Gerald Green, said he thought the case was pursued in part as a warning by the US government to the entertainment industry about how it works with foreign countries.
"We understand the government taking a shot across the bow of Hollywood," Mr Mooney said."We just wish the shell hadn't landed on our clients' boat."
Extra spending to keep local officials happy isn't that unusual.
A 2007 Times analysis of the budget of the film Sahara , for instance, revealed that $237,386 was spent on "courtesy payments","gratuities" and "local bribes".
These payments for Juthamas followed promptly upon the receipt into the green businesses of TAT or TATrelated revenues
FULL HOUSE: The Bangkok International Film Festival was a success.
Two years after Americans Gerald and Patricia Green had taken over the running of the Bangkok International Film Festival (BKKIFF), Tourism Authority of Thailand governor Juthamas Siriwan had no doubts the Hollywood couple had transformed the backwater event into a glittering success.
Mrs Juthamas confidently predicted before the start of the 2005 festival that it would generate a record five billion baht in film distribution revenue and entice more foreign movie crews to shoot in Thailand.
But four years on, the Greens are facing jail terms of up to 10 years after a US court convicted them last Monday of paying $1.8 million in bribes to Mrs Juthamas to secure the festival and other lucrative TAT projects.
While the former tourism chief has strongly denied the charges in the past, media and friends were unable to contact her last week. The National Anti-Corruption Commission is now deciding whether there are grounds to charge Mrs Juthamas based on information from the trial in Los Angeles.
Gerald Green,77, and his wife Patricia,52, were found guilty of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), eight violations of the FCPA and seven acts of money laundering. In addition, Patricia Green was found guilty of two counts of falsely subscribing a US tax return.
While the Greens were on trial in a US jurisdiction, Mrs Juthamas' alleged role in the corruption was widely mentioned in press reports and official court documents tendered by the US government.
The US government's trial memorandum goes into details about the alleged intricate relationship between the Greens and Mrs Juthamas, how the payments were made, and how the former governor acted as an "adviser" to the TAT after she stood down once the claims became public.
It says the Greens arranged payments totalling $1.8 million from a group of Beverly Hills businesses they owned for the benefit of Mrs Juthamas over a four-year period which resulted in $14 million in revenue for the Greens' businesses.
"The corrupt payments took place by transfers into the overseas business accounts of Juthamas' daughter, Jittisopa Siriwan, aka Jib, Juthamas' friend,Kitti Chambundabongse, and occasionally by cash delivery to Juthamas in person. Defendants owed Juthamas these corrupt payments as a variable percentage on TAT-related contracts and subcontracts including, but not limited to, the Bangkok International Film Festival, the Thai Privilege Card,calendars, a book, a website, public relations consulting, a video and a logo."
Gerald Green was the one who knew Mrs Juthamas and negotiated with her on budgets and details of TAT contracts, including contracts where the Greens' businesses "took the role of subcontractor" to other companies that formally held the contract with TAT.
The document alleged the Greens "inflated the budgets of these budgets to allow for the payments to Juthamas,the official approving and promoting these same contracts".
Patricia Green was in charge of dayto-day business operations and implemented her husband's scheme to make the corrupt payments, according to the document.
"In planning and making the bribe payments for the benefit of Juthamas,defendants referred to them in discussions as 'commission' payments.When defendant Gerald Green instructed that it was time to make a 'commission' payment, defendant Patricia Green and another employee,Susan Shore, would look to see which of the businesses had the money available for any given payment. Defendant Patricia Green made all the 40 or more wire transfers and cashiers check transactions at the bank herself, and she planned and tracked these payments.These payments for Juthamas followed promptly upon the receipt into the Green businesses of TAT or TATrelated revenues."
The memorandum alleges that planning and budgeting for the payments to Mrs Juthamas was documented extensively in handwritten notes, memoranda, budget drafts and internal documents prepared by the Greens, Shore and other employees.
"The actual payments for Juthamas themselves were reflected in the Greens businesses' bank records and other accounting records, as well as in handwritten notes and schedules tracking amounts paid and still owing," the document says.
"Both defendants, as well as their co-conspirators Juthamas and Jittisopa, engaged in various patterns of deception to hide the bribery from others, including the Thai government and later the United States government."
The Greens hid the amount of business Mrs Juthamas was "corruptly directing" to them and evaded Thai government fiscal controls meant to check Mrs Juthamas' authority by splitting large contracts for the BKKIFF between their various businesses.
Despite having the misleading appearance of being distinct businesses,they shared the same dummy addresses, telephone numbers and nominee "directors" and "presidents" for use in communication with other TAT officials.
"In reality, all companies operated out of the same business offices with the same personnel," the document said.
To hide the extent of the corrupt business Mrs Juthamas was directing to the Greens, other contractors were also recruited who arranged referral fees to the Greens, part of which was paid to the former governor. A third party company was also used as a "billing conduit" for funds intended for the Greens' businesses.
The Greens transferred the bribes to overseas nominee bank accounts controlled by Mrs Juthamas in the United Kingdom, the Isle of Jersey and Singapore. Money from these accounts then flowed to accounts in Switzerland held in Ms Jittisopa's
name, but controlled by Mrs Juthamas.
"Neither Jittisopa nor Kitti had done any work as employees or contractors of (the) defendants' businesses on the TAT contracts that would explain why accounts in their names had received $1.8 million in the defendants' funds, which they concealed on their income taxes."
The memorandum says that after Mrs Juthamas stood down as TAT governor, the Greens stopped getting new TAT contracts and had difficulty collecting amounts they claimed they were owed for the 2007 BKKIFF.
It alleges that Mrs Juthamas acted as an "adviser" to the TAT and assisted in a plan to have TAT officials pay off the Greens' claim through a phoney third party transaction involving a Thai company.
After last Monday's ruling, attorneys for the Greens said they were disappointed by the verdict and were preparing to appeal. The couple are free on bond and sentencing is set for Dec 17.
"To me it's a case of circumstantial evidence," said Marilyn Bednarski,who represented Patricia Green. She added that "the people of Thailand were not victimised in any way" because the Greens provided "top notch services" for the festival.
But US assistant attorney Bruce H Searby, who prosecuted the case in Los Angeles, said:"There is no more concrete type of harm to the Thai people than taking money out of their treasury and sending it on a round trip through LA back to a government official."
While,Mrs Juthamas has maintained her silence on the allegations, in 2007, after she resigned as governor and as a member of the Puea Pandin Party, she threatened to sue the US Justice Department if it implicated her in the bribery scandal.
"All the procedures involving the case were done according to the regulations and with fairness and transparency among all agencies concerned," she said at the time.
"I have already contacted the company in Los Angeles and found that some employees were fired for unknown reasons. I believe those cases were caused by internal conflicts inside the company," she said, insisting it was a US matter that had no direct link to Thailand.
In the original FBI affidavit against the Greens, neither Mrs Juthamas'name nor the recipient of the alleged bribes were identified, but the term "the Governor" and "the Governor's daughter" were used.
Jerome Mooney, who represented Gerald Green, said he thought the case was pursued in part as a warning by the US government to the entertainment industry about how it works with foreign countries.
"We understand the government taking a shot across the bow of Hollywood," Mr Mooney said."We just wish the shell hadn't landed on our clients' boat."
Extra spending to keep local officials happy isn't that unusual.
A 2007 Times analysis of the budget of the film Sahara , for instance, revealed that $237,386 was spent on "courtesy payments","gratuities" and "local bribes".
These payments for Juthamas followed promptly upon the receipt into the green businesses of TAT or TATrelated revenues
FULL HOUSE: The Bangkok International Film Festival was a success.
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