“A tempestuous tale - Baltimore Sun” plus 3 more |
- A tempestuous tale - Baltimore Sun
- Oscar nominee Ajami' and other recent Israeli films are less political - Sacramento Bee
- The Battle for Abe Lincoln's Soul - Daily Beast
- 'Basterds' carries on proud Oscar history for WWII - MetroMix
| A tempestuous tale - Baltimore Sun Posted: 05 Mar 2010 05:23 AM PST The 19th-century British actress Fanny Kemble was among the most influential women in America and simultaneously one of the least powerful. She argued politics over dinner with a U.S. president and inspired such seminal literary works as Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" and Henry James' " Washington Square." She wrote plays, poetry and memoirs, and became an abolitionist. And yet, she was kept away from her two daughters for most of their childhoods. "She had a phenomenal life filled with contradictions," says Tom Ziegler, whose two-character play "Mrs. Kemble's Tempest" is running at the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival. "She also was arguably the first entertainment superstar of all time," the playwright said. "She was the first person whose life the newspapers gossiped about. Women imitated her hairdo and her clothing. Her portrait was painted on dishes, towels and men's ties." After Kemble married Pierce Butler, a wealthy Philadelphian and slaveholder, she left the stage for about 15 years. But after her divorce in 1849 she needed to support herself, so she gave dramatic readings of Shakespeare's plays in which she performed all the roles. Ziegler's piece is set during a reading of "The Tempest," and the playwright juxtaposes the actress' tumultuous ups and downs with the rapid reversals of fortune in Shakespeare's island fantasy. From time to time, Kemble departs from the Bard's text to tell stories about her life. Ziegler became fascinated with Kemble about a decade ago after reading a book given to him by actress Estelle Parsons. "In one line, Fanny comments that the reason she was able to survive the tempest of her life was because of William Shakespeare," Ziegler says. "That set off an alarm in my head. I began reading biographies about her and also the journals she kept. I could see right away that there were dozens of parallels between her life and Shakespeare's 'Tempest.' " Michael Carleton, the Shakespeare Festival's artistic director, was drawn to the play because it is a contemporary work inspired by the Bard. "When I came here last year, I said that I didn't just want to do Shakespeare. I wanted to do what Shakespeare did," Carleton says. "He took classical plots and themes and put his own spin on them. Tom's play fits our mission just perfectly." The show is directed by Lee Mikeska Gardner and features Washington actress Kimberly Schraf in the title role. The challenges facing Schraf are staggering. Though Ziegler's play has two characters, only one - Fanny Kemble - speaks. The second, Kemble's accompanist, expresses his opinions through music. Schraf must credibly portray nearly a dozen roles from "The Tempest" as well as other Shakespearean productions in which Kemble performed. (In one memorable performance of "Othello," the actress, who was playing Desdemona, rebelled against the script and refused to die.) But, because Kemble makes frequent asides to her audience in which she mimics people from her past, Schraf also must depict such real-life figures as her character's father and husband. She sighs when asked how many characters she portrays in the 90-minute show. "That is not a number that I want to find out," she says. "It would be too daunting." For her, the secret to making the rapid transitions believable is nailing down each character's voice. "I only have a line or two before I'm on to someone else," she says. "There really isn't time to fully inhabit the role. I have to preserve the back and forth of dialogue, so the play can't stop while I reorient myself to another character." In addition, Schraf is only the second actress ever to play Ziegler's Fanny on stage; the part was originated by and is associated with a British actress named Jane Ridley. "It's moving for me to think of taking up the baton from Jane," Schraf says. "She had the play for such a long time. I hope to care for it as lovingly as she did."
If you go"Mrs. Kemble's Tempest" runs through March 28 at the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival, 3900 Roland Ave. Show times are 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays and 5 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $10-$25. Call 410-366-8596 or go to www.baltimoreshakespeare.org.Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Oscar nominee Ajami' and other recent Israeli films are less political - Sacramento Bee Posted: 05 Mar 2010 06:41 AM PST LOS ANGELES - In a popular Israeli joke, several men gather regularly to discuss the state of the world, a conversation that takes a turn toward the bleak. One day, one of the men surprises the others by announcing he's become an optimist. The others look at his furrowed brow and ask, "If you're an optimist, why do you still look so concerned?" The man replies: "You think it's easy being an optimist?" In a country laced with worry, it's perhaps no surprise that even success is cause for consternation. With Scandar Copti's and Yaron Shani's "Ajami," Israel has landed its third consecutive foreign-language Oscar nomination. That's a feat few other countries - including global cinema powerhouses like France and Spain - have pulled off. (The last time came when Spain did it in the late 1990s.) But even as the filmmakers behind "Ajami" take their place at the Kodak Theatre this weekend, there's a little bit of celebration back home - and plenty of debate about what it all means. A startlingly dramatic and touchingly human work from one Palestinian and one Israeli filmmaker, "Ajami" tells the story of warring Arab families in the working-class Israel port town of Jaffa, using multiple points of view and an intoxicating mix of genres. "Ajami" is a crime thriller, cultural biography and family drama all rolled into one, a film that manages to expose subtle layers of character while still weaving a tight narrative. (In this way, it's much like another foreign-language Oscar nominee, Jacques Audiard's "A Prophet"). But more than the many things the movie is, perhaps more significant is what it isn't: a topical film. Copti and Shani are preoccupied with human dynamics far more than political or social ones; if issues like military policy and economic inequality are present at all, it's simply as part of the cinematic furniture. That would be unremarkable in many places. But in the political-minded precincts of the Middle East, it reflects a substantial change. Over the last several years, Israeli movies, which for so long have been set in political hotbeds or wars (there are a lot to choose from), have tied in with far less frequency to the morning papers and evening news. Just two years ago, the Oscar nominee was "Beaufort," a story of Israeli soldiers at an outpost before the start of the country's conflict with Palestine in Gaza 2000. And even movies that told human stories had a political cast - Eytan Fox's 2006 romantic drama "The Bubble," for instance, told a love story between a Palestinian and an Israeli and ended with a shocking terrorist explosion. Recently, though, the biggest Israeli-produced hits (about a dozen films are made locally each year) are films you'd scarcely guess would come from the place. The two biggest of the last year are "A Matter of Size," a story about an overweight man who takes up sumo wrestling to deal with his insecurity, and "Lost Islands," a coming-of-age love triangle involving twins and set in the 1980s. Not exactly a gritty drama in the West Bank. "If you see all the movies we've produced in the last two years, most of them aren't dealing with the situation with the Arabs," says Mosh Danon, the head of the country's producer guild and a producer on "Ajami." "They're comedies and human dramas." But in a country where filmmaking and politics (like everything else) have been so inextricable - and where box office has so long been dominated by Hollywood hits - not everyone is ready to embrace the shift. "I really worry when people describe a movie and they say it's like any love story, just set in Tel Aviv," says Eran Riklis, the director of politically inflected international hits such as "The Lemon Tree" and "The Syrian Bride" and arguably the most acclaimed filmmaker working in Israel today. "There is a dangerous tendency in Israel to say there's so much trouble, don't worry, just worry about your family and your house and your jeep. And I do think in a country like Israel you have to be a socially conscious filmmaker." Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| The Battle for Abe Lincoln's Soul - Daily Beast Posted: 05 Mar 2010 06:27 AM PST
On Saturday night, an overflow crowd of more than 250 will gather in Springfield, Illinois, at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum to hear from the author of the season's hottest read on our nation's 16th president. Little do they know, but they will be arriving on the frontlines of a skirmish promising to divide the ranks of Lincoln faithful. The reader will be Seth Grahame-Smith, and his book is called Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Its publication has the founding director of the museum, Richard Norton Smith, appearing a little miffed. Smith said he found Vampire Hunter's main thrust, that Honest Abe was in fact a hunter of vampires, to be "the most inane idea imaginable." Reached by email this week, Smith said he found Vampire Hunter's main thrust, that Honest Abe was in fact a hunter of vampires, to be "the most inane idea imaginable." He called it, "a true bastardization of the Lincoln story." Elsewhere, Vampire Hunter is already getting some heady reviews. There's a movie in the works, produced by Tim Burton no less. Time magazine is praising the author's narrative gifts ("He's a lively, fluent writer with a sharp sense of tone and pace," critic Lev Grossman writes.) One of the most popular Lincoln historians, Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose Team of Rivals added a new phrase to Washington's lexicon, is said to be a fan. "I spoke to Doris," author Seth Grahame-Smith said this week an hour after the two had appeared on an NPR radio show together. "She loved the book. She thought it was smart. She thought it was fun." The vampire book is hardly the first volume to split Lincoln scholars. The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln was released in 2004 by a sex researcher detailing Honest Abe's supposed bisexuality. Joshua Wolf Shenk's Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness came as part of a raft of work seeking to open a channel into Lincoln's mystery via modern psychiatry.
The opposition from the likes of Richard Norton Smith surprises Grahame-Smith, a 34-year-old freelancer and television writer. "What tickles me about that is that he takes it so seriously. There seems to be this rage," he said. Smith declined to discuss the book further, but he is not alone in taking the throwback Gothic tale seriously. His former colleagues in Springfield are welcoming the book, hoping to make a buck but also taking this mashup of Lincoln's biography and Twilight mania to display the president's real-life interest in the macabre. "He had a real darkness," Grahame-Smith said of Lincoln. "He struggled with that, but he also embraced it to a degree. It makes him the ideal hero." Indeed, the introduction of vampires to Lincoln's story actually jibes with mainstream scholarship. For one thing, the bloodiness and grotesquery of Grahame-Smith's telling follows on the heels of Drew Faust's The Republic of Suffering, which also took the ghastliness of Lincoln's time and war as its theme. Similarly, portraying slaveholders as vampires is part of a long tradition. Leading abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison himself once proclaimed, "I despair of the republic while slavery exists therein… If we had any regard for our safety and happiness, we should strive to crush the vampire which is feeding upon our lifeblood." Lincoln groupies could be forgiven for wanting a break from the limelight, especially after last year's bicentennial orgy (Abe was born in 1809). But the folks in Springfield refuse to sit this one out. For $19.99, they will sell you an Abe Lincoln Vampire Hunter T-shirt featuring Lincoln's signature, his trademark stovepipe hat, and a bat.
Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| 'Basterds' carries on proud Oscar history for WWII - MetroMix Posted: 05 Mar 2010 06:49 AM PST LOS ANGELES (AP) — Quentin Tarantino rewrote the ending of World War II with "Inglourious Basterds," his "Dirty Dozen"-style commando adventure that is nominated for best picture at Sunday's Academy Awards. Filmmakers have been writing the war itself into Oscar history almost since combat broke out. No other subject has resulted in more key Oscar contenders, with nearly three dozen World War II-themed films nominated for best picture, starting with Charles Chaplin's 1940 Nazi satire "The Great Dictator." Seven films with the war as a backdrop have won the top prize at the Oscars — roughly one in 10 of the best-picture winners since 1940. The winners are bookended by two wartime romantic adventures, 1943's "Casablanca" and 1996's "The English Patient." Also winning best picture were 1946's homecoming drama "The Best Years of Our Lives"; 1953's Pearl Harbor saga "From Here to Eternity"; 1957's prisoner-of-war tale "The Bridge on the River Kwai"; 1970's film biography "Patton"; and 1993's Holocaust epic "Schindler's List." Sunday's ceremony marks the first time since the heart of the war that 10 films, rather than the usual five, are competing for best picture. That last time came with the triumph of "Casablanca," when two other World War II tales — "In Which We Serve" and "Watch on the Rhine" — also were among the 10 nominees. Other best-picture contenders over the decades have included Holocaust dramas (1959's "The Diary of Anne Frank," 1998's "Life Is Beautiful" and 2002's "The Pianist"); battle epics (1942's "Wake Island," 1962's "The Longest Day" and 1997's "Saving Private Ryan"); naval and aerial stories (1949's "Twelve O'Clock High," 1954's "The Caine Mutiny" and 1955's "Mister Roberts"); crime and justice narratives (1961's "Judgment at Nuremberg," 1984's "A Soldier's Story" and 2008's "The Reader"); and home-front chronicles (1942's "Mrs. Miniver" and 1987's "Hope and Glory"). Before "Inglourious Basterds," the most recent best-picture contender set during the war was 2006's "Letters From Iwo Jima." While set years after the war, "The Reader" earned Kate Winslet the best-actress Oscar a year ago for her role as a former concentration camp guard on trial. Other acting winners for World War II-themed films include William Holden for 1953's "Stalag 17," Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed for "From Here to Eternity," George C. Scott for "Patton," Juliette Binoche for "The English Patient" and Adrien Brody for "The Pianist." With eight Oscar nominations, "Inglourious Basterds" runs second to the sci-fi tale "Avatar" and "The Hurt Locker," which have nine nominations each. "Avatar" and "The Hurt Locker" are considered the best-picture front-runners, but "Inglourious Basterds" seems certain to win at least one major prize. Dominating at earlier Hollywood honors, Christoph Waltz is heavily favored to earn the supporting-actor Oscar for his "Basterds" role as a chillingly amiable Nazi known as the Third Reich's ace Jew hunter. ___ On the Net: http://www.oscars.org Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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