Actor Michelle Williams said she was ‘paralysed with feelings of futility’ after being 'paid less than $1,000 compared to the $1.5m' that Mark Wahlberg received 'for the exact same amount of work’ while reshooting the film All the Money in the World. Speaking in Washington DC on 2 April during a hearing about closing the gender pay gap, Williams said 'if it was like this for me, a white woman in a glamorised industry, how were my sisters suffering across their professions?' She said the lack of initial reaction was the most depressing element. The controversy only seemed to come to public attention, she said, after the actor Jessica Chastain tweeted about it
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What’s the next Game of Thrones? All the contenders for fantasy TV’s crown
The saga of the Seven Kingdoms may be bowing out, but it has opened the floodgates. Here’s your guide to the next big heroes
Rand al’Thor was found as a baby on the slopes of Dragonmount and taken to Two Rivers, where he grew into a broad-shouldered shepherd boy. But Rand is possessed of immense power, a power as yet untapped, for he is also The Dragon Reborn, destined to be hunted by Darkhounds and Darkfriends as he bids to prove himself a mighty warrior leader. Among other things, Rand’s existence shows that you should always believe ancient prophesies, that even the low-born can save the world – and that characters in TV fantasy series must always have two names.
Rand is just one of the 2,782 characters who appear in Wheel of Time, the bestselling saga of fantasy novels by Robert Jordan. We can only hope the forthcoming adaptation on Amazon will hone the cast down a little, as we follow Rand and his forces towards Tarmon Gai’don, or the final battle between good and evil.
Continue reading...Elton John joins call for boycott of Brunei-owned hotels
Singer follows George Clooney in protest at sultanate’s death penalty for gay sex and adultery
Elton John has joined George Clooney in calling for a boycott of nine Brunei-owned hotels over the sultanate’s new death penalty laws for gay sex and adultery.
“I commend my friend, George Clooney, for taking a stand against the anti-gay discrimination and bigotry taking place in the nation of Brunei – a place where gay people are brutalised, or worse – by boycotting the sultan’s hotels,” the singer wrote on his Twitter page late on Saturday.
Continue reading...Nicolas Cage files for annulment after just four days of marriage
- Hollywood star married Erika Koike in Las Vegas on Saturday
- Cage’s 2002 marriage to Lisa Marie Presley lasted 108 days
The Hollywood actor Nicolas Cage has officially filed an annulment from his wife of four days.
Related: Nicolas Cage: ‘If I don’t have a job to do, I can be very self-destructive’
Continue reading...From Nazi to football hero: the incredible story of Man City’s Bert Trautmann
Famous for playing the 1956 FA cup final with a broken neck, Trautmann went from Nazi soldier to goalkeeping legend and symbol of truth and reconciliation. Now, his life is the subject of a new film
Film director Marcus H Rosenmüller looks out of the car window, a little spooked. “It is only one kilometre from the concentration camp,” he says. We are in a quiet, pretty, well-heeled town, a short drive from Munich. It is called Dachau.
“It’s quite shocking to be coming to Dachau, isn’t it?” says the British producer Chris Curling. Both men agree there is something eerily appropriate about filming here. They are making a movie about the life of the legendary German Manchester City goalkeeper Bert Trautmann, who is still best known for his part in the 1956 FA Cup Final against Birmingham City. With 17 minutes of the match left, he dived at the feet of Birmingham City’s Peter Murphy, and sustained a nasty neck injury. But he continued to play, making two crucial saves as Manchester City won 3-1. Trautmann was a hero, particularly when, three days later, it was discovered that he had actually broken his neck.
Continue reading...Grounded? How Disney’s Dumbo flop could threaten its master plan
The corporation’s buying spree has other studios trembling in its mouse-eared shadow. But are hard times ahead for the entertainment behemoth?
You’ve seen a horse fly, you’ve seen a dragon fly, you’ve seen a house fly. Now watch as a computer-animated elephant with oversized ears … crashes to the ground from a very great height. The reviews are in on Disney’s new Dumbo – reworked from the 1941 classic with “the imagination of Tim Burton” – and they are not unanimously positive, to say the least. “It transforms a gentle and miraculous tale into a routine story by weighing it down with a lot of nuts and bolts it didn’t need,” says Variety. “Floats just high enough to clear the incredibly low bar that it sets for itself,” writes IndieWire. In this paper, Peter Bradshaw calls it “a flightless pachyderm of a film” with a “pointlessly complicated and drawn-out story”. Roll up! Roll up!
If Dumbo flops, it could represent a major disturbance in Disney’s grand master plan. The corporation’s recent buying spree has left other studios trembling in its mouse-eared shadow. Over the last decade or so, Disney has snapped up plum properties such as Star Wars, Marvel and Pixar, culminating in last week’s $71bn (£54bn) acquisition of rival studio 21st Century Fox.
Continue reading...Disney seals $71bn deal for 21st Century Fox as it prepares to take on Netflix
The acquisition of Rupert Murdoch’s film and TV studio business will boost Disney as it enters the TV streaming market
Disney has closed its $71bn (£54bn) acquisition of Rupert Murdoch’s entertainment business in a deal that unites franchises including Cinderella, The Simpsons and Star Wars under one corporate roof to create a media behemoth of unprecedented scale.
The Walt Disney Company closed its acquisition of 21st Century Fox shortly after midnight New York time on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Yuli: this portrait of Carlos Acosta and Cuba is a dance film like no other
Ballet and film complement each other perfectly in a biopic of the superstar dancer that captures life under Castro’s rule
Dance on film can have many functions. It might act as a showstopping decoration to the drama (most movie musicals), a shorthand for its protagonist’s obsession or madness (Black Swan, The Red Shoes) or a blunt tool for illustrating cultural difference (Step Up, Save the Last Dance and every other ballet-girl-meets-hip-hop-boy movie). But, aside from Jerome Robbins’ masterpiece West Side Story, it doesn’t often work as a narrative device – an alternative script. That’s how it functions in Yuli, a new biopic of Cuban ballet star Carlos Acosta, by Spanish director Icíar Bollaín and writer Paul Laverty (I, Daniel Blake).
In Yuli (the title is Acosta’s father’s nickname for him), the concept sounds overcomplicated: a biopic played in flashbacks, mixed with real footage of the dancer on stage, framed by the conceit that “current” Carlos is creating an autobiographical dance piece in which he also performs as his own father. But it works. It really works.
Africa’s film awards still glitter, but few of its big screens are left
‘Video clubs’ and watching on mobile is taking over from the joyful experience of going to the cinema
Three riders on horseback canter up a dusty road in Ouagadougou to deliver the top prize, a golden horse, to the awards ceremony of Africa’s most important film festival. Dressed head to toe in glitter, film-themed wax fabric and flowing silks, celebrities of African cinema settle down, Rwanda’s national ballet performs and the presidents of Burkina Faso, Rwanda and Mali look on from golden chairs as gongs, cheques and conical Fulani grass hats are handed out for more than three hours.
The pan-African film and television festival of Ouagadougou (Fespaco) is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and the ceremony was the culmination of two weeks of screenings, parties and debates over the future of African cinema.
Continue reading...Netflix to adapt One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Streaming giant buys rights to create first ever screen adaptation of Colombian author’s seminal 1967 magical realist novel
Netflix has acquired the rights to Gabriel García Márquez’s seminal One Hundred Years of Solitude to create the first screen adaptation of the author’s 1967 masterpiece.
The streaming company announced on Wednesday that the book will be adapted into a Spanish-language series and filmed largely in the Nobel prize-winning author’s home country of Colombia, with García Márquez’s sons, Rodrigo García and Gonzalo García Barcha, serving as executive producers.
Continue reading...Mexican TV network criticised for brownface parody of Roma star Yalitza Aparicio
Televisa’s Yeka Rosales posted videos of herself on social media wearing brown skin paint in an apparent parody of the indigenous actress
A television personality for the Mexican-based Televisa network is facing criticism for dressing up in brownface and wearing a prosthetic nose to make fun of indigenous Mexican actress Yalitza Aparicio.
Televisa’s Yeka Rosales posted photos and videos of herself on social media wearing brown skin paint in an apparent parody of Aparicio, who attended the Oscars last week after being nominated for best actress for her role in Roma.
The stunt, designed to promote Televisa’s season premiere of the comedy show La Parodia, highlights the racism some scholars say indigenous people in Latin America still face in the media.
Captain Marvel review – Brie Larson kicks ass across the universe
Marvel’s superhero adventure veers from boomingly serious to quirkily droll as Larson wages a vicious war against evil aliens
This latest tale from the Marvel cinematic universe takes us way back in time, many years before the great catastrophe shown in Avengers: Infinity War. We have crash-landed in mid-90s America: a hilariously antediluvian world of Blockbuster video stores, dial-up internet, web searches via AltaVista, and grindingly slow CD-Rom drives. At one important stage, there’s a soundtrack outing for Nirvana: “Come as you are, as you were / As I want you to be / As a friend, as a friend / As a known enemy ...”
This is an engaging and sometimes engagingly odd superhero action movie from directors and co-writers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, a weirdly nonlinear mashup of past and present, memories and present experience, Earth and non-Earth action. It’s an unconventional origin-myth story, which makes it initially uncertain what the nature of those origins is, and maybe even whose origins exactly we’re talking about. There’s an eccentric splurge of tonal registers from boomingly serious to quirkily droll. It gives us a playful first glimpse of a number of things, important and otherwise, including how Shield agent Nick Fury acquired a notable part of his badass image – Fury played of course by Samuel L Jackson, his face digitally regressed to the way it looked around the time of Pulp Fiction. A lovable cat makes an important appearance.
Continue reading...Spandex snobbery smackdown: why the liberal elite snubs wrestling
The sport has drama, showmanship, and gender equality – as the film Fighting With My Family proves. Yet, because it’s working class, it’s marginalised, writes director Stephen Merchant
In 2014, after years of struggle, a working-class British woman, aged just 21, was awarded the highest honour her profession can bestow, live, in front of 20,000 people and a television audience of millions.
The Guardian didn’t report it. In the days following, there were no laudatory profiles, no in-depth interviews, no op-eds about her stratospheric success in a male-dominated world.
Continue reading...The Hole in the Ground review – superbly scary country horror
Mounting weirdness descends as a mother and young son set up home in the middle of a dark and sinister forest
Here’s an Irish folk-horror that clearly drew the right conclusions from the midnight-movie pairing of The Babadook and Under the Shadow: a film operating at a suspenseful, spider-like creep that allows it to skirt your defences and get some distance under the skin.
It opens with a broadly familiar set-up. Recently separated, subtly scarred Sarah (Seána Kerslake) installs herself and young son Chris (James Quinn Markey) in the kind of countryside fixer-upper-type property that conventionally serves as a magnet for trouble. Yet its foundations are undermined in unexpected fashion, first by the discovery of a vast sinkhole in the surrounding forest, then by the neighbourhood crone (Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen) who pauses her catatonic murmuring to insist that Chris isn’t who he seems. As Sarah briefs one confidante: “It’s been a funny few days.”
Continue reading...‘Centuries of entitlement’: Emma Thompson on why she quit Lasseter film
In her resignation letter from the film Luck, the actor questions whether any company should work with disgraced film executive John Lasseter
When the actor Emma Thompson left the forthcoming animated film Luck last month while it was still in production, it was done without public fanfare, and was only confirmed when film-industry publications such as Variety magazine picked up on it. Now Thompson has put herself firmly above the MeToo parapet with the publication publishing her incendiary letter of resignation addressed to the film’s backers, Skydance Media, one of Hollywood’s most prestigious studios.
It was known that Thompson was unhappy with the arrival in January of former head of Pixar John Lasseter as the new head of Skydance Animation. But the letter goes into extraordinary detail about her disquiet over the appointment of a studio executive whose downfall had been one of the key landmarks of the Me Too and Times Up campaigns.
Continue reading...Stanley Donen, director of Singin’ in the Rain, dies aged 94
Donen, who received an honorary Oscar in 1997, also directed On the Town, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Charade
Stanley Donen, the director of Singin’ in the Rain and other classics of the golden age of Hollywood, has died. He was 94.
Related: Charade: The last sparkle of Hollywood
Continue reading...‘No, I’m a Londoner’: Top Boy’s Yann Demange on his tussle with identity in the US
Filmmaker was born to French-Algerian parents and made his home, and his name, in multicultural London. But he never felt a sense of belonging. Then Hollywood called …
Where are you from? It’s a question I’ve always had a hard time with. And since moving to the US four years ago, I’m asked it on a regular basis. Maybe it’s the combination of a brownish face, London accent and French names that throws people off. Who knows? But this question, hearing it asked over and over these past few years, has forced me to confront unresolved questions I have about identity: how I grew up and how those experiences led me to being a director.
People tend to like things compartmentalised and simple, but it’s never been that simple for me. I’ve never had any sense of a “national identity” or, for that matter, a sense of belonging to any one tribe. I’m mixed race: French white mother, Algerian father. So “I’m a Londoner” is my standard go-to short response when the question comes up. That’s the simplest answer I feel comfortable giving without getting into it.
Continue reading...Trump picks up two Razzies as Holmes & Watson dominates worst of Hollywood
Trump wins for worst actor and worst screen combo, but the Will Ferrell detective comedy scores for worst film and director
President Donald Trump and a comedy movie take on Sherlock Holmes on Saturday topped the annual Razzie awards for the worst performances and films of 2018.
Holmes & Watson, starring Will Ferrell and John C Reilly, was the biggest winner, taking four trophies including worst film and worst rip-off. Reilly also was named worst supporting actor in what Razzie founder John Wilson called the “clueless parody” of the classic detective tale.
Continue reading...‘Art is in our genes’: Roma star’s hometown revels in success story
Residents of Tlaxiaco say Yalitza Aparicio, up for best actress at the Oscars, has given indigenous Mexicans renewed sense of pride
A couple of young flautists are practising scales in a small windowless room at Tlaxiaco’s Casa de Cultura. The rest of the town band are rehearsing a competition routine with a troop of young folkloric dancers – including Yalitza Aparicio’s two younger brothers – in the grand courtyard, decorated with murals depicting the town’s pre-Hispanic Mixtec warriors and artists.
Aparicio is nominated for best actress at the Oscars, taking place on Sunday, for her astonishing portrayal of a nanny in Alfonso Cuarón’s acclaimed film Roma. If successful, the 25-year-old Mexican, who worked as teacher before she was discovered almost by accident at a casting call held at the cultural centre, will be the first indigenous winner of the award.
Continue reading...Why BlacKkKlansman should win the best picture Oscar
Spike Lee’s politically charged cinema has irked the Academy in the past, but his witty take on how a black policeman outsmarted the Ku Klux Klan could prove sweetly timed
“Today’s young generation, they don’t know anything,” says Spike Lee in the Oscar-winning Rumble in the Jungle documentary, When We Were Kings. “Something happened last year, they know nothing about it. There are these great, great stories. These great historic events. I’m not talking about 1850s stuff. They don’t know who Malcolm X is. They don’t know who JFK is. They don’t know Muhammad Ali or Jackie Robinson. You can go down the line. It’s scary.”
You could interpret Lee’s career, in part, as an exercise in filling those holes in America’s collective memory. Malcolm X is probably the most famous example, with his 1992 film reigniting a debate about the black political leader and his legacy. His documentary 4 Little Girls told the story of the Birmingham church bombing with its eerie parallels to the Charleston church shooting. But even She Hate Me – ostensibly an ethically questionable film about sperm donation – had a section dedicated to the story of Frank Wills, the security guard who raised the alarm about the Watergate break-in, struggled to find work after (he believed he was blacklisted) and who died in extreme poverty in 2000 at the age of 52.
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