Month: September 2017

With five months to go before the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics open, the games are barely an afterthought for most South Koreans, with slow local ticket sales amid the biggest political scandal in years and a torrent of North Korean weapons tests.

South Korea wants more than a million spectators for the games, and it expects 70 percent to be locals. But if South Koreans are excited about the games, they didn’t fully show it during the first phase of ticket sales between February and June. There were 52,000 tickets sold — less than 7 percent of the 750,000 seats organizers aim to sell domestically.

International sales got off to a faster start, with more than half of the targeted 320,000 seats sold. But now there’s fear that an increasingly belligerent North Korea, which has tested two ICBMs and its strongest ever nuclear bomb in recent weeks, might keep foreign fans away from Pyeongchang, a ski resort town about 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of the world’s most heavily armed border.

South Korean Olympic organizers reopened online ticket sales on September 5 and hope for a late surge in domestic sales as the games draw closer. Locals purchased nearly 17,000 tickets on the first two days of resumed sales.

In a recent interview with The Associated Press, Lee Hee-beom, president of Pyeongchang’s organizing committee, said the North is highly unlikely to cause problems during the games because North Korean athletes could compete in the South. This is not yet clear, though. North Korea is traditionally weak at winter sports, though a figure skating pair has a chance to qualify and organizers are looking at ways to arrange special entries for North Korean athletes.

Lee also linked his optimism about ticket sales to South Korean experience in managing past global events, including the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, three Asian Games and the 2002 World Cup soccer tournament.

“This is a country that sold more than 8 million tickets even for the Expo 2012 in Yeosu,” said Lee, 68, a former Cabinet minister and corporate CEO. “We can definitely handle a million tickets.”

Local apathy

Organizers have overcome construction delays, local conflicts over venues, and a slow pace in attracting domestic sponsorships. They must now figure out how to create genuine local excitement for the games and boost ticket sales.

The 1988 Olympics in Seoul were easier. Those games marked South Korea’s arrival on the world stage as a growing industrial power and budding democracy.

In what’s now the world’s 11th-richest nation, there’s no longer an obvious public craving for the global attention brought by hosting a large sports event. There’s also worry over the huge cost of hosting the games and maintaining facilities that might go unused once the party leaves town.

Or perhaps South Koreans, after a whirlwind past year, are simply too tired to be enthusiastic about the Olympics. Millions took to the streets last year and early this year over a corruption scandal that eventually toppled the president from power and landed her in jail, where she remains during an ongoing trial.

It also doesn’t help that South Korea has never really had a strong winter sports culture, said Heejoon Chung, a sports science professor at Busan’s Dong-A University.

“I don’t think there are many people who are willing to stay outdoors in the cold for hours to watch races on snow,” he said.

Lee, the organizing committee president, is, unsurprisingly, more optimistic. Most South Koreans tend to wait until the last minute to buy tickets, and the atmosphere will improve once the Olympic torch relay arrives in South Korea in November, he said.

November is also when organizers will start to sell tickets offline at airports and train stations. Kim Dai-kyun, director general of communications for Pyeongchang’s organizing committee, said strong advertisement campaigns are planned for television, newspapers, movie theaters and on the internet.

Strong ticket sales are critical, because organizers are currently 300 billion won ($267 million) short of the 2.8 trillion won ($2.4 billion) they need to operate the games. Lee expects new sponsors to sign on and help erase the gap.

Organizers also aim to raise 174.6 billion won ($155 million) by selling about 1.07 million tickets, or 90 percent of the 1.18 million available seats. The 229,000 seats sold during the first phase of ticket sales equal about 21 percent of the target. While this might seem modest, Lee said Pyeongchang has been selling tickets at a faster pace than Sochi was at a similar point ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Cost estimate

The Olympics will cost about 14 trillion won ($12.4 billion) for South Korea, including the 11 trillion won ($9.7 billion) being spent to construct roads, railways and stadiums for the games. This is larger than the 8 million to 9 trillion won ($7 billion to $8 billion) Seoul projected as the overall cost when Pyeongchang won the bid in 2011.

Lodging could be another problem as tourists are already complaining about soaring room rates. Officials hope prices will stabilize after five new hotels are built by the end of the year, adding more than 2,000 rooms. The government is also planning to add hundreds of apartment rentals, and a 2,200-room cruise ship will serve as a floating hotel in the nearby port of Sokcho.

Organizers say a new high-speed rail line will link Seoul and Pyeongchang in an hour, starting in December, and will also allow travelers from the Seoul area to visit the games and return home the same day.
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J.J. Abrams is returning to Star Wars and will replace Colin Trevorrow as writer and director of Episode IX, pushing the film’s release date back seven months.

Disney announced Abrams’ return on Tuesday, a week after news broke of Trevorrow’s departure. After several high-profile exits by previous Star Wars directors, Lucasfilm is turning to the filmmaker who helped resurrect the franchise in the first place. Abrams will co-write the film with screenwriter Chris Terrio, who won an Oscar for adapting Argo and co-wrote Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

As the director of The Force Awakens, Abrams rebooted Star Wars to largely glowing reviews from fans and more than $2 billion at the box office. Abrams had said that would be his only film for the franchise, but he’s now been pulled back in.

Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy said that Abrams “delivered everything we could have possibly hoped for” on The Force Awakens and added, “I am so excited that he is coming back to close out this trilogy.”

This move also means Abrams will be the only director aside from Star Wars creator George Lucas to direct more than one Star Wars film.

Final installment

Star Wars: Episode IX was originally slated to hit theaters in May 2019, but in the wake of the shift it has officially been pushed back to a December 20, 2019, release. It is the final installment in the new “main” Star Wars trilogy that began with Abrams’ The Force Awakens in 2015 and will continue this December with director Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi.

Lucasfilm has had a number of public fallouts with Star Wars directors over the past few years.

Earlier this year, the young Han Solo spinoff film parted ways with director Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and swiftly replaced them with Ron Howard deep into production. In 2015, the company fired director Josh Trank from work on another Star Wars spinoff. And extensive reshoots on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story led to widespread speculation that director Gareth Edwards had been unofficially sidelined by Tony Gilroy.

News of Abrams’ return was greeted warmly by fans on social media Tuesday. He hasn’t directed or committing to directing another project since The Force Awakens, and instead had been focused on producing.

“I’m very much enjoying taking a moment. Since I’ve done the show Felicity, I’ve gone from project to project. So it’s been 20 years since I haven’t been prepping, casting, shooting, editing something,” Abrams told The Associated Press in March.

That moment, however brief, is over. For Abrams, it’s time to go back to the Millennium Falcon and that galaxy far, far away.
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When cameras pan across the faces of anxious Emmy Award nominees at Sunday’s ceremony, TV viewers will see a record 12 African-Americans vying for comedy and drama series acting honors. But it’s a lop-sided outcome in the struggle for diversity.

Master of None star Aziz Ansari, who is of Indian heritage, is the sole Asian-American to be nominated for a continuing series lead or supporting role. Not a single Latino is included in the marquee acting categories.

An Emmy version of the 2015-16 #OscarsSoWhite protests would miss the point: Worthy films and performances from people of color were snubbed by movie academy voters, while insiders say the scant Emmy love for non-black minorities largely reflects closed TV industry doors.

“There are a lot of us, but because we haven’t gotten the opportunity to shine, you don’t know we’re around,” said Ren Hanami, an Asian-American actress who’s worked steadily in TV in smaller roles but found substantive, award-worthy parts elusive.

The hard-won progress made by the African-American stars and makers of Emmy-nominated shows including Black-ish and Atlanta has brought them creative influence, visibility and, this year, nearly a quarter (23.5 percent) of series cast nominations.

While that success is cheered by other ethnic groups, they say it illuminates how narrowly the entertainment industry views diversity despite the fact that Latinos and Asian-Americans are America’s first- and third-largest ethnic groups, respectively.

Failure assumed

“TV has never been brown-ish,” said actor-comedian Paul Rodriguez, riffing on the title of the hit African-American family comedy. He starred in the 1984-85 sitcom a.k.a. Pablo, one of the handful of short-lived, Hispanic-centered series, and wrote The Pitch, or How to Pitch a Latino Sitcom that Will Never Air, a 2015 stage show he’s reprising this month in Los Angeles because, he said, little has changed for Hispanics.

“They don’t put us on television enough for them to even know if it’s not working,” Rodriguez said. “They just assume it won’t work. And it goes on year after year. Our population keeps growing, and so does our frustration.”

That frustration is at critical mass, said Alex Nogales, president of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, which has for years pushed for more diversity on television.

“I’m tired of being the nice Mexican. It hasn’t taken us anywhere,” Nogales said. His new plan: Make sure networks and digital platforms such as Netflix know when Latinos — who have an estimated buying power of about $1.5 trillion and growing — are unhappy with their shows.

“Networks have brands that have been around for a very long time. We can damage that brand. We can do it by marching in front of their offices and embarrassing them. We can do it through social media,” Nogales said.

The financial bottom line is key, agreed Gary Mayeda, president of the Japanese American Citizens League that was established in 1929 and focuses on civil rights issues affecting Asian and Pacific Islander Americans and others.

“Diversity is profitable,” Mayeda said. “Cultural diversity takes nothing nor steals from any other group.”

He called for more and better market research about consumers, a point Rodriguez drives home in his play Pitch. In one scene, a network executive character uses a pie chart that purports to show why Latinos are a loser for TV: They don’t watch enough TV.

‘Look a little further’

Dispelling stereotypes and tired assumptions is familiar to Tiffany Smith-Anoa’i, CBS executive vice president for entertainment diversity, a department she created in 2009.

“I’m always saying diversity doesn’t mean black, it means so much more,” Smith-Anoa’i said. She’s used to encountering the industry attitude that casting one minority means the search is over.

” ‘Have your eyes look a little further,’ ” she advises producers. “It might take three phone calls to find an actor, writer or director [of color] instead of the two that you’re used to. But it definitely is worth it when you’re looking for real authenticity and fresh voices, and you get it.”

Brooklyn Nine-Nine actress Stephanie Beatriz knows what can happen when those with power are part of the solution.

The sitcom’s creators, Daniel J. Goor and Michael Schur, assembled people whose stories aren’t part of their own experience, she said, “but they want to help tell them. As straight white men, they are the strongest allies that underrepresented groups could ever have.”

Established actors of color and others with clout also are taking matters into their own hands. African-Americans are well into the ownership game — music star John Legend’s projects include the TV series Underground, Laurence Fishburne is a producer on Black-ish — and, increasingly, they’re not alone.

Daniel Dae Kim (Lost, Hawaii Five-0) started 3AD, a film and production company whose projects include The Good Doctor, a fall drama for ABC about a young surgeon (Freddie Highmore) with autism and savant syndrome. The company has nine other projects in active development, Kim said, aimed at representing the range of the human condition, ethnic and otherwise.

“It’s a conscious effort on my part, because this is the world that I’d like to see reflected,” said the Korean-born actor, who came to America as a child. “If my company can help be one color in the spectrum of the diversity of entertainment, then that’s the place I would like to hold.”
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The arrest of prominent Russia’s Kirill Serebrennikov has complicated plans to stage the premiere of a ballet he’s directing about the late Soviet ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev at the Bolshoi Theatre, its director general said Tuesday.

It is also possible that the ballet Nureyev, originally due to premiere on July 11, will be performed in Serebrennikov’s absence, Vladimir Urin said.

Russian authorities detained Serebrennikov in August on charges of embezzling state funds, placing him under house arrest until October 19 pending trial.

Serebrennikov has a history of criticizing the authorities, but President Vladimir Putin denied last week that censorship or political pressure was behind his detention.

“I want to confirm that I strongly hope that we will definitely stage the premiere of Nureyev in the 2017-18 season,” Urin told reporters.

Urin said he had agreed with Serebrennikov before his arrest that they would meet again in September to decide on the time frame of the premiere.

Urin also said he had asked investigators to allow him to meet Serebrennikov while he is under house arrest.

“Now it [the premiere] depends on one person, on what decision Serebrennikov takes — whether he allows us to stage the ballet without him or asks us to wait until his situation has been clarified and that it go ahead in his presence,” Urin said.

The ballet was pulled in July just two days before it had been due to open. Urin said at the time the performers were not ready and that it would instead be staged next May.

Russia’s Investigative Committee has said it suspects Serebrennikov of embezzling at least 68 million rubles ($1.18 million) in state funds earmarked for an art project. Serebrennikov denies the charges.

Nureyev is viewed as one of the world’s most gifted male ballet dancers. His dramatic defection to the West in 1961 was a blow to Soviet prestige. He later served as director of the Paris Opera Ballet and died of AIDS in 1993 aged 54.
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A documentary about the life of renowned guitarist Eric Clapton does not attempt to whitewash over the darker side of the hard-drinking musician’s life, even though it is directed by his longtime friend, filmmaker Lili Fini Zanuck said Monday.

Zanuck, who has known Clapton for 25 years, directed “Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars,” following the life of the 72-year-old British guitarist from childhood to international stardom, through his struggle with drugs and alcohol and the 1991 death of his four-year-old son.

“To watch myself going through that was not easy,” Clapton told reporters on Monday at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the film made its debut.

“Right up until the time I stopped drinking, everything I said was complete blather,” he added, to laughter from the audience.

In his 2007 autobiography, Clapton described a 20-year drug and alcohol addiction that he said saw him spending about $16,000 a week on heroin in the 1970s. The death of his son Conor, in a fall from a New York high-rise, was the trigger to sobriety.

The musician, who is a producer on the film, spoke about his struggles with having his life documented on screen and doing interviews with Zanuck in a film that does not shy away from examining his faults.

“I do not like having my picture taken, I do not like talking to journalists. I love to play music,” Clapton said.

Zanuck, who won an Oscar for 1989’s “Driving Miss Daisy,” said Clapton did not second-guess the responsibility he gave her in telling his story.

“For me, the movie is about redemption — personal redemption, not necessarily what society thinks,” Zanuck told Reuters.

“No one got him out of despair, he did it himself,” she added.

With hits such as “Bell Bottom Blues,” “Cocaine” and “Layla,” Clapton has won 17 Grammy Awards, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. He was ranked No. 2 on Rolling Stone magazine’s 2015 list of 100 greatest guitarists of all time, behind Jimi Hendrix.

“Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars” will be released in North American theaters later this year and air on premium cable channel Showtime in February.
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Hurricane Irma may have shattered homes and flooded communities across Florida, but the Key West museum dedicated to acclaimed American author Ernest Hemingway and descendants of his beloved six-toed cats emerged unscathed.

Irma hit the Florida Keys as a powerful Category 4 hurricane early on Sunday, inflicting widespread damage on the archipelago off the tip of southern Florida.

The storm brought sustained winds of up to 130 mph (209 kph) and submerged the highway that connects the string of tropical islands with the rest of the state. Evacuees were told on Monday they could not return to their homes yet.

While Key West remains without water and electricity, the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum, sitting on one of the highest points in the area, was undamaged, curator Dave Gonzales said on Monday.

“We were well prepared and very blessed,” Gonzales told Reuters by telephone.

All 54 cats on the property – six-toed felines descended from a tomcat named Snow White that the author adopted while he lived there in the 1930s – were accounted for, Gonzales said.

The museum keeps the bloodline of the original polydactyl cat intact, as well as the author’s penchant for naming the cats after famous people like actors Grace Kelly, Liz Taylor and Lionel Barrymore, Gonzales said.

Owned by a private group, the house and grounds were deemed a National Historic Landmark in 1968, seven years after Hemingway’s death, said general manager Jacque Sands, who lives in the main house and sheltered on the property with 11 staff members during the storm.

Built in 1851, the Spanish Colonial home was purchased by Hemingway and his second wife, Pauline, in 1928. The couple did extensive renovations to the house and grounds, including building the city’s first swimming pool.

Two of Hemingway’s iconic literary works, the novel “To Have and Have Not” and the short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” were written during the years he lived in Key West.

The museum is filled with Hemingway artifacts, including antique European furnishings, and mounted animal heads and skins Hemingway amassed while on African safaris and hunting trips to the American West.

Sands said she never considered evacuating the property as leaving would have meant abandoning the cats.

“The cats took care of us, or so they think,” she said.
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Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie says she never intended to step behind the camera, but traveling around the world for the United Nations opened her eyes to the conflicts that have inspired many of her most recent films.

“I never thought I could make a movie or direct,” Jolie told an audience at the Toronto Film Festival on Sunday, which is screening her Cambodian genocide film “First They Killed My Father” and Afghan film “The Breadwinner.”

Jolie said her first major film as a director, the 2011 Bosnian war drama “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” was prompted by her humanitarian work as a special envoy for the United Nations refugee agency.

“I wanted to learn more about the war of Yugoslavia. I had been in the region and traveling in the UN. It was a war I really couldn’t get my head around. … It was not a goal to become a director,” she said.

“The Breadwinner,” an animated film that she produced, is about a young Afghan girl who cuts her hair and poses as a boy in order to feed her family.

It “tells the sad reality of many girls having to work and not go to school,” said Jolie, who has made several trips to Afghanistan. “The people I have met over the years are truly my heroes.

The nice thing about being a director is to champion other people,” Jolie added.

Jolie said “First They Killed My Father,” was inspired by wanting to learn more about the history of Cambodia, the birthplace of her son Maddox, one of her six children.

She said she wanted “Maddox to learn about himself as a Cambodian in a different light.”

The film, which was screened in Cambodia earlier this year, tells the story of a young girl during the country’s 1970s genocide who is forced into the countryside to toil in rice paddies and then take up arms as a child soldier.

Jolie, 42, who won a supporting actress Oscar for “Girl, Interrupted” in 2000, shrugged off her status as a role model for women.

“I have a lot to learn and need role models myself,” she said.
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Patty Jenkins will return to direct the 2019 sequel to this year’s hit superhero movie “Wonder Woman,” film trade publications said on Monday, after she became the highest-grossing female director in Hollywood history.

Jenkins, 46, will once again direct Israeli actress Gal Gadot as the titular superhero in “Wonder Woman 2,” scheduled for release on Dec. 13, 2019, publications including Variety and Hollywood Reporter said.

Movie studio Warner Bros did not comment on the news and has not given any further details on the sequel.

“Wonder Woman,” was the first standalone movie to star a female superhero since 2005’s box office dud “Elektra,” and the first to be directed by a woman.

It rode to the top of the box office in June on a wave of good reviews and female empowerment, and with $816.4 million at the worldwide box office, it is now the second-biggest movie of the year after the live action version of “Beauty and the Beast.”

Jenkins overtook Phyllida Lloyd, who directed 2008’s musical “Mamma Mia!,” for the title of highest-grossing female director.

Gadot’s Wonder Woman will next be seen in November’s superhero ensemble movie “Justice League,” alongside Ben Affleck’s Batman and Henry Cavill’s Superman.

“Wonder Woman,” the fourth film in Warner Bros’ current iteration of DC Comics’ cinematic franchise, helped boost profits for Warner Bros.’ parent company Time Warner Inc.
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President John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter and Caroline Kennedy’s daughter Tatiana Schlossberg has gotten married at the family’s Martha’s Vineyard home.

The New York Times reports the 27-year-old Schlossberg married 28-year-old George Moran on Saturday with former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick officiating. The couple met in college at Yale. Schlossberg was an environmental reporter for the Times until July. Moran is a medical student at Columbia University.

Schlossberg is Caroline Kennedy’s second child. She has an older sister, Rose, and a younger brother, Jack. They are President Kennedy’s only grandchildren. He was assassinated just before Caroline Kennedy’s sixth birthday in November 1963.

Kennedy served as ambassador to Japan under former President Barack Obama until earlier this year.
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Cardi B. has a breakthrough hit with “Bodak Yellow (Money Moves)” and the rapper said she’s ready to follow the single’s success with an album next month.

“I have an album coming. It will be dropping in October. I’m an October baby,” Cardi B., who turns 25 on Oct. 11, said in a recent interview. “I’m a little nervous to put the project out, but I think it’s going to be pretty good.”

Cardi B. said she’s nervous because there’s “a lot of pressure on” her after the success of “Bodak Yellow,” which is currently No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, just under Taylor Swift’s comeback hit “Look What You Made Me Do” and the year’s biggest smash, Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito.”

“Everybody’s waiting to see what I’m going to have next and it’s like, ‘…I hope people love it,’ ” she added. “But I have confidence. I really do.”

“Bodak Yellow” has become a No. 1 hit on both the R&B and rap charts, and is one of the year’s most streamed songs. The New York-born rapper, who first gained attention on Instagram, appeared on the VH1 reality show “Love & Hip Hop” before the song’s massive success. The song has helped her become one of the few solo female acts to launch a major hit on the pop charts, which has recently been dominated by male performers for the last two years.

“It feels amazing and it’s overwhelming. It’s like, it fills me up with lot of happiness and a lot of joy,” she said. “It’s just like unbelievable. I’ve been through so many things and I worked so hard for me to be here, and it’s like I’m finally here getting what I wanted, (and getting) the respect from other artists and from everybody.”

One of those artists is Beyonce.

“I’m surprised Beyonce liked me,” Cardi B. squealed. “I met Beyonce!”

“It’s like, ‘Oh my God!’ That’s how it feels like. I can’t talk, I can’t breathe,” she added.

When asked what female rappers she’d like to work with, Cardi B. said: “Well, all of them.” She listed Lil Kim, Trina and Remy Ma as some of her idols.

Cardi B. said she’s been finding time to treat herself in between studio recordings, concerts and photo shoots.

“The first splurge that I did I bought like an $80,000 watch but that’s because I’m a rapper. I need jewelry,” she said, laughing.

 
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Renowned French-Lebanese film director Ziad Doueiri appeared before a military court in Beirut Monday to face questions about his role in a past movie project in neighboring Israel. Lebanon bans its citizens from travel to Israel or having business dealings with Israelis as the two nations are in a state of war.

Doueiri was briefly detained at Beirut’s Rafic Hariri airport late Sunday and his passports confiscated after arriving in Lebanon to promote a new movie that received critical acclaim at the Venice Film Festival recently.  Following his release, Doueiri’s lawyer reportedly told media assembled outside the court that Doueiri had been freed following several hours of investigation and given back his travel documents.

At issue was the earlier film, The Attack, which was released in 2012.  The Attack, about a suicide bombing in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, was filmed in part in Israel and banned in Lebanon.

Profoundly hurt

In a statement to the French news agency before his appearance in court, Doueiri said, “I am profoundly hurt.  I came back to Lebanon with a prize from Venice.  The Lebanese police have authorized the broadcast of my film (The Insult).  I have no idea who is responsible for what has happened.”

Doueiri had flown from the Venice Film Festival, where The Insult, his fourth film, had won the Coppa Volpi best actor prize for Palestinian actor Kamel El Basha.  The Insult is set in Beirut and focuses on the escalation of a minor argument between a Palestinian refugee and a Lebanese Christian.

Doueiri was offered the support of Lebanon’s culture minister, Ghattas Khoury, following the brief detention.  “Ziad Doueiri is a great Lebanese director and that has been honored across the world,” Khoury tweeted, before adding, “Respecting and honoring him is a duty.”

Doueiri, however, angered many Lebanese when the earlier movie, The Attack, was released.

Unpredictable approach

According to Ayman Mhanna, director of Lebanon-based free speech NGO SKeyes, Doueiri’s appearance in court was symptomatic of an unpredictable approach within the government regarding the director’s time in Israel.

Although Mhanna “did not question” the laws preventing Lebanese visits to Israel, he told VOA that Doueiri had visited Lebanon numerous times without repercussion.

The government’s response was “chaotic” and “destabilizing,” he added, with one part of it endorsing Doueiri and another seeking to detain him. Mhanna noted that the Ministry of Culture recently backed Doueiri’s latest film, The Insult, to represent Lebanon in the foreign film category at next year’s Academy Awards in the United States.

Meanwhile, the trying of civilians in military courts has also attracted criticism.

A report by Human Rights Watch earlier this year highlighted the use of such courts to try civilians involved in protests against the Lebanese government’s handling of the country’s waste crisis.

Bassam Khawaja, of Human Rights Watch, told VOA, “Regardless of detentions being brought, Doueiri should not be tried in a military court.

“Unfortunately military courts are still used in Lebanon to try civilians on a broad range of charges, in violation of their due process rights and international law.

“These trials largely take place behind closed doors, with limited grounds for appeal, and it is difficult to see how he would get a fair trial there.”

Long history

There is a a long history of perceived moments of Israeli acknowledgment or collaboration drawing swift rebuke in Lebanon, which was first invaded by its southern neighbor in 1978.

In May, global box office hit Wonder Woman was barred from Lebanese theaters because it starred former Israeli army soldier Gal Gadot.  Last month, Swedish-Lebanese dual citizen Amanda Hanna was stripped of her title Miss Lebanon Emigrant after those behind the event discovered she had visited Israel using her Swedish passport in 2016.

Doueiri is one of the most acclaimed Lebanese directors of his generation.  He first made a name for himself with Lebanese civil war classic West Beirut, which was released in 1998.

He began his career as first camera assistant for Quentin Tarantino on the director’s films Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown.
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Kristen Bell says she’s “singing in a hurricane” while riding out Irma in Florida.

The “Frozen” star is in Orlando filming a movie and staying at a hotel at the Walt Disney World resort. She stopped by an Orlando middle school that was serving as a shelter and belted out songs from “Frozen.” Back at the hotel, Bell posted pictures on Instagram of her singing with one guest and dining with a group of seniors .

Bell also helped out the parents of “Frozen” co-star Josh Gad by securing them a room at the hotel .

Bell tells Sacramento, California, station KMAX-TV, where her father is news director, that the experience is her version of one of her favorite movies, “Singin’ in the Rain.”

 
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Rebel super-hacker Lisbeth Salander is back in the fifth book in the Millennium series, this time battling neo-Nazi prison gangs and honor killings as well as trying to uncover the secrets about her troubled childhood.

The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye is the long-awaited return of Salander, the small but combative computer wizard and hobby quantum physicist, that was introduced to readers in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, published in 2005.

The best-selling series, which made the “Nordic Noir” genre of gritty Scandinavian crime novels popular globally, was created by author and reporter Stieg Larsson who had completed the first three novels before he died in a heart attack in 2004.

Author David Lagercrantz was commissioned to write a fourth novel, published in 2015, and this time around he delves deeper into the mystery of her childhood where she often witnessed her mother being abused by her father.

“The big question is, of course, why does Lisbeth Salander have a big dragon tattoo on her back, and you can be sure that a girl like her wouldn’t [get] a dragon tattoo without a very good reason,” Lagercrantz said.

“I had to find something, you know, that was really heavy and mythical, and when I did, I sort of had a story. I’ve added more darkness to Lisbeth Salander.”

The book, which was released Thursday, also draws inspiration from issues Sweden has grappled with in recent years, such as a resurgent far-right movement and honor killings — both fiercely debated topics in the Nordic country.

“Sweden is now changing so quickly and that is something I have to deal with as well,” Lagercrantz said.

Sweden was shocked after members of a neo-Nazi cell conducted a string of bombings in the city of Gothenburg around the turn of the year, while the far-right Nordic Resistance Movement has stepped up its activity.

As a reporter, Larsson devoted much of his life to investigating Sweden’s far-right movement. In 1995, he co-founded the anti-Fascist magazine Expo and worked there until his death.

“That was the core of Stieg Larsson, to fight intolerance, racism and Fascism,” said Lagercrantz.

Honor killings have also been on the agenda. A recent report by Swedish public service radio showed 10 of the 105 murders in Sweden last year were honor killings. The government has launched an investigation and said it is reviewing relevant legislation.

The original three books have been translated into 50 languages and sold more than 80 million copies while the fourth sequel, the first penned by Lagercrantz, has sold 6 million.
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The kind of breakthrough performance where it’s immediately apparent that an actor is going to be a star for years to come is a rarity in movies. Think of Emma Stone in “Easy A” or Jessica Chastain in “The Tree of Life.”

But that kind of thunderbolt moment is striking now for 21-year-old Timothee Chalamet, a New Yorker with the talent to speak multiple languages, play numerous instruments and take the festival circuit by storm with a handful of performances  — including one assured of ranking among the finest performances of the year.

The Toronto International Film Festival has been a coming out party for Chalamet, who has three films at the festival. He stars in Luca Guadagnino’s coming-of-age, coming-out tale “Call Me By Your Name,” he’s a supporting player in Greta Gerwig’s equally lauded coming-of-age tale “Lady Bird,” and he co-stars in the Christian Bale-led Western “Hostiles.” A Cape Cod thriller in which he stars, “Hot Summer Nights,” was also acquired here by A24.

But the headliner is his performance in “Call Me By Your Name,” which Sony Pictures Classics will release Nov. 24. In the film, adapted by James Ivory from André Aciman’s novel, Chalamet plays Elio, a headstrong 17-year-old living with his parents in 1980s northern Italy. When a handsome academic (Armie Hammer) comes to stay with them, Elio has a self-discovery that mingles love with art, language and natural beauty.

In the film, he plays piano and guitar, speaks fluent French and Italian, and indelibly captures the experience of first love. The film and its cast are considered likely Academy Awards contenders, partly because of Chalamet’s uncommon poise and wide-ranging intelligence in a deeply sensual movie.

“It feels like a real seminal moment,” said Chalamet in an interview. “I feel like the luckiest guy in the world that I get to share it with Luca and Armie and Michaels Stuhlbarg. I’m obviously very young and I’ve had a short career, but I’ve never been a part of anything like this.”

“He’s being excessively humble,” Hammer cuts in. “He’s the man of the year here at TIFF and we’re just riding his coattails.”

Though the two are separated by a decade in age and experience, they’ve become close friends, drawn closer by the intimacy of making “Call Me By Your Name” in the meadows, cafes and villas of Crema, Italy, where Guadagnino lives.

“He’s a very difficult dude to hate,” Hammer said.

What Chalamet lacks in vanity, those around him make up for in their praise for him.

“Not to sound pompous, but the guy is kind of a genius,” said Guadagnino, the Italian filmmaker of “I Am Love.” “He has a capacity for understanding human nature instinctively that’s astonishing. It’s also naive in a way, because he’s young, but also very focused. The cinema is at its best when it can present a new personality in the world.”

Chalamet doesn’t come out of nowhere. He’s appeared on stage, earning a Drama League Award nomination for John Patrick Stanley’s “Prodigal Son.” He was a regular on “Homeland” and played smaller roles in films like Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” and Jason Reitman’s “Men, Women and Children” — his screen debut.

“I have been working for a number of years,” says Chalamet. “I just graduated from theater high school in New York. I went to LaGuardia so I’m very close to the reality that lot of actors work rarely.”

Chalamet’s mother was a Broadway dancer and his French father works for UNICEF. He credits them for pushing him into piano lessons and taking him on trips to France.

He recently shot a father-son drama, “Beautiful Boy,” in which he plays a methamphetamine-addicted son to Steve Carell. After making “Call Me By Your Name,” he shot his scenes for “Lady Bird,” in which he plays the alluring love interest of Saorsie Ronan’s high-school senior.

“To have those films back-to-back, and they contrast so heavily, it helps you understand filmmaking,” said Chalamet. “There’s the truth to every moment that you have to bring to every scene, but you have to understand the tonality the film before you begin, which isn’t something that’s instinctual to me.”

Chalamet will have plenty of practice to get accustom to that adjustment. He’s also to star in Woody Allen’s next, untitled film. But whatever lies ahead for Chalamet, making “Call Me By Your Name” will remain an experience he long treasures.

“I miss the sense of belonging somewhere,” he says. “I miss the sense of belonging on a film as much as I did on ‘Call Me By Your Name.”’
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