Month: November 2018

The Calgary city council on Monday unanimously declared Canada’s 2026 Winter Olympics bid dead, after residents roundly rejected its proposal to host the Games in a referendum.

Mayor Naheed Nenshi said ahead of the council vote that he was “disappointed” in the outcome of the referendum — after nearly two years of bid preparations — but accepted the will of the people.

Calgary’s withdrawal now leaves only Milan and Stockholm in the running when the host city is announced in June in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The council’s announcement came after residents of the city at the foot of the Rocky Mountains last week came out 56.4 percent to 43.6 percent against bringing the event back to Calgary, which staged the 1988 Winter Games.

A tally of 304,774 ballots released by the city showed 171,750 voting against staging the Games, with 132,832 in favor.

The referendum result came after frenzied campaigning which saw pro-bid campaigners fail to convince residents that the city should bankroll a Can$390 million ($295 million US) chunk of the bill for hosting the event.

Bid officials had said bringing the Olympics back to Calgary would provide an economic boost to the city while giving it a chance to shine under a global spotlight.

But opponents cast doubt on the projected revenues from the Games, fearing massive cost overruns, higher property taxes and less funding for other municipal projects.
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The small town of Utqiagvik, Alaska, is the northernmost town in the United States. Entertainment is scarce and so is the list of jobs. A lot of locals still hunt and fish, and there is room for art here as well. As Natasha Mozgovaya reports, indigenous carvers have been creating beautiful figurines, intricate miniature sculptures and jewelry from very Alaskan materials.
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While the Space Needle may be the most recognizable structure in Seattle, Washington, there is another spectacular and futuristic building nearby: Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture. Initially built as a tribute to the legendary Seattle rock musician Jimi Hendrix, it now celebrates American contemporary pop culture as a whole. One display is dedicated to the Marvel Comics Super Heroes, whose creator, Stan Lee, died at 95 earlier this week. Natasha Mozgovaya gives us a look.
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Fashion changes, trends come and go, but jewelry is always present in people’s lives in one way or another. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art just opened a new exhibition dedicated to the history of jewelry and the role it plays in people’s lives. Headdresses and earrings, brooches and belts, necklaces and rings, old and new, traditional and provocative, jewelry never cease to surprise and amaze. Nina Vishneva reports. Anna Rice narrates.
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The weight of legacy hangs heavily over Creed II. Not just for most of the characters, who must come to grips with their own family histories, but also for the filmmakers, tasked with making a sequel to a successful spin-off of a beloved franchise. It would put any film on the ropes. Not this one.

Creed II pulls off a rather amazing feat by adding to the luster of its predecessor and propelling the narrative into a bright future while also reaching back to honor its past, resurrecting unfinished business from Rocky IV and adding a dash of Rocky III. Pound per pound, the sequel might even be better than its predecessor.

Steven Caple Jr. replaced Ryan Coogler in the director’s chair this time, but there is plenty of continuity: Michael B. Jordan returns as Adonis Creed, with Sylvester Stallone by his side as former heavyweight champ and trainer Rocky Balboa. Also back: Tessa Thompson as Creed’s love interest, Phylicia Rashad as Creed’s mom, and Wood Harris as a coach. Max Kellerman is ringside again as color commentator.

The sequel pits Creed against man-mountain Viktor Drago, the son of Ivan Drago, who killed Adonis Creed’s father, Apollo Creed, in the ring in Rocky IV. That stirs up trauma for Rocky, who feels responsible for the elder Creed’s demise. Rocky went on to avenge the death by beating the elder Drago, but we also now learn what that disgrace meant for the Dragos. This film is about ghosts as much as it is a meditation on fatherhood. At one point, Kellerman says the showdown between the sons of Creed and Drago is almost like a Shakespearian drama and — laugh if you must — it feels sort of right here.

Desire — or lack of it — plays a key role in Creed II since we meet young Adonis as the new champion, at the top. Viktor Drago is at the bottom, hauling cement in Ukraine and burning for family redemption. “My son will break your boy,” Ivan Drago threatens Rocky, who sort of agrees. “When a fighter’s got nothing to lose he’s dangerous,” he warns Creed. “Listen, that kid was raised in hate. You weren’t.” Dolph Lungren returns as the elder Drago and there’s even an appearance by Brigitte Nielsen, who plays Drago’s wife in 1985 and was a real-life wife of Stallone. (Talk about keeping it in the family.)

Caple matches Coogler’s moody, gritty vision of a brutal sport conducted by mostly honorable men trying to outwit each other. There’s plenty of gore, slo-mos of smashed heads and Rocky trademarks — the glorious montages with uplifting music as fighters prepare for their shot in the ring. (Prepare to look away if you are fans of massive truck tires — many get horrible beat downs.)

Stallone got his mitts on the script — after having had a role penning all the Rocky films but sitting out writing Creed — and teams up with Cheo Hodari Coker, creator of the Netflix superhero hit Luke Cage. Onscreen, Stallone returns with his dark fedora and small bouncing ball, shuffling about and mumbling, allowing his sad eyes to do the bulk of his acting. It’s in the small moments between crusty Stallone and cocky Jordan where the film finds its sweet spot. “What are you fightin’ for?” the elder man asks the younger.

Jordan proves again that he’s a film force to be reckoned with, capable of searing and savage intensity and yet also goofy softness. This time, his swagger is tested and he must overcome intense pain and anguish. Watching him get up off the canvas again and again will make even the most uncharitable viewer cheer. As Adonis, he wants to carve his own legacy away from his father’s: “This is our chance to rewrite history. Our history,” Creed tells Rocky.

Thompson and Rashad both temper the piles of testosterone onscreen as women who steer and guide the young Adonis. Thompson’s character is battling progressive hearing loss and that is handled intelligently by the writers. There’s even a scene when Adonis is punched so hard that he falls in silence and looks over at her, both connected for a moment in enveloping quiet.

The filmmakers, meanwhile, are creating their own family legacy. Both Creed films share the same composer (Ludwig Goransson), art director (Jesse Rosenthal), special effects coordinator (Patrick White), costumer (Rita Squitiere) and location manager (Patricia Taggart). The films even have the same barber for Jordan (Kenny Duncan). And Coogler didn’t go far — he’s an executive producer.

But while a Creed III is almost guaranteed, there may be dangers ahead if the filmmakers choose to keep reopening old wounds or plundering story lines from the past. And the creep toward more cinematic bombast needs to be watched vigilantly. (Remember how nuts the last few Rocky films got?) Having said that, this spin-off franchise is clearly in very good hands — ones that are heavily wrapped, protected by a glove and aiming for your gut.
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Oscar nominee Matthew Heineman has often put his life on the line while filming award-winning documentaries such as Cartel Land, chronicling wars of Mexican drug cartels, and throwing a light on the atrocities of the Islamic State group in City of Ghosts.

Now, Heineman is releasing his first feature film, A Private War, about another subject close to his heart: Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin, who staked her life on the war fronts of Sri Lanka, Iraq and Syria in order to bring attention to the plight of war victims. 

In A Private War, Oscar-nominated actress Rosamund Pike transforms herself into Colvin, a gritty, fierce, inquisitive American journalist who dedicated her life to reporting on atrocities around the world. 

Pike evokes the journalist’s inexorable drive to cover wars to show the world the plight of war victims and bring truth to light. She also portrays Colvin as a person suffering from PTSD and addiction to alcohol and to her job. And there was the physical toll. Colvin lost her left eye in a rocket-propelled grenade attack in Sri Lanka in 2001. 

Her actions, presence

“Getting into her physicality, which meant changing everything, I had to learn to smoke convincingly, because for Marie, everything was better with a cigarette — every conversation, every car drive,” Pike told VOA. “I had to see the way with which she gestured with her hands — she had these wide-apart fingers. I had to work out how the eye patch made her angle her head differently — how she could penetrate you and sear you with one eye as good as someone else could dress you down with two.” 

In an onscreen soliloquy about her inner demons as Colvin, Pike outlined the personal conflicts that defined the British journalist. 

“I fear growing old, but then I also fear dying young,” she said. “I am most happy with a vodka martini in my hand, but I can’t stand the fact that the chatter in my head won’t go quiet until there is a quart of vodka inside me. I hate being in a war zone, but I also feel compelled, compelled, to see it for myself.” 

WATCH: ‘A Private War’ Examines War Correspondent’s Physical, Psychological Scars

Regarding Colvin’s heavy drinking, Pike said, “Should we even call it alcoholism? I really had to judge and walk a very fine line and find out where the truth lay, because it is not that we are defining her by a drinking problem. But she clearly had one.” 

Filmmaker Heineman described his deep connection to Colvin. A storyteller who took grave risks to document drug cartels and IS to the world, he wanted to do justice to the complexity of Colvin’s character and her courage as she unflinchingly reported from Homs, Syria, in 2012 during Bashar al-Assad’s heavy bombardment of the city. 

This is where Colvin lost her life. Through Colvin’s commitment, Heineman said he wanted to show the risks that journalists take to uncover the truth to the world. 

Power of storytelling

“Journalists are the bedrock of a free and independent society. You might not always agree with what they say, but the fact that journalism has been politicized, as our whole world has been politicized and our countries have been politicized and divided, is really sad to me,” the filmmaker said. “The fact that journalists have been demonized in this country, in other countries, the fact that a journalist was recently obviously killed, in Turkey [Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi], I think that’s one of the reasons why I make films. 

“I think film, journalism, storytelling has the ability to bring people together to create dialogue, to create two sides of a conversation,” he told VOA. 

As a documentarian, Heineman wanted to give this real-life texture to his film. In a scene where Colvin discovers a mass grave in Iraq, the local women and men gathered around mourning are real victims of war.  

“The women in that scene were Iraqi women crying about real trauma that they experienced, and at the end of that scene, like in any documentary that I made, something unforeseen happened: They started chanting and doing this prayer for the dead,” Heineman said. 

Pike related a similar experience she had while filming an unscripted scene with a refugee woman huddled with her kids in a safe house. The scene was depicting the siege of Homs. 

Through an interpreter, the woman told Pike how she fed her baby only sugar and water because she could not produce milk to breastfeed after the trauma of losing one of her kids to a bomb attack.  

“Then the woman said to me as Marie — and it was caught on camera — she said, ‘I don’t want this, please, I don’t want this just to be words on paper. I want the world to know that a generation is dying here. I want the world to know my story.’ ”  

Pike said that at that moment, she felt what drove Colvin — the journalist’s grave responsibility to bear witness to people’s suffering, no matter the cost.  
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Oscar nominee Matthew Heineman’s film “A Private War,” about Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin, brings attention to the danger journalists face reporting on the plight of war victims. VOA’s Penelope Poulou describes how and why “A Private War” was a labor of love, a docudrama delving into Colvin’s psyche.
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Cicely Tyson received her first and only Oscar nomination in 1972. It was for best actress for her work in “Sounder,” which she thinks of as her first major role. She wasn’t called to the stage that year — Liza Minnelli was for “Cabaret” —  but now 45 years later, Tyson is finally getting her Oscar.

 

“It is an emotionally wrenching matter to me,” Tyson said.

 

Tyson, 93, is no stranger to awards and honors. She’s won three Emmys (two in the same year for “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” and one for “The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All”), a Tony award (for “The Trip to Bountiful”), been a Kennedy Center honoree and, in 2016 was given a Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama. Now she can add one more award to that list as she prepares to accept her honorary Oscar at the 10th annual Governors Awards Sunday in Hollywood.

 

“I come from lowly status. I grew up in an area that was called the slums at the time,” Tyson said. “I still cannot imagine that I have met with presidents, kings, queens. How did I get here? I marvel at it.”

 

When film academy President John Bailey called her to inform her that the Board of Governors voted unanimously to give her the award, she “went to water.”

 

“It is the last thing in the world that I ever expected,” Tyson said, thinking, “I hadn’t done a major movie since ‘The Help.'”

 

Tyson has worked since the 2011 film, with roles in “Last Flag Flying’ and the television show “How to Get Away With Murder,” but ‘The Help’ was the last film that had anyone mentioning her name alongside Oscar. Oprah even called her and predicted she’d get a nomination, to which she responded: “My role was two seconds!’

 

“I am extremely grateful to the Board that they even know my name,” Tyson added with a hearty laugh.

 

She is being honored Sunday along with publicist Marvin Levy and composer Lalo Schifrin.

 

Born in Harlem, Tyson started out as a model and theater actress, eventually landing a role in the film “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” in 1968. Her pursuit of acting caused a rift with her mother, who disapproved, but Tyson said she was her “motivating force.”

 

“I was determined to prove her wrong,” Tyson said.

 

Plus, she learned quickly that she had a larger purpose than just acting. On the press tour for “Sounder,” which took her to parts of the United States that she hadn’t yet been to, she remembers a man in a press conference telling her that watching the film made him realize that he was prejudiced.

 

“He said, ‘You know, I could not accept the fact that your older son was referring to his father as daddy. That’s what my son calls me,'” Tyson said. “And I thought to myself, `My God. My God.’ It was those kinds of experiences as I went across the country promoting ‘Sounder’ that made me realize that I, Cicely Tyson, could not afford the luxury of being an actress. There were some issues that I definitely had to address and I chose my profession as my platform.”

 

It led to a lifetime of activism and humanitarianism off screen. Tyson even has a performing arts school named after her in New Jersey and frequently goes on tour to speak to children. On screen Tyson has portrayed women like Coretta Scott King and Harriet Ross Tubman. She decided early that she would only take jobs that “speak to something,” which is also why she ends up saying “no” a lot.

 

“My honorary Oscar proves to me that I was on the right track and I stayed on it,” Tyson said.

 

And while most of the time “no” works, sometimes it doesn’t. Tyson tried to say no to wearing a terrifically large hat to Aretha Franklin’s funeral only to be overruled by her designer. The hat would become a viral highlight.

 

“I never thought in my career that I would be upstaged by a hat! And I did not want to wear it,” Tyson said. “I said, ‘I can’t wear that hat, I will be blocking the view of the people behind me, they won’t be able to see and they’ll call me all kinds of names.’ He just looked at me and said, ‘Put the hat on.'”

 

She came around, eventually, thinking of the hat as homage to Franklin’s appearance at Obama’s inauguration.

 

As for whether or not she’ll don a similarly spectacular piece of art on her head Sunday night at the Governors Awards? Tyson just laughs.

 

“Oh no!” she said. “I won’t even mention it to him.”
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