Month: August 2024

rome — Stars from Angelina Jolie to George Clooney will gather this week at the Venice Film Festival, bringing a high dose of Hollywood pizzazz back to the watery city’s sandy Lido. 

With 21 films vying for the top Golden Lion prize, the 81st edition of the prestigious festival kicks off Wednesday, with Lady Gaga, Daniel Craig and Brad Pitt expected on the red carpet during the 10-day affair. 

The dazzle is welcome after the Hollywood strikes last year kept most studio films and their A-lister stars away from the world’s longest-running festival, known as “La Mostra.” 

In the spotlight, but out of competition, is “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” the long-anticipated sequel to Tim Burton’s 1988 cult classic that opens the festival Wednesday, with Michael Keaton, Catherine O’Hara and Winona Ryder reprising their original roles.  

High-profile contenders in the main competition include Todd Phillips’ “Joker: Folie a Deux,” the sequel to the U.S. director’s 2019 Venice-winning film that sees Joaquin Phoenix paired with Lady Gaga; and “Queer” from Italy’s Luca Guadagnino, starring Craig and based on the William Burroughs novel set in 1940s Mexico City. 

Jolie headlines “Maria,” a Maria Callas biopic from Chile’s Pablo Larrain, who returns to Venice following his Diana drama “Spencer” in 2021, while Nicole Kidman and Antonio Banderas star in the erotic thriller “Babygirl” from Dutch director Halina Reijn. 

To keep the drama on the screen — and avoid it behind the scenes — “Maria” will premiere on the festival’s first full day Thursday, while “Wolfs” starring Jolie’s ex, Brad Pitt, will screen out of competition Sunday. 

Joining Pitt in the Apple TV+ film from “Spider-Man” director Jon Watts is Clooney, with the actors playing rival professional fixers in the action comedy. 

The main competition also includes the first full-length film in English for a Venice regular, Spain’s Pedro Almodovar — “The Room Next Door” with Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore — while “The Order” from Australian director Justin Kurzel sees Jude Law playing an FBI agent investigating a terror ring in the Pacific Northwest. 

Weaver, Costner and Kline  

Wednesday’s opening night will feature the introduction of the international jury led by its president, French actress Isabelle Huppert, and the awarding of an honorary Golden Lion for lifetime achievement to “Alien” star Sigourney Weaver. 

Also having its out-of-competition debut is the second chapter of Kevin Costner’s “Horizon: An American Saga.” The first part of the actor-director’s Western epic premiered at Cannes in May.  

Running until September 7, the international festival has increasingly become known for showcasing films that go on to Oscar glory for its directors and cast members, including former Golden Lion winners “Poor Things,” “Nomadland” and “Joker.”  

Unlike at the rival Cannes Film Festival, Venice accepts films produced by streaming services in competition, especially Netflix, which has found great success launching titles such as “Maestro” and “Roma” at the Italian festival.  

Besides “Wolfs,” Apple TV+ also produced “Disclaimer,” a thriller series starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline and Sacha Baron Cohen, which is also having its premiere in Venice. 
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Los Angeles — In a sleepy summer weekend at the box office, holdovers reigned supreme as newcomers landed without a splash.

“Deadpool & Wolverine” reclaimed first place at the North American box office in its fifth weekend with $18.3 million. Its cumulative international earnings now sit at over $1.2 billion.

The Walt Disney Co., which owns 20th Century Studios, claimed the top two spots on the charts for the second weekend in a row with “Alien: Romulus” following close behind the foul-mouthed superhero movie. The latest installment in the 45-year-old franchise brought in $16.2 million in its second weekend after a promising opening. Disney’s “Inside Out 2” also remained on the charts, raking in $2.1 million domestically in its 11th weekend. Its global earnings are now over $1.6 billion.

“This is an incredible turnaround for Disney, who almost fell off the radar, shockingly enough, last year and over the course of the pandemic,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore. “They got a couple of billion-dollar films out so far and ‘Moana 2’ is still up on the way. This is a huge comeback year for Disney – no question about it.”

Romantic drama “It Ends With Us,” another repeat chart-topper, landed in third place for the second consecutive weekend with $11.9 million. The Sony movie starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, who also directed, has made $242.6 million to date globally. It cost only $25 million to produce.

The new releases were victim to the crowded movie marketplace, resulting in what Dergarabedian called “box office deja vu,” with the familiar films dominating and making it harder for the new releases to find their footing. Dergarabedian says the upcoming Labor Day holiday will likely benefit the newer titles as word-of-mouth spreads and more people head to theaters during the long weekend.

“Blink Twice,” directed by Zoe Kravitz and starring her life partner Channing Tatum, saw a modest opening, taking in $7.3 million and claiming fourth place on the charts. The Amazon MGM Studios psychological thriller follows Tatum as tech magnate Slater King, who whisks two women away to his private island.

While it may seem like a picture-perfect vacation at first, much more sinister events unfold as the visitors learn the truth about the island and the billionaire. The film’s budget has been reported at $20 million.

Reviews have been mixed, with audiences giving the film a B- CinemaScore, but the film has been deemed Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes with a 79% score.

Rounding out the top five was “The Forge,” a faith-focused coming-of-age movie about a young man finding his way through Christianity. The film opened with $6.6 million and received an A+ CinemaScore from audiences. It was released by Affirm Films, Sony’s faith-based banner.

Another new release, “The Crow,” was beat out by “Twisters” and “Coraline” in the rankings. “Twisters” entered its sixth week with $6.2 million in domestic earnings and “Coraline,” which was re-released for its 15th anniversary last week, brought in an additional $5.1 million in its second weekend.

Lionsgate’s “The Crow,” an R-rated adaptation of the acclaimed graphic novel and a remake of the 1994 film of the same name, opened with $4.6 million. The studio also floundered in August with the release of “Borderlands,” an adaptation of the video game, which made $15.2 million over three weekends compared to its reported $120 million budget.

To complete the “tale of the holdovers,” as Dergarabedian put it, “Despicable Me 4” and “Inside Out 2” closed out the top 10 films of the weekend, bringing in $4.4 million and $2.1 million, respectively. “Inside Out 2” has been on the charts for 11 consecutive weekends and remains the No. 1 animated film of all time globally.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.

1. “Deadpool & Wolverine,” $18.3 million.

2. “Alien: Romulus,” $16.2 million.

3. “It Ends With Us,” $11.9 million.

4. “Blink Twice,” $7.3 million.

5. “The Forge,” $6.6 million.

6. “Twisters,” $6.2 million.

7. “Coraline,” $5.1 million.

8. “The Crow,” $4.6 million.

9. “Despicable Me 4,” $4.4 million.

10. “Inside Out 2,” $2.1 million.
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Dubai, United Arab Emirates — U.S. rapper Macklemore has announced he is cancelling an upcoming show in Dubai over the UAE’s involvement in the conflict in Sudan, charges the Gulf state has denied.

The rapper best known for hits like 2012’s “Thrift Shop” made the announcement in a post on social media on Saturday.

“I have decided to cancel my upcoming show in Dubai this October,” he said.

“Over the last several months I’ve had a number of people reach out to me, sharing resources and asking me to cancel the show in solidarity with the people of Sudan,” he said.

“Until the UAE stops arming and funding the RSF I will not perform there,” Macklemore added, referring to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces that have been battling the Sundanese army.

War has raged since April 2023 between the Sudanese army, under the country’s de facto ruler Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the RSF, which is commanded by Burhan’s former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.

For months, the army has accused the UAE of supporting the RSF.

In June, Sudan’s ambassador to the United Nations Al-Harith Idriss al-Harith Mohamed called Abu Dhabi’s financial and military support for the RSF the “main reason behind this protracted war.”

The UAE has denied allegations of RSF support as “disinformation,” saying that it’s efforts are focused exclusively towards de-escalation and alleviating Sudan’s humanitarian suffering.

Macklemore has released socially aware music in the past, supporting LGBTQ+ rights while also criticizing ills including poverty and consumerism.

In his latest track released in May, Macklemore voices support for Palestinians and also praises students across the United States protesting against Israel’s war in Gaza.

The song, “Hind’s Hall,” is named after a building at Columbia University that students recently occupied and renamed after Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl killed in Gaza. 
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Herat, Afghanistan — Seated in front of a searing furnace, Ghulam Sakhi Saifi teases forth sinews of molten blue glass — the guardian of an Afghan glassblowing trade refusing to break with tradition.

“This is our art, our inheritance. It has fed us for a long time,” he told AFP, resting from the work that has singed his knuckles and calloused his palms.

“We are trying to make sure it is not forgotten. If we do not pass it down, it will disappear from the whole world,” said Saifi, who guesses his age is around 50.

Glassblowing in Afghanistan’s western city of Herat is an ancient craft. Saifi says it has run in his family for about three centuries.

The last two furnaces in the windswept metropolis near the border with Iran are in his family home and a mud-and-straw shed with a holey roof in the shadow of Herat’s citadel.

‘Slow suffocation’

Saifi now lights one of the furnaces only once a month — eking out around $30 from his stock of cups, plates and candleholders after expensive wood for fuel, dyes and other raw materials are accounted for.

He attributes the dramatic downturn to the exodus of already low numbers of foreign customers during the COVID-19 pandemic followed by the 2021 Taliban takeover, which saw many diplomats and aid workers pack up and leave.

Cheaper Chinese-made imports have also dented demand.

“There have been times when we haven’t worked for three months — we sit at home forever,” he said.

“Locals have no use for these products, for the price they would first think to buy two loaves of bread for their children.”

But when the furnace is lit, Saifi is in his element.

With a crude kitchen knife and a blowpipe he pulls glowing globs of glass out of the mud furnace and inflates them into household wares.

Unlike in the past, when they used quartz, the glassblowers now use easier-to-find recycled bottles shattered into shards and superheated back into their liquid state.

The green and blue pieces cool into charmingly imperfect shapes, shot through with air bubbles, and are sold from clattering piles in shops in Herat and the capital Kabul for around $3 each.

Outside the shed it is already 36 degrees Celsius but stepping over the threshold is like being gripped by a sudden fever.

“Sometimes we really feel the heat, I think I am being slowly suffocated,” Saifi said. “But this is our inheritance, we are used to it.

“Today is a bad day, but maybe it will get better in the future. Maybe the day after tomorrow, we hope to God.”

‘Craft needs to endure’

A gaggle of boys and teenagers assists Saifi in his work, but it is growing hard to tempt the younger generation into a trade they view as a dead end.

His eldest son became an expert in the craft only to abandon it for migrant labor over the border in Iran.

Two cousins who learned to blow glass also saw no future and downed their tools.

His middle son, 18-year-old Naqibullah, vows he will continue the trade, though it’s not clear how.

Before the Taliban takeover there was still enough demand for three days of work a week — a distant prospect for the young man who shares shifts with his father on the rare occasion they light the furnaces.

“We hope that there is a future and that day by day things will get better,” Naqibullah said.

“Even if we’re not making much money the craft needs to endure,” he added. “The art of making things by hand needs to be preserved. We can’t let this skill disappear.”
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NEW YORK — It started a couple of years ago when Juliana Pache was doing a crossword puzzle and got stuck.

She was unfamiliar with the reference that the clue made. It made her think about what a crossword puzzle would look like if the clues and answers included more of some subjects that she was familiar with, thanks to her own identity and interests — Black history and Black popular culture.

When she couldn’t find such a thing, Pache decided to do it herself. In January 2023, she created blackcrossword.com, a site that offers a free mini-crossword puzzle every day. And Tuesday marked the release of her first book, Black Crossword: 100 Mini Puzzles Celebrating the African Diaspora.

It’s a good moment for it, nearly 111 years after the first crossword appeared in a New York newspaper. Recent years have seen an increasing amount of conversation around representation in crossword puzzles, from who’s constructing them to what words can be used for answers and how the clues are framed. There’s been a push to expand the idea of the kinds of “common knowledge” players would have to fill them out.

“I had never made a crossword puzzle before,” Pache, 32, said with a laugh. “But I was like, ‘I can figure it out.’”

And she did.

Made ‘with Black people in mind’

Each puzzle on Pache’s site includes at least a few clues and answers connecting to Black culture. The tagline on the site: “If you know, you know.”

The book is brimming with the kinds of puzzles that she estimates about 2,200 people play daily on her site — squares made up of five lines, each with five spaces. She aims for at least three of the clues to be references to aspects of Black cultures from around the world.

Pache, a native of the New York City borough of Queens with family ties to Cuba and the Dominican Republic, had a couple of goals in mind when she started. Primarily, she wanted to create something that Black people would enjoy.

“I’m making it with Black people in mind,” she said. “And then if anyone else enjoys it, they learn things from it, that’s a bonus but it’s not my focus.”

She’s also trying to show the diversity in Black communities and cultures with the clues and words she uses, and to encourage people from different parts of the African diaspora to learn about each other.

“I also want to make it challenging, not just for people who might be interested in Black culture, but people within Black culture who might be interested in other regions,” she said. “Part of my mission with this is to highlight Black people from all over, Black culture from all over. And I think … that keeps us learning about each other.”

What, really, is ‘general knowledge’?

While on the surface if might just seem like a game, the knowledge base required for crosswords does say something about what kind of knowledge is considered “general” and “universal” and what isn’t, said Michelle Pera-McGhee, a data journalist at The Pudding, a site that focuses on data-driven stories.

In 2020, Pera-McGhee undertook a data project analyzing crossword puzzles through the decades from a handful of the most well-known media outlets. The project assessed clues and answers that used the names of real people to determine a breakdown along gender and race categories.

Unsurprisingly, the data indicated that for the most part, men were disproportionately more likely than women to be featured, as well as white people compared to racial and ethnic minorities.

It’s “interesting because it’s supposed to be easy,” Pera-McGhee said. “You want … ideally to reference things that people, everybody knows about because everyone learns about them in school or whatever. … What are the things that we decide we all should know?”

There are efforts to make crosswords more accessible and representative, including the recently started fellowship for puzzle constructors from underrepresented groups at The New York Times, among the most high-profile crossword puzzles around. Puzzle creators have made puzzles aimed at LGBTQ+ communities, at women, using a wider array of references as Pache is doing.

Bottom line, “it is really cool to see our culture reflected in this medium,” Pache said.

And, Pera-McGhee said, it can be cool to learn new things.

“It’s kind of enriching to have things in the puzzle that you don’t know about,” she said. “It’s not that the experience of not knowing is bad. It’s just that it should maybe be spread out along with the experience of knowing. Both are kind of good in the crossword-solving experience.”
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DALLAS, Texas — Nearly a century after Babe Ruth called his shot during the 1932 World Series, the jersey worn by the New York Yankees slugger when he hit the home run to center field could sell at auction for as much as $30 million.

Heritage Auctions is offering up the jersey Saturday night in Dallas.

Ruth’s famed, debated and often imitated “called shot” came as the Yankees and Chicago Cubs faced off in Game 3 of the World Series at Chicago’s Wrigley Field on October 1, 1932. In the fifth inning, Ruth made a pointing gesture while at bat and then hit a home run off Cubs pitcher Charlie Root.

The Yankees won the game 7-5 and swept the Cubs the next day to win the series.

That was Ruth’s last World Series, and the “called shot” was his last home run in a World Series, said Mike Provenzale, the production manager for Heritage’s sports department.

“When you can tie an item like that to an important figure and their most important moment, that’s what collectors are really looking for,” Provenzale said.

Heritage said Ruth gave the road jersey to one of his golfing buddies in Florida around 1940 and it remained in that family for decades. Then, in the early 1990s, that man’s daughter sold it to a collector. It was then sold at auction in 2005 for $940,000, and that buyer consigned it to Heritage this year.

In 2019, one of Ruth’s road jerseys dating to 1928-30 sold for $5.64 million in an auction conducted at Yankee Stadium. That jersey was part of a collection of items that Ruth’s family had put up for sale.
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SINTRA, Portugal — The doorbell to Martinho de Almada Pimentel’s house is hard to find, and he likes it that way. It’s a long rope that, when pulled, rings a literal bell on the roof that lets him know someone is outside the mountainside mansion that his great-grandfather built in 1914 as a monument to privacy.

There’s precious little of that for Pimentel during this summer of “overtourism.”

Travelers idling in standstill traffic outside the sunwashed walls of Casa do Cipreste in Cintra sometimes spot the bell and pull the string “because it’s funny,” he says. With the windows open, he can smell the car exhaust and hear the “tuk-tuk” of outsized scooters named for the sound they make. And he can sense the frustration of 5,000 visitors a day who are forced to queue around the house on the crawl up single-lane switchbacks to Pena Palace, the onetime retreat of King Ferdinand II.

“Now I’m more isolated than during COVID,” the soft-spoken Pimentel, who lives alone, said during an interview this month on the veranda. “Now I try to (not) go out. What I feel is: angry.”

This is a story of what it means to be visited in 2024, the first year in which global tourism is expected to set records since the coronavirus pandemic brought much of life on Earth to a halt. Wandering is surging, rather than leveling off, driven by lingering revenge travel, digital nomad campaigns and so-called golden visas blamed in part for skyrocketing housing prices.

Cue the violins, you might grouse, for people like Pimentel who are well-off enough to live in places worth visiting. But it’s more than a problem for rich people.

“Not to be able to get an ambulance or to not be able to get my groceries is a rich people problem?” said Matthew Bedell, another resident of Sintra, which has no pharmacy or grocery store in the center of the UNESCO-designated district. “Those don’t feel like rich people problems to me.”

Overtourism generally describes the tipping point at which visitors and their cash stop benefiting residents and instead cause harm by degrading historic sites, overwhelming infrastructure and making life markedly more difficult for those who live there.

Look a little deeper and you’ll find knottier issues for locals and their leaders, none more universal than housing prices driven up by short-term rentals like Airbnb, from Spain to South Africa.

The summer of 2023 was defined by the chaos of the journey itself — airports and airlines overwhelmed, passports a nightmare for travelers from the US. Yet by the end of the year, signs abounded that the COVID-19 rush of revenge travel was accelerating.

In January, the United Nations’ tourism agency predicted that worldwide tourism would exceed the records set in 2019 by 2%. By the end of March, the agency reported, more than 285 million tourists had travelled internationally, about 20% more than the first quarter of 2023. The World Travel & Tourism Council projected in April that 142 of 185 countries it analyzed would set records for tourism, set to generate $11.1 trillion globally and account for 330 million jobs.

Aside from the money, there’s been trouble in paradise this year, with Spain playing a starring role in everything from water management problems to skyrocketing housing prices and drunken tourist drama.

Protests erupted across the country as early as March, with thousands of people demonstrating in Spain’s Canary Islands against visitors and construction that was overwhelming water services and jacking up housing prices.

Japan set records for tourist arrivals. In Fujikawaguchiko, a town that offers some of the best views of Mount Fuji, leaders erected a large black screen in a parking lot to deter tourists from overcrowding the site. The tourists apparently struck back by cutting holes in the screen at eye level.

Air travel, meanwhile, only got more miserable, the U.S. government reported in July.

Tourism is surging and shifting so quickly, in fact, that some experts say the very term “overtourism” is outdated.

Michael O’Regan, a lecturer on tourism and events at Glasgow Caledonian University, argues that “overtourism” doesn’t reflect the fact that the experience depends largely on the success or failure of crowd management.

“There’s been backlash against the business models on which modern tourism has been built and the lack of response by politicians,” he said in an interview. Tourism “came back quicker than we expected,” he allows, but tourists aren’t the problem. “So what happens when we get too many tourists? Destinations need to do more research.”

Virpi Makela can describe exactly what happens in her corner of Sintra. Incoming guests at Casa do Valle, her hillside bed-and-breakfast near the village center, call Makela in anguish because they cannot figure out how to find her property amid Sintra’s “disorganized” traffic rules that seem to change without notice.

“There’s a pillar in the middle of the road that goes up and down and you can’t go forward because you ruin your car. So you have to somehow come down but you can’t turn around, so you have to back down the road,” says Makela, a resident of Portugal for 36 years. “And then people get so frustrated they come to our road, which also has a sign that says `authorized vehicles only.’ And they block everything.”

A 40-minute train ride to the west, Sintra’s municipality has invested in more parking lots outside town and youth housing at lower prices near the center, the mayor’s office said.

More than 3 million people every year visit the mountains and castles of Sintra, long one of Portugal’s wealthiest regions for its cool microclimate and scenery. Sintra City Hall also said via email that fewer tickets are now sold to the nearby historic sites. Pena Palace, for example, began this year to permit less than half the 12,000 tickets per day sold there in the past.

It’s not enough, say local residents, who have organized into QSintra, an association that’s challenging City Hall to “put residents first” with better communication, to start. They also want to know the government’s plan for managing guests at a new hotel being constructed to increase the number of overnight stays, and more limits on the number of cars and visitors allowed.

“We’re not against tourists,” reads the group’s manifesto. “We’re against the pandemonium that (local leaders) cannot resolve.”
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Xolo Maridueña is currently starring in the sixth and final season of the hit karate series “Cobra Kai,” which premiered on Netflix in July. But he also made waves last year when he was cast as the first Latino superhero lead in “Blue Beetle.” The actor spoke with Veronica Villafañe about the impact of these roles in his career and the need for Latino representation in Hollywood.
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KATHMANDU, Nepal — Hundreds of LGBTQ+ people and their supporters rallied in Nepal’s capital Tuesday during the annual Pride parade, the first since gay couples were able to register same-sex marriages officially in the Himalayan nation.

The event brought together the sexual minority community and its supporters in Kathmandu during the Gai Jatra festival. A government minister, diplomats and officials participated in the rally, which began at the city’s tourist hub and went around its main streets.

“Gai Jatra festival is a festival that is a long tradition that has been carried for years, and we all are here to help preserve and continue the tradition, and as a sexual minority are doing our part to save the tradition. We also celebrate the day as a Pride parade,” said Bhumika Shrestha, a gay rights activist who was at the parade.

The Gai Jatra festival is celebrated to remember family members who have passed away during the year but has long had colorful parades that brought in sexual minorities.

After years of struggle, gay couples were able to register same-sex marriages for the first time in November 2023 following a Supreme Court order. Rights activists had long sought to amend laws and end provisions that limited marriage to heterosexual couples.

Nepal has undergone a transformation since a court decision in 2007 asked the government to make changes in favor of LGBTQ+ people. People who do not identify as female or male are now able to choose “third gender” on their passports and other government documents. The 2015 constitution also states that there can be no discrimination based on sexual orientation.
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