The sequel to all-time box office champion “Avatar” has been delayed again and will not be arriving in movie theaters as expected in 2018, director James Cameron has said.

Cameron told the Toronto Star that he was working on all four planned movie sequels simultaneously and had no firm release date for “Avatar 2.”

“Well 2018 is not happening. We haven’t announced a firm release date,” the Oscar-winning director told the newspaper in an interview published on Thursday, when asked about progress on “Avatar 2.” “What people have to understand is that this is a cadence of releases. So we’re not making ‘Avatar 2.’ We’re making ‘Avatar 2,’ 3, 4 and 5. It’s an epic undertaking.

“It took us four-and-a-half years to make one movie and now we’re making four. We’re full tilt boogie right now,” Cameron added.

The 2009 release of Twentieth Century Fox movie “Avatar,” a fantasy adventure set in the distant magical world of Pandora, smashed box office records, taking in an as yet unrivaled $2.8 billion worldwide.

The sequel was first set for a 2014 release and has been delayed at least three times since then.

Fox did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Cameron’s remarks.

Meanwhile, Disney this week gave fans a first glimpse of its Pandora theme park attraction that is due to open at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida in May.

The Pandora attraction features a Na’vi River Journey, floating mountains, luminescent plants, and an Avatar Flight of Passage ride – all inspired by the movie and its upcoming sequels, according to features on Disney-owned TV shows “Good Morning America” and “The View.”

Pandora, the World of Avatar is due to open within the park’s Animal Kingdom on May 27.
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Robert James Waller, whose best-selling, bittersweet 1992 romance novel “The Bridges of Madison County” was turned into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood and later into a soaring Broadway musical, has died in Texas, according to a longtime friend. He was 77.

 

Scott Cawelti, of Cedar Falls, Iowa, told The Associated Press that Waller died early Friday at his home in Fredericksburg, Texas. He had been fighting multiple myeloma, a form of cancer.

 

In “Bridges,” a literary phenomenon which Waller famously wrote in 11 days, the roving National Geographic photographer Robert Kincaid spends four days taking pictures of bridges and also romancing Francesca Johnson, a war bride from Italy married to a no-nonsense Iowa farmer. One famous line from the book reads: “The old dreams were good dreams; they didn’t work out but I’m glad I had them.”

 

Waller’s novel reached No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list and stayed on it for over three years, longer than any work of fiction since “The Robe,” a novel about Jesus’ crucifixion published in the early 1950s. The Eastwood-directed 1995 movie grossed $182 million worldwide.

 

Many critics made fun of “Bridges,” calling it sappy and cliche-ridden. The Independent newspaper said of the central romantic pair “it is hard to believe in, or to like, either of them.” (Publishers Weekly was more charitable, calling the book, “quietly powerful and thoroughly credible.”)

 

The New York Times was dismissive: “Waller depicts their mating dance in plodding detail, but he fails to develop them as believable characters,” reviewer Eils Lotozo wrote. “Instead, we get a lot of quasi-mystical business about the shaman-like photographer who overwhelms the shy, bookish Francesca with ‘his sheer emotional and physical power.'”

 

Readers, however, bought more than 12 million copies in 40 languages. “Bridges” turned the unknown writer into a multimillionaire and made Madison County, Iowa, an international tourist attraction.

 

“I really do have a small ego,” Waller told The New York Times in 2002. “I am open to rational discussion. If you don’t like the book and can say why, I am willing to listen. But the criticism turned to nastiness. … I was stunned.”

 

The novel prompted couples across the world to marry on Madison County’s covered bridges. Around the town of Winterset, population 4,200, tourists arrived by the busloads, buying “Bridges” T-shirts, perfume and postcards. Thousands signed in at the Chamber of Commerce office, where they could use restrooms marked “Roberts” and “Francescas.”

 

Waller told The Des Moines Register in 1992 that “Bridges” was “written” in his mind as he drove from Des Moines to Cedar Falls after photographing the covered bridges in Madison County.

 

“It’s something that’s difficult to explain,” he recounted. “As I drove home, it just came to me. I had some sort of Zen feeling, a high. When I got home, I threw my stuff on the floor and immediately started writing.”

 

The film version was greeted warmly by audiences and critics. The New York Times said that Eastwood had made “a moving, elegiac love story.” The New York Daily News said, “On that short shelf of classic movie romances ‘Seventh Heaven,’ ‘Brief Encounter,’ ‘An Affair to Remember’ you can now place ‘The Bridges of Madison County.'”

 

After the novel’s success, Waller left Iowa, where he had grown up, and moved to a ranch in Alpine, Texas, 50 miles from the nearest town. He also divorced his wife of 36 years, Georgia, with whom he had a daughter, and found a new partner in Linda Bow, who worked as a landscaper.

 

Waller grew up in Rockford, Iowa, and he was educated at the University of Northern Iowa and Indiana University, where he received his doctorate. He taught management, economics, and applied mathematics at the University of Northern Iowa from 1968 to 1991. Waller’s seven books include “Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend,” which unseated “Bridges” on the best-seller list, “Border Music,” “Puerto Vallarta Squeeze” and “A Thousand County Roads: An Epilogue to The Bridges of Madison County.”

 

The last, a sequel to his monster hit, was prompted by thousands of letters from people who wanted to know more about the characters. “Finally, I got curious and decided I’d find out – I wrote the book,” he told the AP in 2002.

 

A musical was made of “The Bridges of Madison County” in 2014 starring Kelli O’Hara and Steven Pasquale with a score by Jason Robert Brown, but it closed after just 137 performances on Broadway. A national tour kicked off in 2015.
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Archaeologists from Egypt and Germany have found a massive eight-meter statue submerged in ground water in a Cairo slum that they say probably depicts revered Pharaoh Ramses II, who ruled Egypt more than 3,000 years ago.

The discovery, hailed by the Antiquities Ministry as one of the most important ever, was made near the ruins of Ramses II’s temple in the ancient city of Heliopolis, located in the eastern part of modern-day Cairo.

“Last Tuesday they called me to announce the big discovery of a colossus of a king, most probably Ramses II, made out of quartzite,” Antiquities Minister Khaled al-Anani told Reuters on Thursday at the site of the statue’s unveiling.

The most powerful and celebrated ruler of ancient Egypt, the pharaoh also known as Ramses the Great was the third of the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt and ruled from 1279 to 1213 BCE. He led several military expeditions and expanded the Egyptian Empire to stretch from Syria in the east to Nubia in the south. His successors called him the “Great Ancestor.”

“We found the bust of the statue and the lower part of the head and now we removed the head and we found the crown and the right ear and a fragment of the right eye,” Anani said.

On Thursday, archaeologists, officials, local residents, and members of the news media looked on as a massive forklift pulled the statue’s head out of the water

The joint Egyptian-German expedition also found the upper part of a life-sized limestone statue of Pharaoh Seti II, Ramses II’s grandson, that is 80 centimeters long.

The sun temple in Heliopolis was founded by Ramses II, lending weight to the likelihood the statue is of him, archaeologists say.

It was one of the largest temples in Egypt, almost double the size of Luxor’s Karnak, but was destroyed in Greco-Roman times. Many of its obelisks were moved to Alexandria or to Europe and stones from the site were looted and used for building as Cairo developed.

Experts will now attempt to extract the remaining pieces of both statues before restoring them. If they are successful and the colossus is proven to depict Ramses II, it will be moved to the entrance of the Grand Egyptian Museum, set to open in 2018.

The discovery was made in the working class area of Matariya, among unfinished buildings and mud roads.

Dietrich Raue, head of the expedition’s German team, told Reuters that ancient Egyptians believed Heliopolis was the place where the sun god lives, meaning it was off-limits for any royal residences.

“The sun god created the world in Heliopolis, in Matariya. That’s what I always tell the people here when they say is there anything important. According to the pharaonic belief, the world was created in Matariya,” Raue said.

“That means everything had to be built here. Statues, temples, obelisks, everything. But … the king never lived in Matariya, because it was the sun god living here.”

The find could be a boon for Egypt’s tourism industry, which has suffered many setbacks since the uprising that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011 but remains a vital source of foreign currency. The number of tourists visiting Egypt slumped to 9.8 million in 2011 from more than 14.7 million in 2010.

A bomb attack that brought down a Russian plane carrying 224 people from a Red Sea resort in October 2015 further hit arrivals, which dropped to 1.2 million in the first quarter of 2016 from 2.2 million a year earlier.
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Since January of this year, thousands of school children in India’s northeastern state of Assam have pored over an illustrated story of how two young girls from a relief camp were lured by a man who told them of the good life they could lead in a big city, home to swanky buildings and flashy cars. It sounded attractive to the poor youngsters who could only visualize a bleak life ahead.

Fortunately spotted by a policeman as they waited for the man at a railway station to head to the city, the story goes on to relate what their future could have been like when they were sold to work as poorly paid domestic employees, sex workers or laborers.

The comic in the Assamese language aims to raise awareness among children about trafficking rings that lure young girls and boys from villages into India’s booming cities with the promise of good jobs.

The most vulnerable to human traffickers are states such as Assam, where a violent ethnic conflict has displaced many families, and the country’s poorer, underdeveloped states such as West Bengal, Telengana, and Andhra Pradesh.

As child rights campaigners stress prevention as key to addressing the problem, comic books have emerged as an effective tool to empower children to protect themselves in these areas. Children being sold accounted for nearly half of the human trafficking cases in India in 2015.

“There are more colors, more expressions, its an effective means of communication, especially for children,” says Miguel Queah at Assam-based non-profit Utsah, who wrote the story and helps organize reading sessions in vulnerable and displaced communities such as relief camps, children’s homes and government schools in Assam. “Children love reading the stories, discussing among their friends, we could see that response taking place” he says.

Orders to print more comics have gone out with the initial stock of 800 copies having run out and there is a proposal to incorporate it in school curriculums.

The non-profit My Choices Foundation began reaching out to rural communities a little over a year ago with its comic book, The Light of Safe Villages to educate children about threats such as trafficking and other social problems such as child marriage.

Hannah Norling who heads communications at the My Choices Foundation is confident that the colorful books and simple stories in local languages are effectively spreading the message of how traffickers trap young children. “We are in the right place,” she said.

It is distributed to students across more than 500 Indian villages.

She points out that while it is sometimes difficult to reach out to parents, who are busy working, children are more of a captive audience and the idea was to give them an illustrated book that could serve as a complete educational tool which they could share with their parents.

“We had to leave something behind that would be a long term reminder. If something happens a year from now, a physical frame of reference for them to revert back to ‘OK now what do I do?” said Norling.

One of the stories in the comic is of a guardian girl on a mission to save others and another of a vigilant boy.

Growing awareness among children has made them more alert to threats from traffickers and some have reported to village council or others if they noticed a friend missing, according to Norling. She said that helped in the rescue of three girls in the past year who had left their village.

The comic book initiative is among several efforts to prevent trafficking in rural areas. One of them by Save the Children spreads the message in local communities through children who have been rescued.

India honored a woman on Wednesday when 21-year-old Anoyara Khatun, who was trafficked from West Bengal state, received the “Women Power” award from the president for stopping hundreds of other children from being forced into labor or married off.

Khatun was brought to Delhi when she was 12 years old and forced to work as a house maid, but managed to escape after six months. With the help of child rights advocates, she returned home and is part of a network of children’s groups in 80 villages where young people are taught about their rights.

Manab Ray at Save the Children in New Delhi points out that once trafficking has happened, there is little that can be done to help the victims, so the key is to stop it in villages. And at the heart of the effort to engage local communities are the children themselves. “Children we found are the best informers, in terms of knowing the issues, because they face it themselves, they can have the natural ability of identifying the traffickers and all,” said Ray.
…

Driving through the ancient swamplands of the Big Cypress National Preserve in southern Florida made national parks traveler Mikah Meyer feel like he was in another world.

Ghostly landscape

“Because it was so early, it was super foggy,” he said. “We couldn’t see more than 20- 30 feet in front of us and it was just this ethereal, misty experience.”

“At one point we came up against a controlled burn site, so you have these tall trees that were green at the top but then underneath, everything was charred and… it was straight out of a Star Wars movie…I was just waiting for the Ewoks to appear!”

 

Mikah – who’s on a mission to visit all of the more than 400 National Park sites – had just been to Florida’s famous Everglades National Park, so it was natural for him to want to visit the neighboring preserve. “It was on the same road as I took to go to the Everglades — Highway 41. The Everglades was on the south side; the Big Cypress National Preserve on the right side.”

Western Everglades

“A far less popular park than the Everglades, Big Cypress is a lot more wild,” Mikah noted. The huge cypress swamp, most of which is in Big Cypress National Preserve, is dominated by bald cypress trees that grow in water, which create surreal scenes that are enhanced by fog and smoke.

His guide, Ozzie Gonzalez from Everglades Nature Tours, drove Mikah and his travel companion, Andy Waldron, through the ghostly environment on a swamp buggy, a vehicle that’s specially designed to navigate the area’s rough and muddy terrain. “It had these monster truck wheels that were only four-pounds pressure, and that’s basically because you’re going over so many rocks and so many holes that it’s needed to be light pressure so that the vehicle doesn’t break,” Mikah explained.

Big Cypress was actually the first national preserve in the National Park Service, established in 1974. It owes that distinction to a massive community effort. “It was both industry and conservationists, along with hunters and Native people who use this land for their own recreational purposes,” Mikah noted, “so it was a real group effort to make sure that it remained in ways that helped everybody.”

Freshwater to the sea

The primary reason the preserve was created was to protect its freshwater’s natural flow into the neighboring Everglades and Ten Thousand Islands, and help support the rich marine estuaries along Florida’s southwest coast.

“It helps protect the watershed,” Mikah said. “So the water that comes down from Lake Okeechobee, today only 25% of it flows to the Everglades as it did historically. So by having the preserve north of the Everglades, it helps protect the water that comes down into the Everglades…and is the drinking water for half of the people that live in Florida – so over 10 million people — so that’s important.”

Plentiful pythons

Protecting nearly 300,000 hectares of this vast swamp, Big Cypress National Preserve comprises a combination of tropical and temperate plant communities that are home to a diversity of wildlife. That includes the elusive Florida panther, and in more recent years, Burmese pythons, one of the largest snake species on Earth.

The invasive snakes have been turning up in and around Big Cypress National Preserve and are now known to be breeding in the preserve and spreading throughout south Florida.

Mikah said that back in the ‘70s, having exotic pets was a trend. “People would purchase pythons as little, one-foot long baby snakes, which would eventually grow to over 10 feet and you’d have to feed them a pig a week…so all these people were just taking them to the Everglades and Big Cypress and dumping them in nature.”

Now they’ve reproduced, “and have basically taken over the place to the point that some naturalists think there will come a point when they will have eaten all of the other species and at that point they’ll start to cannibalize each other,” he said.

Big Cypress National Preserve is working with other government agencies to control the growing Burmese python population and address other invasive species. On its website, the National Park Service notes that the reptiles “serve as a painful reminder of just how dangerous invasive species can be.”

Stepping back in time

About 130 kilometers west of Miami, far from the bright lights and bustle of city life, the national parks and preserved spaces in south Florida — and the wildlife they support — are also a reminder of what protection can offer… a chance for visitors from around the world to explore a special and fragile place that remains untouched by civilization.

“It was so interesting to be in south Florida because I think when we hear south Florida, we just think of nightclubs on Miami Beach,” Mikah said. “But in reality, the vast majority of the land is made up of Everglades National Park and the Big Cypress National Preserve and so it’s important to remember that these two National Park Service sites represent what Florida looked like before human interaction.

“So if you want to step back in time, this is a place you can do it.”

Mikah invites you to learn more about his travels in Florida and all across America by visiting his website, Facebook and Instagram.
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Senior citizens who move to Charlestown Retirement Community in Catonsville, Maryland, have a chance to start new careers in television. No matter what they did before retiring, they’re encouraged to participate in creating a range of programs broadcast on channel 972, a closed circuit 24-hour TV station. Faiza Elmasry has the story. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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Before leaving her home each day to teach art to children, Mariluce Maria de Souza must factor in extra time to account for the shootings and other eruptions of violence that occur daily in Alemao, Rio de Janeiro’s largest complex of slums, or favelas.

The 35-year-old mother sometimes has to cancel a session teaching painting to children because the journey to class is just too dangerous. Through the project called Favela Art, the self-taught artist requires that her students attend school and study hard in return.

Souza has become an example of empowerment for girls and women in the slum, who often face domestic violence and workplace discrimination.

“Sometimes the mothers, who are mother and father at the same time, don’t have the time to give the kind of attention that five, six or seven children need,” Souza said.

Like many Latin American countries, Brazil has deep problems with gender-specific violence. The Brazilian nonprofit Mapa da Violencia says nearly five in 100,000 women are killed each year, giving the country one of the world’s highest homicide rates for women.

The situation is even worse for black women, many of whom live in slums. Between 2003 and 2013, the annual number homicides of black women jumped 54 percent, according to Mapa da Violencia.

“We use the graffiti to demand the end of violence against women,” said Maiara Viana Rodrigues, a 25-year-old who said that as a teen she was sexually abused by a man in her neighborhood.

To make her point, the member of Afrograffitteiras, a group working to empower black women, on one recent afternoon painted graffiti exhorting: “Viva! You, Woman!” on a wall in a Rio suburb.

Along with rejecting physical violence, the female artists say they also want to shine a light on psychological abuse, unequal access to education and health care, and less pay for women doing the same job as men. 

Lya Alves, who recently painted a mural of a black woman on a wall in Rio’s renovated port area, says feminism has lost much of its meaning since the 1970s, when women fought against being considered sexual objects.

“Nowadays the media promotes” the sexual objectification of women, she said. “Is that helping to obtain a better education, a better salary?”
…

Lagos has long been known as Nigeria’s pop culture hub. It’s the home of Nigeria’s film industry, Nollywood, as well as many of the country’s top musicians and artists.

But a group of rappers and fashion designers is creating a scene of their own in Kaduna, in northern Nigeria, some 600 kilometers from Lagos. Kaduna’s is the new center of Nigeria’s growing hip-hop culture.

 

DJ Jakes Tudu is cranking out jams on his weekly radio show, playing the latest tunes from local rap artists.

 

Hip-hop music has taken over Nigeria’s pop music scene. Rappers like Morell, DJ AB, Kheengz, and Classiq are part of a new generation of rappers. They hail from Kaduna and they’re trying to put their city on the music map.  

 

On the surface, Kaduna is a quiet conservative city. But there’s another side of it. Here, music artists like Kevin Words are becoming local celebrities. DJ Jakes is a huge fan of Words.

“Stepping into the Kaduna music industry you have to listen to the likes of Kevin Words because a lot of people out there have this stereotype or this mindset that Kaduna artists or the Kaduna industry is full of mediocres, but when you hear people like Kevin Words, trust me, you want to sit up,” DJ Jakes says.

Ibrahim Ilyia, 28, is another rapper from the streets of Kaduna. He goes by the stage name IBI. One of his most recent hit songs, Alhamdulillah, fuses the local Hausa slang with American hip-hop style.  

 

“When I was young I used to listen to rap a lot and I fell in love with rap music and right now I do rap music because I love it,” Ilyia says.

Most rappers in Nigeria, Ilyia says, end up going to Lagos to make it but Lagos, in his opinion, is passe.

 

“I’m not actually against people going to Lagos, but if Kaduna people can just build themselves alone, reach a certain level, I mean Lagos is nothing. We’ll counter them.”

So, he works hard, putting pen to paper to write rhymes and trying out new lyrics with sample beats. He’s good at free-styling, too.

 

The music is just one part of hip-hop culture. Fashion is also important. Kaduna is fertile ground for young ambitious designers.

Hussena Raji is the CEO of Mummy’s Fashun. Her clothes are an edgy blend of urban and African.

“I decided to blend hip-hop because that’s what’s selling in the market. Almost everybody wants to wear and feel like it. So we try as much as possible to make everything look it,” says Raji.

Patrick Yamai, 24, is another designer combining different looks with his fashion label YKP Clothing.

 

‘I just felt there was a space in the fashion line that had been neglected. It’s either fully African or it’s fully English, or fully corporate, but I had this dream of fusing the two. Something you can wear to the club and still wear to the office. So I tried to fuse African and urban together to see if it can go and the reception has been wonderful. We’re doing clothes that are African but you can wear it with a sneaker and still look cool, that’s what we’re trying to do,” he said.

   

Yamai is an accounting graduate while DJ Jakes studied architecture in school. But they each found their calling in this local scene.
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Today, woman around the world are celebrating International Women’s Day.  U.N. agencies are calling for greater efforts to ensure gender equality and end hunger and poverty.
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You may not particularly recall Nov. 16, but Broadway actor Michael Luwoye will never forget it.

It was a Wednesday and he certainly earned his salary that day. Luwoye played the title role in the mega-hit musical “Hamilton” at the matinee and then suited up a few hours later to play Aaron Burr that evening.

“I knew that this would happen, at some point. I was prepped and a little excited to do that. So it was one of those moments of just, ‘Let’s just go!'” he said. “It was much more exhilarating than I’d imagined it would be.”

Luwoye is the first person to play both pivotal roles on the same day, and audiences across the country will soon be getting a chance to see why he was entrusted with the responsibilities.

The 26-year-old Alabama native stars as Alexander Hamilton in the “Hamilton” national tour, which kicks off this month with a 21-week stand in San Francisco, followed by a 21-week engagement in Los Angeles.

“It’s incredible how much people love this show and they haven’t seen it. So it warms my heart to know that more people will be able to see it with this tour,” Luwoye said.

Luwoye is the fifth actor to play Hamilton and promises a strong take on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s striving Founding Father. “My Hamilton is pretty gritty. I feel like that fire that Hamilton has, I feel like I capture that very well,” he said.

Thomas Kail, the Tony Award-winning director of “Hamilton,” said he watched and listened to Luwoye audition for Hamilton with a memorable take on the striving song “My Shot.”

“It was one of those moments when you sit up straight in your chair and you know that you are witnessing something,” said Kail. “We throw a lot of material at people when we’re auditioning and there are certain people who rise to meet that. And he just rose to meet it.”

Miranda’s multiple award-winning take on the nation’s first U.S. treasury secretary has a varied score, ranging from pop ballads to rap battles to sexy R&B. It has been cheered for reclaiming the nation’s founding story with a multicultural cast.

Luwoye, born and raised in Huntsville, Alabama, went to the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa and decided to make performing a career as a junior in college. His credits include playing a Ugandan dreamer in off-Broadway’s “Invisible Thread” and Peter Tosh in a bio-musical of Bob Marley in Maryland.

When “Hamilton” was first being created downtown, he initially auditioned for the dual roles of Hercules Mulligan/James Madison. He didn’t get it – the roles went to Okieriete Onaodowan – but Luwoye kept auditioning, learning new characters and eventually impressing with his Hamilton and Burr.

Luwoye got the call that he’d won the part of the Hamilton alternate on Broadway when he was working as a caterer. “I was in the middle of putting on my tuxedo,” he said. “Once I hung up the phone, I was like, ‘I have a lot of words to learn.'”

Then came that pivotal winter day when on the same day he played both the chatty, workaholic Hamilton and his political nemesis, the sly and careful Burr, which he considers a harder part. Luwoye said doing both made the show more clear.

“Hamilton and Burr onstage mirror each other,” he said. “Hamilton gets to express a lot more and is very, very fast – that fire is lit under him and he just goes. Burr has the same drive but has to do it a lot slower. The story is not about him. He’s telling the story and so his moments are not the priority in the storytelling.”

Luwoye has packed up his Brooklyn apartment and flown to San Francisco where company members include Joshua Henry as Burr and Rory O’Malley as King George III. “I don’t really have words for this, to be very honest,” he said.

One thing is certain: His catering days are done.

“I think so,” he said with a smile. “I think so.”
…

A lawyer for Scarlett Johansson’s husband Romain Dauriac says he’s “shocked” that the star filed for divorce.

 

Johansson’s filing in a New York City court on Tuesday states that her marriage to Dauriac is “irretrievably broken.” The move follows a January announcement that the couple split last summer after less than two years of marriage.

 

Johansson asks for joint custody of the couple’s toddler daughter in the filing, but also wants the child to live with her. Dauriac’s lawyer, Hal Mayerson, says he’s taken aback by the request because he has been the “primary parent” for Rose while Johansson has been involved with her career.

 

Johansson’s representatives and attorneys didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

 

Johansson was previously wed to actor Ryan Reynolds from 2008 to 2011.

 
…

Jackie Chan says letting more Hollywood movies into the Chinese market would pressure Chinese filmmakers to make better films.

China sets a quota on the number of foreign movies allowed to be shown in the country, trying to fend off a cinematic wave that could swamp local filmmakers and loosen the ruling Communist Party’s grip on culture.

However, competition can be good, Chan said.

“It is this pressure that makes our filmmakers work harder and shoot better films,” Chan told reporters at a news conference in Beijing on Tuesday. “If we had shot our own films behind closed doors without any competition, we wouldn’t have had the growth in box office we have today.”

The Hong Kong action star is a member of the official advisory body to the national legislature, which is meeting this week in the Chinese capital.

Negotiators from China and the U.S. are expected to reach a new agreement this year on how many foreign films to allow into China, now the world’s the second-biggest movie market after North America. An expanded quota would mean more competition for domestic films, which last year accounted for 58 percent of the total box office, or 26.7 billion yuan ($3.8 billion).

In 2012, then-Vice President Xi Jinping and then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden negotiated a five-year deal to allow 34 foreign films to be shown in Chinese cinemas each year on a revenue-sharing basis. State media reports have suggested that a new deal could see the quota increased by 10 films or more.

In addition to the quota, a handful of extra Hollywood movies were let in last year to try to boost a disappointing slowdown in box office receipts.  

Apart from expanding the quota, Hollywood executives hope to increase their share of ticket sales in China from the current 25 percent. They receive 40 percent of ticket revenues in other markets.

It’s unclear how much effort President Donald Trump’s administration will put into promoting Hollywood’s interests in China. Trump has been criticized by various Hollywood stars and fired off his own insults at others.
…

Two of the most celebrated actors of their generation, Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, will star together for the first time in new Steven Spielberg political drama “The Post,” according to Hollywood trade magazine Variety.

The film will focus on the Washington Post’s publication of the 1971 Pentagon Papers, which made headlines around the world when the newspaper’s editor and publisher challenged the U.S. federal government over their right to publish them.

Twice Oscar winner Hanks will play the editor, Ben Bradlee, while triple Oscar winner Streep will take on the role of the publisher, Kay Graham, according to Variety.

No dates for filming were revealed in the report, with award-laden director Spielberg currently in post-production on science-fiction action movie, “Ready Player One,” which is due to hit theaters in March 2018.

Streep was branded an “overrated actress” by U.S. President Donald Trump after she criticized him for belittling a disabled journalist at the Golden Globes in January.
…

Africa’s largest film festival, Fespaco, recently celebrated its 25th edition. The main venue, as always, was the old and respectable Cine Burkina, in the heart of the capital Ouagadougou. The city used to have at least nine dedicated cinemas — now only two remain.

It is a picture that is repeated across the continent.

In Senegal, don’t go looking for the Cinema de Paris, the old film temple at the Place de l’Independence in downtown Dakar. It’s gone. It was knocked down in 2011, and the hole it left behind was filled with hotels and office blocks.

And in the Cameroonian capital Yaounde, the number of cinemas is …

“Zero. In Yaounde, we’re three million [people] but we don’t have a single functioning cinema,” said Cameroonian culture journalist Parfait Tabapsi.

The arrival of DVDs and the failure of the big cinemas to go digital are two of the reasons for the demise in West Africa.

People can watch the latest Hollywood flicks — often pirated, of course — for a pittance on TVs at little neighborhood viewing spots, but try to find any African films, besides perhaps a bit of Nollywood, and you will be disappointed.

Changing that is at the heart of Tabapsi’s work in Cameroon with an organization called Mobile Digital Cinema.

“Our aim is to bring movies to the places where they cannot go,” he said. “Because there’s no communication means, there’s no electricity, the roads are bad. … But people need to see artists and directors that tell the story of Africa. So we buy the film rights and screen the films for free.”

And now, belatedly, the old-fashioned cinema is catching up.

Fespaco joined the digital age two editions ago, when it announced that directors were no longer required to deliver their films in the expensive and cumbersome 33-mm format.

It’s a shift that can also be seen elsewhere in the industry.

Young Ivorian film director and actress Kadhy Toure has proven that home-grown movies can be made, and can make money.

Her film, L’Interprete, is the biggest box office hit in Ivorian history.

“In Ivory Coast, we only have one big company that has three cinemas,” Toure said. “They were blown away. They kept asking me: How did you do it? This is the first time that they see a line of people just wanting to see an African film.”

The film is about the many twists and turns in the love life of an Abidjan woman who works as an interpreter. It’s a story, Toure says, about us — and that’s why people queue around the block to see it.

Toure says a sequel is on the way. Elsewhere, her fellow African directors are working equally hard to have their films shown — in their countries.

The award-winning Chadian Mahamat-Saleh Haroun single-handedly revived Le Normandie, in the capital N’Djamena. And in Burkina Faso, another mythical cinema, Guimbi, in the country’s second-largest city of Bobo Dioulasso, is under reconstruction, according to the project’s spokeswoman Rosalie Zida.

Reconstruction of the cinema — the only one in the city — started in mid-2015 and is the initiative of local filmmakers, along with the help of friends in Belgium and France. One hall will open later this year, Zida says, and the full complex will be finished in 2018.

And, in Ouagadougou, this year’s Fespaco coincided with the opening of a new screening venue, the Canal Olympia. It is part of a series of multifunctional cultural venues owned by the French chain Canal+ and already present in Conakry, Guinea.

So what is the takeaway, as Fespaco goes into its habitual two-year slumber? That mostly private initiatives are helping to resurrect African cinema, and that this applies to the buildings and to what is shown on the big screens. Produce it — and they will come.
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IOC member Frank Fredericks has stepped down from his role overseeing the 2024 Olympic bidding process after a $300,000 payment from a banned track official was revealed.

Fredericks says “Paris and Los Angeles are presenting two fantastic candidatures and I do not wish to become a distraction.”

The Namibian sprinter, a four-time Olympic silver medalist, says stepping aside as IOC evaluation chairman is “in the best interests” of the bidding process.

Fredericks would have led an April 23-25 visit to Los Angeles.

He also will skip the September hosting vote.

Last Friday, Fredericks said he contacted the IOC Ethics Commission ahead of French daily Le Monde reporting that a company linked to him was paid $299,300 on Oct. 2, 2009, the day Rio de Janeiro won 2016 Olympic hosting rights.

Fredericks denies wrongdoing.
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The Oklahoma City bombing nearly 22 years ago was an act of domestic terror by U.S. military veteran Timothy McVeigh and his accomplice, Terry Nichols. The bombing destroyed one third of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, killing 168 people and injuring 680 others. In his documentary, Oklahoma City, filmmaker Barak Goodman revisits the bombing as the first major domestic terrorist attack in the United States on April 19, 1995.

It was the number of civilians killed – especially the 15 children, four of them infants, crushed inside the building’s day care center – that made this terrorist attack by a massive fertilizer bomb so heinous for many Americans. Many films have recounted the story, but Goodman’s documentary treats the Oklahoma City bombing as a springboard to examine the roots of America’s ultra-right militia and to analyze the makeup of homegrown American terrorism.

History of suspicion

“It goes all the way back to the founding of the Republic,” the filmmaker told VOA. “The Republic was founded on the suspicion of government.” Goodman says many of these extreme separatists believe in white supremacy and in unregulated freedom to keep and bear arms so that they can protect themselves from outsiders and the government.

In the documentary, former militia member Kerry Noble explains the ideology. “The government is an enemy of the people, and in this war it’s an all or nothing. We’re either gonna win as the white race or we’re gonna lose.”  

Oklahoma City points to two events in the late 20th century that bolstered separatist ideologies: The Ruby Ridge incident on August 21, 1992, and the Waco siege in Waco, Texas, between February 28 and April 19, 1993. In both cases, federal and local government agents clashed with American separatists. The deadly incidents were fueled by the authorities’ demand to search the premises for illegal firearms.

The Waco siege was particularly deadly. The compound belonged to a group known as the Branch Davidians, led by David Koresh. When federal authorities sent in armed agents and armored vehicles to end the standoff, a fire engulfed the compound, killing 82 people, including David Koresh. Sixty-two of the victims were women and children.

Birth of an extremist

Timothy McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran disillusioned by the government during his tour in Iraq, was among those who went to witness the siege.  According to the documentary, McVeigh was radicalized by those events and by an extremist publication called The Turner Diaries.

“It’s a Talisman for the far right, even to this day, but especially back in the ’90s and ’80s it was the ‘Bible’ of this movement,” says Goodman. “It’s a novel about a small group of ‘patriots,’ ‘white patriots’ who retake the government from the Jews and blacks who have infiltrated it, essentially. It’s a racist creed and as I said, it is very poorly done. Intriguingly though, it describes the bombing of the FBI, the culmination of the novel, and it really lays out a recipe on how to build a bomb like this.”

That bomb is very similar to the one McVeigh used in Oklahoma City.

“McVeigh was deeply, deeply influenced by this book,” Goodman adds. “He sold it in gun shows, he quoted it, when he was arrested he had several pages of it in a folder beside him in a car. And it wasn’t just McVeigh, it was all through this movement. People were really exorcised, impassioned, inflamed by this novel.”

The documentary shows McVeigh obsessed with his guns and with the idea that the government was going to take them away. The film also points out that his exposure to the war in Iraq accelerated his feeling of mistrust of the U.S. government. 

“The way he put it made it sound he was emphatic towards the dead Iraqi soldiers that he killed. I really don’t think that’s the case,” says Barak Goodman. Instead, says the filmmaker, it was McVeigh’s mistrust of the U.S. government, how it had blundered into Iraq and his idea of the U.S. government as a bully, and McVeigh, says Goodman, hated bullies. The Ruby Ridge and Waco stand-offs reinforced that idea in his mind.

Homegrown extremism

According to the documentary, there are 500 militia organizations in the U.S. today. Goodman believes they are as radicalized as ever.  “Some of them have gotten rid of their camouflage outfits and put on suits and ties, but really the rhetoric has been virtually the same for 100 years or more. ‘It’s a whites-only country, it should be a whites-only country, the federal government is in the hands of Jews, blacks, it’s a conspiracy.’”

Goodman says it is a misconception to believe that this is a movement of white poor disenfranchised people. Certainly, he says, many are, but there also many professionals feeling a loss of entitlement, a loss of privilege and power. The filmmaker stresses that these people operate outside political parties and share a deep mistrust of the Washington political establishment.

But Goodman cautions these extremists are not de facto terrorists. He says it takes a confluence of opportunity and a warped personality, often a lone individual, to commit a terrorist act of a scale such as the Oklahoma City bombing.

“McVeigh was a shock to most people in the FBI. It would be less of a shock today. But it’s very hard to prevent these things. One of the takeaways from our film and audiences who have seen it have been amazed at how really easy it was to do this. It cost about $6000, it was one guy, reading some literature,” says the filmmaker.

Goodman says in a politically polarized America, the possibility for future domestic terrorist attacks is high. 

“If you talk to people from the Southern Law Poverty Center, which tracks these groups, they are pounding on the wall, they are ringing the bell, they are saying, ‘This is an ongoing threat, it’s threat level midnight, it’s rising, it’s whatever the highest color is on the chart,’” he says.

The SPLC reports, “the number of hate groups in the United States rose for a second year in a row in 2016 as the radical right was energized by the candidacy of Donald Trump.” “The most dramatic growth,” it states, “was the near-tripling of anti-Muslim hate groups – from 34 in 2015 to 101 last year.” Also, a wave of bomb threats and vandalism has rattled Jewish institutions around the country, but especially in the South.  “Right now, minorities feel particularly threatened,” says the Oklahoma City filmmaker.

“There is a very big difference between even hard gun rights activists and terrorists. I want to make that clear,” says Goodman. “I would take issue with the idea that they have infiltrated the administration. But it is a little galling to see the really mono focus on terrorists from abroad, terrorists influenced by ideas from abroad, whatever those ideas might be, and not on any real discussion about home-grown terrorism which has always been with us and which is not going away and which is actually — if you look at the numbers of the incidents — rivaling or exceeding those by that other group,” he adds.

Goodman hopes his film, Oklahoma City, will call attention to this rising threat and contribute to the conversation on the inherent dangers of domestic terrorism.
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Actor Alec Baldwin said that his impersonation of U.S. President Donald Trump on NBC’s sketch show “Saturday Night Live” has revived his “dead” comedy career after he wrapped up sitcom “30 Rock” in 2012.

“I didn’t realize in the comedy terms that I was dead,” Baldwin told Reuters on Monday when asked if he felt he was entering a new era with his comedy.

“Maybe I was in a coma … now I’m waking up from a coma and now I’m ready to do some comedy.”

The actor was promoting his latest film, DreamWorks’ animated comedy “The Boss Baby,” out in theaters on March 31, in which he voices a suit-wearing baby manager of a corporation for babies who is adopted by a family to undertake a covert mission.

It has been nearly five years since Baldwin, 58, concluded his six-year tenure as the charming corporate boss Jack Donaghy in NBC’s quirky comedy series “30 Rock.”

Since then, he has appeared in a handful of movies in supporting roles, but the actor saw a new surge in popularity when he took over as Trump on “Saturday Night Live” (SNL) last October, ahead of November’s U.S. presidential elections.

Baldwin quipped that his comedy career “did die” but that “I’m being reincarnated. As Trump! Oh God!”

Viewer ratings have soared for “Saturday Night Live” since Baldwin started portraying Trump in a series of skits mocking the billionaire reality TV star-turned-politician as a dim-witted commander-in-chief with a short attention span, an oversized-ego and a Twitter addiction.

Trump criticized the NBC show in December, calling it “totally unwatchable” and a “hit-job.”

Asked whether he felt playing the president took a toll on him, Baldwin said the challenge of the role was that it would “delight some people and offend other people.”

“A large plurality of the country voted for Trump as president, and I think many of them are people that are not fond of the way Trump is treated, not just by ‘Saturday Night Live’ but the comedy cosmos in general,” he said.

“I think for me playing Trump has been, it’s been a fun experience because it’s like going home when I do SNL.”

 
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Pop star George Michael died from natural causes, according to a British coroner.

Specifically, the singer died of “dilated cardiomyopathy with myocarditis and fatty liver,” according to Darren Salter senior coroner for Oxfordshire, where Michael died last Christmas at the age of 53.

The heart conditions named interfere with the heart’s ability to pump blood and cause inflammation of the heart muscle.

Since Michael died of natural causes, there will be no investigation.

Michael had a long history of drug and alcohol abuse.

Born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, he once played music on the London underground train system before forming Wham! with Andrew Ridgeley in 1981.

Michael enjoyed immense popularity early in his career as a member of Wham! with hits such as “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” and “Careless Whisper.”

As a solo artist, he developed into a more serious singer and songwriter, lauded by critics for his tremendous vocal range. Some of his solo hits included “Father Figure” and “Freedom.”

In 2011, Michael postponed a series of concerts after being hospitalized with pneumonia. He later said it had been “touch and go” as to whether he lived.

Michael disclosed he was gay in 1998 after being arrested in a public toilet in Beverly Hills, California for engaging in a lewd act.
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For generations, the circus meant big entertainment – elephants, lion tamers, dancing bears, high-wire acts. But times, and tastes, have changed. In May, after nearly a century and a half, the Ringling Brothers/Barnum and Bailey Circus – “the greatest show on earth” – will close.

But circuses are alive and well, largely without the ringmasters and exotic animals. Instead, they use a combination of music, amazing acrobatics and story-telling to transfix their audiences.

“Circus artists have been producing new and incredible circus acts and apparatuses and shows that have an artistic context and theatrical storylines, or well-drawn characters,” Adam Woolley notes. “And this has been happening around the world for the past 10, 15 years or so.”

Woolley runs Circus Now, a non-profit organization which supports and promotes contemporary circus arts, which combine traditional circus skills, like acrobatics, juggling and trapeze, with theatrical techniques to tell a story.

 

Cutting-edge entertainment

Here in the U.S., smaller traditional troupes, like the Kelly Miller Circus, still pitch their tents across the country.  But Woolley says there are more experimental companies that are pushing the art form, and those are the ones Circus Now works with.  

“Audiences or families who might not be interested to go see, you know, some very avant garde modern dance, will still go see the circus.  You know, people who would prefer to watch movies or television than go see a play, will probably still come see the circus.”

Circus Now’s festival in New York this month featured the Race Horse Company from Finland. Acrobat Rauli Kosonen formed it with a couple of other performers nine years ago, because he says there’s something unique about circus.

“I think it’s really pure art form, in the sense that you can really feel the risks – there’s a lot of risks, so you can get a lot of adrenaline, while you watch it, if there is kind of tricks that make your heart bounce.  Because it’s real.  They can see if they make a mistake, they might get hurt.  So, I guess that’s always been why circus is appealing.  It reminds us that, uh, we’re humans.”  

And Kosonen – whose specialty is trampoline – has the broken bones to prove it. 

“Well, I had three operations,” he admits, adding ruefully, “it’s part of the job; sometimes you don’t get lucky.”  

New York’s Only Child Aerial Theatre also performed during the festival. Kendall Ridleigh, one of the troupe’s founders, says they shy away from calling themselves a circus.

“Just because there is the implication that the skills or the spectacle is sort of paramount, rather than the narrative.  And we really have tried to keep the narrative the most important element and have the skills really drive and support the narrative.”

In a former factory in Brooklyn, Only Child is rehearsing its latest show, Asylum.  It’s set in a mental institution in the 1970s.  There’s a story, but there’s no spoken dialogue, says co-founder Nicki Miller.

“We would describe it as a theater piece that includes a lot of aerial work, dance, some recorded music, some live music and overhead projection and shadow.  So, the story is told, rather than through dialogue, through the conversation of those theatrical vocabularies, instead,” Miller said. 

So, even as the performers do aerial tricks, they’re dressed like mental patients, doctors and nurses, says Rileigh. There are no sparkles or spandex. But, they’re still doing stuff high off the ground…without a net.  

A big tent for big stories

Circus Now’s Adam Woolley says contemporary circus companies, even with their different skill sets and artistic approaches, all fall under what can only be called the “big tent” of what circus can be.  

He says they share the belief that with lots of practice and hard work, they can accomplish the impossible.

“That’s the core idea that everyone in circus believes in and everyone in circus tries to impart to the audiences – that ‘I have dedicated my life to this seven minutes of performance and honed my skill to the place where  I’m going to accomplish something in front of you now that you did not think could be done.’” 

And that’s what still thrills audiences.
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