This year’s Venice Film Festival will include a crime comedy by George Clooney, a Guillermo del Toro fantasy and a Darren Aronofsky thriller.

Organizers of the world’s oldest film festival announced a 21-film competition lineup Thursday that features the Clooney-directed “Suburbicon,” the story of a home invasion gone wrong that stars Matt Damon and Julianne Moore, with a script by Joel and Ethan Coen.

Venice’s late-summer time slot — starting a few days ahead of the Toronto festival — has made it a major awards-season springboard. In recent years it has presented the world premieres of major Oscar winners including “Spotlight” and “La La Land.”

This year’s contenders for Venice’s top Golden Lion award include del Toro’s “The Shape of Water,” starring Sally Hawkins as a woman who forges a relationship with a sea creature, and Aronofsky’s secrecy-shrouded “Mother!” starring Jennifer Lawrence.

The 74th Venice festival opens Aug. 30 in the canal-crossed Italian city with Alexander Payne’s “Downsizing,” about a man — Damon again — who decides to shrink himself. It closes Sept. 9 with Takeshi Kitano’s gangster thriller “Outrage Coda.”

The winner of the Golden Lion and other prizes will be decided by a jury led this year by actress Annette Bening.

Films in competition include “Human Flow,” a documentary about migration by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei; “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” by Ireland’s auteur of tragicomedy, Martin McDonagh; “The Third Murder,” by Japan’s Hirokazu Koreeda; and “Mektour, My Love: Canto Uno” by French-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche, director of the Cannes winner “Blue is the Warmest Color.”

Competing directors are drawn from around the globe, with films from Australia’s Warwick Thornton (“Sweet Country”), Israel’s Samuel Maoz (“Foxtrot”), and Lebanon’s Ziad Doueiri (“The Insult”). But only one director among the 21 is a woman — China’s Vivian Qu, whose “Angels Wear White” centers on two girls assaulted by a man in a small seaside town.

Outside the main competition, high-interest entries include Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s “Loving Pablo,” starring Javier Bardem as Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar, and Stephen Frears’ reality-based historical drama “Victoria & Abdul,” with Judi Dench as Britain’s Queen Victoria and Ai Fazal as her Indian servant Abdul Karim.

The streaming service Netflix, which has shaken up the business of making and distributing movies, will debut the miniseries “Our Souls at Night,” a late-life romance starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda.

 
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A jury on Wednesday found that Michael Jackson’s estate owes Quincy Jones $9.4 million in royalties and production fees from “Billie Jean,” “Thriller” and more of the superstar’s biggest hits.

The award from a Los Angeles Superior Court jury fell short of the $30 million the legendary producer sought in the lawsuit filed nearly four years ago, but well above the approximately $392,000 the Jackson estate contended Jones was owed.

The jury of 10 women and two men had been deliberating since Monday.

“This lawsuit was never about Michael, it was about protecting the integrity of the work we all did in the recording studio and the legacy of what we created,” Jones wrote in a statement. “Although this [judgment] is not the full amount that I was seeking, I am very grateful that the jury decided in our favor in this matter. I view it not only as a victory for myself personally, but for artists’ rights overall.”

Estate attorney Howard Weitzman said he and his team were surprised by the verdict and would appeal it.

Weitzman and co-counsel Zia Modabber wrote in a statement that Jones was seeking money that wasn’t owed to him.

“Any amount above and beyond what is called for in his contracts is too much and unfair to Michael’s heirs,” the lawyers said. “Although Mr. Jones is portraying this is a victory for artists’ rights, the real artist is Michael Jackson and it is his money Mr. Jones is seeking.”

Jones claimed in the lawsuit that Jackson’s estate and Sony Music Entertainment owed him for music he had produced that was used in the concert film “This Is It” and two Cirque du Soleil shows that used Jackson’s songs.

The lawsuit said the entities had improperly re-edited the songs to deprive Jones of royalties and production fees, and that he had a contractual right to take first crack at any re-edit or remix.

The Jackson camp held that Jones should only be paid licensing fees for songs used in those three productions. Jones claimed he was entitled to a share of the overall receipts from them.

The trial centered on the definitions of terms in the two contracts Jackson and Jones signed in 1978 and 1985.

Under the deals, for example, Jones is entitled to a share of net receipts from a “videoshow” of the songs. The Jackson attorneys argued that the term was meant to apply to music videos and not feature films.

Jury foreman Duy Nguyen, 28, said the contracts were the strongest pieces of evidence the jury considered, and said hearing Jones’ testimony was also helpful.

He said he and many members of the jury are Jackson fans, but that didn’t factor into the deliberations. He said the verdict amount was a compromise figure based on an expert’s testimony.

Jones took the stand during the trial, and was asked by Jackson estate attorney Howard Weitzman whether he realized he was essentially suing Jackson himself.

Jones angrily disagreed.

“I’m not suing Michael,” he said. “I’m suing you all.”

The defense attorneys pointed out that Jackson’s death in 2009 has already been lucrative for Jones, who made $8 million from his share of their works in the two years after the singer’s death, versus $3 million in the two years previous.

“You don’t deserve a raise,” Weitzman said during closing arguments. “You can’t have any more of Michael Jackson’s money.”

Jones insisted he was seeking his due for the work he has done rather than merely seeking money.

His attorney Scott Cole accused the defense of using “word games and loopholes” to deny Jones, the Hollywood Reporter said.

The producer worked with Jackson on the three-album run widely considered the performer’s prime: “Off the Wall,” “Thriller” and “Bad.”

Jackson’s hits from those albums including “Billie Jean,” “Thriller” and “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” are among the songs Jones claims were re-edited.

The lawsuit initially set the amount Jones sought at least $10 million, but his attorneys later arrived at $30 million after an accounting of the estate’s profits from the works.

Jones and Jackson proved to be a perfect partnership starting with 1979’s “Off the Wall.” Jackson gave a youthful pop vitality to Jones, who was known primarily as a producer and arranger of jazz and film soundtracks. And Jones lent experience and gravitas to Jackson, who was still best known to most as the child prodigy who fronted the Jackson 5.
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Angelina Jolie says she developed high blood pressure and Bell’s palsy last year.

The actor-director told Vanity Fair that she credited acupuncture for her full recovery from the paralysis, which was caused by nerve damage and led one side of her face to droop.

Jolie also opened up about her divorce from Brad Pitt in the magazine’s September cover story, which was released online Wednesday. Jolie filed for divorce in September 2016.

She said they care for each other and for their family and are “both working toward the same goal.” She said she does not want her six children to worry about her and that “it’s very important to cry in the shower and not in front of them.”
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The lead singer of a Lebanese rock band, which has courted controversy for its songs dealing with homophobia and sexism, has urged more men to champion women’s rights in the Middle East.

Hamed Sinno, the openly gay frontman of Mashrou’ Leila, also called for more women in politics and for discriminatory laws to be repealed.

“No one is saying that we should arbitrarily just get rid of all men in power and substitute them with women, but there is a question about … why it is that we still have this many issues with women’s representation, with women in government and other rights,” he said.

Mashrou’ Leila, which is on a world tour, has made headlines for singing about subjects that are largely taboo in the Arabic pop scene, including politics, religion, social justice, and sexual freedom.

The group has garnered a loyal following in the Middle East, but has also received death threats on social media and was banned from playing in Jordan last month.

Jordanian parliamentarian Dima Tahboub suggested in media interviews that the ban was linked to Sinno’s homosexuality.

In a statement on Facebook, Mashrou’ Leila said the ban was symptomatic of “the fanatical conservatism that has contributed in making the region increasingly toxic over the last decade”.

Speaking by phone from New York, Sinno told the Thomson Reuters Foundation there was a lot of work to be done in the struggle for gender equality in the Middle East.

He criticized the lack of female representation in government in the region, wage inequality, women’s right to govern their own bodies, and Lebanon’s rape laws, which include a provision that allows a rapist to avoid punishment by marrying his victim.

The 29-year-old American-Lebanese singer said men should celebrate the achievements of leading women in the Middle East and he praised Muslim feminists, including the writers Mona Eltahawy and Maya Mikdashi, for “disturbing patriarchal codes”.

Sinno, who has described his all-male band as “extremely vocal feminists”, also said he was fed up of western stereotyping of Middle Eastern women as “passive”.

The band’s new music video by female Lebanese director Jessy Moussallem – released last week with their song “Roman” – is intended to challenge the way Muslim and Arab women are portrayed, he said.

The video shows dozens of women wearing traditional Islamic dress uniting around a powerful central figure who performs a striking contemporary dance wearing an abaya (loose-fitting robe) and hijab. Sinno said the video was a celebration of Muslim women’s ability to empower each other.

The male members of the band take a backseat in the video. “Having men there not doing anything was basically what the point was,” Sinno added.

 
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In 2016, an Iraqi-American artist sat down with Bahjat Abdulwahed — the so-called “Walter Cronkite of Baghdad” — with the idea of launching a radio project that would be part documentary, part radio play and part variety show.

Abdulwahed was the voice of Iraqi radio from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, but came to Philadelphia as a refugee in 2009 after receiving death threats from insurgents.

“He represented authority and respectability in relationship to the news through many different political changes,” said Elizabeth Thomas, curator of “Radio Silence,” a public art piece that resulted from the meeting with Abdulwahed.

Thomas had invited artist Michael Rakowitz to Philadelphia to create a project for Mural Arts Philadelphia, which has been expanding its public art reach from murals into new and innovative spaces.

After nearly five years of research, Rakowitz distilled his project into a radio broadcast that would involve putting the vivacious and caramel-voiced Abdulwahed back on the air, and using Philadelphia-area Iraqi refugees and local Iraq war veterans as his field reporters. It would feature Iraqi music, remembrances of the country and vintage weather reports from a happier time in Iraq.

“One of the many initial titles was “Desert Home Companion,” Rakowitz said, riffing on “A Prairie Home Companion,” the radio variety show created by Garrison Keillor.

Rakowitz recorded an initial and very informal session with Abdulwahed in his living room in January 2016. Two weeks later, Abdulwahed collapsed. He had to have an emergency tracheostomy and was on life support until he died seven months later.

At Abdulwahed’s funeral, his friends urged Rakowitz to continue with the project, to show how much of the country they left behind was slipping away and to help fight cultural amnesia.

Rakowitz recalibrated the project, which became “Radio Silence,” a 10-part radio broadcast with each episode focusing on a synonym of silence, in homage to Abdulwahed.

“The voice of Baghdad had lost his voice,” Rakowitz said, calling him a “narrator of Iraq’s history.”

It will be hosted by Rakowitz and features fragments of that first recording session with Abdulwahed, as well as interviews with his wife and other Iraqi refugees living in Philadelphia.

Rakowitz and Thomas also worked with Warrior Writers, a nonprofit based in Philadelphia that helps war veterans work through their experiences using writing and art.

The first episode, on speechlessness, will launch Aug. 6. It will be broadcast on community radio stations across the country through Prometheus Radio Project.

One participant is Jawad Al Amiri, an Iraqi refugee who came to the United States in the 1980s. He said silence in Iraq has been a way of life for many decades.

“Silence is a way of survival. Silence is a decree by the Baath regime, not to tell what you see in front of your eyes. Silence is synonymous with fear. If you tell, you will be put through agony,” he said at a preview Tuesday of the live broadcast. He said he saw his own sister poisoned and die and wasn’t allowed to speak of it.

When he came to the U.S. in 1981, his father told him: “We send you here for education and to speak for the millions of Iraqis in the land where freedom of speech is practiced.”

Lawrence Davidson is an Army veteran who served during the Iraq War and works with Warrior Writers also contributed to the project. He said the project is a place to exchange ideas and honestly share feelings with refugees and other veterans.

The project kicks off on July 29 with a live broadcast performance on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall — what Rakowitz calls the symbolic home of American democracy. It will feature storytelling, food from refugees and discussions from the veterans with Warrior Writers.
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Stories of survival in turbulent times, including David Gordon Green’s world premiere of Stronger about a victim of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, are among the highlights in store at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

Angelina Jolie’s First They Killed My Father, set in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge reign, and horror mystery Mother! by Darren Aronofsky, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem, were also among the films announced Tuesday in the first look at the festival’s lineup for 2017.

Audiences can also catch social satire Downsizing, directed by Alexander Payne and starring Matt Damon, and George Clooney-directed crime-comedy Suburbicon. Guillermo del Toro’s fantastical The Shape of Water will also screen.

The Toronto event, which kicks off September 7, has become one of the world’s largest film festivals, known for debuting critically acclaimed films that have later won Academy Awards for best picture.

Stronger stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Jeff Bauman, who lost both his legs during the Boston Marathon, and Tatiana Maslany as his girlfriend.

“It’s a moment of incredible transformation, disruption, change, challenge, so I think you’ll see that reflected in the films we’re showing,” said Piers Handling, chief executive and director of the film festival, now in its 42nd year.

“One of the ideas that struck me is the whole notion of survival,” he said about the films announced so far. “It seems to be a topic that a lot of people are thinking about.”

Hany Abu-Assad’s The Mountain Between Us, starring Idris Elba and Kate Winslet, is about two strangers stranded on a mountain after surviving a plane crash.

Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier’s Long Time Running is a documentary about the 2016 tour of The Tragically Hip, a Canadian rock band, as frontman Gord Downie battles terminal brain cancer.

Organizers did not announce which film would kick off the 10-day festival, but said the world premiere of C’est La Vie! by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, the duo behind The Intouchables, would close.

Women will also grab the festival spotlight, with Haifaa Al Mansour’s Mary Shelley and Angela Robinson’s Professor Marston & the Wonder Women having their world premieres in Toronto.

“We don’t program for themes, but as you begin to step back … and you look at the films that you’ve chosen, some things begin to emerge,” Cameron Bailey, the festival’s artistic director, said in an interview.

The festival will run until September 17.
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Kathryn Bigelow hasn’t forgotten the out-of-body experience she felt when she won the best director Academy Award for her 2009 The Hurt Locker. At that moment, she became the first woman to win the award. None have been nominated since.

“The gender inequity that exists in the industry, I thought it would maybe be the beginning of that inequity not being quite so pronounced,” said Bigelow in a recent interview. “Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the case. And I don’t know why that is. I just don’t know. But I sort of feel like on behalf of all the women who might yearn to tell challenging, relevant, topical, entertaining stories, that I was standing there for them. And that emboldened me.”

Boldness is not a fleeting quality for Bigelow. Since The Hurt Locker, she has, with the reporter-turned-screenwriter Mark Boal, continued to craft an ambitious, intrepid kind of cinema that marries visceral big-screen immersion with deeply researched journalism. Their previous collaboration, the Osama bin Laden-hunt thriller Zero Dark Thirty, proved an unparalleled flashpoint in both Hollywood and Washington, prompting debates over its representation of the role torture played in the manhunt.

“I’m the messenger. I didn’t invent the message,” she said. “I’m just compelled to make these challenging pieces. And I’m compelled by stories that are informational, that tell you what you didn’t know going in — that I didn’t know going in.”

Incident amid 1967 riots

Her latest film, Detroit, is a no less challenging dive into the violent soul of America, but this time, she’s on the home front. The film, also from a script from Boal, is about the Algiers Motel incident, a relatively little-remembered event that took place amid the 1967 Detroit riots — an uprising sparked by a police raid of an after-hours club — and a reaction to a long history of oppression of the city’s African-Americans. The riots, among the largest in U.S. history, left 43 dead and led to the deployment of thousands of national guardsmen to a Detroit that raged in fire and fury.

Detroit seeks to show the historical context and individual reality of the riots, which many say should be called a “rebellion.” Within the chaos was the particularly heinous act at the Algiers Motel. Three unarmed black males were killed in an encounter with police, and nine others (seven of them black) were beaten and terrorized. Three officers were charged with murder, as well as other crimes, but found not guilty.

Boal approached Bigelow about making a film about the incident shortly after a St. Louis County grand jury decided not to indict Officer Darren Wilson, whose fatal shooting of Michael Brown in August 2014 prompted the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. The relevance of the Detroit tale, Bigelow said, fueled her motivation for making it.

“There was something sadly, tragically contemporaneous about this story,” Bigelow said. ” ‘How can this conversation happen in a meaningful way?’ is what I walk away asking. I’m just telling this story in as authentic and truthful and honest a way as we could, given the information that is out there.”

Swept into a nightmare

The story for Boal began with Cleveland Larry Reed. During the riots, Reed (played by Algee Smith in the film) was an 18-year-old singer in the Dramatics, an up-and-coming Motown group whose concert was canceled that night. He and another bandmate hunkered down at the Algiers, only to find themselves swept into a nightmare. Reed, who met with Boal and later with Smith, never recovered from the ordeal; he gave up professional music, singing instead in church choirs.

“In the summer of 2014, I was drawn to this story after meeting Larry Reed and hearing him recount what had happened to him 50 years ago, and then, later on, hearing from other survivors of the Algiers,” Boal wrote in an email. “My idea for the movie was driven from the start by real people, being moved by the fine-grained particulars of what they went through.”

Smith, a 22-year-old actor from Saginaw, Michigan, described the set as a profoundly emotional one where the cast merely needed to “log on to our social medias for inspiration.” 

“We were shooting a movie about history but it felt like today,” he said.

He and other actors playing the terrorized victims weren’t given scripts for much of the production so that their reactions of shock and horror were more genuine.

“She wanted us to have a tomorrow’s-not-promised type of mindset,” Smith said. “We just got there and then the first day it was just total chaos. It was: ‘Put your hands on the wall.’ Screaming. I’m getting lightheaded because I’m breathing so hard in between takes. It was emotionally and physically draining every day for those first two weeks. Will Poulter (who plays the ringleader officer) broke down on set. In the middle of a scene, he just started crying. The whole set just stopped. Everyone stopped. Will went outside and I put my arm around him, but I just started crying, too.”

Not the perfect storyteller

Some may say Detroit is a story that ought to have been told by black filmmakers. Bigelow, who has spent her career either ignoring or exploding gender stereotypes, understands such criticism.

“Am I the perfect person to tell that story? Absolutely not,” Bigelow said. “But I felt honored to tell this story. It’s a story that’s been out of circulation for 50 years. And if it can encourage a conversation about race in this country, I would find that extremely encouraging and important.”

Her films, she said, are about creating empathy and, she hopes, dialogue. Earlier this year, she co-directed an eight-minute virtual reality film about park rangers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, The Protectors: Walk in the Rangers’ Shoes.

“Institutionalized racism is at the heart of the piece,” Bigelow said of Detroit. “I think the purpose of art is to agitate for change. But you can’t change anything unless you’re aware of it.”
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Barbara Sinatra, the fourth wife of legendary singer Frank Sinatra and a prominent children’s advocate and philanthropist who raised millions of dollars to help abused children, died Tuesday at 90.

Sinatra died of natural causes at her Rancho Mirage, California, home surrounded by family and friends, said John Thoresen, director of the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center.

With her husband’s help, Barbara Sinatra founded a nonprofit center in 1986 to provide therapy and other support to young victims of physical, sexual and emotional abuse.

In the years since, Thoresen said, more than 20,000 children have been treated at the center in the desert city of Rancho Mirage and hundreds of thousands more throughout the world through videos it provides.

A former model and Las Vegas showgirl, Barbara Sinatra was a prominent Palm Springs socialite in her own right before she married her husband in 1976 when he was 60 and she 49. They remained wed until his death at in 1998 age 82.

She met the singer through her previous husband, Zeppo Marx of the famous Marx Brothers comedy team. Marx and Frank Sinatra had been close friends and neighbors in Rancho Mirage until she left Marx.

It was her third marriage, Sinatra’s fourth and the most enduring union for both.

Frank Sinatra had previously been married to Nancy Sinatra (mother of their children Nancy and Frank Jr.), as well as actresses Ava Gardner, who died in 1990, and Mia Farrow.

Over the years, Frank and Barbara Sinatra played an active role in the children’s center.

“Frank would come over and sit and read to the kids,” Thoresen said of the sometimes volatile entertainer.

“But the best way she used Frank,” he added with a chuckle, “was she would say, `I need a half-million dollars for this, so you do a concert and I get half the money.”‘

She remained active at the center until recently, pushing for creation of the video program just last year and making sure the children had anything they needed, Thoresen said.
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Backstreet Boys got their first hit country song this year on a collaboration with country duo Florida Georgia and now the two powerhouse acts are teaming up for a “CMT Crossroads” episode airing Aug. 30.

The cross-genre television show will feature all-star group performances of each other’s biggest singles, including “I Want It That Way,” “As Long As You Love Me,” “Cruise” and “H.O.L.Y.” as well as their partnership on the platinum hit “God, Your Momma, and Me.”

The two groups are popping up together a lot this year. They performed together on the Academy of Country Music Awards this year and are playing a series of baseball stadium tour dates this summer.

Longtime fans

FGL’s Tyler Hubbard and Brian Kelley are longtime fans of the ’90s boy band icons, who are on an upswing after a successful Las Vegas residency this year. Hubbard said in an email interview with The Associated Press that he’s most looking forward to singing their classic, “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back).”

“It’s crazy to think how we grew up listening to this song and now are on stage performing it together,” Hubbard said. “It still gets me every time!”

With the two groups hitting Boston, Minneapolis and Chicago stadiums, Hubbard said watching the Backstreet Boys performances has been a learning experience.

“These guys are master entertainers, no doubt,” Hubbard said. “But, I gotta say that BK and I have learned to really step up our game all the way around.”

Big hit in Las Vegas

Their performance at the ACMs in Las Vegas in April got everyone from Nicole Kidman to Tim McGraw on their feet to dance along. But the country duo acknowledges that it’s pretty complicated to get all seven singers up on stage together to dance.

“The dance moves are still a new thing for us but we love it, so much so that we even added dancers to our stadium shows,” Kelley said.

Debuting in 2002, “CMT Crossroads” has featured musical mashups between Def Leppard and Taylor Swift, Steven Tyler and Carrie Underwood, and John Mayer and Keith Urban. The one-hour show will air at 10 p.m. Eastern/Pacific on Aug. 30.
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Eight siblings who grew up in southwestern Indiana have amassed nearly 450 years of combined marriage.

Bruce Clinkenbeard of Freelandville, Indiana, and his wife Sally have been married for 53 years, but that’s just the tip of the Clinkenbeard family’s matrimonial iceberg.

Bruce and his seven siblings have together racked up a combined 448 years of marriage, and counting. Seven of the eight siblings either have been or were married for more than a half-century. That includes a sister who died in 2013 after 63 years of matrimony.

Bill Clinkenbeard has been married 59 years, but he and his wife Karen have always worked out any differences they’ve had. He tells the Vincennes Sun-Commercial their marriage is “a lot of give and take – and a lot of love.”
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