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EuropeGolden Globe hopes for Winslet and Mendes
Working with one's spouse can so often be a shortcut to acrimony, but not for Kate Winslet and her husband, Sam Mendes. Yesterday, their first joint project, Revolutionary Road - directed by him and starring her - received a slew of nominations at the Golden Globes, honoured alongside an unusually large array of British talent.If all goes well on January 11, he could win best director, it could win best film, she could scoop best actress and her co-star, Leonardo DiCaprio, could take best actor.Winslet has another chance to win the Golden Globe that has eluded her on five occasions: she is also nominated for best supporting actress for The Reader, in which she plays a former Nazi concentration camp guard who has an affair with a teenage boy.The Winslet-Mendeses are not the only couple up for awards. Brad Pitt is nominated for best actor for his role as the eponymous hero in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, who is born aged 80 and grows younger by the day, and his partner, Angelina Jolie, has a chance at best actress for The Changeling.In the coveted best drama category, Revolutionary Road is competing against Stephen Daldry's The Reader and another British-directed film, Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire. But the big competition looks to come from Frost/Nixon and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which both won five nominations. Doubt, which stars Meryl Streep as a nun who confronts a priest she suspects of abusing a black student, is also competing in five categories.British talent was nominated in at least 20 of the 25 categories.British actress Kristin Scott Thomas was nominated in the best dramatic actress category for her role in the French film I've Loved You So Long. It is her first Golden Globe nomination since 1997, when she was up for best actress for her performance in The English Patient.Other British women in contention include Emma Thompson for Last Chance Harvey, Sally Hawkins for Happy-Go-Lucky and Rebecca Hall for Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The last two are up for best comedy or musical, alongside Burn After Reading, Happy-Go-Lucky, In Bruges and Mamma Mia!Ralph Fiennes has been given a best TV actor nod for Bernard and Doris, an HBO film in which he stars alongside Susan Sarandon. He is also a contender in the best supporting actor category for The Duchess, against the late Heath Ledger, who is favourite to win for his role as the Joker in the Batman film The Dark Knight.Frost/Nixon is a big-screen version of Peter Morgan's West End hit, which recreates the 1977 standoff between presenter David Frost and the disgraced former president Richard Nixon. Morgan has been nominated for best screenplay, pitting him against fellow Britons Simon Beaufoy for Slumdog Millionaire and David Hare for The Reader.The Globes are typically seen as a crucial pointer towards the Academy Awards that follow in February, though they are not foolproof. Last year's best drama award went to Atonement, while Sweeney Todd was named best comedy or musical. A month later, the best film Oscar went to No Country for Old Men. Sweeney Todd failed to even secure a nomination.Kate WinsletBrad PittAngelina JolieGolden GlobesMeryl StreepDanny Boyleguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Published: Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:17:38 GMT - Source: Guardian.Co.Uk - Read the articleEuropePaul Harris: Washington prepares a record party for Obama
The sound of hammers was ringing out on the steps of the Capitol last week as workers built the wooden platform on which Barack Obama will be sworn in as America's first black President.The viewing area around the stage, which is rising slowly at the end of Washington's famous Mall, contains some of the most sought after seating in the world. Those lucky enough to be admitted will be the privileged witnesses of an inauguration ceremony set to be the biggest and most celebrated in American history. As she watched last week, local office worker Kara Brown summed up the thoughts of most DC natives: 'It is going to be a really great party.'As many as five million people are expected to descend on Washington on 20 January to watch the era of President George W Bush come to an end and celebrate the swearing in of Obama as the country's 44th President. That kind of attendance will dwarf the previous record of 1.2 million who came to see Lyndon Johnson take the oath of office in 1965. About one million were at John F Kennedy's inauguration despite a blanket of snow. Many of those coming are eager to hear Obama's inaugural speech, which is expected to rival Martin Luther King's address on the Mall at the height of the civil rights struggle in 1963. 'Obama will have to live up to his own reputation. That will be the challenge. This is going to be an unbelievably historic moment for America,' said Bruce Gronbeck, an expert in political rhetoric at the University of Iowa.But the history of the occasion is just one part of the inauguration ritual, when America indulges in the sort of political theatre and ceremony more associated with the monarchies of 'Old Europe'. The days around the inauguration are rapidly turning into an enormous bonanza of celebrations, fancy balls and celebrity-laden events that will briefly make the normally staid capital city into one of the world's great party towns. 'It is an amazing and wonderful piece of ritual drama,' said Jim Bendat, author of the book Democracy's Big Day, which studies the history of the ceremony.Despite the fact that Obama's term of office will begin in the middle of two foreign wars and a huge economic crisis, there seems little sign that the event will be anything but a huge shindig. 'Those several million people visiting the city to watch this are going to want to do something else besides just stand in the cold and watch a parade. They are going to want to have a good time,' said Bendat. That will not be hard. The city council has passed special rules allowing bars to stay open until 5am in the days surrounding the inauguration. There will be scores of balls and parties to attend. They range from the huge ball that Obama himself will host as the newly minted president, to ones put on by individual states or industries. Music television channel MTV will probably hold the most celebrity-laden event with its own ball. Washington will temporarily outshine New York and Los Angeles as it is flooded with celebrities and the paparazzi who stalk them. Those expected to come to Washington include Oprah Winfrey, Ashley Judd, Spike Lee, Susan Sarandon, Tom Hanks and a host of others. Perhaps one of the most unusual events will be hosted by a black businessman called Earl Stafford, who has splashed out $1m to take over the entire Marriott hotel, and serve $200,000 worth of food to mainly disadvantaged people, such as the ill, the poor and wounded veterans. The city's hotels were booked out weeks ago, often going for vastly inflated rates of more than $1,000 a night. Rooms in cities as far away as Charleston, West Virginia, Richmond in Virginia and Baltimore in Maryland have also sold out. There has been a booming market in private houses rented to visitors for as much as $20,000 a week. Just like Obama's election campaign, which drew huge crowds, the inauguration reveals the almost magnetic power of a man many have already come to see as a historic figure. That makes the task of giving his first speech as President all the more difficult. Despite the excesses of the inauguration, America is in deep crisis both at home and abroad. While Obama is certain to make at least a nod towards his unique position as America's first black President, political analysts will be more concerned with what he has to say about the future direction of American policy. 'He'll talk mainly about domestic issues, like the economic crisis, and also try to announce to the world that America is taking a new direction,' Gronbeck predicted. But, while the pundits pore over every word in Obama's speech, the millions flooding the streets of Washington will be forgetting the political troubles of the country and making the most of an American feelgood moment that will be remembered for decades to come.Obama White HouseUnited Statesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Published: Sun, 07 Dec 2008 00:05:20 GMT - Source: Guardian.Co.Uk - Read the articleEuropePaul MacInnes discovers that the Cairo film festival shows a country divided
"I think that all films are political," says Susan Sarandon in a tone that suggests she's expressed such sentiments before. "The ones that reinforce stereotypes are just as political as those that do not. The good news and bad news is that Hollywood is not political."Sarandon is in Cairo and this should be a gimme. One of Hollywood's most famous liberals railing against the iniquities of her industry to a group of North African Muslims, it would appear speaker and audience are ideally matched. But Sarandon is having a tough time, railed at in Arabic by a series of circumlocutory questioners, she is accused of being a representative of the very yankee empire she thinks she spends her life railing against. A grand insistence that "art will definitely conquer power in the end" doesn't really help to calm matters.Cairo may well be a jumble of contrasts, as the old cliche has it, or it could be a comfortable sum of its many parts - I wouldn't know. It's a conurbation of up to 20 million people and, as such, it might take more than a flying visit to the banks of the Nile to work it out. What I can say, though, is that the Cairo international film festival (CIFF) and the films it showcases seem to render uncannily the awkward gap between cinema and the real world it hopes to represent. The opening night of the festival saw the Cairo opera house, which nestles in a web of roads a few hundred metres from the river, taken over by the Egyptian glitterati. There was no end to the stars gracing both the red carpet and the hall's main stage where, expertly cajoled by Omar Sharif, they honoured Sarandon and her fellow Hollywood guests in an interminable ceremony that left you wondering whether Goldie Hawn, another guest, had stood up for so long since making Wildcats. It was a low-cut night smothered in diamante, that finished up with a screening of Return to Hansala, a Spanish movie about the corpses of drowned immigrants. By that point the auditorium was four-fifths empty.Return to Hansala, which is competing in the main competition in Cairo, is a political film, and not just in the Sarandon sense. Illegal labour (the bloated bodies had been on their way to work in the fruit farms of Andalucía), the migration it inspires and, centrally, the cultural differences between migrants and the native Spanish are all tackled. Much of the movie is spent in Morocco as the hero, an undertaker played by José Luis García Pérez, tries to return the corpse of a boy to his family. A series of misunderstandings follows him on his journey, from his insistence on smoking during Ramadan, to his bafflement at the treatment of his travelling companion by her father. A number of scenes feature nothing more than Pérez conducting mutually uncomprehending conversations with locals. It's not a bad metaphor. Not just for the disjuncture between west and (middle) east, but between those who make cinema and those who watch it. It may be the same at most film festivals, but attending CIFF you do feel as if you're in a bubble, heading from your security-clad hotel to your specially commandeered cinema, and back again in time for a subsidised dinner. I was even warned off attending some of the cinemas participating in the festival as they were too far away and, anyway, only for the normal viewer. When I got to one of them I found it to be in the exclusive Towers Mall, a complex that required you to have your bags scanned upon entry.Everywhere you looked there were two different realities plonked next to each other. While the actresses wear revealing gowns and the promotional campaign for the festival features a woman on all fours, her long hair blown back as she conjures a pyramid out of the air, the majority of Egyptian women go about their daily business wearing a hijab. While the festival screened an interesting programme of movies around the topic of human rights, one of Egypt's leading actors, Mahmoud Qabil, used his festival conference to rail against the censorship that prevails in his homeland. At the same time, the festival would not exist without a reported $1m (£655,000) subsidy from the very government that imposes the censorship. (One of Cairo's English-language newspapers announced the opening of CIFF with an unlikely splash - "Hosny excited about Cairo film fest"; replace Hosny and Cairo with Andy Burnham and London and you'll have its unlikely British equivalent.)Amidst all these contradictions the only certainty seemed to be that CIFF was not there to engage with the average Egyptian cinemagoer. The screenings are spectacularly under-attended. Meanwhile, mainstream Egyptian movies ? Laylat El-Baby Doll, for example, which concerns an American Egyptian trying to conceive a child on New Year's Eve despite various comic interventions and some genitals damaged in 9/11 - could be said to offer as nuanced a view of the world as their Hollywood equivalents. So the directors and selectors of the Cairo international film festival have, with care and acuity, developed a programme that is rich, challenging and will be seen only by those people who engage with cinema for their living. The Hollywood stars will express their strong sentiments of solidarity with the Arab people and return home after a tour of the pyramids. The ministers will continue to enjoy seeing CIFF listed among the world's 11 best film festivals and continue to bankroll the red carpet. Yet amid it all, you do wonder if, somewhere along the line, a point has been missed.FestivalsEgyptGenderguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Published: Wed, 26 Nov 2008 12:26:09 GMT - Source: Guardian.Co.Uk - Read the articleSee Also:
