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nutty1005 · 4 years ago

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The new and starstudded “A Dream Like A Dream”, is the starting point, not the ending point, of Xiao Zhans

Original Article: https://m.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_12542131 Original Author: 程辉剧场手记 The author published this in Pengpai News and shared on his Weibo Post on 6 May 2021.

Andante Cantabile, my most beloved music by Tchaikovsky, came from his String Quartet No. 1 in D major, every time it would painfully touch my heart, poet Xi Murong also used this to caption a melancholic poem. I thought, using it to sum up Lai Shengchuan’s representative work, “A Dream Like A Dream”, would be most apt.

“A Dream Like A Dream” lasts for 8 hours, this is something rare in Chinese theaters. Using the doctor as the first person, Patient No. 5 recalled and narrated in his narration, a surreal stage arrangement, emotions, life, fate, culture and societal upheaval, bringing tears to fog up your eyes. After 9 years of continued changes in the crew, Yanghua Theater brought in a new version with actors such as Xu Qing, Feng Xianzhen, Ge Xinyi, Xiao Zhan, Yan Nan, Zhang Liang, Huang Lu, Kong Wei, etc. The new version rivaled the quality of its predecessors, but yet bestowed a new presentation and expression.

A unique city was the backdrop for its first showing and the chance fate of the characters within the play allowed us to truly understand the nature of impermanence. In the play, there was an important term called “self-exchange”, which was said to come from an ancient practice from South Asia, by “breathing” with the others, so as to gift health and happiness, and remove his pain and misfortune. “A Dream Like A Dream” was a play that spoke of the search for the meaning of life, did it also deliberately “self-exchange” with the audience then? Once we understood the concept of “self-exchange”, we could also see that it was also a request to communicate with the reserved hearts of the contemporary person.

The fates of Gu Xianglan and Patient No. 5 were the two main timelines in “A Dream Like A Dream”, and the other timelines served to supplement or trigger the former. Patient No. 5’s motive came from “searching”, Gu Xianglan’s came from “chasing”. The chaser is the key to enlightening the searcher, the searcher became the resolution for the chaser, although they had different obsessions in their lives, they both came together in the end. Gu Xianglan’s deathbed confession to Patient No. 5 was not simply just an apology in her dazed state, but also her most unforgettable, wonderful and romantic memories of love; Patient No. 5, with his concern, consideration and inquiries, was like the listener from heaven, the guiding light to aid the soul in letting go of her regrets.

The 2021 Yanghua version of “A Dream Like A Dream” maintained its previous feature of multiple actors to one role, and multiple roles to one actor. Xu Qing, Feng Xianzhen, Ge Xinyi acted as after going abroad, old age and before going abroad versions of Gu Xianglan respectively. From the “peerless beauty” socialite of the brothels in Shanghai Beach, to the Baroness of a French Ambassador, to an artist, then to a maid, a sweeper of roads and alleys, to the lonely elderly in the hospital, she went through indescribable ups and downs.

Xu Qing had acted as Gu Xianglan since the play’s debut, and in the new version, her portrayal had already been exquisitely refined, the Gu Xianglan in her prime is lovely and graceful, but yet proud and wild, sensitive and emotional, as though Gu Xianglan’s soul had fully occupied her body. In addition to the true to form portrayal of the amorous nature of Gu Xianglan, her performance was exceptionally focused on the details of the silent scenes. When she and Xiao Zhan’s Patient No. 5 gazed at each other, when teary eyes met with clear eyes; from afar it seemed like she was looking at her younger self about to go onto a journey of no return, the resigned helplessness and the restless hope looked at each other; when realizing that the lost Baron had once returned, her astonished and sharp glares of anger; when Wang Debao found the tiny loft she stayed in by chance, her stealing glances were surprised and flustered… They were all full of the character’s aura and emotional tension, and the pain took the audiences by their hearts.

Senior actress Feng Xianzhen’s portrayal of the elderly version of Gu Xianglan was quite different from the version by the previous actress Lu Yan, which allowed the audiences to experience the wonder of plays due to different characterization. Lu Yan’s version was one that remained elegant and proud despite her tribulations, there was more calm and temperance, which would make the audiences respect the tenacity of this legendary lady. Feng Xianzhen’s version was a Gu Xianglan who went to France from Shanghai, and back to Shanghai from France, twice she found freedom and twice she fell. The cruelty of fate had ripped away all of the pretentiousness, the charm of her past had been lost, she was like every ordinary person. She would scheme cigarettes from strangers, curse as she liked with phrases such as “bastard”, “no good-doers in Taiwan”, mock those relatives who came to look after her as those who came for their inheritance. She fully portrayed the effects of her unfortunate life and her bitterness at the world, which made the audiences sigh in sadness.

Facing these two powerful actresses in portraying the same role, Ge Xinyi as the young Gu Xianglan, had a lot of pressure. Her performance was more inclined to a lonely beauty, the purity despite her circumstances, so as to provide a solid motive for the Baron and Wang Debao’s unrestrained infatuation. As a newcomer to the theater, her steady control was not an easy task, and should be praised for it. If she would be more open, layered and flavorful in her portrayal, the characterization would be better. After all, Gu Xianglan was the top courtesan within the midst of love and affairs, and the quiet and calm of a learned lady would be quite different from that.

Patient No. 5 was a journeyman of life. In the beginning, he suffered painful setbacks from the death of his child and the loss of his wife, and started a self-exiled wanderlust. His marriage came by mistake, almost like a replacement for his wife’s frustrating relationship. Fate caused him to lose his spirit, but he was unwilling to give up, hence he wanted to search for his wife, as though he wanted to search for himself. His encounter with Jiang Hong, was the wanderers’ sympathy for each other and to rely on each other. Only when he walked into the French castle and saw the tranquil and woeful eyes of Gu Xianglan, he seemed to see himself at the far coast of the lake, the cumulative rage and sorrow in both their hearts, their collective unwillingness to concede suddenly exploded, and he decisively dropped everything to find the lady in the painting. He did not know what question was ignited then, but he started his search for the dream of life.

In terms of the control of this character, Xiao Zhan and Yan Nan definitely put in a lot of efforts, they were highly immersive. What was even more rare was that, although their performances had different focuses, but they were both very united in terms of aura, body language, speech, pace and habitual actions, as though the two actors in the same stage were truly one character. For such a complete creation, you need not only tacit understanding.

Xiao Zhan’s performance exceeded my expectations. Despite it being his debut in a play, his performance was not even the least bit disjointed, and he was even able to merge his own personality characteristics with the role itself. His actions, pace and emotions gave a smooth interplay between tension and relaxation. The portrayal of innocent, naive, youthful, kind and fragile Patient No. 5, his unpreparedness in matters of love, was especially suitable as a youth who just joined society. It made the random encounter in the cinemas as the prelude of love more believable, and also gave a firm foundation to his actions later on, the multiple setbacks in later on, his wanderings, and his endless searching. With his wife and Jiang Hong, he had different relationships, the former was a budding first love, the latter came from empathy, Xiao Zhan had slightly different portrayal for the different phases of space and time, the cycle from simple to confusion, from searching to questioning, there was careful understanding and detailed handling. After discovering Gu Xianglan’s tracks, the clear longing that Xiao Zhan gave off collided with the layered longing from Xu Qing after her tribulations, was like the undercurrents under a calm lake, it drew in the rousing emotions, and became the strong force that pushed the story forward.

Xiao Zhan has the ability and the reason to achieve much better results in future theater stages. With time, if he could become even more at ease with the control of his body, if he could be even more accurate during the changes of character condition, I trust that he could achieve another breakthrough, and create even more challenging characters.

Reprising Patient No. 5 after many years, Yan Nan was obviously even more in-depth with his understanding of the script and character, and gifted the character a melancholy aura similar to those of an ancient poet, the quiet tones and deep glances became the key feature. The sense of accumulation of the vicissitudes, merged with Xiao Zhan’s portrayal, realized the continuation of the character’s fate. His performance on the hospital bed contrasted with Gu Xianglan on her hospital bed in a different time, and manifested Patient No. 5’s enlightenment after his miles of wandering, the person on the bed is awake, but those not were instead still dreaming. His calmness held the strings of every timeline together.

Zhang Liang’s portrayal of the Baron was the surprise of the show. If the old version’s Baron and Gu Xianglan was like the contest between eagle and the wild pigeon, the huge difference in power created the tragedy that made the audiences sad. The 2021 Yanghua version’s Baron and Gu Xianglan was like a pair of heavenly cranes, but they sang different notes as they flew to each other, and became a pair of lovebirds who hurt each other as they fell. The Baron became more romantic, more gentle and loving, but he remained prideful as he was still a noble beneath that amicable exterior, this was Zhang Liang’s new expression to the character, this also elevated Gu Xianglan’s difficulty in her choice, and even more so contrasted Gu Xianglan’s “evil” in her woeful revenge, and also left a branching point to the remaining love. His love for Gu Xianglan was true, it was not possession, but he loved the Oriental beauty, the caged Gu Xianglan, not the wild and free Gu Xianglan. Letting go and abandoning was his hopelessness for his lover, he felt that Gu Xianglan was letting herself go, she was betraying and depraving her beauty, he felt that his efforts were painfully wasted, it was not an attack on an escaped prey. This kind of portrayal made us wonder – love, was it to love a person, or was it to love an ideal? Love was to give or to receive? Was the ultimate goal of giving receiving?

The tragedy between Baron and Gu Xianglan became a tragedy of conflict between culture, social status and ideals. The difference between Baron and Gu Xianglan, did not merely exist on levels of culture and artistic ideals, but it was down to different life goals due to different cultural influences. It was hard for Baron to understand that his love only moved Gu Xianglan from a smaller cage to another bigger cage, even if he loved her deeply; Gu Xianglan who struggled for survival in a twisted environment, simply wanted to escape her cage, even if it meant poverty. This type of tragedy could not simply be explained with the character’s personality. The energy from repeated characterization is evident.

Huang Lu as Jiang Hong was a character that was rather difficult to grasp in “A Dream Like A Dream”. In her portrayal, Jiang Hong was an ordinary girl, who went through multiple troubles but was always chosen, besides her strong sense of survival, I almost could not see more personality. I remembered that I had brief flashes of a parallel universe while cooking eggs one morning, that was the state that she could not find herself or her position in life. She claimed herself as “the original Jiang Hong was dead, the Jiang Hong who arrived in Paris never existed” wanderer, her “relationship” with Patient No. 5 was merely a chance encounter in life, both of them were scared and questioning whether they should “fall into another relationship”. Huang Lu’s performance was very restrained, controlled, and tried hard to make herself not stand out, to do it to this extent was quite difficult. When she was talking about her stowaway escape, there was a point for emotional explosion, but yet she had to control it within the fine line between “surviving the calamity” and “unable to calm herself”. For this actress who was nominated multiple times for international awards and also won a national acting award, this was a rare stage experience.

Kong Wei, who just took off her costume in “Thunder Rain”, portrayed Shi Li Hong, the Mama-san of “Fairy Court”, in “A Dream Like A Dream”. Scheming and cunning in worldly matters, but yet she maintained her own sense of righteousness with Gu Xianglan and her sisters, fleshed out the character with even more emotions. Especially when the drunk professor professed his love for her, her teasing and forced calmness was mixed with surprise and shyness, as every emotion came at the same time, she managed them with ease, not only was the set brightly colored, there was also the sudden exposure of the character’s personality. Wang Peiyu who acted as the young Wang Debao, also showed the character’s clumsiness and stubbornness, his portrayal of passionate love was on point, which was just as brilliant.

There were many characters in “A Dream Like A Dream”, the group’s shared brilliance could not be forgotten, many actors who acted as multiple roles displayed exceeding energy. This came down to the Yanghua creativity production team, lead by Art Director Wang Keran, who had astute senses in actor selection as well as careful detailing in every part of the creation.

Luo Yongjuan, who portrayed a puppet in “Jewish City” and Li Zonglei, who had many important roles in many dramas and plays, both portrayed over 10 characters, and outstandingly completed the character creation for all of these different roles. Ruan Li, who portrayed the cousin, the dancer, the child, etc, also contributed multiple talents. Wang Weiqian, who portrayed Aunt Jin, the tourist, etc; Sun Zhongyi, who portrayed the professor, the old servant, etc, they all left deep impressions.

To display the characters but not to display themselves, this was the forefront of all theater actors, this was done by Xu Qing and Xiao Zhan, Zhang Liang and other stars, this was the respect they gave the play, the stage, the audience and themselves.

When the first kissing scene appeared for Xiao Zhan, part of the audiences were controlled but there were still some excessive “fan” reactions, but this did not interrupt his performance pace, this reminded me that Xu Qing and Hu Ge version also had the same situation many years ago. We could see that the actors were immersed, they prepared mental homework for every segment and detail, this was the hard work and the goal of both the production and the actors. Putting in efforts into acting and solely seeking the effects of celebrity, these are two totally different things after all.

When rehearsing or refreshing old classic plays, most of the time, methods such as subversion, recreation or simple replay were used. 2021 Yanghua’s version of “A Dream Like A Dream” is a case of production relying on the new cast to continuously discover deeper understandings, to recreate, and then to give audience a new icing on the cake while ensuring the quality of the play.

I was interviewed after the debut showing and said that this play was the Xiao Zhan’s starting point and not his ending point, and I also hoped that more capable actors would come to the theater stage, focus on the creation of art, and from that we could forge our own generation of quality “full celebrities”, such as Jin Shan, Shi Hui, Bai Yang, Zhang Ruifang, Shu Xiuwen, Laurence Olivier, Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, etc, of China. On the international theatrical stage, this is just commonplace.

#xiao zhan #sean xiao #xiaozhan #肖战

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gay-otlc · 3 years ago

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Keepers Of The Chaos (3)

Summary: Tam, Linh, Dex, Keefe, Biana, and Fitz are part of the tiny fandom for Keeper of the Chaos, and Tam and Linh’s podcast convinces some of their other friends to watch it as well. The group finds themselves strangely invested in this show, where students at Tumblr High School who work together to write about an elf named Sophia, cause incomprehensible chaos, and fight their rival Pinterest High School.

Content warnings: Cursing, religion (Jewish Vackers), and Amsterdam (just in case, I know that was stressful for some people).

Word count: 1621

Notes: Most of the episodes are just events stolen from Lynn's roundup, Dex's memes are here

(Read on AO3)

The life of an amateur meme maker on dumbles dot com was a strange one, that was for sure. After finishing xyr favorite show- Ze-Ra: Monaerchs of Powhir- for the third time, Dex had searched for another show to fill the void in xyr soul. Biana recommended this show called "Keepers of the Chaos" and described it to xem. Xe was doubtful at first, but after watching the first episode, xe was hooked.

Xe used to not have many friends at xyr school, so xe did what every neurodivergent queer teen would do- made an account on dumbles dot com. People seemed to like xem- or at least, they liked dizznee-plus's memes and edits of Ze-Ra characters. Even after Dex befriended xyr squish, Fitz, thons sister, Biana, and aer girlfriend, Sophie, xe continued making content on dumbles. Around that time, the Ze-Ra fandom started dying off, and xyr memes started getting fewer note

In a sudden, two am burst of inspiration, Dex made edits of some of xyr favorite characters, like Ref, Akki, and Rose, with their respective pride flags (all of them bi) over them, and captioned it "we must be gay." The post blew up, or at least, what could be considered blowing up in Keeper of the Chaos's tiny fandom, and that was how Dex found xyr calling as an amateur meme/edit maker for KOTC.

History had been repeating itself, with the KOTC fandom starting to die off, until it was revived by an announcement from creator Saturn Nolastname- a season two would be released soon. Frantically, Dex made a meme about season one episode two, with the car salesman meme. Xe edited "chaos keepers" onto the car salesman, "the rarelynoticed" on the car, and "this bad boy can fit so many stripper outfits into it."

That had been... an interesting episode, to say the least. The chaos keepers had been talking about the antagonists of "Sophie and the Dark Duck"- a rebel group called the Rarelynoticed. In the information packet they'd been given, it was confirmed that the Rarelynoticed wore black cloaks and armbands, but no other clothes had been mentioned. Somehow, the chaos keepers came to the conclusion that the Rarelynoticed really wore neon pink leotards and green stripper heels, then drew this idea.

Needless to say, the Tumblr staff did not let them write that into the book. Nor did Lynn, the unofficially chosen leader of the group. Unfortunately for her, this didn't stop the chaos keepers from drawing more of these- or the fandom from making a ton of memes. In addition to the car salesman meme, a post with Drake saying no to "wearing normal fucking villain outfits" and yes to "leotards and stripper heels" gained popularity within the small fandom.

Though nothing could match the absolute shock of seeing the Rarelynoticed stripper outfit for the first time, Dex decided to rewatch the episode anyway- it was funny to see the chaos keepers freak out, and maybe xe could get some good screen captures. The good Saturn Nolastname indulged xem, and xe captured an excellent scene of most of the chaos keepers either laughing or screaming at the Rarelynoticed stripper outfits, with Kimber- one of xyr favorites- sitting on the side, explaining to Juno and Kaitee why Bianca Cracker was bisexual.

Xe went over to dumbles, posted the picture, added an image description, and captioned it "Live photo of me not caring when my friends talk about sex/romance." Xe chuckled to xemself- this really was how it felt to be aroace. Xe tagged it as aromantic and asexual as well, since dumbles added flag colors. Smiling, xe went to go check xyr notifications.

Xyr jaw dropped when xe saw that @lordofthesnuggles- Fitzroy (Dex didn't know thons middle name) Vacker thonself had liked and reblogged all three of xyr memes, even adding compliments in the tags! Xe'd had a bit of a platonic crush on Fitz for... a really long time, but xe always felt too awkward to talk to thon, so it was nice to see that thon appreciated xyr humor.

Feeling energized- and excited to procrastinate on xyr math homework- Dex went to watch the next episode: Dark Duck Is Jewish Now. Being Jewish xemself, this was a really funny episode to xem.

Lynn had been writing a sort of spinoff- it would be called fanfiction, but it was for her own story- about some of the Dark Duck characters celebrating Christmas, and added a throwaway line about Bianca and Finn Cracker celebrating Hanukkah. Then, her fiance, Shai, had taken that idea and run with it, writing a list of ideas about what would happen if the Cracker family was Jewish. Hir friend Sam had jumped on the idea, and soon they had abandoned writing the actual Dark Duck in favor of writing a story about Jewish Dark Duck characters. Some of the other Jewish chaos keepers, like Ref and Cat, helped out.

To be honest, it kind of surprised Dex that no one had made a joke about the Jewish Crackers just being matzah, so xe supposed xe would have to be the first.

Xe posted that observation, quickly getting a like from Fitz- which made xem smile. After a few minutes, Dex posted another meme: Shai and Sam standing in front of a door with a sign that read "elves don't have religion," and them saying "This sign won't stop me, because I can't read!"

It was accurate.

While that episode was great for Jewish representation, and funny, the Banana Noir episode was just plain weird.

It focused less on the Dark Duck than most of the other episodes, and was more about the crazy interactions of the chaos keepers. The episode was named for Banana Noir, who was really Cat Noir, but in a banana suit. Banana Noir was the son of Mellie, who looked like a shark, and Nora, who had platonically married faer. The mothers tried to arrange a marriage between him and Akki, who loved the side characters of the Dark Duck series. However, Akki wanted to marry Amelia. After a lot of shit that basically no one understood, Banana Noir's attempts were thwarted, and Lynn officiated the wedding between Akki and Amelia.

Yeah, Dex had no idea what the fuck was going on either. Xe'd watched an episode of Twins of the Chaos and a youtube video by arsonpog analyzing the Banana Noir chronicles, as it had been dubbed by the chaos keepers, and both expert opinions seemed to agree that Saturn Nolastname and the rest of the writers had probably been on crack when they made that episode.

The next episode made slightly more sense, though it was a low bar. After taking a break from the "official" Dark Duck story, the chaos keepers began collectively writing a Cinderella story about the characters Sophia and Bianca. People weren't allowed to be queer in the official story, but the chaos keepers still wanted to have fun with their obviously gay characters.

Even to the viewers of the show, who only received secondhand information about the Dark Duck characters, knew there was no way any of them, let alone all of them, were allocishet. The exact identities weren't entirely clear- when Dex had made edits of the characters' official art and xyr headcanons for their pride flags, a few people had disagreed- but both the chaos keepers and the fandom knew that despite what Shannon said, Sophia and Bianca were in love, and their Cinderella story should have made it in to the official Dark Duck story.

While excerpts of the Cinderella story were quoted in the show, most of it was left unclear, so Biana had taken it upon aerself to write aer own version of it. Dex was expecting an update later that day, actually, or maybe the next. Ae wasn't always 100% reliable with aer update schedule. Still, Dex looked forward to when it eventually did come.

After the brief calmness from the Sophianca Cinderella episode, season one episode six, Amsterdam, exploded back into chaos. A few of the chaos keepers decided to discuss a fake scene in the book in which crazy shit went down, with the scene supposedly being located in Amsterdam. It had never been written and was never going to be, but everyone discussed it like it was real. Some of the highlights involved all the Dark Duck girls having swords (and the chaos keepers being gay for them), and a speedboat chase scene through the canals. Fitz had a popular theory that the chaos keepers would actually travel to Amsterdam in order to commemorate this crazy part of their lives. Almost as popular as that was a meme Dex made, with a man labeled "chaos keepers discussing amsterdam" and gesturing feverishly to a wall covered in papers and red string.

Of course, episode seven (Dark Duck Disney) was chaotic too. Everything was chaotic with this group, it was in the title. Shannon announced that the winning Dark Duck story would be adapted into a Disney movie. After past experience with terrible book to movie adaptations, the chaos keepers panicked. They panicked so much that it became major news within their school, which until then, had been largely ignoring the chaos keepers. Once the discussion about the movie settled down, they talked a lot about how in awe they were that their Dark Duck shenanigans were trending within the school.

But of course, none of that compared to the last episode of the season...

Dex changed xyr profile picture to include an ominous pair of teal eyes and sighed.

#tumblr kotlc fandom fandom #keepers of the chaos #shai types things #shai's writing #hehe like the ze-ra reference

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joealwyndaily · 5 years ago

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Sometimes the best Christmas presents are the ones we don’t think we need; a new Christmas Carol, for instance. Indeed it may be indicative of a certain unappreciated vacancy around the Christmas tree that in discussing the BBC’s new version of the Dickens classic both its director and leading man refer back to The Muppet Christmas Carol made way back in 1992.

“I was sent the script,” admits Nick Murphy, best known for directing the Rebecca Hall ghost movie The Awakening, “and my first thought was, ‘For God’s sake! The Muppets! They nailed it. What’s the point?’ ”

Joe Alwyn, who plays Scrooge’s clerk Bob Cratchit in the BBC three-parter, has meanwhile posted a trailer on Instagram with the caption: “Hard to fill the shoes once worn by Kermit. But I tried.” The self-deprecation was quickly “hearted” by the singer Taylor Swift, who is the actor’s girlfriend and who will be watching the mini-series with Alwyn and his family in London in the final days before Christmas.

There is nothing wrong, of course, with The Muppet Christmas Carol. It is probably in most people’s top three adaptations of Dickens’s masterpiece (alongside, I would say, Alastair Sim’s 1951 version and Scrooged). Its endurance does suggest, however, that it may be time someone did something a bit more serious, a little darker and a touch more grown-up with a tale that excoriated Victorian neglect and associated Christmas with the relief of poverty for ever more.

And this is exactly what Nick Murphy has achieved with a bracingly fresh script by the Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight. Guy Pearce’s Ebenezer Scrooge is still a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner”, but since Pearce is only 52, there is rather less of the old. At the end of the novel, Dickens wrote that “ever afterwards” — that is after Scrooge’s Very Bad Night — “it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well”. That is rather more of an achievement when, as in this version, you may have 40 Christmases, rather than a couple, left to you.

Equally remade is Cratchit, who in Alwyn’s incarnation is far from the bashfully gulping frog thanking his master for granting him Christmas Day off before scampering back to Miss Piggy’s fleshy arms. Although Alwyn grew a rough beard for the part, his is also the best-looking Bob Cratchit you have seen. As the actor and I talk at the Picturehouse Central cinema in London, I find him as mesmerising off screen as on.

“Bob is trapped by Scrooge,” Alwyn says. “He’s abused by him. He’s not treated fairly. He’s there only because he has to be. He’s treated like shit.”

I’d say there’s a definite feeling in their shared scenes that Bob might just snap and hit Ebenezer over the head with a poker. “That was the intention. He’s at breaking point. He’s pushed right to his limits and Scrooge, I think, relishes winding him up. All Bob can do is hold his ground and fight back as much as he can — but he isn’t such a sap in this version.”

Scrooge and Cratchit’s relationship so much resembles an unhappy marriage that the niggling, bitter exchanges invented by Knight, with very little reference to Dickens’s dialogue, resemble Steptoe and Son rewritten by Strindberg. The easy contrast would have been with the Cratchits’ poor but happy marriage, but this too comes under scrutiny. There is an acknowledgment of the challenges a disabled child can bring to a household, and it is somehow emphasised by Tiny Tim being played by Lenny Rush, an extraordinary young actor, aged ten, who has a rare form of dwarfism called spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita, the same condition as Warwick Davis.

“It really mattered to me that nobody was photo-fit,” Murphy says from a studio where he is dubbing the last episode. “Bob Cratchit is always a winsome, put-upon nice guy and the Cratchits themselves represent this idea of an ideal, working-class, lovely family. So we looked into their relationship on the page and there seems a genuine tension between Bob and his wife. Things are hard. It isn’t easy to have no money and a disabled child, and they lean on each other and they’re not straight with each other and there is a genuine antagonism between them.”

Knight has written into the narrative a family secret that connects the Cratchits to Scrooge. The secret belongs to Mrs Cratchit, played by Vinette Robinson, whose part is greatly expanded; indeed, the novella does not even grant her a first name, although the Muppets, and other adaptors, opted for Emily.

“Inevitably the secret begins to surface and cracks appear in the family,” Alwyn says. “Something has to happen. I think what Steven has done is take the story and drill deeper. He hasn’t taken too much liberty. It’s not bending the truth too much from what Dickens would have wanted. Or I hope not.”

Murphy insists that worthwhile adaptations of classic texts should be “edgy” and have “a good bite to them”. “If you absolutely don’t want any variation from the book then I strongly suggest you sit in a corner at Christmas and read it again. But if you want to see it used as a prism through which we can see a broader and slightly different subject explored, then this one’s for you.”

Alwyn’s performance is part of the iconoclasm. “Joe’s instinct as an actor is always to push away from the obvious and into ambiguity,” Murphy says. “He’s very quietly spoken. He’s not brash at all. He’s a gentle, intelligent guy, but he just simply wasn’t interested in fitting a Dickensian cliché.”

“I’ll take that,” Alwyn says when I pass on the compliment, having not considered his technique in such terms. He is 28 and would probably accept that he is best known for two facts: the first is that he is Taylor Swift’s boyfriend; the second that, aged 25 and with no professional acting experience, he won the title role in an Ang Lee movie.

He is from north London, the middle of three sons. Their father is the television documentary-maker Richard Alwyn, renowned for making The Shrine about the public reaction to Princess Diana’s death.

“He was away a bit,” Alwyn says. “He made quite a lot of films in Africa when I was growing up. He was often in Uganda, Rwanda at one point, South Sudan. So he’d come back with stories and artefacts from all over the place. He made a great documentary in Liverpool during the World Cup about two kids on an estate growing up there.”

His mother, Elizabeth, is a psychotherapist. So, I say, although his family were comfortably off and he was sent to the fee-paying City of London School, he knew something of other people’s lives?

“All different kinds of people, all different kinds of stories,” he says. “Obviously, she couldn’t share them with me in the same way that Dad could, but both their jobs take an interest in other people and are about how to empathise, understand, and listen to stories and tell stories. I suppose it’s not a million miles away from an actor’s job; listening to other people, understanding them, trying to tell stories.”

I ask about the contemporary political resonances of A Christmas Carol. I cite the wealth of certain members of his profession and of Swift’s. Only the other day I have read that she has a private jet so she can visit Alwyn on a whim. He promises me that 99.9 per cent of what the press write about them is false, and this is an example.

I ask if he finds it embarrassing.

“Find what embarrassing?”

The disparity between the amount some people earn and the wages of workers in, say, Amazon fulfilment centres.

“I saw something in The Guardian the other day, I think, saying that the top six richest people in the UK accumulate the same amount of wealth as the poorest 13 million. I think that was the figure,” he says.

And politics today?

“It’s bigger than Scrooge, but it’s the same thing amplified; not being able to see beyond yourself, building walls, cutting yourself off from other countries. If there was ever a story to counter that, featuring someone who epitomises that and then who remembers who he is as a human being, it is A Christmas Carol.”

Unlike the young Dickens, Alwyn was not a boy to stand on a table and sing and dance. As a child he auditioned to play Liam Neeson’s son in the Richard Curtis film Love Actually, but didn’t get it. He harboured ambitions to act, but pursued them only later at the University of Bristol, where he took plays up to the Edinburgh Fringe. One night he acted before an audience of one: the writer’s mother. Undeterred, he went on to the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, joining the scramble at the end to find an agent. Weeks later, his new agent rang to say that Ang Lee was working on a new film, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, and wanted to see an audition tape.

“I got some mates to film me in a lunch break and then my dad filmed another scene, and we got a call that night saying, ‘He wants to meet you this weekend. He’s saying, we’re going to put you on a plane and take you out of school. Come for the weekend. Learn these scenes.’ ”

As Billy, a young US Marine fêted for killing an enemy assailant in Iraq, Alwyn was painfully believable; a virgin solider returning home to be exploited for an act that had devastated him. The film did not do well, mainly because it was shot at a hyper-reality frame rate that few cinemas had the technology to show, but Alwyn was on his way.

“Things only evolve by change and people taking risks,” he says. “And Ang Lee is someone who I admire for that. None of his films are the same. Maybe thematically they draw on the same things, but he’s always pushing the boundaries.”

The same can be said for A Christmas Carol and, even more, about Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, in which Alwyn appeared alongside Emma Stone and Olivia Colman. It applies less so to his other recent films, Mary Queen of Scots, Boy Erased and now Harriet, a faithful biopic about the slave liberator Harriet Tubman in which he played a slave owner’s son. What he has managed to do consistently is work and learn from some seriously good actresses — Colman, Stone, Saoirse Ronan and Cynthia Erivo. “I know. I am targeting them,” he jokes.

I tell him my daughters have insisted I ask if he minds Swift writing songs about him (whole albums, actually, but check out London Boy if you are in search of a little cringe). “No, not at all. No. It’s flattering.”

Does it matter to him that the press — it’s a bit metatextual this, I admit, for I’m probably doing the same thing — make it obvious that they are as interested in his girlfriend as they are in him? “I just don’t pay attention to what I don’t want to pay attention to,” he explains tolerantly. “I turn everything else down on a dial. I don’t have any interest in tabloids. I know what I want to do, and that’s this, and that’s what I am doing.”

The boyf, described only the other day as “mysterious” in one of those tabloids, is no mystery at all. He knows what he wants for Christmas, and it is the career he is already forging.

A Christmas Carol begins on BBC One at 9pm on Sunday

#joe alwyn #the times #taylor swift #interview #a christmas carol

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rainbowamory · 4 years ago

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Mansfield Park (1999) Review

The film I am reviewing is the one that came out in 1999. There is actually another film made in 2007.

I want to start by saying that I was a fool. I take back everything I said in my first post about this film. I had been reluctant to watch it for the reasons I explained in the previous post, but I finally pushed myself to give it a chance and… by the end of the film, it went from being my least favourite cousin love story in a novel to one of my Top Favourite films exploring this kind of relationship. I want to explain why I loved it this time round and what my impressions were of the book vs. the film.

The truth is I read the novel by Jane Austen years ago, so I don’t really remember the exact details or what the film might have changed. The main love story is still there. They might’ve just changed some details of the scenes here and there. But I remember that my first impression of the novel was that Edmund was indecisive and took forever to realize Fanny’s worth. Or that’s how it seemed to me, and that was the main reason for the bad impression I got of the book. It’s possible I misremembered or simply misinterpreted the book’s version of Edmund.

As for Fanny, I thought they changed her personality completely, but that too was a misunderstanding. The first time I tried to watch this film, I had only watched the opening scenes and I was irritated because I didn’t like the creepy stories that Fanny was reading out loud… I recall the book version of her being more sensitive, so I was put off by those opening lines because it seemed on the surface that the film version of her was harsh and unfeeling.

But the fact it, sometimes Fanny is cold on the outside, but she’s a sweetheart on the inside, and always faithful. (Wait a minute. Isn’t that my type?? So how could I possibly dislike her?) I think if they changed anything about her it was just that they made her personality more vivid and passionate in the film. They didn’t change her core character traits or values from the book.

The 2nd reason I had a negative impression of Fanny was that before I watched this film, I had seen some screenshots of the 2007 film, and I noticed two males in the picture, which sometimes indicates a love triangle. My personal preference in ships has always been monogamous pairings. The only scenarios in which I am ok with non-monogamous ships is if all characters involved are truly poly. I don’t care for stories where one person leads on two people and acts like the center of attention. In the 1999 version of the film, it’s clear that Fanny’s heart is always with the one guy: Edmund. There is no ambiguity there. If Henry Crawford feels like a third wheel, it’s his own dumb fault because no one is leading him on....

As I watched more of the film, it became clear that the dilemma Fanny and Edmund were really going through was the dilemma of a second-born son being in love with a woman from a lower class. Their marriage would not have been “advantageous” in a material sense in their time period. That was a huge part of what was holding them back from getting together.

So Edmund actually had a good reason for his hesitations. He was struggling inside because he felt he didn’t have enough to offer Fanny if she were to be his wife. And the only reason Fanny went along with the courtship with the other guy was because she too was trying to make the best of her circumstances and the fact that being with Edmund was not initially an option.

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[Typo in the captions below. It should read “I hope you know how much I shall...”]

Edmund and Fanny were always each other’s first choice. And they were always honest with each other every step of the way, even when they were going in separate directions. There was no sleezy deception. It’s this fact that ultimately won my heart: this consistent mutual respect. It’s what made them worthy of each other in the end.

There were a number of other things I also loved about this film. Often times, when consanguineous pairings are handled in fiction, especially more modern fiction, they tend to set the pair in a “broken family backdrop”. That’s something I really hate—this implication that incestuous relations only happen in unstable or “dysfunctional” families. Mansfield Park appears on the surface to follow this stereotype, but there’s more going on. Fanny’s uncle is a very sick individual who gets away with horrific crimes, but there was unfortunately nothing Fanny could directly do as she didn’t have the power to expose him. To add to that, Edmund’s mother is emotionally absent, Fanny’s parents are always struggling with poverty, and Edmund’s siblings are troubled in their own ways.

So one can say that Edmund and Fanny really only had each other. But it’s clear that the “broken family backdrop” is not the reason they got together.

I look at the common Cousin Dynamics to see where Fanny and Edmund would fit, and they actually don’t fit into the 3 main categories that are most typical. They grew up separately up to a certain point, and they didn’t seem to see each other as siblings, so it’s not Dynamic 1. But they did grow up together under the same roof for a big part of their lives, so it’s not Dynamic 2 which involves more distance. It’s not Genetic Sexual Attraction, because they did not fall in love upon first meeting. They had developed a bond and shared history before they fell in love.

They were playful and mutually supportive and they just seemed very in synch with each other’s personalities and values. It was a bond that came with the build-up of trust over time, familial and romantic at the same time. The “broken family backdrop” in this scenario did not force any of that. If anything, it only brought two already close people even closer. Dysfunction in their families was a circumstance, not the catalyst for their love.

Would I recommend this film? YES. However, you should know it’s not a plot-heavy story. It’s more a “slice of life” kind of story. When I watched it with my partner, half-way through she asked me, “Is this one of those stories where nothing really happens?”

My answer was that actually a lot is happening, but it’s in subtext. The themes that we see in subtext include women’s social expectations, inequalities between genders, classism, and the darker undertones of what was happening with slavery in those times.

But the main story is focused on the inner conflicts and coming-of-age of two characters.

It’s a refreshing exploration of a relationship that is allowed to form without the added stigma of the “incest taboo”. This is also due to the time period in which the story is set, in which cousin marriage was not automatically seen in a negative light.

As the 2nd born son, Edmund will not inherit the main wealth of the family. So their future is that of a clergyman and a clergyman’s wife, a humble middle class couple. This is an interesting alternative to the usual stories about royal couples or rural stereotypes.��And something tells me they will not be the blind, bigoted type of religious people. Edmund’s comments about the music at church and about Fanny’s character traits, and Fanny’s own ability to see through falseness in others shows they are people who can see the very essence of things.

Watching this movie was like watching a dream. It was beautiful and very charming and satisfying. The symbolism, the subtle humor, the way it was filmed, the acting… every decision fit the story and the themes. I was getting worried near the end whether it would end the way I was hoping it would, and when he started confessing to her, this was my reaction:

YES. SAY IT YOU SON OF A B*TCH. SAY IT. APOLOGIZE TO HER. THAT’S RIGHT. YES. NOW KISS HER.

And after that moment, all was forgiven in my head…

It was really a treat for a romantic with an open mind. And I regret dismissing it before, but now that I’ve seen it in full, I love it so much I would actually like to make a fanvideo for it eventually.

#Mansfield Park #Mansfield Park review #consanguinamory #Jane Austen #romance #cousin-cousin

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biofunmy · 5 years ago

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15 best nostalgic movies and TV shows to watch immediately

Cable watching may still be more popular than streaming, but as Disney+ and others join the battle, will streaming remain the cheaper option? Just the FAQs, USA TODAY

The Disney Vault is, at long last, open.

With the debut of Disney+, the new streaming service from the Mouse House, many films and TV shows that have been out of public circulation for years are now available at the click of the mouse, delighting diehard Disney fans and nostalgic millennials alike.

The service is billed as a mix of Disney, Pixar, Marvel, “Star Wars” and National Geographic, and while the other brands are great, they weren’t locked away in a “vault” for years on end when you just wanted a VHS copy of “Beauty and the Beast” for Christmas. One of the biggest benefits of the service is access to Disney’s theatrical animated films, along with the campy collection of Disney Channel Original Movies, series and a few gems from the 20th Century Fox studio that Disney acquired this year.

More: Disney+ to Apple TV+ to Netflix: All the major streaming services, ranked

Disney+ includes more than 7,500 episodes of television and 500 movies, which might make choosing just one childhood classic difficult. But fear not, we’ve picked 15 films and shows that should be at the top of your queue, from everyone’s favorites to hidden gems you probably haven’t thought about since you were 12.

A scene from Disney’s”Hercules” featuring Phil and Hercules. (Photo: Walt Disney Pictures)

Animated treasures

‘Hercules’

Before you dive into the heavy hitters from Disney animation (and we have several on this list), take a moment to enjoy one of the most underrated films from the “Disney Renaissance” of the 1990s: “Hercules.” The powers and adventures of the Greek gods are brought to life in the film, which uses a gospel and jazz score and original music to bring it all back down to Earth. Definitely a hero, not a zero.

‘Aladdin’

Please, we beg you, ignore this year’s Will Smith remake of this story and stick to the one with a brilliant voice performance from Robin Williams. There are few times in animated films where the vocals and animation feed off each other in such wonderful ways, and it’s infinitely better than a guy covered in blue makeup.

‘The Little Mermaid’

While you’re forgetting “Aladdin,” forget ABC’s “live” version��of “Mermaid,” too. The original 1989 film, in all its hand-drawn glory, is all you need to be “part of that world” (get it?). The music, by the legendary team of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, is among the best Disney’s ever produced, and it’s worth revisiting just to hear the songs in context again.

‘101 Dalmatians’

One of the movies that feels like it was sealed in the vault forever (in part because of Glenn Close’s later live-action films), “Dalmatians” is a veritable explosion of puppy love and good boys and girls. The film has a great villain and an even better villain song. If Cruella de Vil doesn’t scare you, no evil thing will.

‘The Aristocats’

“Dalmatians” is for dog people, and “Aristocats” covers cat people. One of the more under-the-radar Disney films, “Aristocats” is sleek and sweet with a great soundtrack. Released in 1970, it’s a little dated (though not as dated as other Disney films), but still full of cool cats.

Pups gather around the TV in “101 Dalmatians.” (Photo: DISNEY)

Live-action films that aren’t remakes

‘Escape to Witch Mountain’ (1975)

No offense to Dwayne Johnson, but there’s no beating the original version of this paranormal tale about two mysterious orphan siblings with powers and a mad millionaire chasing after them. The retro special effects and action sequences just make the the whole film better.

‘Heavyweights’

Though not a Disney Channel original, this Ben Stiller comedy aired on the network so often in the 2000s you wouldn’t be remiss for thinking it was. The sometimes problematic story of young boys sent to a torturous fat camp run by a psychotic fitness instructor (Stiller) is a celebration of individuality and adolescence. That Stiller makes an incredibly hilarious bad guy is simply gravy.

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Millennial DCOM Favorites

‘Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century’

There is, and never will be, a better Disney Channel Original Movie than this campy sci-fi classic, about a girl raised on a space station who faces a tough transition to life on Earth. The film portrays a version of the 21st century with a distinctly 1990s flair (all the cars are Volkswagen Beetles), its own catchphrase (Zeedus Lapidus!) and a boy-band tune that you won’t get out of your head anytime soon (“Supernova Girl”).

‘Smart House’

This 1999 movie beat “Black Mirror” in depicting technology as dangerous instead of empowering. Before we had Alexa or Siri, this Ryan Merriman DCOM asked, “what if Alexa could cook and had separation anxiety?” Come for the dance parties, stay for Katey Sagal (“Sons of Anarchy”) as the human embodiment of the Smart House.

‘Quints’

Millennial fans of Disney Channel may know Kimberly J. Brown better from the “Halloweentown” films, but “Quints” is just as worthy a use of her Disney charm. The movie follows 14-year-old Jamie (Brown), who hates being an only child until her mom gives birth to (you guessed it) quintuplets. Diaper humor is mixed with some surprisingly deep insights about forging an identity as a kid, and what you want and need from your parents.

Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn, left, with John Payne) is put on trial in the 1947 classic “Miracle on 34th Street.” (Photo: 20TH CENTURY FOX)

The Fox lot

‘Miracle on 34th Street’ (1947)

The Christmas classic, from the vast and historical catalog that went to Disney after its 20th Century Fox deal, airs often on broadcast TV during the holiday season, but now you can queue it up whenever you want. As many new Christmas movies as we get each year, there’s really no replacement for a young Natalie Wood learning to believe in Santa Claus. Sorry, Hallmark.

‘X-Men: The Animated Series’

Almost a decade before Hugh Jackman stepped into Wolverine’s clawed shoes, the comic book mutants came to life for kids in this fabulous animated series. Part of Fox’s old Saturday morning cartoon lineup, the series told complex, deep stories of heroes and villains while we ate our cereal from 1992-96. Now you can binge all 76 episodes over overnight oats.

Cory (Ben Savage) and Shawn (Rider Strong) in “Boy Meets World.” (Photo: Disney)

Disney and ABC TV series

‘Boy Meets World’

Cory (Ben Savage), Topanga (Danielle Fishel) and Shawn (Rider Strong) are the kind of friends you can count on for a very long time. “Boy” seems as if it was made for the binge-watching era, considering the long-running series (1993-2000) covered the trio from junior high to college and marriage. One of the best shows about growing up, it now can help teach a new generation about the ins and outs of puberty and young adulthood.

‘DuckTales’ (2017)

A rare instance where the reboot outshines the original, this recent take on Huey, Dewey and Louie Duck (along with the evil Scrooge McDuck) is an absolute delight. Parents can enjoy watching with kids, in part because the voice cast includes so many talented actors, including Ben Schwartz, Danny Pudi, Bobby Moynihan and David Tennant.

‘So Weird’

“So Weird” is something of a kid-friendly take on “The X-Files,” in which a family (with “One Day at a Time” star Mackenzie Phillips as the mom) travels around the country and encounters supernatural occurrences. The series covers a wide variety of weird, including crop circles, mythic Sirens and curses. Today’s kids may have a little trouble identifying with the early internet website protagonist Fi (Cara DeLizia) uses chronicles her adventures, but it’s important to learn there was life before TikTok.

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caveartfair · 6 years ago

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This Photographer Is Reimagining Norman Rockwell for the 21st Century

In 1964, Norman Rockwell’s Civil Rights-era painting The Problem We All Live With depicted Ruby Bridges, the 6-year-old black girl who entered an all-white school in 1960, walking between deputy U.S. marshals with volleyed tomatoes and a racial slur staining the wall behind her. In 2015, artist Maggie Meiners reimagined the famous composition to explore the plight of another youth: this time, a Dreamer—a child of undocumented immigrants given temporary protection under the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

In the photo, which she titled Dream Act (2015), Meiners directed actors and models to depict the scene of a young immigrant girl, standing alone and surrounded by a squadron of U.S. border-patrol agents. While Meiners created the image three years ago, it found new relevance under the current U.S. administration’s “Zero Tolerance” policy, enacted this spring, which resulted in immigrant children being separated from their parents at the U.S. border.

Dream Act wasn’t Meiners’s first Rockwell-inspired work. The artist has long been fascinated by the painter’s depictions of 20th-century American life, which charmed and shocked millions in the mid-1900s, and their power to adeptly illustrate an entire era.

Along with Rockwell’s arresting scenes of daily life—town gossips spreading the good word; a zookeeper on his lunch break while a lion eyes his peanut butter sandwich—were works that depicted timely, charged issues, like Civil Rights-era desegregation. In the process, his works came to embody American culture of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, and the social issues Rockwell and his peers were grappling with.

When Meiners visited the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 2010, she couldn’t help but wonder what Rockwell’s paintings would look like if they’d been made today—a thought that laid the groundwork for “Revisiting Rockwell,” her photo series that reimagines the legendary painter’s canvases in a contemporary context.

Meiners was facing Freedom from Want (1941–43), one of Rockwell’s most famous works, when the idea struck her. The painting depicts an idealistic Thanksgiving dinner, in which several generations of a middle-class white family gather around a long table crammed with requisite side dishes (cranberry sauce and the like) as the matriarch serves a massive, glistening turkey.

When Rockwell made the piece for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, he set out to portray traditional family values—the starry-eyed kind included in then-president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address, known as “Four Freedoms.”

As Meiners studied the painting, she pondered what an ideal American family looked like in 2010—and, more poignantly, “who gets to decide what an ideal family is,” she told Artsy, from her home in Chicago’s suburbs. “What if you’re an orphan? What if you’re adopted? What if you’re gay?”

At the time, the state of California had recently overturned Proposition 8, the controversial same-sex marriage ban, and gay rights were on Meiners’s mind. The court’s decision gave the artist hope that narrow definitions of family were expanding, and she wanted to illuminate the shift.

Meiners has a background in cultural anthropology, so before executing a Rockwell reboot, she wanted to take a deeper dive into the the social forces that informed Rockwell’s work. She began researching his practice and the political climate of his time, and realized that many of the topics that Rockwell depicted (parenting, generational divides, freedom of speech, race relations) could be tweaked to reflect contemporary culture.

From there, Meiners chose a number of paintings and illustrations to adapt for “Revisiting Rockwell.” Her selections were based on two factors. First, “it was about what I could actually execute,” she recalled. Restaging Rockwell’s compositions would be a complicated process, as many are filled with 10 or more subjects set against detailed backdrops. More importantly, though, a given piece needed to depict a subject that was “translatable to something that’s going on today,” she said. “I asked myself: ‘What can I say now that’s a little different than what was said in Rockwell’s time?’”

To ease into the series, Meiner temporarily shelved her plan for an updated Thanksgiving scene and started with Rockwell’s The Tattoo Artist (1944), a painting that portrays just two people (logistically, this would be easier to restage with sets and models than more complex, larger works). While Rockwell’s piece shows a male sailor getting inked—the names of six past lovers on his muscled arm crossed out in favor of the newest, “Betty”—Meiner trades Rockwell’s macho protagonist with a woman, toppling 1940s gender dynamics in the process. In her version, a woman can proudly brandish tattoos and boast many past lovers, too.

Soon after, Meiners took on the rendition of Freedom from Want, placing a gay couple at the head of the Thanksgiving table. Next was the lighthearted It Went Viral, in which Meiners restaged Rockwell’s famous The Gossips (1948), replacing the landlines that townspeople use to play a game of real-world “telephone” with big, glowing smartphones.

Maggie Meiners, It Went Viral.

However, most of Meiners’s works in the series, like 2015’s Dream Act, strike a decidedly more serious tone. Her transformation of Rockwell’s Freedom from Fear (1943) is particularly powerful. In his painting, parents tuck their children into bed while holding a newspaper emblazoned with all-caps World War II-era headlines, telling stories of widespread bombing overseas. Meiners replaces the white family with a black mother and her two young sons, who face violence that exists much closer to home. She grasps a copy of the Chicago Tribune, bearing the headline “Another Black Youth Shot,” referring to police violence and structural racism in America.

Like Dream Act, Meiners’s photographs are meant to provoke discussion. Her work often deconstructs and reconstructs American iconography and visual history. And though it took three years for Dream Act to make waves on the internet, the impact was profound. Hollywood actress Jennifer Garner even posted it on her Instagram account on June 29th. Under it, her caption read: “This photograph from @maggiemeinersprojects #revisitingrockwell collection tells you everything you need to know in a glance. Kids belong with parents.”

The popularity of Meiners’s Dream Act, and the controversy it reflected, resembles the public response to Rockwell’s most probing, incisive works. And that, of course, was Meiners’s hope for “Revisiting Rockwell.” “That was my big takeaway from this project: things change,” she said. “But there’s always something else that needs to be worked on.”

from Artsy News

#Artsy News

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bestmovies0 · 7 years ago

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Zombie thrills spell financial success

Image caption Zombies and Christmas: A seasonal mash-up too far?

A zombie walks into a shopping centre.

That may sound like the start of a creepy gag, but for horror fans an encounter with the strolling dead is a very serious proposition.

In a disused shopping centre, sweating, sometimes calling, punters run up long-decommissioned escalators to get away from zombies( or at least performers convincingly pretending to be them ).

Racing past empty newsagents and deserted jeweller, the person or persons desperately try not the draw “members attention” of the re-animated corpses committing chase.

Full immersion

It feels like something straight out of a low budget horror movie, and in a way it is, says Lee Fields, a director of Zed Events which stages the zombie survival periods in Reading, west of London.

“What we’ve created is a full submersion movie-like experience, so instead of playing a computer game or sitting in the cinema watching a zombie movie, you come here, ” he says.

Image copyright Lee Fields Image caption “We’ve had marriage proposals in the middle of a zombie strike, ” says event organiser Lee Fields

“All hell violates loose and you participate as if it’s happening for real. It’s is presided over by performers, they propel you through a story line which you interact with.”

Punters pay PS119 for two to 3 hour of the grizzly alternative reality, and although it may sound pricey it’s attracted guests from all over the world.

“We’ve had Americans, Canadians, Japanese; people have winged across the world, ” says Mr Fields.

“We likewise have stag and hen parties, team building workouts, and we’ve had proposals; in the middle of a zombie attempt person asked, ‘if we survive this will you marry me? ‘.”

Adrenalin rush

So why do people voluntarily invest an afternoon being frightened out their intellects?

Image copyright Zed Events Image caption It is all about “that rush of fear”, says novelist and fright devotee Daniel Benson

Daniel Benson, horror devotee and editor of website Horror Talk.com, managed to escape the clutches of Reading’s strolling dead to give his assessment.

“I think it’s that rushing of adrenalin, that rushing of dread, ” he says.

“You think you’re not going to be scared; I didn’t envision I would be, but there were periods when I seemed my nerve thumping through my chest, and I felt the dread even though I knew I wasn’t at risk of any harm.”

Mr Benson says that horror events in general are frighteningly successful.

“The number of zombie experiences are increasing, but so is the fright industry in general – it’s big in the US, and we’re starting to get more over here.”

The US, though, is still the place to go for extreme frights, and they don’t come more frightening than haunted home McKamey Manor.

Originally built by owner Russ McKamey in San Diego, California, there are now two sites, Alabama and Tennessee.

Extreme attraction

Mr McKamey, who revels in the incongruity of also being a part period wedding singer, prides himself on running what he calls “the world’s more extreme haunted attraction”.

Image copyright Russ McKamey Image caption One visitor tries his luck at McKamey Manor in the US

He claims to have a waiting list of around 30,000, so what attains it so afraid something happened to you?

“Every experience is different, ” says Mr McKamey. “We tailor the particular haunt to that individual’s anxieties and phobias.

“We talk to family members, friends and co-workers, and by doing that we’re able to dig into that person’s subconsciou. They will experience things such as being interred alive, being inside a water-based coffin with live eels.”

It’s such a horrific experience that despite there being a $2,000( PS1, 500) reward for completing the seven to 10-hour ordeal , nobody has.

“It’s not as easy as it sounds, and there’s a reason that in 16 years no one has ever come close. The reason they are able to ever fail is that my thinker is stronger than their mind.”

Test bed

Mind games in the form of psychological frights are a speciality of Hammer Films. The studio is best known for its Dracula films, and chairman Simon Oakes explains some of the secrets of a subtler shape of scare.

“Once there’s a sense of jeopardy you get people frightened, ” he says.

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Hammer Films, best known for its Christopher Lee Dracula films, has been trying out its own immersive theater experiences

“In Psycho there’s merely one really scary scene at the start of this movie. We often use “whats called” jumping frightens – in some cases they’re nothing, only a tap coming on when you least expect it. Sometimes it can be the atmosphere that stimulates the cinema frightening.”

Atmosphere was crucial to Hammer’s recent immersive theater experience, the Soulless Ones, a vampire-inspired scare evening, established in the spookily made-over Hoxton Hall in east London.

Mr Oakes, says this kind of event both brings in new audiences and acts as a testing bed for future film projects.

“It’s a great creative lab for ideas, out of 10 scripts you might only make two or three, so it’s a cost effective way of testing the scripts.”

Hammer currently has a movie in production, The Lodge, and it’s a good time to be in the business according to Georg Szalai, international business editor at The Hollywood Reporter.

“There’s been a changing seem in the horror genre, ” he says. “There’s now a lot of high concept films, with movies like Get off, for example, tackling social question, and there’s also been a lot of critical praise.

“You don’t typically see that with horror, which has often been sneered at and appeared down on.”

Rising profits

And fans are voting with their feet; in 2017, the adaptation of Stephen King’s It induced $697 m( PS521m ).

Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The movie version of Stephen King’s It was one of the most important one grossing horror movies ever

“If you adjust it for inflation, the Exorcist would have built more, but in absolute dollar terms It was the most difficult fright film ever, ” says Mr Szalai.

It’s likewise a potentially profitable genre, he adds.

“Horror is a low cost bet, you don’t usually have suns being paid tens of millions of pounds, and there’s often one location so you don’t have to go to far-flung destinations.

“You generally don’t need the big special effects and the blown up houses so that are typically keeps the cost fairly low.”

Mr Szalai points out that relatively humble budgets can reap creative dividends,

“As a very low investment, if it fails you don’t lose money, so it’s a big area of experimentation and innovation these days.”

Which all bodes well for fans of fear.