Rendering 16

     

The article which is called   "Russian music journalist supports the local scene" was published  on April 15 by Daryana Antipova. The author told us about music critic and award judge Vadim Ponomaryov, known by his professional name, Guru Ken who had thrived just on practical training - no degree or university diploma to his name. It was while working at the Teatr Chikhachyova in Moscow that Ponomaryov realized he did not want to be an actor. Instead, self-education and experience in various fields - from theaters to sales to rock music - gave him all the skills he needed when he settled on a profession.
       The author underlined the fact that Ponomaryov's first online journalistic foray was guruken.ru, where he began posting his own articles about show business and music. In 2002, when he started the site, the Russian Internet was mostly devoid of coverage about Russian music. Instead, there were many sites about Western artists who were still obscure in Russia - rather than popular taste dictating coverage, it was the people running the sites, who followed artists of narrow appeal and whom Ponomaryov calls a "fifth column."
       Ponomaryov thought that he  did't call all the journalists that, but only that clan that believes that all good music was abroad, and imposes this ridiculous point of view on readers. The cultural bias of music journalists pushed Ponomaryov to try to fill this gap himself, building on guruken.ru and developing newsmusic.ru - his current project - in 2005.
       Ponomaryov divides up his materials: rock fans go to the rock section, where there is nothing about pop music. The same happens with the annual Russian TOP award, which has been running since 2006. Newsmusic.ru originally created the prize per category, with votes for the best rock and pop music, but now runs single, non-genre votes for best album, artist, singer and group. Fans of the heavy metal band Kipelov and the pop singer Nyusha still exchange insults, but Ponomaryov feels a general understanding: it's not genre that defines who is the best singer, but instead the singer's voice and artistry.
       Ponomaryov has a bleak view of the industry's prospects, partly due to a lack of new musical ideas in the world. In Russia, people are losing interest in music, and less money is coming into entertainment. Many talented musicians are leaving the profession, since working in large companies - he cited Gazprom as an example - is more profitable. The decline in the industry marks a return to the environment of the early 1980s, despite the flourishing Russian music scene of the past 25 years.
        As a result, Ponomaryov consciously keeps his contact with artists to a minimum, preferring to deal with directors and PR managers. His reputation is very high, allowing him to participate on national award juries and to write for industry-specific and news publications, such as, respectively, Muzykalnaya Zhizn and Ogonyok. He also hosts a Friday evening radio show about rock music on Komsomolskaya Pravda radio, "The Guru Ken Show."
      
       

Rendering 15

      

The article which is called   "A director with an ear for music"  was published  on  May  27 by Vladimir Kozlov. The author told us about Alexei Balabanov, who died earlier this month at the age of 54, was one of the few Russian directors who paid special attention to the music in his films.
       Balabanov had close ties with the St. Petersburg rock community – especially with musicians, who, like him, had moved to the city from Yekaterinburg. Among them was Vyacheslav Butusov, formerly the front man of band Nautilus Pompilius, whose songs appear on the soundtracks of several of the director’s movies.
       Butusov had a cameo playing himself in 1997’s “Brat” (Brother), Balabanov’s breakthrough movie. Its main character, Danila Bagrov, is a fan of Nautilus Pompilius and searches for their song “Krilya.” The soundtrack features many of the group’s songs, mostly taken from the album “Yablokitai,” released the same year.
     The author underlined the fact  that a video for the track “Vo Vremya Dozhdya” (During the Rain) includes footage from “Brat,” as well as some additional shots featuring Bagrov. Another notable Nautilus Pompilius track on the “Brat” soundtrack is “Letuchi Fregat,” (Flying Frigate), with vocals provided by another former Yekaterinburger, Nastya Poleva. The film’s most evocative track is probably “Polkovniku Nikto Ne Pishet” (No One Writes to the Colonel) by Bi-2. Although Bi-2 had been around for more than 10 years, its main members lived in Australia and were hardly known in Russia. Their relocation to Moscow coincided with the release of “Brat 2,” and the movie boosted the group’s popularity.
      Other notable songs on the “Brat 2” soundtrack are “Iskala” (I Was Looking) by Zemfira, a new star at the time following her 1999 eponymous debut album, and Tantsy Minus with “Idu” (I’m Walking). Petersburg band Splean, whose heyday was the late 1990s and early 2000s, had three songs on the “Voina” soundtrack, including the gloomy “Plasmassovaya Zhizn” (Plastic Life).
      Balabanov’s last film, “Ya Tozhe Khochu” (I Also Want It) features music exclusively by veteran St. Petersburg band Auktsyon and front man Leonid Fyodorov. Tracks such as “Golova-Noga” (Head-Leg) and “Zimy Ne Budet” (There Won’t Be a Winter) are well-known to the band’s fans, but sound new when juxtaposed with the movie’s images.

It was a great man with a great talant. All his films are wonderful and speaking about the music of his films, all people know it and listen. To my mind the author was a fan of Balabanov. We can read about the majority of the music from the films of this great man.

Rendering 14

      The article which is called "John Fogerty: 'I had rules. I wasn't embarrassed that I was ambitious"
was published in The Guardian on Wednesday 29 May by Dorian Lynskey. The author told us about John Fogerty. He was once rock's most consistent hitmaker. Then bitterness descended. Forty years after Creedence Clearwater Revival broke up. ohn Fogerty would like to make it very clear that he is happy now. That needs spelling out because, for many years after the demise of his band Creedence Clearwater Revival, he was famous for being miserable.
       The author underlined that for a short while, Creedence Clearwater Revival were the biggest band in America and, after the Beatles split up, the world. Between 1968 and 1972 they released seven albums and an unbroken string of hit singles, including Bad Moon Rising, Proud Mary and Who'll Stop the Rain . Creedence were the only band who could unite hippies, rednecks and the pop critic of the New Yorker. But their acrimonious split in 1972 marked the start of decades of legal strife, bad blood and creative paralysis. In fact, Creedence's afterlife has been so painful and messy that they rival the Smiths as the most unreunitable band in rock, and Fogerty even became estranged from his own songs. He refused to perform them for another 25 years because the associations were too painful. If one of his old hits came on the car radio – which happened often – he would turn it off.
        Fogerty's youthful ambition, class-conscious lyrics and craving for stability can all be traced back to his childhood in the California suburb of El Cerrito. After divorcing his alcoholic father, his mother was left to raise five boys alone on a teacher's salary. John's bedroom was in the basement and when it rained hard the room flooded, so he had to lay down planks of wood in order to reach his bed. Fogerty first began playing with his older brother Tom, bassist Stu Cook and drummer Doug Clifford in a high school band, the Blue Velvets, when he was just 15. They signhttp://www.blogger.come to San Francisco independent label Fantasy Records, who rechristened them the Golliwogs and made them wear fuzzy white wigs to match their regrettable name. It's perhaps for the best that their career was halted in 1966 when Fogerty was drafted into the Army Reserve. That was when he experienced his first songwriting epiphany.
         Fogerty wasn't just Creedence's sole songwriter but its producer and manager. By the standards of the time, he was unusually square (the closest he comes to swearing is "fricking") and strait-laced. He still blames the Grateful Dead for ruining Creedence's big moment at Woodstock.
        Fogerty turned some kind of corner in 1997 when he finally began playing Creedence material again and releasing solo albums with some regularity. He found it hard to explain exactly what he was thinking and feeling in the long and testing period prior to that. At least former heroin addicted acquire the language to talk about the bad times but there was no rehab for bitterness and the suppressed anger still bubbles to the surface sometimes. After one long anecdote about some legal imbroglio, we realise we only have a couple of minutes left and Fogerty laughs awkwardly.
    
So,  perhaps, he feels he has spent too much of his life telling negative stories and fighting unwinnable wars. It's this context that makes Wrote a Song for Everyone more poignant and significant than most celebrity collaboration albums. It decisively reunites an extraordinary songwriter with the songs that, for too long, felt like strangers to him. So when Fogerty grins boyishly and describes the making of the album as a joyous experience, you can't help feeling his joy is long overdue.
        
     

Rendering 13

   

The article which is called  Music fans will buy songs, says head of free online music site Spotify was published in The Gardian by Alexandra Topping. The author told us about that record sales are down, illegal file sharing persists and a whole generation is getting used to enjoying music for free.
     Daniel Ek, the man behind Spotify, the world's fastest growing online music service, is convinced that fans will still pay for songs they love if they are packaged in the right way. In one of his first interviews since the British launch in February of the "online jukebox" which allows users to listen to songs instantly for free in return for occasional adverts, Ek outlined a new blueprint for the music industry.
    The author underline that Ek is confident that the future is bright if the music industry seizes the digital initiative. Today Brighton's new music festival and convention The Great Escape - think South by Southwest by the seaside - announced that Ek will share a stage with Patrick Walker, director of video partnerships at YouTube or Google at the event next month.
     Then author wrote that The pair will discuss new ways of making money and halting the decline of the music industry. With Spotify seen by many as the most important digital tool to hit the music industry since Napster, and YouTube embroiled in a rights row after removing all premium music videos from its site, it promises to be explosive, said Martin Elbourne, founder and creative director of the Great Escape. Martin Elbourne said to The Gardian that YouTube is now bigger than MySpace for the music industry and Spotify is seen as its potential saviour, to have them sharing a stage is very exciting.
      Bands who have grasped the digital nettle include Radiohead, who turned the industry on its head when they invited fans to pay what they liked to download their album In Rainbows and Coldplay, who released their first single Violet Hill off their new album Viva la Vida exclusively on their website for one week. The album's title track went on to become Coldplay's first British number one based on download sales alone, after it was released solely on iTunes.
       Among other options, fans could download the first nine songs for free, get the entire 36-track album for $5 (£3.37) or opt for one of an edition of 2,500 personally-signed box sets at $300 a piece. And it worked: the deluxe box set sold out in less than 30 hours and the album - available online for free - made $1.6m in its first week of sales.
        Ek said that music industry as a whole can be in a better position than it has ever been and that there has been a massive shift from ownership to access but people will pay for music if packaged correctly and it offers them something special. However, trying to force people to consume music in traditional ways, by prosecuting file sharing sites or the fans themselves for example, was futile and counter-productive.
        After reading this article I should say that Ek is confident it will. In return for access to their catalogues labels will be able to target their audience and market their product like never before, while in exchange for their talent artists will have direct access to their fans, and far more flexibility. And the service on offer is useful enough for users to pay. Although he is far from claiming to be a knight in shining armour Ek is sure that Spotify has its role to play.

Pleasure Reading Part 1

Kitty and Charlie were in the midst of an adulterous rendezvous at her home in Hong Kong. This was a common occurrence for them, but Charlie had decided to come over at an abnormal time. Kitty was scared because someone tried to open the door to the bedroom they are in and fears it is her husband, but Charlie reassured her that it was one of the Chinese servants. After that there were description of Kitty's early life. Her mother wanted she got married as soon as possible. But after her marriage, Kitty knew she had made a mistake but blamed her mother for pressuring her. Her father was a lawyer—a King's Counsel—and a very slight, timid man. Her mother was overbearing and critical. Kitty was not at all fond of her mother, Mrs. Garstin. She had married Kitty's father in the hopes that he would turn out to be a prestigious, rich man, but those hopes never panned out, and he wound up with a modest legal practice. He was a very timid man, and she had no difficulty controlling him. Kitty's mother was driven by social ambition and frugality. She would frequently throw dinner parties for her many acquaintances and prided herself on how cheaply she could do so.

Film Review 3

 Cast :

• Naomi Watts - Ellie Parker
• Rebecca Rigg - Sam
• Scott Coffey - Chris
• Mark Pellegrino - Justin
• Blair Mastbaum - Smash Jackson
• Chevy Chase - Dennis Swartzbaum
• Jennifer Syme - Casting Chick
• Gregory Frietas - Rick Saul
• Gaye Pope - Leslie Towne
• Jessica Vogl - Trixie
• Kim Fay - Therapist
• Todd Coffey - Upstairs Neighbour
• David Baer - Acting Teacher
• Marcel Sarmiento - Acting Student
• Robbi Chong - Acting Student
• Jessicka Whitt Crane - Acting Student
• Brian McCardie - Acting Student
• Bret Domrose - Dogstar Band Member
• Robert Mailhouse - Dogstar Band Member
• Keanu Reeves - Dogstar Band Member
• Debbie Leavit - Vicodin Girl
• Gabriella Wall - 'Slut' Yelling Girl
• Fanshen Cox - Receptionist
• Samantha Shelton - Rainbow
• Julie Fay - Therapist's Companion
• Kate Garwood - Actress Before Ellie
• Victoria Smirnova - Russian
• Sergei Afrika - Russian
• Billy Ray Cyrus - Russian

 Ellie Parker is a semi-autobiographical story of an Australian actress struggling to make it in Hollywood. Ellie is young enough to still go to auditions back and forth across L.A., changing wardrobes and slapping on makeup en route, but just old enough that the future feels "more like a threat than a promise". She lives with her vacuous musician boyfriend (Mark Pellegrino), who leaves her just about as dissatisfied as any other part of her life, and has a loose definition of the word "fidelity". Helping make sense of their surreal and humiliating Hollywood existence is her best friend Sam (Rebecca Rigg), another out-of-work actress trying her hand at design, who attends acting classes with Ellie to stay sharp. When Ellie gets into a fender bender with a guy who claims he's a cinematographer (Scott Coffey), her perspective on her work and the dating world starts to change. Chevy Chase also makes an appearance in this series of Hollywood vignettes, playing Ellie's agent.

 This film is astounding. As Ellie Parker, she's not so different from hundreds --perhaps thousands-- of actors of both genders running around for auditions that agents send them out on, all eager to show how capable they are for a particular part, to add their own interpretation to a role. As Ellie does so smartly here, they dress and make themselves up to suggest the character for the benefit of the director, producer, casting director "seeing" them in the role  so long as they know what they're going up for in advance, which is not always the case.

Rendering 12

This article is called You're so vain.. It was published in The Gardian. The author told us how John Travolta's vanity project Battlefield Earth had taken 10 years to make and was set to be the turkey of the year. But, as Mark Morris explains, he was not the first star whose labour of love has resulted in risible self-indulgence.
There's nothing like a real Hollywood flop. Not an average bad movie doing averagely badly, but a complete wreck of a film that makes you wonder what the hell anyone was thinking of when they decided to make it and how the hell anyone had the guts to release it. There's no doubt that this year that film is Battlefield Earth . It's not just that the reviews were beyond brutal (' Battlefield Earth may well turn out to be the worst movie of this century,' suggested the New York Times ), or the fact that the box-office figures have been pitiful for a $70 million movie. It's more precise than that: the statistics showed that the audience crumbled between its first Saturday on release and the Sunday. In other words, people were calling their friends and strongly advising them not to see this film. But that's barely the start of the Battlefield Earth catastrophe. Because the film isn't just any old lame sci-fi movie about a race of evil aliens who have conquered the earth. This is the film John Travolta has been struggling to make for at least a decade, his true labour of love. Yet even with Travolta's name behind it, no one was dumb enough to stump up the cash until hustling producer Elie Samaha started sucking up to big stars at a time when the studios were starting to worry that they were a waste of cash. Orig inally, Travolta was going to play the hero of Battlefield Earth , Johnny Goodboy Tyler. But the years drifted by and he grew too old for the part, and had to settle instead for playing the 10-foot, dreadlocked alien leader with the bizarre (British?) accent. Travolta wanted Brad Pitt to play Tyler, but had to settle for the little-known Barry Pepper. 'It will be like Star Wars, only better,' Travolta used to say. Well, in a word, no. In two ghastly weeks, Travolta's reputation has dived back to where it was before Pulp Fiction . So why did he do it? Simple: the novel Battlefield Earth was written by L. Ron Hubbard, who apart from being a master of immense, turgid sci-fi epics, was the founder of the Church Of Scientology. And Travolta is one of Hollywood's many devoted followers of Hubbard's weird self-help creed. In fact, before Battlefield Earth was released, a few over-anxious cult watchers had warned about either overt, or subliminal, propaganda for scientology being pushed by the film. As it is, the film has done scientology more damage than anything its opponents could ever have contrived. But let's say Travolta wasn't just obsessed by the book because he is a scientologist. It might just be his favourite novel. That's even sadder. Film stars' long-nurtured pet projects usually have an element of tragic over-ambition to them, a yearning to do something that's either more personal or breaks them out of the restrictions of their star persona. Like Steve McQueen, frustrated with all those years as a taciturn cool guy in cool movies, growing a big bushy beard and donning glasses to star in an Arthur Miller adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy Of The People . That's Miller and Ibsen . You can imagine how proud McQueen - the executive producer - was to be given the chance to elevate the minds of his audience. And you can imagine how horrified his agent was. It took a couple of years of sitting on a shelf for the film to make it into the cinemas, and then it only had a very short run. And 20 years after McQueen's death, it's clear he's still remembered as that silent guy in the Mustang or on the bike. At least An Enemy Of The People saw the light of day. No such luck for Jerry Lewis's The Day The Clown Cried . In the 1972 film, which Lewis directed and wrote, he played a clown in a concentration camp who is used to lure the children into the gas chambers. Lewis lost 40lbs to play the role, which was designed to transform the reputation of the star of The Nutty Professor forever. But it was never released, for legal reasons rather than seemingly more pressing matters of taste. Mind you, after Life Is Beautiful and Jakob The Liar, The Day The Clown Cried suddenly doesn't seem such an outlandish idea. Its fate was almost mirrored by The Brave, Johnny Depp's directorial debut about an illiterate man who sells himself to a producer of snuff movies. Depp talked his friend Marlon Brando into co-starring, and Iggy Pop into writing the soundtrack. The film was shown at the 1997 Cannes festival, to an astonishingly hostile reception. It was never released in the UK or the US. Even when a star's baby gets merely mediocre reviews and revenues, it can still backfire. Girl, Interrupted appealed to Winona Ryder because of her own history of psychiatric trouble. So naturally, she took the central role as the author/narrator, even though she was a good 10 years too old for the part. She was promptly blown off the screen by the Oscar-nabbing Angelina Jolie. Worthy intentions can't save you either: Bruce Willis used his own money to get Breakfast Of Champions made, ignoring the conventional wisdom that Kurt Vonnegut's work doesn't translate to film. The film was released last year in the US to utter indifference from the critics and the public. Which is why even the biggest stars can find it impossible to get their pet projects made. As one old studio hand warned: 'The problem is that you're dealing with people who are so obsessed with a project that they've lost all objectivity.' At the height of his identification with Native Americans, Marlon Brando tried to get Martin Scorsese to direct The Battle Of Wounded Knee . Scorsese wasn't biting. Brando then spent years cooking up projects with wayward genius Donald Cammell, the co-director of Performance . Unsurprisingly, they never got anywhere. But the real heartbreaker is Sylvester Stallone's Edgar Allan Poe movie. Stallone started the script in 1970, long before he had found stardom, and plugged away at it throughout the Rocky and Rambo years. Yet even when he was the world's biggest film star, money for him to play Poe was never laid on the table. He was still tinkering with the idea in the 1990s, but as the years passed it began to sound like his heart had gone out of it. 'As I get older, Poe gets older,' he said at one point. No longer, presumably: Stallone has now lived 14 years longer than the opium-eating poet and writer. Then there's Meg Ryan, who has hauled her Sylvia Plath script from studio to studio for the best part of a decade. It's easy enough to see why they all passed, even before you hear Ryan's reasons for wanting to make the film. 'I am totally fascinated by that woman. I think Sylvia Plath speaks to women forever, but especially now, because more than ever we are these multi-tasking people with a lot to accomplish - and on top of everything else, she was a mother. To be an artist and a mother - those are two very difficult things to reconcile.' And there you were thinking the Plath myth was all about the intensity of the poetry and her tortured relationship with Ted Hughes. Just occasionally, stars get away with it. Burt Lancaster's The Swimmer was received almost as badly as Battlefield Earth when it was released in 1968, but these days it is largely viewed as a pretty interesting film. In case Travolta tries to take any comfort from the story, he should be reminded that as Lancaster's source material was John Cheever rather than L. Ron Hubbard, respectability was always nearer at hand.
And while in 1984 it seemed truly barmy that Bill Murray was writing and starring in an adaptation of Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge , his reputation has grown so much since that it seems like an interesting curiosity rather than an act of stupidity. And there was widespread scepticism when Gary Oldman, at a time when he was Hollywood's evil mastermind of choice, kept insisting he was about to make an autobiographical film in south London. But the sneering stopped after Nil By Mouth . It helped, of course, that Oldman stayed behind the camera and that he wanted to make a realist European film.

To my mind there is one star who shows that you can make Hollywood fulfil your dreams, no matter how crazy they are. And they don't come much more deranged than taking a minor Isaac Bashevis Singer short story and blowing it up into a two hour 13 minute musical with 12 songs. Then, casting a 40-year-old woman as a 20-year-old who could pass for a man. Truly, the fact that Barbra Streisand was not only allowed to produce, direct and star in Yentl , but wasn't chased out of town by a lynch mob when the film came out shows that she exists on a different planet from the rest of us. No matter how misguided Battlefield Earth might be, when it comes to untethered self-indulgence, Travolta is strictly a beginner.

Rendering 11

The article which is called Redford gets into his swing  was published  in The Gardian. The author wrote about  that  Redford's latest film, as director, features Hollywood's brightest young stars. The golfing fable also marks a return to form. Interview by John Anderson. Robert Redford enters the Manhattan hotel room smiling, blond, trim, casual, a bit craggy at 63 but pretty much as you expect. The legendary mystique is intact. His cultivated superstardom has made the actor-director-producer a kind of totem in the annals of Hollywood stereotyping. Redford, after all, always has been Redford - the way Gable was Gable, Cooper was Cooper, William Powell was William Powell. Redford is his own man, and his own model, too - and he does not deviate from it much. Younger stars push the envelope: Tom Cruise has done Magnolia and Eyes Wide Shut, Brad Pitt 12 Monkeys and even Matt Damon - seemingly the most Redfordian of them all - was in The Talented Mr. Ripley, although his sexually ambivalent homicidal maniac was the most sympathetic sociopath you had ever seen. Damon, not coincidentally, is the star of The Legend of Bagger Vance, Redford's sixth film as a director - the area of Redford's career where he has stretched himself. In the Oscar-winning Ordinary People (1980) or the much-honoured Quiz Show ( 1994) or even his last, The Horse Whisperer (1998), Redford exhibits more daring than he ever did in his choice of movie roles, although nobility, or a grasping for nobility, is afoot in all his work. In Bagger Vance, a Jazz Age golden boy (Damon), a golfing sensation, goes off to the First World War, has his ideals shot out from under him and returns a broken man. With the aid of a mysterious caddie named Bagger (Will Smith), he strives to regain his swing, his soul and his girl (Charlize Theron). Redford did fly fishing in A River Runs Through It ( 1992). Maybe a movie about golf is not so strange. And maybe golf isn't the attraction at all. 'No, that would not interest me,' he says. 'First of all, it's everywhere. It's ubiquitous. You turn on the Golf Channel. Airlines. It's everywhere.' Some would suggest that's just the reason to do it. 'Yeah, but it wouldn't be mine,' he says. 'But golf as a metaphor for life does interest me.' Bagger Vance is based on a novel by Steven Pressfield (screenplay by Jeremy Leven) and what Redford found in it was the way to create a story in a classic form: the hero's fall into darkness and his struggle to return to the light. Pressfield, Redford says, borrowed heavily from the Bhagavad-Gita and other Eastern sources, as well as Western mythology 'and the part that interested me was the part that related to the character's battle with himself, the idea of focus, concentration, centre, what we now hear of as "the zone" - the way an athlete gets into the zone. He also needed a break after the gravity of The Horse Whisperer. The author underline the festival, of course, is Sundance, with which Redford has been involved since the mid-Eighties, when his Sundance Institute (he was, after all, the Sundance Kid) took over the existing US Film Festival. His presence there has been erratic, almost shadowy; in an effort not to eclipse the filmmakers, he has become its resident phan. Redford is himself, of course, an independent filmmaker, one with carefully wrought ideas and a genuine cinematic palette: The opening sequence in Horse Whisperer, for example, is an elegiac daydream of half-tones and impressionism; Quiz Show recreates its era of early TV with effortless grace.

Interesting article! I think the author like this man and his work. How he wrote -  Redford has directed a few films, starred in scores more. But if you had to guess it would be directing that has his heart.

Rendering 10

The article which is called Attempting the Impossible: why does western cinema whitewash Asian stories was published in THE GARDIAN. The author told us that  The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 killed at least 227,898 people. Around a third of these were children. The economy of coastal south-east Asia was devastated, with the loss in some places of two thirds of the boats on which fisherfolk depended. The environment was irreversibly defiled. Since many of the bodies were never found, psychological trauma was compounded by the tradition in many of the areas affected that the dead must always be buried by a family member.
Scope here for drama you might have thought. Yet The Impossible, like Clint Eastwood's Hereafter before it, concentrates not on the plight of the indigenous victims but on the less harrowing experiences of privileged white visitors. The film's winsomely western family, headed by Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor, experience little more than separation anxiety and survivable injury before jetting safely homewards.
This scenario has provoked outrage, not least on this site. The New York Times found the film "less an examination of mass destruction than the tale of a spoiled holiday". Still, the indicted parties have alibis to hand.
According to Watts, "Fifty per cent of the people that died in Thailand were tourists." Good try, but perhaps a little disingenuous. Holiday paradise Thailand, with its 5,400 deaths, was actually at the margins of the tragedy. Indonesia alone suffered 130,700 deaths, largely of low-income Acehnese people; the figure for the UK, whence The Impossible's family appears to hail, is 149.
McGregor has filed a different defence. "Naomi's character is saved by a Thai man, and taken to safety in a Thai village where the Thai women dress her. In the hospital they're all Thai nurses and Thai doctors – you see nothing but Thai people saving lives and helping. Does this make matters worse? Those who are protesting don't want to see non-whites patronised with background roles as saintly ciphers; they want them to play mainstream parts as three-dimensional protagonists in what is, after all, their story.
As it happens, The Impossible's director, Juan Antonio Bayona, was inspired by the tale of a real-life family. However, this family was Spanish, not British. So, it seems, even Catalan people like the woman Watts actually plays aren't considered mainstream enough, even for what is a wholly European film.
Still, few who have spent much time in cinemas will be surprised. Ever since the medium emerged into an era of cheery racism, the movies have appeared to like their heroes to be white. In 1915, The Birth of a Nation celebrated America's reconstruction after the Civil War with African-Americans played by white actors in blackface, together with a sympathetic attitude to the Ku Klux Klan.
Now, of course, social attitudes have changed, and most of the time film-makers inhabit the vanguard of the progressive class. Yet white saviours continue to pop up in films such as Dances with Wolves, The Blind Side, Avatar and The Help. You can't imagine an Oscar-winner like The Hurt Locker promoting Iraqi rather than American derring-do. Even children's animations and, more weirdly, fantasy require Caucasians in their primary roles.
Producers have justified this approach with the claim that audiences won't tolerate non-white characters or actors in dominant roles. Is this just a cowardly failure on their part to recognise the maturity of contemporary filmgoers? Apparently not. Last year an Indiana University study confronted 68 white college students with a variety of synopses accompanied by casts of varying ethnicity. "The higher the percentage of black actors in the movie, the less interested white participants were in seeing the movie," said the report. "Importantly, this effect occurred regardless of participants' racial attitudes or actors' relative celebrity."
The success of Will Smith, Morgan Freeman, Eddie Murphy, Denzel Washington and Halle Berry shouldn't be exaggerated. A few genuinely mixed-race movies, such as the Fast & Furious franchise, have broken through. Yet in 2010, non-white actors took leading roles in only two of America's 30 top-grossing films. Studios remain convinced that the audiences of middle America just won't identify with non-white characters.
So far, so familiar. Yet since that approach was forged, the movie business has been transformed. Once, Hollywood made films for the home market and regarded any overseas earnings as a bonus. That's no longer the case: big films are now global products earning most of their money outside the US. The prejudices of middle America (whose own makeup is changing fast) are no longer overwhelmingly important, and the suits know it. .
So, studios are falling over themselves to reorient their activities. There's a scramble to co-produce with the Chinese. A major children's movie, such as Rio, gets to be set in Brazil. Yet here's a puzzle. The great wide world at which films such as The Impossible are now aimed is only 17% white. Nonetheless, the predominance of white characters among their protagonists seems hardly to have fallen.
The title of Captain America: The First Avenger was changed in some territories in deference to local sensibilities, but the captain himself was allowed to fight on, along with his equally white super-hero colleagues, British agent James Bond, Twilight's milky-skinned vampires, the little-Englander Hobbit and the rest.
Those who object to films such as The Impossible sometimes speak as if they suspect a plot by western film-makers to re-colonise the world through cultural imperialism. In fact, in movie circles, it's money, not ideological ambition, that talks. The plain fact is that much of the world seems to have no objection to the chalky faces of the screen heroes with which it's presented.
Captain America earned more overseas than it did in the captain's homeland. Now Les Misérables has opened with impressive figures in Japan, The Hobbit is doing well in Mexico and Brazil, while Skyfall has pulled in $16m in South Korea. Meanwhile, Bollywood may make more films than Hollywood, but it shows no sign of gaining global traction. China may be pouring money into its film industry, yet it's doing no better beyond its borders. Instead, both India and China are hiring more and more western actors.
Not until this picture changes do white people look likely to vacate their throne on the silver screen.

As for me  I saw this film. It is horrible because you can feel all horror of people who was there. Also it is hard for watching too. To my mind the author think negative about this movie.

Rendering 9

The article which is called Journey To Italy: the Italian film that kickstarted the French New Wave was pulished on Saturday 4 May 2013  in The Gardian. The author wrote that Roberto Rossellini's half-improvised neo-realist masterpiece uses the ruins of Pompeii as an unforgettable metaphor for a marriage. In terms of cinema history, Roberto Rossellini's Journey To Italy  is one of the most important films you've never seen. The third part of an informal trilogy of Italian movies starring his wife Ingrid Bergman – the others are Stromboli  and Europa 51  – it follows an English couple (Bergman and George Sanders) visiting Naples to sell off an inherited villa, as their unfamiliar and enforced intimacy starts eating away at the fabric of their union. As he idles with other expats and their marriage proves a transient, temporary thing, she immerses herself in the ruins around Pompeii and Herculaneum, all the while feeling rebuked and chastened by the ancient permanence of everything around her. Rossellini, the grand old man of Italian neo-realism, is the only film-maker of 1945 to hold true to its tenets throughout his creative life. Here, he redirects that ethic away from the grand social concerns and contemporary history of his postwar neo-realist trilogy – films shot, to adapt Irène Némirovsky's phrase, on the still-moving molten lava of great and terrible events – and into the private sphere of intimacy and personal relationships. The rational and irrational are in conflict at every level, and language and imagery are haunted by death and entropy. In one searing moment, the couple, their marriage now a ruin too, are taken to an archeological dig at Pompeii and watch as a hollow place in the cold lava – where the remains of the dead have left an imprint – is filled with plaster and then excavated. A cement couple is disinterred, perhaps a husband and wife, and the guide comments, "They found death together – united." Bergman can't help but fall to pieces. It flopped at the box office, but critics at Cahiers du Cinéma – the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol – all saw it as the moment when poetic cinema grew up and became indisputably modern. Journey To Italy is thus one wellspring of the French New Wave. A film convulsed by themes of sterility, petrification, pregnancy and eternity, it finds its echo in such death-haunted Nouvelle Vague masterpieces as Chabrol's Le Boucher and Truffaut's La Chambre Verte. Hopefully its UK cinema rerelease on Friday 4 May will bring the wonders of the Bergman-Rossellini collaboration back from the dead, too.

Very interesting article! For me it is important to know different facts about different films. I did not see direct attitude from the author. As for the film may be it will interesting to watch this film.