Ava Gardner #1

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No idea who the guy is. Glad you like the pics!

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you are welcome Harumi

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The Independent
African cinema: The fight is not over

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From Tarzan to Blood Diamond, Hollywood's view of the continent has been slanted for white audiences. Thankfully, African directors have been making passionate and truthful movies of their own, says Keith Shiri
Friday, 28 November 2008

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Africa has featured in Hollywood dramas since the birth of cinema, although always as an exotic backdrop. Very little has changed since King Solomon's Mines or the numerous Tarzan sequels. Africa has been portrayed as one giant generic place that must be subdued or saved from despotic leaders, as in The Last King of Scotland, or from greedy blood-letting rebels in Blood Diamond.

Films about Africa produced in the US and Europe have promoted images of Africa dominated by American or European stars with whom Western viewers can easily identify. Director Kevin Macdonald's central character in The Last King of Scotland is Idi Amin's doctor, played by James McAvoy, who finds himself plunged into Ugandan politics. It is only through his character that we are meant to understand Idi Amin, played by Forest Whitaker.
In Blood Diamond, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Danny Archer, a white Zimbabwean who smuggles conflict diamonds, so named because their sale subsidises civil wars. He is cast as the lead so that we can understand the story of Djimon Hounsou as Solomon Vandy, a terrified peasant who realises the precious stone he has found and hidden from the rebels might enable him to pay to find his missing family.
Humphrey Bogart won an Oscar for The African Queen, the Africa-set wartime drama. Ava Gardner was nominated for Best Actress for John Ford's 1953 safari adventure Mogambo. Out of Africa (1985) won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Sydney Pollack's film presents an Africa of the past – an exotic continent where contented Africans who have been dispossessed of their land happily serve their white masters. Elsewhere, great white hunters battle it out against vicious natives and beasts.
Almost 50 years ago, sub-Saharan Africa welcomed the independence of its countries with a wave of optimism. A new cinema was born, championed by Senegalese film-maker Ousmane Sembène. This new cinema would provide a conduit of expression for voiceless Africans – revealing social conditions and sharing stories. Sembène's first short film, Borom Sarret, was a watershed. It reached a worldwide audience with a plot based on the tale of a poor cart driver whose tragic life mirrored hazards facing many ordinary people. Borom Sarret's issues became dominant themes of African cinema.
Armed only with the belief that Africans should tell their own dramas, African film-makers have been battling against the legacies of colonialism. The Malian director Abderrahmane Sissako's 2006 Bamako is an imaginary tale revolving around a court case in which lawyers put forward arguments for and against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund's aid systems and their impact on Africa. Sissako won a prize at Cannes with Heremakono ("Waiting for Happiness") in 2002 and top prize at the Panafrican film festival of Ouagadougou in 2003.
With the brilliant Darrat, the Chadian director Mahamat Saleh Haroun challenges us to think about his country's civil war and its aftermath. The most creative African countries in cinema are former French territories. The reason is not hard to find. In the years preceding independence, France – unlike the British and Portuguese – adopted interventionist political and cultural policies in its colonies.
In South Africa, the early films were made by the mining industry. They were overtly racist and intended to civilise the majority black population. In the Fifties, classic anti-apartheid films were made by foreign directors – Zoltan Korda's 1951 movie Cry, the Beloved Country, and Lionel Rogosin's classic Come Back Africa (1959).
Today, 15 years after the end of apartheid, South Africa is setting the cinematic pace. With an Oscar for Gavin Hood's Tsotsi, South Africa is now the continent's leading film location and has enhanced its infrastructure through foreign location work.
Nigeria is the centre of a lucrative home video industry – known as Nollywood. With some 600 to 1,000 titles released each year and a revenue of about £100m, Nigeria is positioning itself as the world's third largest film industry after Bollywood and Hollywood. Movies are made on the cheap and copies are distributed via increasing numbers of video clubs, or exported. The film-makers have to work fast and around the clock in their desperate attempt to fend off the pirates.
The London African Film Festival hopes to disrupt old perceptions about Africa as well as offering visitors the opportunity to see the compelling stories that African film-makers are bringing to the cinema. Included in the programme of more than 40 films are the Ugandan low-budget guerrilla film Divizionz and the UK premiere of Jerusalema, South Africa's foreign-language Oscar submission.

The London African Film Festival will run from tomorrow until 7 December (www.africaatthepictures.co.uk). Keith Shiri is the director of the festival

 

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News Courier
NIGHTLIFE
The TKTS booth in the Marriott Marquis Hotel (West 46th St) sells tickets at up to 50 per cent off for same-night Broadway and off-Broadway shows. Check listings.
Watch the sun set from the outdoor Boathouse Bar beside the Central Park lake or sink a cocktail at Ava Lounge atop Dream Hotel (210 West 55th St), named after sultry actor Ava Gardner, whose penthouse this once was, with great views over the West Side and Broadway.

 

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Arizona Star
Accent


Opinion by Bonnie Henry : Stand up and cheer, all you brunettes

Blonde's lawsuit makes her hair curl — almost
Opinion by Bonnie Henry

Tucson, Arizona | Published: 11.16.2008

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Do blondes really have more fun? Apparently so, claims a former blonde, though the law says otherwise.
A few weeks ago, a judge finally threw out a three-year-old lawsuit filed by one Charlotte Feeney of Stratford, Conn.
According to The Associated Press, the lawsuit claimed that L'Oreal Inc. ruined Ms. Feeney's social life when she accidentally dyed her hair brunette.
As a result, she said, she suffered headaches and anxious moments. Not only that, she missed the attention that blondes received.
This, in turn, left her so traumatized she had to gulp down antidepressants and hide her crowning glory beneath a succession of hats.
Horrors!
Now, a sensible person would suggest, "Hey, lady, just grab a bottle of peroxide and go back to being a blonde."
Sigh. If only it were that simple. For from what I can glean from the reports, Ms. Feeney "can never return to her natural blond hue."
Hmmm. If it was so natural, why was she messin' with it in the first place?
Also, experience leads me to believe that hair does grow. Shouldn't the new stuff coming in, say, a few months from now, resemble her "natural blond hue?"
But what really upsets me about all this is not the fact that this woman tied up the legal system for three years with this nonsense. No, it's that she managed to defame and disparage all the brunettes of the world, present company included.
Maybe we should get up a class-action suit against her. Who says our social lives are dull, or that our dark tresses keep us out of the spotlight?
Cleopatra, I do believe, was a brunette. So were Ava Gardner and Jane Russell.
Today's No. 1 female movie star — judging by the posse of paparazzi that seems to follow her every move — is Angelina Jolie, brunette to the core.
Why, if she weren't raising so many kids, she'd probably be doing commercials for L'Oreal. And she wouldn't be a blonde.
The sad thing is, if you live long enough, ladies, you'll no longer be the blonde, or brunette or redhead of your youth.
For into each life some gray must sprout. And sprout. And sprout. And no lawsuit in the world will make it go away.
Same for misbehaving hair. You know: Hair that frizzes up or goes limp whenever the humidity climbs a degree or two.
Or hair that will only curl just this side of electrocution.
That would be mine.
If only I could sue my ancestors for passing down that gene.
The sleepless nights I tossed and turned while rollers and bobby pins pierced my scalp.
The curling irons that scorched my neck and earlobes, as well as my hair.
The permanent-wave solutions that assaulted my nostrils and on at least one trip to the beauty college burned the nape of my neck.
We shoulda sued. Instead, we reached for the Toni home-permanent wave. The house reeked of ammonia for days.
Still, it was preferable to the fate of Katharina Laible, whose husband, Charles Nessler, invented a method in the early 1900s of curling hair using a machine that heated the hair via connecting rods that one's tresses were wrapped around.
The process, which took six hours, was first conducted on Laible. First results were not promising. In fact, the first two attempts completely burned Laible's hair off and burned her scalp.
Madam, you should have sued.

 

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Trading Markets
Case of the missing 'Bribe'
Laura Boyes, N.C. Museum of Art film curator, had a somewhat easier time getting early 20th-century films for the museum's fall film series, "Homage to Film Noir," which recently wrapped up.
Well, not all of them. She locked up a 35 mm print of the 1982 detective story spoof "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid," in which Steve Martin interacts with stars from the 1930s and '40s through clips of their movies. But there was one film Boyes couldn't get her hands on: the Robert Taylor-Ava Gardner movie "The Bribe." She even contacted the Ava Gardner Museum in Smithfield, but no dice.
"I wanted to get a print of that so I could show 'The Bribe,' and then show the way 'Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid' sort of took it apart and put it back together again," Boyes says. "But I was told in a couple of different places that there were no available, circulating 35 mm prints of 'The Bribe.' So it was something that I had to finally give up on."
Boyes researches where to get prints of films, knowing whom to contact and whom not to contact.
"We have a lot harder time getting prints from Warner Brothers and MGM," she says. "So unless I have access through Library of Congress or UCLA or someplace like that, I try to avoid those."
Colony manager Denver Hill gets his prints from his film bookers through the studios. He has also had trouble snatching up actual prints. He wanted to get a print of "Die Hard" for a 20th-anniversary screening for December, but existing prints were beaten up or unplayable. He almost didn't get a print for the Colony's most-attended movie, "The Big Lebowski."
"The company [that distributed it], Gramercy Films, they went out of business," Hill says. "And no one was renting it for a while. Until about a year ago, [when] they started renting it again."

 

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Time
Cooke's day job, as The Guardian's American correspondent, gave him carte blanche to crisscross his favorite country and send back his impressions of it. It also afforded him access to the glamorous people he'd revered watching them on a Blackpool movie screen. (In the 1950s Cooke's traveling companions were his second wife Jane and their friends, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.) The famous somehow fell into his lap. Cooke was Greta Garbo's unofficial cigarette lighter, though he once said the most beautiful woman he'd ever met was Ava Gardner. They were charmed; he was blessed.

 

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Polaris

 

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