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Met praises TV drama Adolescence for raising awareness of violence against women

Met praises TV drama Adolescence for raising awareness of violence against women

Yahoo20-03-2025

A Met Police boss has praised Netflix drama Adolescence for shining a spotlight on violence against women.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Ben Russell, who leads the Met's V100 initiative, said the drama starring Stephen Graham had raised awareness of the issue in a 'significant way'.
The series, which follows a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering a teenage girl, has been praised for its portrayal of violence against women and its impact on communities.
Speaking outside New Scotland Yard on Thursday, Mr Russell said: 'When TV programmes are serious, thoughtful and address issues that are often unspoken, that can be a significant way to raise attention, public discourse and understanding.
'On the broad themes [of the show], there are a number of factors that influence violence and children.
'The age that someone begins to offend can be a worrying concern.
'If someone starts offending at a young age, that can be a serious concern.'
The series, which starts with the arrest of 13-year-old Jamie Miller, played by newcomer Owen Cooper, has been at the top of the most-watched programmes on the streaming website globally and has prompted questions in Parliament.
The limited series, starring Graham as Jamie's father, examines so-called incel culture, which has been blamed for misogyny online, and the use of social media in bullying.

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Jamie Foxx cries in BET Awards speech about health, credits daughters with recovery
Jamie Foxx cries in BET Awards speech about health, credits daughters with recovery

USA Today

time28 minutes ago

  • USA Today

Jamie Foxx cries in BET Awards speech about health, credits daughters with recovery

Jamie Foxx cries in BET Awards speech about health, credits daughters with recovery Show Caption Hide Caption Jamie Foxx, Cameron Diaz talk returning to 'Back in Action' set Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz tell USA TODAY what it was like to return to shooting 'Back in Action' after pausing for Foxx's health scare. Two years out from his stroke and subsequent coma, Jamie Foxx emotionally thanked his sister and daughters for getting him through the dark period. Daughters Corinne Foxx, 31, and Anelise Bishop, 16, – like their dad – were in tears as they were seated in the 2025 BET Awards crowd. Anelise's chin trembled as she looked up at her dad on stage, who accepted one of the night's Ultimate Icon Awards. "When I saw that in memoriam, I was like, 'Man, that could've been me.' But I don't know why I went through what I went through, but I know that my second chance, I'm not going to turn it down," said Foxx, 57. He went on to thank sister Deidre Dixon, a Hollywood hair and makeup artist, because she "made sure that she took care of her brother" in spring 2023. Then he shouted out his eldest daughter, who was the one sharing updates on his health at the time. "My beautiful daughter, Corinne, I cannot say enough about you," Foxx said. "You've always taken a backseat to everything. But when you needed to drive it, you drove. And you made sure I was here. And at a certain point, I'm going to stop crying, but I'm not going to stop yet." Jamie Foxx speaks out: Actor reveals his mysterious illness in Netflix special Jamie Foxx daughters sob during speech as he reveals how Anelise helped recovery with guitar Foxx's lengthy speech also included a story about how his younger daughter helped with his recovery in the hospital. "Anelise Estelle Foxx, my baby with the big hair. She hides under that hair because she's got something special. You're so beautiful, man," Foxx said. "When I was fighting for my life in there, I've got to say this. They said, 'We're going to lose him because his vitals are bad.' And I didn't want my 14 year old to see me like that. But Anelise overheard the conversation and she snuck into my hospital room with her guitar and said, 'I know what my Daddy needs,'" he continued. Foxx recounted, "And as she played the guitar, my vitals (improved). And I realized God was in her guitar. The nurses ran in and said, 'What did they give him?' My daughter said, 'Shh, I've got him.'" What happened to Jamie Foxx? Foxx explained in his 2024 Netflix special that he'd experienced "a bad headache" on April 11, 2023. Moments after he'd asked for an aspirin, he lost consciousness — and now doesn't remember the ensuing 20 days. During this comatose period, Foxx was taken to a doctor, who administered a cortisone shot and sent him home. Then a follow-up appointment with a doctor revealed Foxx had experienced a stroke caused by a brain bleed. The exact cause of the stroke was not determined. Jamie Foxx on medical emergency: 'I was gone for 20 days' Speaking to a group outside of a hotel in Phoenix, actor Jamie Foxx revealed more details about a medical emergency he experienced last year. Jamie Foxx, Stevie Wonder joke about blindness With Foxx's speech lasting around 10 minutes, music legend and award presenter Stevie Wonder wandered back to Foxx, who was standing center stage, to gently encourage him to start wrapping it up. After Foxx noted he'd almost elbowed Wonder behind him, he started walking around the microphone with the trophy outstretched (which was not how Wonder was moving on stage). "How did he know?" Foxx said. Wonder joked earlier in the night that he watched and edited the tribute package for Foxx and had ribbed Foxx for trying to connect with him as a blind artist when he portrayed Ray Charles in the Oscar-winning movie "Ray." Contributing: Edward Segarra, USA TODAY

The Astroworld Tragedy: the true story behind the Travis Scott festival disaster where 10 people died
The Astroworld Tragedy: the true story behind the Travis Scott festival disaster where 10 people died

Cosmopolitan

time32 minutes ago

  • Cosmopolitan

The Astroworld Tragedy: the true story behind the Travis Scott festival disaster where 10 people died

It was meant to be the festival of a lifetime; Travis Scott was performing on the large, mountain-esque 'Chills' stage, a lauded homecoming at the third Astroworld festival. Launched in 2018 and named after Scott's third album, the two-day music festival was planned as the ultimate celebration of Houston's hip-hop culture, and Scott's love of his hometown. While the festival had been gaining in popularity, no-one could have predicted that its latest (and which soon proved to be final) outing would have resulted in one of the worst US concert tragedies in history. Now Netflix's latest series, Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy, speaks to witnesses and emergency responders who were there on the day and looks to examine how an exciting evening became a living nightmare, resulting in 10 deaths, and over 300 causalities. Astroworld Festival was the brainchild of psychedelic rapper Travis Scott, and took place annually. It was based in NRG Park in Houston, Texas, and named after a former theme-park that locals enjoyed going to in their childhoods. Since launching in 2018, the festival had steadily grown in popularity, and was set to be bigger than ever in 2021; the event was now spanning two days, and had artists such as Tame Impala, Sza and Bad Bunny on the line-up. Tickets sold out in just 30 minutes. Astroworld was now also comprised of two stages: the 'Thrills' stage for supporting artists, and the 'Chills' stage, which was specifically for Scott's headline performance. It was at the Chills stage where the crowd crush occurred. Scott is a 34-year-old rapper, known for his psychedelic and intense performances, who has had five tracks hit number one in the United States. As well as working with huge hip-hop goliaths such as Kid Cudi, Scott is also known for dating Kylie Jenner between 2017 and 2023. The pair share two children together. While 50,000 people were thought to be in attendance, there were reports of people trying to rush the gates as early as 2pm, with eyewitnesses reporting people being trampled on. However, it wasn't until later in the evening that casualties began to happen. A timer appeared on stage counting down the 30 minutes before Scott performed. It was when Scott appeared, slightly later than scheduled at 9pm (he was reportedly meant to start at 8.45pm) that members of the crowd pressed forward and surged from the sides, causing a crush. Many people fell and others struggled to breathe as it was so tightly packed. Describing the carnage, festival survivor Ayden Cruz remembers being pushed over by the crowds. In the documentary Astroworld: Countdown to Tragedy, he recalls climbing up to a camera operator and begging them to 'stop the show' as people were becoming increasingly crushed. While Scott did stop performing numerous times to flag that people in the crowd had passed out and needed medical assistance, his show continued on until between 10.10pm and 10.15pm, according to witnesses, after he performed with Drake. However, a mass casualty incident was called from 9.38pm. Numerous festivalgoers tried to halt proceedings, however, none succeeded in getting Scott to stop. Eight people died on the night in hospital, while a further two people died in hospital. The youngest person who passed away was just nine, while the oldest was 27. Two high schoolers are listed as victims. It was ruled that all 10 people died from 'compression asphyxia' – this is where external force limits the ability of the chest to expand, cutting off oxygen. The list of victims are as follows. It wasn't until many of the 50,000 festivalgoers went home that they realised there had been fatalities in the crowds. In the immediate aftermath, people were looking to see who was responsible for the deaths. Scott took to X to say he was 'absolutely devastated' at learning of the incident following the concert. He also claimed that he was not aware of what was happening below the stage at the time. 'I am committed to working together with the Houston community to heal and support the families in need,' he wrote. 'Thank you Houston PD, Fire Department and NRG Park for their immediate response and support.' Then-girlfriend Kylie Jenner also deleted Instagram stories from the event, and sent 'thoughts and prayers' to those impacted. A Texas state task force looked into what happened at Astroworld, which emphasised the need for adequate training for security and event staff. Astroworld organisers were criticised for a lack of preparedness among security contracted to work the event. Meanwhile, the head of safety at Astroworld, Seyth Boardman, wrote to the Texas festival's operations director expressing concern about the size of the stage. Per documents seen by the BBC, Boardman wrote: 'I feel like there is no way we are going to fit 50,000 people in front of that stage.' Numerous lawsuits were filed by victims and survivors' families, alleging a lack of adequate safety protocols and emergency response to Scott, Live Nation and other defendants. However, by June 2024, all 10 wrongful death lawsuits had been settled out of court by Live Nation, Travis Scott, and other defendants for undisclosed amounts. Scott was amongst six individuals who faced criminal charges related to the deaths of 10 people at the 2021 Astroworld Festival – however, a Texan grand jury found no single individual was criminally responsible for the death. 'In this instance, the grand jury of the 228th district court of Harris County found that no crime did occur,' county District Attorney Kim Ogg told reporters in 2023. 'That no single individual was criminally responsible.' The festival was cancelled following reports of deaths. It has not been revived since. Speaking about the event, Scott told GQ in 2023: '[I want people] to know I have pain too. I have concerns, things that I think about, and the things I see on a day-to-day basis I think about them. And every day I want to find change in the things, to make things better, make myself better. It's just like: I go through things like everyone else.' Scott also launched Project HEAL, aimed at supporting community-based programs and enhancing safety measures at large-scale events. Kimberley Bond is a Multiplatform Writer for Harper's Bazaar, focusing on the arts, culture, careers and lifestyle. She previously worked as a Features Writer for Cosmopolitan UK, and has bylines at The Telegraph, The Independent and British Vogue among countless others.

How the Director and Stars of ‘Pavements' Brought Many Stephen Malkmuses to Life
How the Director and Stars of ‘Pavements' Brought Many Stephen Malkmuses to Life

Yahoo

time2 hours ago

  • Yahoo

How the Director and Stars of ‘Pavements' Brought Many Stephen Malkmuses to Life

The prevailing initial state of the two actors tasked with portraying Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus in Alex Ross Perry's multifaceted, genre-warped film Pavements was, reasonably, confusion. Pavements — which releases in theaters across North America June 6 — is nominally, and for the most part, a documentary. It follows Pavement as they prep for their 2022 reunion tour and uses archival footage to tell the story of a band of alternative-nation outsiders who made erudite, inscrutable, and irresistible tunes; navigated the post-Nirvana Nineties with blasé circumspection; broke up as cult heroes; and returned decades later as widely-recognized, era-defining greats. More from Rolling Stone 'Titan': See Trailer for Netflix Doc That Dives Deep Into OceanGate Disaster Martin Scorsese's Career Goes in Front of Camera for Five-Part Apple TV+ Documentary That Doc on Shia LaBeouf's Acting School Is Even Crazier Than You've Heard But along with parsing and probing Pavement's importance, Perry also wanted to explore the ways we bestow that importance. So, he cooked up the various kinds of cultural schlock that get pumped out when it comes time to celebrate (and profit from) legacy acts — a biopic, a jukebox musical, even a museum exhibit filled with phony and real artifacts — and combined them to create a Russian nesting doll of a film, genres stacked on top of one another, reality packed inside fiction. And for the actors Perry hired to star in his real-but-not-real biopic and musical, performing in Pavements was a confounding but also intriguing prospect. Joe Keery, the Stranger Things star and Djo musician, who plays Malkmus in the Oscar-baity biopic-within-the-movie, tells Rolling Stone, 'I didn't understand the full context of the movie until I showed up a couple of days before and we were doing the [costume] fittings and stuff. 'Then I started to wrap my mind around it. They had done the musical already, so I had the reference point of, 'It's this real thing, but it's fake, and it exists within the world of the movie.'' Michael Esper, an established theater actor, remembers his own bewilderment when Perry called him 'out of the blue' to offer him the role of Essem, the Malkmus-esque (emphasis on the 'esque') lead in the film's off-Broadway jukebox musical component, Slanted! Enchanted! 'I couldn't tell how serious he was,' Esper says. 'Like, how real do you want it to be? How much of a joke? Are we really doing this in front of people? How earnest am I supposed to be? Pavement is cool with this?' He adds with a laugh: 'It was such an insane idea, and the potential for humiliation was so high.' Perry was compelled to cram all of these sub-projects into Pavements because he firmly believes 'we don't actually want these things.' He argues, for instance, that no one is asking for a 'cliché, birth-to-death biopic' of Kurt Cobain, yet the likelihood of one existing, eventually, seems disconcertingly high. Perry also saw huge potential in this multigenre approach. 'The truth I'm reaching for,' he says, 'is [that] this format of prismatic, hall-of-mirrors storytelling is the only way to even consider approaching the truth of any great artist.' Pavement, and Malkmus in particular, is uniquely positioned for this kind of interrogation. Perry argues the frontman is up there with 20th-century geniuses like Bob Dylan and David Bowie 'because he's this enigma — he's so fascinating, and the music is so good.' Keery also uses that word — 'enigma' — while Esper, a longtime fan who was scouring zines and VHS tapes in the Nineties for anything Pavement-related, calls Malkmus an almost 'mythical figure.' And like Bowie or Dylan, Malmkus has played with personas, cultivating a distance between his public-facing artistic self and the human behind the mask. Perry notes that, since Pavement began, 'Malkmus has presented the idea that he is playing a character' known as 'The Singer.' 'He christened himself with this moniker at the age of, like, 21, to become this other personality,' the director says. 'To hide behind the idea of, 'That's what the singer would do.'' (He cites, by way of example, two early Pavement tunes in this vein, 'Our Singer' and 'Shoot the Singer.') So as Perry set out to design the Malkmuses that Esper and Keery would portray in Pavements, he made sure they had 'nothing to do with the real person.' That's certainly the case with Essem, a small-town boy with big rock dreams, who moves to the city with his girlfriend, becomes successful, meets another girl, and ultimately has to choose between the two. (That this love triangle framework maps almost exactly onto last year's Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown feels like an affirmation of Perry's feelings towards the legacy-act industrial complex.) The name Essem is, of course, a phonetic representation of Malkmus' initials, S.M. But in terms of actual similarities between character and person, there's only the vague echo of Malkmus' own journey from the Central Valley suburb of Stockton, California, to New York City in pursuit of rock & roll. 'To try and do some kind of real, authentic characterization of Stephen Malkmus in this context felt so wildly inappropriate,' Esper says. 'To try and put him in a jukebox musical just feels like it wouldn't serve what they were trying to do [with the film]. It functioned like a ride — you just throw yourself into it and perform that as best you can.' As for the embedded biopic, titled Range Life, Keery says his performance 'is not a direct reflection of Malkmus' but 'the punch-up Hollywood biopic version that they would write' if such a film were to be made. He continues: 'It's not exactly who he was. It's sort of the antithesis of the guy.' (Keery also gets to send up his own profession in several behind-the-scenes-featurette-style sequences, in which he descends into Method acting madness — asking to be called 'Stephen,' working with a voice coach to perfect his imitation of Malkmus' fried California tone, and eventually worrying he might've gone too far.) The Range Life scenes primarily fictionalize a real pivot point in Pavement's story: their brush with Nirvana-sized success with 'Cut Your Hair' and 1994's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, followed by the underappreciated triumph of their third album Wowee Zowee. It's perfect fodder for overwrought episodes in which the band and their Matador Records bosses (played by Jason Schwartzman and Tim Heidecker) debate artistic integrity and commercial reality. The most melodramatic moments are emblazoned with an awards-thirsty 'For your consideration' watermark. And yet, it's still rooted in something real, because Perry plucked much of the heavy-handed dialog Keery delivers verbatim from the Wowee Zowee press kit, contemporaneous Malkmus interviews, and things Malkmus told Perry himself. Keery says it was 'stressful' at times to navigate this multifaceted, hyper-meta narrative, but also fun. 'I enjoyed being put into this gray area where it's like, 'Is this really happening? Is this shtick?' It felt like the perfect way to pay homage to the band.' Perry wanted to preserve a sense of mystery around Malkmus, one epitomized by an early shot of the frontman hunched over a desk, writing a set list, back to the camera. 'You obviously see him throughout the movie, but you see him from the back,' Perry says. 'We see Joe and Michael from the front, but the front has a mask on.' Mysterious as Malkmus may be, Perry's instinct reflects something that distinguishes Malkmus from so many other mythical, enigmatic artistic geniuses we scrutinize. Esper pinpoints it, too, when discussing all the time he spent as a teenager poring over Pavement lyrics, learning the band's songs on guitar, and reading any interview he could find: a wariness of ever getting 'too close to knowing too much about' Malkmus himself. This was partly because, Esper jokes, 'I felt like I would discover that he would hate me.' But it was also the sense that behind the Singer was just a normal guy. 'I did feel like to figure out too much about him, his personal history, or even what his intention was lyrically or musically, was a mistake,' Esper says. 'I had some kind of instinct around that boundary, where [with] other musicians, I would do a really deep dive. I'd want to know everything about Bowie or Lou Reed. With him, I really didn't want to know that much.' Having studied and spent time with him, Keery describes Malkmus as someone who's 'just doing things because he loves them. Or not doing things because he doesn't [love them]. Which is something I admire.' And Perry says that while making Pavements he did get to glimpse the 'big Rosetta Stone' when he watched Malkmus interact with his wife and children. 'That's the guy. That's a real person,' Perry says, while also stressing that those moments were completely irrelevant to the film. 'There is no single truth to reach with this kind of character,' Perry says. 'The movie could never singularly decode who this man actually is, nor would that be of any interest to me. The movie can only address the buffoonery of other works of art that attempt to do a version of that.' Nowhere does the film distill this ideal better than the scene where Keery is working with the voice coach and shows her what he says is a photo of Malkmus' actual throat, hoping it might unlock the secret to a perfect performance. Asked — half as a joke, but also out of curiosity to know the extent to which the bit was committed — if that was indeed a photo of Malkmus' throat, Keery deadpans, 'He wouldn't release that. That was a step too far. But I'm still hunting that down. I'm determined to get that tongue pic. I think it will reveal a lot for everyone out there.' Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Best 'Saturday Night Live' Characters of All Time Denzel Washington's Movies Ranked, From Worst to Best 70 Greatest Comedies of the 21st Century

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