Latest news with #Brylcreem
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Chronology of Water' Review: Kristen Stewart Makes a Boldly Assured Directing Debut, Starring a Transformative Imogen Poots
There's a beguiling dichotomy in Kristen Stewart's accomplished first feature as writer-director — between the dreamlike haze and fragmentation of memory and the raw wound of trauma so vivid it will always be with you. Adapted from the influential 2011 memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water is challenging material, an unflinching account of childhood sexual abuse followed by years of vanishing — into addiction, sexual experimentation and self-destruction before the author found her voice by channeling her pain into writing. Stewart also appears to have found her voice, announcing the seriousness of her intentions not with auteurist self-importance but with unimpeachable commitment to honoring her subject's story. More from The Hollywood Reporter Cannes: 'Corsage' Director Marie Kreutzer Wins Investors Circle Prize for 'Gentle Monster' Strong Festival, Soft Market at Cannes Enters Final Stretch Chie Hayakawa on Revisiting the Pain and Wonder of Childhood in Cannes Film 'Renoir' That subject, Lidia, played by Imogen Poots in a daring high-wire act, represents not just herself and her fellow-survivor sister Claudia (Thora Birch) but countless women shamed into silence or damaged beyond repair by violations of their bodies. It's a visceral, densely textured film, shot on grainy 16mm and splashed with disorienting color washes and lens flare and light that deliberately obscures as much as it illuminates. It cuts deep even while washing over you with soothing images of water, as the title suggests. 'Come in. The water will hold you,' says Lidia at the end, which is exactly what the movie invites us to do, in ways that may be triggering, but perhaps also cathartic. Dispensing with exposition, establishing shots and specific time indicators, and shooting much of the movie in intimate closeup, Stewart shapes The Chronology of Water into a scrappy collage, almost like pictures pasted into a journal. The narrative is ragged and nonlinear but rendered as stream-of-consciousness poetry in Olivia Neergaard-Holm's nervy and yet somehow liquid edit. Stewart and Poots thrust us into the molten core of Lidia's experience, forcing us — with emotional candor rather than manipulation — to know her pain. While the approach is entirely different, more than once I was reminded of Su Friedrich's landmark 1990 experimental memoir film Sink or Swim, which reflects in a more detached but no less personal way on a young girl's upbringing and her experience of emotional and physical abuse from an aloof, hard-to-please father. Lidia's father, Mike (Michael Epp), is the kind of firm-jawed, handsome man who looks like he just stepped out of a Brylcreem commercial. But his cruelty is on full display when he sits her down to read her college acceptance letters and rejects the half or three-quarter scholarship offers, all but gloating over her failure to secure a full ride. 'If they don't want you then you don't belong there,' he sneers. In her depiction of his abuse, Stewart shows sound judgment and maturity, keeping the sexual violence almost entirely off-camera. But it's shocking, nonetheless. In one scene, the family drives to the woods to cut down a Christmas tree. The young Lidia (Anna Wittowsky) waits in the car with her mother, Dorothy (Susannah Flood), who is absent even when she's present and has perfected the art of not seeing. Mike instructs teenage Claudia (Marlena Sniega) to grab the saw and go with him. They come back to the car in silence, without a tree, and even with the fuzzy perception of a child, Lidia seems to intuit what took place from the deadened look in her sister's eyes. When she's older, Mike warns Lidia about the disgusting things college boys will want to do to her. Corey C. Waters' camera stays on Lidia through the whole conversation, keeping Mike outside the frame. But the words and sounds we hear make it clear that he's touching her inappropriately, probably doing exactly what he says those imagined college boys will do, but in Mike's case, he acts with entitlement. Stewart makes extensive use of voiceover narration, which embraces the film's literary roots while also endowing it with first-person immediacy. Lidia's words guide us from her childhood in 1970s San Francisco through her escape from home via competitive swimming; the death of her Olympics dream when drugs and alcohol got her kicked out of a program; the flailing sexual excesses of her college years, flipping between men and women, slugging vodka from a flask that's always with her and snorting endless lines of blow. 'My own drugs. My own sex. My own friends. My own freedom,' she intones like a mantra, trying to convince herself those are the keys to moving forward. Long after Lidia's swimming career fizzles, water remains inextricably linked for her with memory. Water is also where she can imagine herself in whatever altered state she believes will quiet her tormented mind — oblivion, erasure, salvation, purification, transformation, or just simply being able to feel a sense of self, which remains elusive. 'In water, like in books, you can leave your life,' she says at one point. Later, when she has published her first collection of stories and won an award from Poets & Writers Magazine, she's invited to give a public reading. The piece she chooses begins with a starter's call at a race: 'Swimmers, on your marks.' She goes on to describe wanting to emerge from the chlorinated water like something amphibious, without gender. But her tenuous self-confidence leaves her shaken, unable to absorb the compliments of organizers or audience, or to react to the interest of a publisher in seeing more of her work. Her relationships run from saddening to toxic. Still trying to shut out the sound of her father's voice, she allows herself to be charmed by gentle-natured, guitar-strumming folkie Phillip (Earl Cave, son of the musician Nick Cave), confessing that she treated him badly and wishes she could go back and apologize. She's put off by his sweetness, his refusal to respond to her meanness and his unfailing encouragement, expressing pride in her tiniest recovery wins. Even if Phillip's niceness chafes, she asks him to marry her, which they do in a sweet, goofy ceremony on a beach. But when she gets pregnant, she goes to stay with Claudia, both sisters still carrying around the dead weight of their childhood legacy. The tragedy that results from that pregnancy yields a return to the same beach with Phillip in a funny-sad scene that lurches from awkwardness to wrenching loss. In the wake of Phillip, Lidia takes up with the opposite of nice, Devin (Tom Sturridge), a cocky fuckboy who steers her into heavier drug use and slams her against walls in sex that seems more punishing than pleasurable, which is maybe what she thinks she needs. A relationship with a photographer played by Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon gives her a taste of BDSM, her arms bound to her torso while she's spanked hard with a paddle. No matter how messed up Lidia gets, writing remains her life raft. A friend gets her into a creative writing workshop in Oregon with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest author Ken Kesey. He's played in a lovely turn by Jim Belushi as a rambling acid head, whose thorny charms give the movie a welcome lift. The group works with Kesey on his collaborative novel Caverns, and he's quick to spot Lidia's talent, his mentorship helping to steer her in the right direction. But it's when she starts teaching a writing class that hope and purpose and some kind of stability finally appear within reach. Unsurprisingly, Stewart gets fine work from her actors, even those who appear only in a few fragments. Cave has the most fully developed secondary character and the most screen time, and he brings aching sensitivity to the kind of naïve young man who believes he can fix a broken person. Birch also has strong moments, the misplaced guilt showing on her face over leaving years earlier to save herself and abandoning Lidia to their father. Inviting Lidia into her home and caring for her while she's pregnant seems like the older sister's way of atoning. But Poots is the transfixing fulcrum around which the entire cloudy but still clear-eyed movie spins. Stripped to the bone and flayed by her ugly experiences, both during and for years after, Lidia is emotionally naked, unable even to ask for or accept help. For the longest time she appears to believe she's a void, equipped solely to be that damaged girl from her childhood. It's a remarkable performance. The film's running time stretched by almost 40 minutes between the first program details on the Cannes schedule and the premiere, and it must be said that its sheer intensity often becomes draining, to the point where you wonder who its audience will be. Further tinkering would help and appears a given, since it was rushed to Cannes pretty much straight from the lab. But whatever its future, it seems clear that Stewart has made exactly the movie she wanted to make, establishing a visceral connection with her subject and never letting go. 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Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Hair styling product cannot be used to treat knee pain
"KNEE PAIN?" reads Malay-language text overlaid on a Facebook video posted on March 12, 2025. The video features a man showing a jar of Brylcreem hair styling cream, claiming it cured his knee pain by "almost 80 percent" after three months of applying the product. He further adds that the cream would work for the elderly who struggle with knee problems. "Try it. Send this video to anyone who has knee pain," he says. Identical videos were shared on the same user's Instagram, TikTok and YouTube accounts -- racking up more than 280,000 views. A similar claim about the Brylcreem hair product curing knee pain also circulated in a 2020 post on Facebook. Social media users left comments apparently backing up the video's claim: "Yes, that's right... brylcreem contains petroleum gel.. Before this I used it for hair.. Now I use it for my knees.. best find." "Nothing wrong with trying it out and it's not expensive either," another wrote. However, a Malaysian representative from Unilever, which produces Brylcreem, told AFP on April 28: "Brylcreem is a hair styling product. It is formulated to be used on hair and is not intended for other applications." Meanwhile, orthopaedists said there was no evidence to support the use of hair cream for knee pain. "There is no scientific evidence to suggest that any hair cream can function as an effective treatment for knee or muscle pain," said orthopaedic surgeon Dr Suhail Suresh Abdullah at Sunway Medical Centre in Malaysia's Sunway City (archived link). "The ingredients in the product, such as mineral oil and beeswax, have no known therapeutic effect on joint inflammation, or nerve-related pain," he added. Dr Nazrul Nashi, a consultant at the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Singapore's National University Hospital (NUH), said that Brylcreem is not approved by any major health authority, such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use as a treatment for joint or muscle pain (archived link). "The scientific treatments that work for knee pain include topical painkillers, which contain ingredients such as anti-inflammatory medications," he told AFP on April 30. Both experts said knee pain worsens over time if ignored, especially in aging-related conditions like osteoarthritis. They said early diagnosis and conservative management are key to treat the condition effectively. AFP has previously fact-checked other purported health remedies here and here.
AFP
02-05-2025
- Health
- AFP
Hair styling product cannot be used to treat knee pain
"KNEE PAIN?" reads Malay-language text overlaid on a Facebook video posted on March 12, 2025. The video features a man showing a jar of Brylcreem hair styling cream, claiming it cured his knee pain by "almost 80 percent" after three months of applying the product. He further adds that the cream would work for the elderly who struggle with knee problems. "Try it. Send this video to anyone who has knee pain," he says. Image Screenshot of the false Facebook post, taken April 30, 2025 Identical videos were shared on the same user's Instagram, TikTok and YouTube accounts -- racking up more than 280,000 views. A similar claim about the Brylcreem hair product curing knee pain also circulated in a 2020 post on Facebook. Social media users left comments apparently backing up the video's claim: "Yes, that's right... brylcreem contains petroleum gel.. Before this I used it for hair.. Now I use it for my knees.. best find." "Nothing wrong with trying it out and it's not expensive either," another wrote. However, a Malaysian representative from Unilever, which produces Brylcreem, told AFP on April 28: "Brylcreem is a hair styling product. It is formulated to be used on hair and is not intended for other applications." Meanwhile, orthopaedists said there was no evidence to support the use of hair cream for knee pain. "There is no scientific evidence to suggest that any hair cream can function as an effective treatment for knee or muscle pain," said orthopaedic surgeon Dr Suhail Suresh Abdullah at Sunway Medical Centre in Malaysia's Sunway City (archived link). "The ingredients in the product, such as mineral oil and beeswax, have no known therapeutic effect on joint inflammation, or nerve-related pain," he added. Dr Nazrul Nashi, a consultant at the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Singapore's National University Hospital (NUH), said that Brylcreem is not approved by any major health authority, such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use as a treatment for joint or muscle pain (archived link). "The scientific treatments that work for knee pain include topical painkillers, which contain ingredients such as anti-inflammatory medications," he told AFP on April 30. Both experts said knee pain worsens over time if ignored, especially in aging-related conditions like osteoarthritis. They said early diagnosis and conservative management are key to treat the condition effectively. AFP has previously fact-checked other purported health remedies here and here.
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
All the Best People, Cont'd
Donald Trump says he stands behind Pete Hegseth, our entirely unqualified secretary of defense, a former Fox News weekend morning-show clown and future Brylcreem model who is in the habit of treating sensitive military information as though it were knitting-circle gossip. Hegseth has chatted about upcoming military actions with everyone and his brother—literally, his brother, as well as his wife—through an app that is in and of itself not sufficiently secure but which is even more insecure when it is being handled by tech-illiterate doofuses (and the Trump administration is full of these) who, in a related instance, accidentally copied the editor of The Atlantic on the conversation. The president says he has complete confidence in Hegseth. So, he's probably cooked. No, it's not a great time for former Fox News personalities serving in top-level positions—which is a damned weird thing to write! Janette Nesheiwat, a former Fox News contributor nominated as surgeon general for some reason, 'falsified, misled, selectively omitted, or lied about her medical education, board certifications, and military experience,' according to Anthony Clark, an independent journalist and former staffer on the House Oversight Committee. Short version: Nesheiwat has said and written things that implied she was a student at University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, where she was never enrolled, and/or American University, which does not have a medical school but is a too-cute way of saying 'American University … of the Caribbean,' the for-profit medical school—unrelated to the university in Washington, D.C.—from which her degree actually comes. There is more reporting to be done, but Clark seems to have the goods. You can probably guess where this will all lead. The usual people are making the expected noises: 'None of this is based in reality,' Hegseth said about the chat scandal, though the facts of the case—the reality—are not in dispute. 'Fake news,' press secretary Karoline Leavitt said about an NPR report alleging that Trump is thinking about dumping Hegseth. One suspects she'll be the last to know. But if you work for the Trump administration, Trump has thought about firing you at least once before his second Diet Coke of the day. Of course, there's more. Our secretary of homeland security, dog-murdering goofball cosplay enthusiast Kristi Noem, who is not a former television personality but who seems to be positioning herself for a future in show business, is having a little trouble with security here in the homeland, having managed to get herself robbed of a purse containing $3,000 in cash, among other sundries, at a restaurant in Washington. The gold Rolex Daytona she wore to pose in front of Salvadoran gangsters appears to be safe. Florida man Dan Bongino, who insists that 'taxation is theft' in spite of the fact that he spent almost the entirety of his career firmly attached to the taxpayers' teat as a government employee of one kind or another, finally made it to the FBI when he was appointed deputy director. Ever eager to demonstrate what a tough guy he is, Bongino stepped onto the mat with an FBI trainer, got his ass kicked, and then took to social media to denounce the New York Times for reporting that he'd been injured in the ass-kicking. The New York Times had not yet reported the fact, but Bongino successfully made the non-story into a non-non-story. Like many of his colleagues in the administration, Bongino got onto Trump's radar as a Fox News guy, and, like many of his colleagues, he is not really qualified for the job to which he was appointed and is not very good at it. Bongino has made some innovations: He has a multiagent bodyguard team to watch over him, something no previous deputy director has felt necessary. He also spends a great deal of time behaving like an idiot child on social media. There are a couple of good people left in government. Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, was never a game-show host and seems to know what he is doing. Trump is endeavoring mightily to fire him, and worldwide financial markets are micturating voluminously and from a great height on U.S. stocks and the dollar. What are the markets saying? Approximately: 'Well, hell. This dumbass apparently means it.' Meanwhile, there is the vice president, J.D. Vance, who may have actually bored the pope to death. Sweet release! Pope Francis' occasional heresies (Was the pope Catholic?) may necessitate the briefest taste of purgatory, but I suspect a lot of Americans will look back on the holy father's timing as being pretty solid. The rest of us will have to live under the wisdom of the median American voter for a little while longer.
The Guardian
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Capulets and the Montagues review – stylish staging sees ETO's Bellini go gangster
An attempt at brokering peace between warring factions is made in a tense call from a phonebox to a bar where men crowd around the beige receiver. The look: double-breasted suits and Brylcreem for one gang, brown leather and rollnecks for the other. Fedoras for all. As the curtain falls on act one, a man lights a Molotov cocktail and raises his arm to lob it into enemy property. Poison comes in mini liqueur bottles. The heroine has a serving hatch, not a balcony. Forget Verona. Even without directorial input, Bellini's Romeo and Juliet opera has long been a red rag to purists, riffing as it does on Shakespeare's play via multiple Italian sources. Produced in six weeks to plug a gap in the roster at Venice's La Fenice after another composer failed to deliver, this opera-against-the-odds has never matched the popularity of Bellini's La Sonnambula or Norma. Eloise Lally's mid-century Little Italy update for English Touring Opera is energetic and stylish. Its small box set sees a bar interior – formica tables, sauce bottles, Venetian blinds – become a subtly lit ruin after the Molotov incident. Staging Romeo's conference with the Capuleti (the production is sung in Italian) as a call via a gangster hotline is genuinely effective. So is the transformation of the Montecchi attack on the Capuleti into a slow-motion brawl in the latter's dingy, linoleum-floored bar, even if Romeo's attempt to crash Giulietta's wedding in 'disguise' – swapping slimline burgundy tailoring for an oversized pinstriped number – stretched the production's internal rules about visual realism. It was a shame the subtlety of the production wasn't matched in the pit, where a heater nestled between musicians suggested that playing conditions weren't ideal. Under conductor Alphonse Cemin, ETO's pared-down orchestra sounded threadbare at times, the strings in act one far from the bel canto lushness demanded by the score. Elsewhere there were tuning problems. Crucially, despite a few carefully sculpted woodwind solos, more overall shape and direction was needed from the podium as well as more attention to balance. The singing was classier. The tiny male chorus did sterling work, while Timothy Nelson was a stentorian patriarch and Masimba Ushe a warm, sympathetic Lorenzo. Brenton Spiteri's Tebaldo was endlessly ardent, though lacked the smooth line invited by Bellini's famously long melodies. No such problem with Samantha Price or Jessica Cale as the star-cross'd lovers: the chemistry they alas lacked physically – why not do more with a trouser-role Romeo in 1950s NYC? – was sumptuously compensated in vocal terms. Price's burnished mezzo worked wonders with Bellini's lyricism, her coloratura finely delineated. Cale had the biggest voice of all, powerfully communicative but beautifully controlled in intimate moments. In a production that conjures perma-violence, Cale's Giulietta is a force to be reckoned with. On tour until 26 April.
