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Business Standard
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Standard
Disney to open new tech-centric theme park in Abu Dhabi, 1st in West Asia
Disney has announced plans to build a new theme park in Abu Dhabi, expanding its business in West Asia. This will be the seventh Disney resort in the world. The new Disney theme park will be "tech-centric". It will be built in partnership with Miral, a company in Abu Dhabi known for building immersive destinations. The park will be located on Yas Island, a popular tourist spot in Abu Dhabi. Disney Abu Dhabi resort details The park does not have an official name yet. However, it will include Disney-style entertainment, themed hotels, special restaurants, shops, and lots of storytelling. It will also try to blend both Disney's history and Abu Dhabi's culture. 'The waterfront resort will be located on Yas Island, a world-class destination for entertainment and leisure, connecting travellers from West Asia and Africa, India, Asia, Europe and beyond. This seventh Disney theme park resort will combine Disney's iconic stories, characters and attractions with Abu Dhabi's vibrant culture, stunning shorelines and breathtaking architecture,' Disney's press release said. 'Abu Dhabi is a place where heritage meets innovation, where we preserve our past while designing the future,' Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, chairman at Miral, said. The new resort will be fully built and developed by Miral, the company behind several family attractions on Yas Island. Disney and 'imagineers' will handle the creative design and oversee the operations to ensure a good experience. Once complete, Miral will operate the resort, continuing its partnerships with top US and European entertainment brands. Disney CEO Bob Iger said, 'This is a thrilling moment for our company as we announce plans to build an exciting Disney theme park resort in Abu Dhabi.' 'As our seventh theme park destination, it will rise from this land in spectacular fashion, blending contemporary architecture with cutting-edge technology to offer guests deeply immersive entertainment experiences in unique and modern ways,' he added. Disney has not announced the opening date yet.
CairoScene
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CairoScene
A Disney Theme Park & Resort Is Coming to Abu Dhabi
The first of its kind in the Middle East, the new Disney theme park and resort will join Ferrari World, Warner Bros. World, and SeaWorld on Yas Island. Yup, it's official—Disney is setting up camp in Abu Dhabi. The Walt Disney Company is teaming up with Miral, the developers behind Yas Island's blockbuster attractions, to bring a brand-new Disney theme park and resort to the UAE capital. Set along the sparkling shoreline of Yas Island—already home to Ferrari World, Warner Bros. World, and SeaWorld—the upcoming Disney resort will mark the brand's first-ever theme park in the Middle East and its seventh destination worldwide. Think of it as the magical missing puzzle piece in one of the world's most entertainment-packed islands. So, what's coming? While exact details are still under wraps (we're crossing our fingers for Aladdin's Agrabah in real life), the resort is expected to include classic Disney-style rides, immersive lands, themed hotels, and experiences where you might just run into Elsa, Buzz Lightyear, or even Moana by the water's edge. And yes—Mickey and Minnie are on the guest list. Imagineers (Disney's legendary creative wizards) will be working hand in hand with Miral to bring the dream to life, blending beloved Disney storytelling with Abu Dhabi's futuristic skyline and deep cultural heritage. No opening date has been confirmed yet, but one thing's for sure: Disney in Abu Dhabi is no longer a fantasy.
Daily Mirror
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Ross Kemp's horror over relative who 'threatened to cut off mum's head with kitchen knife'
Actor Ross Kemp makes the grim discovery about his great grandfather's older brother in the latest instalment of Who Do You Think You Are? on BBC1 EastEnders hard man Ross Kemp tells of his sadness over the 'dreadful' discovery his great uncle was a violent alcoholic who was blacklisted from British pubs - and never spoken about by his family. For BBC1 's Who Do You Think You Are? the actor turned TV presenter finds that Albert Chalmers was brought up in a Portsmouth pub alongside his ten siblings, who included Ross's great grandfather Arthur, nicknamed Pop. He imagines that the family might have had a 'Disney-style' existence, perhaps similar to his alter ego Grant Mitchell, who spent most of his time in The Queen Vic alongside his mother Peggy, played by the late Barbara Windsor. But while Ross's great grandfather Arthur was nicknamed Pop after Popeye, because of his successful life on the high seas, his great uncle Albert's time in the navy didn't end well after he was discharged. The actor discovers he spent years gathering court charges for being drunk and violent, with one report revealing he threatened to decapitate his own mother. Reading from the story in the local paper at the time, Ross says: 'It was alleged he threatened to cut his mother's head off, and everyone else in the house, at the same time chasing after her with a table knife.' Calling him "a bit of a wrong 'un", Ross learns that his behaviour not only led to several spells in prison, but also to him being barred from every pub in the land after he was named on the 'blacklist' of the 1902 Licensing Act. The 60-year-old dad of four says that the story relates to his long-running role in EastEnders. 'It doesn't matter whether I'm in Afghanistan or Columbia, I'm always going to be Grant Mitchell in a leather jacket going 'get outta my pub!' 'One story in the family, which I think has been very conveniently forgotten, is about Pop's brother, my great uncle Albert, who was a bad man. A blacklister.' After learning more about his ancestor he ends up feeling some sympathy for Albert, who was sent to the Inebriate Reformatory for three years to try and cure his out-of-control drinking. The facility, contained within a prison in Warwick, aimed to reform inmates with no medical treatment other than denying them access to booze. It didn't work and, just one year into his term in 1914, Albert was moved to a psychiatric hospital back in Portsmouth, at the age of 31. Ross, who has made award-winning documentaries, says the same problems are still commonplace today. 'Having been to prisons in the UK recently, I see mental health issues and I see people with addiction issues. It's dreadful to think that in four generations, very little has changed,' he says sadly. Looking at a photograph of his troubled ancestor, he adds: 'I feel very sorry for him. I look at the picture and think 'there was a life there'. And he wasn't remembered by anyone, even by his own brother. My great grandfather never mentioned him to his daughters and it was definitely not handed down to my mum and certainly wasn't handed down to me. 'Albert's life was never really mentioned in the family history. This is not what I was expecting. I thought they all lived in the pub and it was all slightly Disney. The reality is my great uncle was an alcoholic with mental health issues and there is nothing romantic or sweet or sugar-coated about that.' Ross says he can relate to both Pop, born in 1892, and older brother Albert, born a decade earlier, being in the Navy because he has always loved the sea. Brought up by his detective dad John and hairdresser mum Jean in Essex, Ross said that he and his brother Darren were taken on many trips around Europe in the early 1970s before it became popular. 'We travelled at an early age when a lot of people weren't doing that. I've always loved being in water. I strongly suspect that there is a connection to the ocean and to travel is in my DNA,' he says, before setting out on his journey of discovery. In the programme he learns that his maternal great grandfather Pop transferred from the merchant navy to become an ordinary seaman at the start of WWI, quickly rising to become a quartermaster by the age of 22. When the actor wonders if there is any truth to the family story that he was later shipwrecked, he finds out that in 1943 Pop's troop carrier, the Duchess of York, was bombed while en route to Algeria, 300 miles off the coast of Portugal. Dozens of men lost their lives when the ship sank, but Pop was one of the lucky ones, rescued and taken to the Allied-controlled port of Casablanca 700 miles away. Ross, who is a qualified diver, becomes tearful as he imagines what his ancestor went through that day, saying: "I've been on my own in the water for a period of time and it's frightening – you start to hallucinate. I've been lost at sea twice when I was diving - of course, it's nothing like what Pop would have gone through, with the horrors of oil in the water, flames, and dead men floating around you.'
BBC News
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
'Banal and hollow': Why the quaint paintings of Thomas Kinkade divided the US
Beloved by many, despised by others, Thomas Kinkade's quaint rustic scenes and his wholesome image belied a dark and tortured story that contrasts with his 'sugary' artworks. Thomas Kinkade was one of the best-selling artists in history, as well as one of the most divisive. When he died in 2012, the American painter had been rocked by business problems, but at his commercial peak a decade earlier, his company was bringing in more than $100m a year. And yet his work was despised by many critics – not because it was blasphemous or obscene, but because, well, he specialised in quaint pictures of thatched-roof rural cottages nestling in leafy groves. "Thomas Kinkade's style is illustrative saccharine fantasy rather than art with which you can connect at any meaningful level," Charlotte Mullins, the author of A Little History of Art, tells the BBC. "It is schmaltzy pastiches of Disney-style woodland scenes, complete with cutesy animals and fairy tale cottages. They are… like the images you find on cheap greetings cards – sugary and forgettable." And compared to some critics, Mullins is being polite. These critics don't just consider Kinkade's paintings to be nauseatingly sickly, they detect something disturbing and ominous about them. In her 2003 book on California, Where I Was From, Joan Didion summed up his art by saying. "It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent cosiness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire." As harsh as that sounds, Didion may have been more perceptive than she realised. Art for Everybody, a new documentary directed by Miranda Yousef, shows that the man who called himself the "Painter of Light" did indeed have a dark side. "His branding was so effective that you didn't know there was this really complicated and I would say tortured artist behind it all," Yousef tells the BBC. "He lived a Greek tragedy of a life." The documentary features audio tapes recorded by Kinkade when he was a long-haired, bohemian-looking art student in California in the 1970s – and even then, he was already fretting over the question of whether he could make an impact as an artist while making a decent living. After a stint in Hollywood, painting backgrounds for Ralph Bakshi's 1983 animated feature film, Fire and Ice, he concentrated on idealised, nostalgic American landscapes, and he and his wife Nanette sold reproductions of them outside a local grocer's shop. In the 1990s, he took the idealism and the nostalgia to new heights, and swapped his rugged vistas for soft-focus pastoral scenes that a Hobbit might deem a bit on the twee side. Old-fashioned lampposts and cottage windows glowed. Streams twinkled beneath slender stone footbridges. Bushes burst with pastel flowers. And cash registers rang. Kinkade didn't sell the paintings themselves, but the hazy idylls they depicted were soon being printed on collectible plates advertised in newspapers and magazines. For many Americans, they were comforting refuges from the modern world. In Art for Everybody, Christopher Knight, the art critic of the Los Angeles Times, is contemptuous of Kinkade's imagery. "It's a cliché piled upon a fantasy piled upon a bad idea," he says. "The colour is juiced and the light coming from inside those cottages is intense and blaring." Just as importantly, as far as his critics were concerned, Kinkade's pictures had nothing to them beyond their superficial decorative qualities. "They are banal and hollow, with no intent to say anything meaningful," says Mullins. "Today we would think they had been produced by AI – designed as if by algorithm to a certain formula." But Yousef insists that Kinkade's skill can't be discounted. "There were actually other people who were painting cottages and Christmas scenes and putting them on plates and all that stuff," she notes, "and the thing is that Kinkade's were so much better. His works just blew everybody else's out of the water." She also believes that Kinkade's paintings, rather than being wholly market-led, were linked to his childhood in Placerville, California, where he was raised by his single mother and only intermittently saw his violent father. "It's a common criticism that his cottages look like they're on fire on the inside. And then you learn that it was because when he was growing up it was always cold and dark in the house when he got home, because they didn't have the money to keep the heat and the lights on. He was painting the thing that he wanted." Kinkade's deprived upbringing, says Yousef, didn't just inspire his choice of subject matter, but drove him to make as much money as he could. He and his business partners printed pictures on an industrial scale, as well as putting his immediately recognisable imagery on furniture and ornaments, and selling them on the QVC shopping network. They also set up hundreds of faux olde worlde Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries in shopping malls around the US, and trademarked the "Painter of Light" brand. Again, Yousef doesn't see Kinkade as entirely calculating. Having grown up in a house with no pictures on the walls, "He sincerely believed that art should be accessible to everyone." Behind the fantasy Whatever you thought of the paintings, the mass-marketing of the work of a single artist was certainly groundbreaking. In interviews at the time, Kinkade asserted that he was no different from an author selling stacks of novels or a musician selling CDs. He even declared that by industrialising his output, he was doing what Andy Warhol had always dreamt of. But Mullins argues that Kinkade was being "obfuscatory and disingenuous" by churning out reproductions by the thousand, paying his assistants to add a few dabs of paint here and there, and then selling these prints for thousands of dollars, as if they were rare and precious works of art. "Prints offer an affordable way of buying art by great artists," she says. "They retain their value through the limited nature of the edition. This was never Kinkade's strategy." Still, this sort of disagreement between Kinkade and his critics was one of his selling points. Art for Everybody features news reports and promotional videos, in which he tells adoring audiences that his art could be understood and appreciated by everyone, whereas only the snooty elite could see anything artistic about Chris Ofili putting elephant dung on his canvases, or Tracey Emin presenting her unmade bed to gallery-goers. "This is not legitimate art," he proclaimed. As much a televangelist as a painter, Kinkade was a born-again Christian who assured his devotees that buying his work put them on the right side of a political and spiritual line separating them from decadent metropolitan tastemakers. He trademarked the sobriquet "Painter of Light", not just because of all the sunlit clouds and fiery cottages in his pictures, but to signify that he was a force for virtue and Christianity. "The art world is a world of darkness today," he thundered. He, in contrast, was "someone who stands up for family and God and country and beauty". A doughy, plaid shirt-wearing fellow with a thick moustache, he often appeared on television with his blonde wife and his four blonde daughters: the embodiment of wholesome, traditional, all-American values. His fans weren't just paying for his pictures; they were paying to associate themselves with this proudly conservative persona. But that persona, like the pictures themselves, was more a fantasy that Kinkade wished for than an accurate representation of reality. He was prone to swearing after the directors of his mawkishvideos called "cut". He relied on alcohol to cope with work pressures. And, in the documentary, his daughters say that they were encouraged to smile in videos and personal appearances, but often felt as if their father cared more about his career than about them. "Thomas Kinkade and his persona and his brand really cast an extraordinarily long, dark shadow over his entire family," says Yousef, "and there was a lot wrapped up in perpetuating the brand and preserving it." More like this:• The surprising story of Van Gogh's guardian angel• Five ways to spot a fake masterpiece• Eight images that tell the story of America In order to maintain this brand and the vast business empire that went with it, Kinkade had to present himself as a Christian paragon, and he had to complete a stylistically identical painting every month. That meant that he had to suppress other, more conflicted parts of his psyche. The strain became too much. In the mid-2000s, Kinkade fell out with his business partners, and had legal battles with gallery franchisees. He reinvented himself as a womanising, hard-drinking hellraiser. After some interventions by his friends and family, some time in rehab, and the collapse of his marriage, he died of an accidental overdose of alcohol and diazepam at the age of 54. It was only after his death that his family sorted through the vault containing his artwork, and uncovered a stash of bleak, violent drawings and paintings that seemed to express his inner rage and fear in a way that his cottage paintings never could: a shack in the middle of nowhere on a murky night; a nun pointing a gun at herself; giant monsters and distorted faces. Art for Everybody raises the questions of whether these pictures are more authentic than the ones the public knew about. Do they express how Kinkade really felt about his difficult upbringing and his frightening father? Would it have been healthier for him to explore the shadowy netherworlds in these pictures instead of shutting himself inside his stifling sylvan cottages, year after year? And were his critics right to say that his famous paintings were disturbing all along? "One of the things that was obvious early on," says Yousef, "was that his fans had a two-dimensional view of him and his critics had another completely different two-dimensional view of him. I knew there was a three-dimensional person in there somewhere, and that's what I wanted to try to find." In some ways, Kinkade was ahead of his time. First, he was a culture warrior before culture wars were being fought as fiercely as they are now. As someone who claimed that he was taking a stand for Christianity and patriotism and against the intellectual elite, he was staking out territory occupied by more and more in the US today. He was also ahead of his time as an artist with such a brazen commercial side. "Today we're seeing all these artist collabs," says Yousef. "There's Yayoi Kusama who's working with Louis Vuitton, and Tom Sachs is working with Nike, and Kehinde Wiley is doing a collab with American Express, whereas you see in the movie an MBNA bank card with a Thomas Kinkade painting on it. He was already doing it 20 or 30 years ago." Finally, by calling himself the Painter of Light, and by trading on his pious family-man persona, Kinkade turned himself into a kind of product. "Look at where we are today with social media, and everybody being a brand," says Yousef. "He was really ahead of his time with that. But I think that one of the big questions of the film is, what are the costs of turning yourself into a brand?" In Kinkade's case, the costs were unbearably high. Art for Everybody is released on 28 March in the US. --
