Latest news with #JonathanGlazer
France 24
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- France 24
Five things to know about Scarlett Johansson
Here are five things to know about the teen star turned Hollywood A-Lister: Starlet Scarlett When baby Johansson was born into a Jewish family in Manhattan in 1984, early signs suggested stardom was ahead. Her parents named her after Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone With the Wind", and at a young age she was drawn to tap dance and theatre. Barely into double-digits she made her screen debut, and soon after Robert Redford cast her in "The Horse Whisperer" for her first major role. Then, just shy of 20, she hit the big time with Sofia Coppola's art-house classic "Lost in Translation". In the film, which unfolds in the alienating surroundings of a Tokyo hotel, Johansson manages to touch the heart of an ever-sardonic Bill Murray as well as charming spectators and critics worldwide. Cha-ching! Over the next decades, Johansson has starred in a string of hits and top directors have queued up to cast her, from Wes Anderson and the Coen brothers to Jonathan Glazer and Christopher Nolan. Catapulting her into movie stratosphere, she joined the Marvel universe as the indomitable Black Widow in 2010 and made eight films with the franchise. During this collaboration she topped the Forbes list of highest-paid actresses and featured in hits including "Avengers: Infinity War" (2018), one of the top-10 highest grossing films of all time according to IMDB Pro. Other missions But Johansson the box-office megastar has also missed out on, or sidestepped, plenty of big roles. There was a potential "Mission Impossible" movie but this was shelved, officially due to scheduling clashes. She did not land the lead in "Les Miserables", which went to Anne Hathaway, who won an Oscar for it, nor did she get Lisbeth Salander in "Millennium". But she was plenty busy, often starring in lower-budget films that wowed critics and audiences. These included a stand-out performance as an alien in Jonathan Glazer's remarkable "Under the Skin" (2013), shot in wintery backstreets, abandoned houses and seedy minivans. So far, she has not won an Oscar, but she was nominated for best actress and supporting actress in 2020 for her roles in indie favourites "Marriage Story" and "Jojo Rabbit". That voice It is unmistakable and Johansson has capitalised on it, though sometimes with unwanted repercussions. She brought her deep, distinctive vocals to the voice of Samantha in "Her" (2013) by Spike Jonze, about an artificial intelligence system Joaquin Phoenix falls for. But in May last year Johansson accused tech firm OpenAI of using her voice in their own generative AI ChatGPT, which responded by modifying its tone. She can also be heard in hit animations including "The Jungle Book" and the two "Sing" films. Johansson has also released two albums, "Anywhere I Lay My Head" in 2008 and a year later "Break Up". They did not rock the music world, but reviewing the inaugural album, Pitchfork called it a "curio" while praising the "wide textural range" of Johansson's voice. Against the grain Never reluctant to speak her mind, Johansson has been outspoken on various social and film-related issues. She has supported victims of harassment, pushed for gender-equal pay and spotlighted the impact of streaming on theatrical releases. She is also willing to take more controversial stances, not least in defending Woody Allen -- who has cast her in three films -- when much of Hollywood has shunned him over a long-running sexual assault scandal. "I love Woody. I believe him, and I would work with him any time," she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2019.
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Auschwitz Memorial Announces Project To Create Digital Replica Offering Virtual Film Location
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Generate Key Takeaways The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial is working on a project to create a certified digital replica of the preserved concentration and extermination camp which can be used as a virtual film location. The initiative is likely to draw considerable interest from the film world because the production of fiction feature films is not permitted at the memorial, situated on the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in southern Poland, where around 1.1 million people died in horrific conditions during World War Two. More from Deadline Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, for example, was made in cooperation with the memorial and museum, which gave the production access to camp documents, survivors' testimonies, and expert guidance, and also allowed it to scan parts of the area of the former camp. However, none of the dramatic reconstructions were filmed on the site. Documentary films are allowed to film with permission, which meant the final sequences of the Oscar-nominated drama, showing the work of the museum and the objects that belonged to victims, could be shot on its premises. The groundbreaking digital replica project, bannered Picture From Auschwitz, will be presented in a panel at the Cannes Film Festival's Marche du Film as part of its technology and innovation focused Cannes Next strand. Polish director Agnieszka Holland and Polish American photographer Ryszard Horowitz; an Auschwitz survivor, who was one of the youngest survivors on Schindler's List, will join Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation CEO Wojciech Soczewica, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Deputy Spokesperson Paweł Sawicki and the project's creative producer Maciej Żemojcin on stage to talk about the project. Żemojcin and his team are using cutting-edge 3D scanning technologies to create a certified digital replica which preserves and protects the site's historical integrity. 'The certified digital replica offers filmmakers a revolutionary tool rooted in accuracy and ethical storytelling helping combat denial and distortion at a time when misinformation is on the rise,' read a release announcing the project and panel. 'Designed for a wide range of films – from documentaries to large-scale Hollywood productions – Picture From Auschwitz supports the telling of the true story of the camp as out of numerous reasons the historical site is not and will not be accessible for filmmaking.' The replica will feature every detail of the site from the 'Arbeit Macht Frei' entry gate to its fence posts, with every brick or roof tile of its buildings meticulously documented, to reveal perspectives and details invisible to the naked eye. The data will be preserved and reprocessed over time as new technologies emerge. Żemojcin's team has already completed a 1:1 digital replica of Auschwitz I using the most advanced spatial scanning tools available. Next steps in the project include completing the digital interiors of Auschwitz I, and the exteriors and interiors of Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp – securing the entirety of the Memorial site. Licensing fees for the virtual replica will directly support the Memorial, which is marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camp this year, and its mission of commemorating all victims, fighting antisemitism and all forms of hatred as well as raising reflection about our contemporary moral responsibility. Partners on the project include the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial, Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, American Friends of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, Creative Media Europe, ATM Virtual and Leica Geosystems. Footage from the project will be showcased during the panel while a website for the initiative will go live on May 15. Best of Deadline Sign up for Deadline's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
The Guardian
07-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Israel is starving Gaza. It's a cheap, silent and brutal way to kill
I recently looked up a biography of Rudolf Höss. The Kommandant who led the Auschwitz prison camp in Poland during the second world war was fastidious in his duties. He successfully oversaw the extermination of millions of people from 1940 to 1943, and, according to accounts, seems to have been a father who cared for his five children. His home life was imagined, and captured, by the film-maker Jonathan Glazer in his 2023 movie The Zone of Interest. John Primomo recounts, in his biography, how the Nazi would randomly select groups of prisoners and sentence them to die by starvation. Höss was eventually captured by Nazi hunters and hanged for his crimes, in his case a slow death on a short gallows. Yoav Gallant, the former Israeli defense minister, is the primary architect of the starvation policy in Gaza, which is unfolding as I write. The international criminal court issued a warrant for his arrest indicating 'reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Netanyahu … and Mr Gallant … bear criminal responsibility for … the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare.' Gallant's successor, Israel Katz, has embraced the Gallant policy. He and his boss, Benjamin Netanyahu, broke the ceasefire with Hamas in March. Since then, they have worked fastidiously to starve the people in Gaza – food, medicine and critical supplies for the maintenance of human life have all been prevented by Israeli troops from entering the territory for more than two months. This video shows a young girl, Rahaf, who is starving to death. On 2 May, Amnesty International issued an urgent notice. 'Israel must immediately end its devastating siege on the occupied Gaza Strip which constitutes a genocidal act, a blatant form of unlawful collective punishment, and the war crime of using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare,' it reads. Unable to stand idly by, a group of activists, including Greta Thunberg, organized the Freedom Flotilla, a boat carrying supplies meant for Gaza. Their goal was to break into the '139-square mile prison camp', as the journalist Ben Ehrenreich has described Gaza. On 1 May, their boat was attacked and disabled by drones, according to eyewitnesses. A reasonable person may assume the Israelis destroyed the boat. Starvation is attractive to mass murderers for a few reasons. First, it's cheap. While Joe Biden and Donald Trump – and the majority of Democrats and Republicans in Congress – have committed more than $22bn of public money to Israeli's genocide, killing people can be expensive. Tanks, bombs, missiles, drones, bullets and incendiary devices all cost money to make and deliver. But starvation doesn't require any big outlays. Impose a siege, and human biology resolves the rest. Beyond being inexpensive to implement, starvation makes little noise. For those who seek to silence their victims – as Israel has by murdering at least 155 Palestinian journalists – and obscure their actions, starvation is a useful tool. There are no bomb craters, no burning children or journalists. There are only emaciated corpses. And 18 months into the darkness that has enveloped the Palestinians, they do not warrant many headlines. And that benefit – obfuscation – extends to the patrons too. The leaders of the US, UK, France, Italy, Germany and so on – who have underwritten the extermination of the Palestinians – can feign ignorance, or just ignore, what their partners in Israel are doing. They are busy people. Bandwidth is limited. And yet, despite its advantages, starving humans to death is evil. Not least because of how it works. Starvation is a slow, painful way to die. For survivors, particularly children, the future is attenuated. Normal brain and social development is disrupted and recovery may be impossible in many cases. In the first stages of starvation, the body uses reserves – usually fat – to keep going. Once those reserves have been depleted – a process that varies from individual to individual – the body begins to consume itself. Organs like the lungs, liver and kidneys shrink before they too begin to be destroyed. Finally, muscle is the only store of energy remaining. The body cannibalizes its protein. And as Dr. Nancy Zucker, Director of the Center for Eating Disorders at Duke University, explained to NPR, 'once protein stores start getting used, death is not far'. The heart is a muscle – and it too is consumed, a fitting symbol for those leaders in the West, and the Israelis they sustain. Each of them a heartless person, no matter how well fed they may be. Ahmed Moor is a Palestinian American writer and recipient of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans
The Guardian
01-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Most Precious of Cargoes review – postmodern Holocaust fairytale is dreamy curiosity
Directed by Michel Hazanavicius, this postmodern Holocaust fairytale premiered at Cannes last year, and turns out to be a dreamy animated curiosity which is certainly different to the icy realist rigour of other films which have appeared there on the same theme, such as Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest or László Nemes's Son of Saul. It is adapted from a novella by author and screenwriter Jean-Claude Grumberg (who collaborated with Truffaut on The Last Metro), whose own father was murdered in the Nazi death camps. The late Jean-Louis Trintignant has his final credit as the narrator, introducing us to scenes that could, at first glance, be from the Brothers Grimm. We see a dense central European forest … through which a second world war Nazi train is seen speeding through, carrying terrified Jews to Auschwitz. One man, with a wife, young child and a baby makes a desperate decision to throw his baby out on to the snowy hillside in the hope that someone finds it – and someone does. A poor woodcutter's wife (voiced by Dominique Blanc), in agony after the death of her own child, rescues the baby and brings it home where her grumpy old husband (voiced by Grégory Gadebois) is initially suspicious and filled with antisemitic loathing, having evidently guessed what has happened. (The plausibility of his having guessed this is perhaps the least of the film's narrative issues.) But just as his old heart is melted by the adorable baby, the anti-Semites close in. The movie is topped off by a twist-ending postwar coda whose enigmatic quality the film whimsically complicates by getting the narrator to announce that yes, this is fiction, and far-fetched fiction at that, but there are plenty of deniers out there who claim that the Holocaust is fiction as well. It's a strange, muddled equivalence and an odd juxtaposition. The existence of Holocaust deniers does not itself justify a fiction contrived around the Holocaust. This is a rather sentimental bucolic tale, featuring sweet little cartoon birds and rabbits – and the real horror of Nazi death camps. Yet the rebuke to the fascists is sincere enough. The Most Precious of Cargoes is in UK and Irish cinemas from 4 April.
Telegraph
08-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
I've been rewatching the best old TV ads – and everything we loved has gone
It was a private rebellion against World Book Day. Despairing that in some corners of this nation it's suggested that you might look at a book once a year and, at vast expense, dress up your kid as a giant peach, I took to YouTube. I doom-scrolled and the algorithm thrust at me a programme first broadcast by Channel 4 in April 2000: The 100 Greatest TV Ads. It was almost three hours long, and as I watched, it turned into a soul-tearing hymn to a now dead art. Presented by a youthful Graham Norton, sweetly free of beard, it was like a tour of a graveyard of beloved cultural icons. At the number-one spot (sorry if I'm spoiling this, but you've had 25 years to watch it) was a Guinness advert. Released in 1999, it tells the story of a Polynesian surfer who has the patience to wait for the perfect wave. When it comes, and he rides it, the white horses of the sea's foam become actual horses. While others wipe out around him, he rides the wave to shore and is leapt on by his fellow surfers as they congratulate him. In its extended one-and-a-half minutes, there is much to ponder on and marvel at. Not least the freedom that the advertising agency AMV BBDO was given by its client so it could make a film of such beauty and subtlety. There is symbolism that the waves are like the frothy head of a Guinness and, more acutely, it's a pint that is worth the wait; a proper pint of Guinness must be poured no more than three-quarters full, rested and settled before topping off. And if that necessity is controversial, everyone agrees it's marketing genius. Then, within the narrator's script there's an unintended nod to a future scourge of our planet: 'Tick, followed tock, followed tick followed tock'. For that is now the beating heart of advertising, TikTok. Vapid, trivial, egocentric, vain, amateur and that most hideous of terms that sums up all that is wrong in modern media: user-generated content. From TikTok and other social media channels comes today's inspiration: adverts that mirror the content of 'influencers' – think of every commercial for food delivery, deodorant, apps and more, aping the hand-held mobile phone video. Although it's getting confusing now, because the influencers, now called ' social creators ', are simulating the movie makers with more professional styles of filming. All of which must cause even more pain for directors such as Jonathan Glazer, who made that Guinness advert and went on to create the gangster film Sexy Beast. The ad world doesn't use or nurture talent like that anymore. When I was 19, I got work experience in the post room at Saatchi & Saatchi on London's Charlotte Street. I always made particularly slow deliveries to one office, that of the director of the Silk Cut campaigns; he had framed images on the walls of the likes of knives cutting through purple silk. Today that fabulous creativity can't see the light of day, it is banned. Legal restrictions and woke sentiment have eradicated these ads, and it's reflective of the lost spirit and adventure of Britain. Or, to summarise: no booze, no fags, no fun. You see, the authorities no longer trust us. Even a witty portrayal of an outdated attitude is forbidden, lest we lose our marbles and enact it. Remember that advert with Penelope Keith for Parker Pens from 1975 when she taught a class of girls at finishing school 'How to spend Daddy's lovely money'? One girl sticks up a hand to ask, 'Does one spell pence with an 'S' or a 'C'?' 'I don't think you need worry about that, my dear,' replies Ms Keith. Today we must be shielded from jokes about the aspirations of women. Then there was the Tango advert of 1991, in which a slow-motion replay reveals an oversized orange person slapping the face of a man who has just taken a sip of the fizzy drink. It was pulled from broadcast after school children started mimicking the advert and hurting each other – sometimes bursting ear drums – in the process. And there's the plethora of adverts, across the 1970s, that feature the twin horrors of the pleasures of alcohol and the advances of men. Cointreau specialised in featuring lascivious Frenchmen plying young women with twice-distilled triple sec orange liqueur. A 1984 Fosters ad depicted a woman as needing shielding (by Paul Hogan of Crocodile Dundee fame) from a ballet dancer 'with no strides on', while Castlemaine XXXX famously saw a pick-up filled with lager collapse with the addition of two bottles of sweet sherry 'for the ladies'. Such humour is now a no-go area, as is the idea of a man dressed in black, crossing snow-filled mountains to bring a box of Milk Tray chocolates to a woman who lives alone in a smart chalet. Back then, this Bond-like character was the stuff of female fantasy. Now he's a creepy intruder. We must also tread carefully to avoid offending our neighbours. Thus you wouldn't today watch an Audi advert mocking stereotypical Germanic behaviour, as happened in 1984 with a voiceover saying, 'If you want to get on the beach before the Germans, you'd better buy an Audi 100.' One of the great ad men of the 1980s was Robin Wight, now a London ex-pat living on remote Exmoor. Wight and his firm WCRS created a spoof version of the Dambusters film to advertise Carling Black Label lager, and he tells me, 'I couldn't have made that now, as we're not allowed to upset the Germans.' Thus a nostalgic watch of the greatest ads of all time is a distressing tale of lost culture and humour. No Hamlet cigar ads, because you cannot relieve misfortune with tobacco; no saucy Flake adverts, because they demean women, are pornographic and encourage you to flood the bathroom floor. While Fry's Turkish Delight is an abomination because it depicts white people as sexy nomads in thawbs and shemaghs. Still, if you want to access all that's foul, murderous, bullying and immoral, it's just a click away on Google.
