Latest news with #Lanny
Yahoo
09-04-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Daffodils remind Mitchell County man of the beauty in life
MITCHELL COUNTY, N.C. (QUEEN CITY HOMETOWN) — The memories. 'It took all that pipe out.' The sense of safety. 'Most of it's up and down the creek.' And the life Lanny Wright built has all crumbled. 'I'm kind of disgusted. I worked 55 years for this,' said Lanny. 'So… it ain't much.' Though it's been months, Hurricane Helne keeps taking more of what little he has left. 'Everywhere you look, it's just bad,' said Lanny. 'Everything is heartbreaking.' He wasn't home when the water wiped out his driveway and swept away the house his wife, Karen, grew up in. 'This side was a house- it was a two story. It was actually where Karen was born and raised,' said Lanny, pointing to a Chimney and a few bricks left on the ground. Karen passed away four years ago. Her touches were all over the life they built together in Mitchell County. 'It's still moving,' sighed Lanny. Right now, her little beauty salon she ran is perched on the edge of a cliff. Every time Lanny sees it, he thinks of her. 'They think it'll fall before they can get it fixed,' said Lanny. It'll cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix what the hurricane did- it's money Lanny doesn't have. 'With how much time you put into it,' said Lanny, choking up. 'This place used to look good, but not anymore.' Right when Lanny can't look anymore, something catches his eye. The daffodils Karen planted all those years ago have suddenly bloomed. 'She loved those things,' said Lanny, looking down at the yellow flowers. Maybe those flowers are hope. Maybe those flowers are Karen- telling him to hold on. Maybe something beautiful can still grow here. Maybe… Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Telegraph
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Thing with Feathers: Benedict Cumberbatch's surreal horror is a squawking misfire
Some books cast a spell, which must be what attracted Benedict Cumberbatch to star in The Thing with Feathers. But that doesn't mean they're destined to make great films, however honest everyone's aims, and diligent their acting. Writer-director Dylan Southern turns a very literary tour de force into cinema that clomps, languishes and squawks 'METAPHOR!' with almost no plot to motor it along. On the page, the conceit of Max Porter's 2015 debut novella Grief is the Thing with Feathers – that of a giant crow presiding over a widower's bereavement – was certainly a flex, showing promising gumption. Lo and behold, Porter's next novel Lanny (2019) was altogether wondrous. The former book has already been adapted for the stage, in a well-liked 2018 version by Enda Walsh, starring Cillian Murphy. Southern wants to meet Porter's achievement anew, but it's an almighty hurdle to set himself as a first-time feature director. The supposed climax becomes a hellscape in all the wrong ways, as well as an unwieldy genre hybrid, about one-third of the way (but no more) to Babadook-esque horror. As a straight grief drama, which is how things start, The Thing with Feathers does make some gritty inroads – which is kind of impressive, given how weirdly unspecific it all is. Cumberbatch is a grieving father, unnamed except as 'Dad' by his two young sons (Henry and Richard Boxall). His late wife has collapsed in a freak accident at home and died; he found the body. While concealing his full devastation to preserve a sense of normality, he can't handle the small things: putting milk in the fridge, not burning the toast, stopping these tykes trundling all over him. He's an illustrator, which cues up his black feathered nemesis, Crow, to make a looming leap off the page. After the Netflix drama Eric, which paired Cumberbatch with an imaginary blue puppet monster that helped his character cope with losing his son, we perhaps need to call time now on him sharing the screen with lumbering personifications of emotion. This man-sized corvine figment rasps in the voice of David Thewlis – who else? – and taunts him as a 'Sad Dad' hitting the bottle. Alas, the relationship being sold between Crow and Dad's grief is so hammeringly obvious it gives the film nowhere to go but down. Southern directs the young brothers well – there's a degree of spite to their rough-housing that's believable. And Cumberbatch, who has never phoned in any performance I've seen, is doing everything he can to keep the film in touch with reality. But the problems are insurmountable. The material is just so ill-suited to this unpoetic quasi-horror approach. The lighting in the house turns sickly; the iffily designed creature starts flapping around in a frenzy; the viewer feels nothing. There's no way Southern can lift us out of this pit of despond, which is what Porter's flair for literary invention did. It's a grim situation – like watching a film peck at its own entrails.
Yahoo
30-01-2025
- General
- Yahoo
'Keep the stories alive so this doesn't happen again'
SANDOWN — There were two groups of people living in Berlin when things became dangerous for Jewish people — those who fled out of fear and those who stayed, wondering how bad it could get. When Jewish businesses began to burn and Jewish children could no longer attend school, Arnold Zweig's family fled to South America while Lanny (Lehman) Zweig's family stayed until they feared for their lives. Eventually, both families sought refuge in Colombia, where Lanny and Arnold met, married and lived for 20 years before immigrating to Los Angeles, where their son, Milton Zweig, was born. Lanny (Lehman) Zweig's story Lanny was 8 years old when her father received a phone call warning him that he and his family would be burned alive if they didn't leave their apartment, which sat atop the family's dry cleaning business in what was downtown Berlin. It was 1938, said Zweig, and the Kristallnacht had just begun. With her parents and her grandmother by her side, Lanny hid her yellow star with a teddy bear and boarded a train that would take the family into France. From there, they were smuggled through the woods into Brussels while being shot at. Shortly after arriving, Lanny's father was arrested for not wearing his yellow star in public and brought to Mechelen, a holding camp in the suburbs of Brussels, before he was transported to Auschwitz and murdered. He'd write letters to his family about his time in the concentration camp, which Zweig has today, along with his yellow star and other Holocaust artifacts. The letters were filled with positives notes about his time in the camp. 'He said everything was fine, that he was having a good time, kind of like a summer camp but it was anything but,' Zweig said. Though Lanny and her mother were hiding out in a relative's apartment, the family decided to send Lanny away to live with another family. She changed her name, attended a Catholic school and lived as a non-Jew until she could spend the rest of the war hiding in a cellar with her mother. 'She remembered when the British liberated Brussels. She and her mother watched them come through the streets,' Zweig said. 'Shortly after that, they decided to leave and go to South America.' Being an only child, Lanny and her mother traveled alone to Bogota, Colombia, where she would later meet Arnold, another survivor and Berlin native. The couple married and they and Lanny's mother moved to Los Angeles where Zweig was born. 'I remember going to my grandmother's apartment on the weekends,' he said. 'She would have all of her German friends that were there come to her apartment to play cards and most of the people that came there had numbers on their arms. I remember seeing that as a young child.' Arnold Zweig's story Arnold's mother didn't want to take the chance of staying in Berlin. 'She heard there was someone writing visas for people to leave the country so she went there and some guy wrote her a visa that turned out to be bogus but it worked anyway,' Zweig said. 'When she went home and told the family they were leaving, my father said he had no idea where that country was.' The family, made up of Arnold, his brother and their parents, boarded a boat, crossed the Atlantic Ocean and were dropped on the shores of Cartagena, Colombia. 'It was pouring rain, they had nowhere to stay and no money. They had a few chests with all of their clothes in there,' Zweig said. 'They stayed in a hotel for a few days and slowly they found a place to live.' The family eventually learned to speak Spanish and English, and they survived there before immigrating to the United States, where Arnold worked in insurance and Lanny was the picture of the classic homemaker, caring for the home, Arnold and their four children. Zweig said that it was common for Europeans impacted by the Holocaust to flee to South America. After the war, a lot of Nazis sought refuge in South America, too, and were hunted down by Nazi hunters during the 1940s and 1950s. Lanny and Arnold were married for 67 years before they died eight months apart from one another, Lanny, age 90, in 2021 and Arnold, age 97, in 2022. 'This impacted them their whole lives. There was never a time when it wasn't on their minds. It always affected them,' Zweig said. Holocaust survivors are older, they're dying and soon, too, will their children and family members. Tell the stories, record them, write them down, preserve them, so this doesn't happen again and so people never forget, Zweig said. 'Keep the stories alive,' he continued. Zweig's family history, research and artifacts will soon be donated to Keene State College where they will be available for public viewing.
