Latest news with #MichaelPowell
Yahoo
01-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Thelma Schoonmaker and Rose Matafeo Sessions Added to Edinburgh Film Fest Lineup
This year, the Edinburgh International Film Festival will welcome acclaimed film editor Thelma Schoonmaker for a special 'In Conversation' event to discuss her late husband Michael Powell's life and filmmaking career. Schoonmaker — best known for her Oscar-winning work on Raging Bull, The Aviator and The Departed — will take the audience through her partner's career, which started with him directing low-budget films in the 1930s prior to his acclaimed 1937 film The Edge of the World (also screening in a restoration at EIFF 2025). More from The Hollywood Reporter What's Behind Universal Music Group's U.S. Stock Listing Plan? Taron Egerton Rules Himself Out of the Running for James Bond: "It Would Be Wasted on Me" Julian Schnabel to Receive Venice Festival's Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award Powell is perhaps best known for his creative partnership with Emeric Pressburger, which produced some of the most brilliant British films of the 20th century, including The Life of Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). Public outrage at Powell's solo directorial effort, the disturbing horror Peeping Tom (1960) has since turned to praise and Powell is now considered one of the most important British filmmakers of the 20th century. This is, in part, thanks to the efforts of Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese since the 1980s, with their championing of his films and efforts to restore them. Thelma will also introduce a special screening of Powell's classic film The Edge of the World (1937) at Edinburgh, presented in a digital restoration. In Conversation: Thelma Schoonmaker on Michael Powell will take place Sunday, Aug. 17, joining a host of sessions with huge names including Ken Loach, Kevin Macdonald and Nia DaCosta. EIFF also confirmed on Wednesday that the guest at 90 Minutes or Less FilmFest Podcast (Live) on Aug. 17 will be acclaimed comedian Rose Matafeo, star of Starstruck, Baby Done and Junior Taskmaster. 90 Minutes or Less is a podcast in which host Sam Clements discusses a film under 90 minutes in length with special guests. The Edinburgh International Film Festival will run Aug. 14-20. Best of The Hollywood Reporter The 40 Greatest Needle Drops in Film History The 40 Best Films About the Immigrant Experience Wes Anderson's Movies Ranked From Worst to Best Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
30-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Edinburgh Film Festival to Spotlight Michael Powell With Iconic Editor Thelma Schoonmaker in Conversation and Restored Screening of ‘The Edge of the World'
Legendary film editor Thelma Schoonmaker will return to the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) this August for a special In Conversation tribute to her late husband, acclaimed British filmmaker Michael Powell. The event, taking place Aug. 17 at the city's Tollcross Central Hall, will see Schoonmaker reflect on Powell's pioneering career from early independent features to his celebrated collaboration with Emeric Pressburger and his enduring influence on generations of filmmakers, most famously Martin Scorsese. More from Variety Andrea Arnold, Nia DaCosta, Jeremy Thomas, Ken Loach Lead Powerhouse Upscale Industry Lineup at Edinburgh Film Festival Scottish Producers Hail Return of Edinburgh Industry Program While Calling for More Talent Development, Networking Opportunities Year-Round Edinburgh Film Fest Boss Paul Ridd on Resurrecting the Shuttered Event and Creating a 'Discovery Festival' for New Talent The tribute also includes a newly restored screening of Powell's 1937 breakthrough feature 'The Edge of the World,' introduced by Schoonmaker on Aug. 16 at Cameo 1. Shot in the remote Shetland Islands, the film explores the tension between tradition and change in an isolated Scottish community, and is widely regarded as a defining early work in Powell's filmography. 'We are over the moon that the living legend Thelma Schoonmaker will be returning to EIFF this year to present a terrific film, and to talk with us about the life and work of her late husband Michael Powell, a filmmaker who left such an indelible mark on the history of cinema,' said Paul Ridd, EIFF CEO and festival director. Powell's creative partnership with Pressburger produced some of the most iconic British films of the 20th century, including the epic 'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,' perhaps David Niven's best role in 'A Matter of Life and Death,' the technical marvel that is 'Black Narcissus,' and arguably their pinnacle in 'The Red Shoes.' Though Powell's solo 1960 feature 'Peeping Tom' was initially reviled, it has since been hailed as a landmark psychological thriller, largely thanks to Schoonmaker and longtime collaborator Martin Scorsese's efforts to restore and reintroduce his work to new audiences. Schoonmaker was last at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2024, where she lent her name to the festival's newly established Shorts Competition. The 2025 edition of EIFF runs Aug. 14–20. Best of Variety What's Coming to Disney+ in August 2025 What's Coming to Netflix in August 2025 New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week
Telegraph
01-06-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
How England lured Jacob Bethell away from West Indies
'Jacob is a sponge, so he will have learnt a lot from Virat.' Michael Powell should know because he was Jacob Bethell's cricket coach at Rugby School. Bethell spent six years there, where Powell and his wife Michelle were guardians to the boy who arrived from Barbados aged 12, with a reference from Sir Garfield Sobers and Brian Lara in his back pocket. Now he is an England cricketer who has opened the batting in the Indian Premier League with Virat Kohli and marked his first international at his home ground, Edgbaston, on Thursday night with a man-of-the-match performance against West Indies, waving his bat to Powell when he reached 50. In the second ODI in Cardiff on Sunday he has a further opportunity to push for keeping his Test place for the India series. Powell, the former Warwickshire captain recently made a club life member, was sitting in the chairman's box beaming with pride on Thursday. Bethell has not forgotten his upbringing. He acknowledged afterwards that Powell was the reason why he was in the UK and joined Warwickshire's academy almost as soon as he arrived in this country. He handed over signed shirts for a couple of the pupils at Rugby after the game. Powell took him to Edgbaston as a wide-eyed 12-year-old and said one day he would play there for England. 'You know what, it felt funny,' he told Telegraph Sport. 'I played under-19s for England with Marcus Trescothick and Michael Vaughan, and Jacob reminds me so much of them. They all use Gunn & Moore bats, and stood out from others their age. Then I see Tres at Edgbaston [working as England's batting coach] throwing balls to Jacob. It's just weird how the stars have aligned.' Powell took Bethell to the Edgbaston museum to see photos of Brian Lara scoring his 501 at the ground. Bethell stopped for a picture next to a framed one of his mentor. 'We had a laugh about that,' Powell says now. It used to be that every 10 years or so in English cricket a player would come along with a natural air of permanence at an early age, relishing the scrutiny and pressure of international cricket. The 18 county academies and cricket's pathway are now producing those players more regularly. Think of Joe Root in 2012, Ben Stokes a year later making a hundred in his second Test in Australia and Harry Brook. Bethell, 21, is the latest with cricket in his blood and a grounding in the game that was fine-tuned on the fields of Rugby. Powell would spend hours on the school grounds where the sport of rugby union was born, hitting balls in the air for the teenage Bethell to dive around and catch. 'You know what? He never, ever dropped a single one. He was a phenomenal fielder. Hand on heart, the first time I saw him swing a bat, I thought he'd play international cricket,' he said. Bethell arrived at Rugby with a burgeoning cricketing reputation. He joined the Franklyn Stephenson Academy in Barbados aged 11, and was coached by Lara at 12. His grandfather played for Barbados, his father Graham club cricket in Sheffield with Vaughan and the family had strong links and contacts in English cricket. In 2015, his academy side played Loretto, a touring school from Scotland and Bethell scored a 50. Watching was John Patterson, who worked with Bethell's dad years previously and whose sons were at Rugby, looked after by Powell. He tipped Powell off about Bethell and Rugby beat a number of other public schools offering scholarships because of those links. Rugby's close ties to Warwickshire helped, too. 'First time I saw him, he didn't have a bat or kit. I threw him some tennis balls and he just cut and pulled them to shreds,' Powell said. 'I later discovered a video of him taken in the back garden in Barbados, where there was a ball on a string hanging up and every morning from 6am he would be out there hitting it. When people say Tiger Woods was born with a golf club in his hands, it applies to Jacob in a cricket sense. But for us it was about supporting him, this young kid growing up a thousand miles away from his parents. It was about pastoral care as well as cricket.' Like Brook, who went to Sedburgh, Bethell benefitted from a full sports scholarship at a top public school. English cricket relies heavily on the public-school system, skewing the perception of the sport, although there are fears within the ECB that the government's VAT levy will affect the number of scholarships handed out to those like Brook and Bethell who would otherwise have been unable to afford the privilege. 'He would get frustrated because he did not have the strength to pierce the infield so I had to tell him to be patient,' says Powell. 'I remember saying, 'Right now you're getting 20 off 80 balls, but there were 17 dots today that you drove and the fielders cut them off. Soon they will pierce those gaps so there's an extra 68, so that's your 88 off 80 balls.' He was frustrated because the guy at the other end, who was older, was smoking it. I just said in 10 years' time, he will be playing club cricket. They will not be doing what you're doing.' What Bethell is doing is building on that talent. He had no problem finding the gaps against West Indies. After finding his feet with 20 off 26 balls, he exploded with 62 off his next 23, with eight fours and five sixes. He recently told the Professional Cricketers' Association magazine, Beyond The Boundaries, that he was spending his time in India facing Bhuvneshwar Kumar swinging the new ball round corners in the nets while training with Bangalore. 'Pretty good prep for red-ball cricket,' he said. 'My technique and the way I bat is very much suited to red-ball cricket. it is a case of becoming more or less expansive depending on the scenario I'm faced with.' He may have lost his Test No 3 spot to Ollie Pope for the time being, but perhaps the upside of staying in the IPL is his exposure to Indian conditions, and the benefit that will give England across formats over the long term. Just living in the goldfish bowl with Kohli can only help. 'I think he quite enjoys the overseas boys because we're just pretty chill around him,' says Bethell. 'He's definitely got that aura and it's pretty electrifying to walk out to bat with him. I don't want to give away everything I learnt, but obviously you go to India and the first thing you think of is spin. And just the way those batters go about thinking about playing spin. They're pretty clinical in how they pick length and the deliveries they try and hit for four and six. That was nice to have more of a power-game input into my game rather than a bit of touch around spin as well. So then just trying to mesh the two together would help a lot.' It proves Powell is right about his sponge-like tendencies. 'It is just very rewarding to see him realise his dream,' he added. 'But also go out there and grab it with both hands.'
The Verge
05-05-2025
- Business
- The Verge
RIP Skype — you were right about almost everything
'When I knew it was over was when I downloaded Skype.' All the way back in 2003, Michael Powell, then the chairman of the FCC and the United States' chief regulator of the telecom industry, told a roomful of academics and executives at the University of California at San Diego that he had seen the future of communication. 'When the inventors of Kazaa are distributing, for free, a little program that you can talk to anybody else, and the quality is fantastic and it's free, it's over. You can pretend it's not. You can fight these fights. But it is over. The world will change now inevitably.' Powell was right. The world did change, and it changed in Skype's image. Then it left Skype behind. On Monday, Microsoft shut Skype down for good, a few days short of 14 years after buying the service for $8.5 billion. Skype still had users until the bitter end, but both Microsoft and the world had more or less moved on. Microsoft has shifted all its investment to Teams, a corporate-focused app that the company swears will someday catch on with regular people. Zoom and Meet and countless other apps do video chat perfectly well. WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and dozens of other messaging services offer high-quality video and audio in addition to text. The technology that made Skype special two decades ago is now utterly commoditized, and maybe the world just no longer needed the company that made it all possible. I would happily trade most of what's available in modern messaging apps for the Skype feature set circa about 2007 But before it goes offline for good, let's just quickly give Skype its due. No company before or since has had an idea about communication as fundamentally correct as Skype: that what the internet needed was an all-in-one communication system. With Skype, you could call other Skype users, obviously. But you could also call anyone with a phone number. You often had to pay for it, but still: that idea alone remains the most ambitious thing anyone's ever done in internet chat. Skype's founders understood that they weren't building a platform — they were building a global communication system. I would happily trade most of what's available in modern messaging apps for the Skype feature set circa about 2007. You could make high-quality calls over voice and video, to practically anyone anywhere on the planet. You could send instant messages to other Skype users, or SMS messages to anyone with a phone. Your Skype account had an answering machine, so people could leave you messages. With Skypecasts, you could have up to 100 people in a single moderated call. Skype was available on every platform that mattered, and its quality was unbeatable. At its peak, Skype was enormous. In 2009, The New York Times reported the app had 405 million users, and accounted for 8 percent of all the world's international calling minutes. Skype was a verb! You didn't call someone from your laptop, you Skyped them. And its ringtone remains one of the most iconic internet sounds of all time. Ultimately, it seems that what killed Skype was the very thing that made it so powerful all those years ago: its peer-to-peer technology, borrowed from the file-sharing platform Kazaa (its founders previous startup), that connected users directly to each other instead of hosting everything on the internet. This made it vastly easier and cheaper to scale the service when bandwidth was still hugely expensive, but caused trouble over time. Only a few people truly understood how it worked, one early Skype employee told me, and as Skype was growing there was hardly any incentive to re-architect the whole system. After a while, the system became so specialized, and tuned to so many edge cases, that it began to collapse under its own weight. Pivoting Skype to an internet-based system, which Microsoft eventually did, was a huge amount of work. Skype's outdated tech became a particular problem when mobile platforms became dominant. It both obviated some of Skype's coolest features — I now have a thousand different ways to ping your phone, with or without your phone number — and killed some of the appeal of the peer-to-peer tech. P2P requires devices to be always on and always connected; the way mobile phones are architected just doesn't allow an app to stay awake all the time. And that's not even counting all the vagaries of mobile networks around the world. Skype turned into a knockoff of a bunch of better social apps At the same time, though, Microsoft didn't always help Skype's chances. For a while, Microsoft appeared all-in: the company already had a popular messaging service, Windows Live Messenger, but retired that in 2012 to focus on Skype. But then, 'Instead of refining the product, the focus shifted to cramming in features and maximizing the number of users Microsoft could pull in,' Bartosz Jaworski, a former product manager at Skype, wrote in a blog post after the shutdown was announced. Microsoft added a bunch of features nobody really cared about, inexplicably created a new app called Skype Qik, and launched a full redesign that went over so badly Microsoft had to redesign it again a year later. After a while, the app that had once been so far in front of its competition turned into a knockoff of a bunch of better social apps. By 2016, when Teams launched, it became obvious that Microsoft would focus more on its business-friendly brand than its renegade consumer platform. When the Covid pandemic hit in 2020, Skype's user numbers jumped, but Zoom took its place as the video-chat app of choice. That was Skype's last chance to stay relevant, and probably the last nail in its coffin. Microsoft has little use for a free consumer chat app, and none for a second-tier one. The business of consumer chat is a tough one — it might not even exist, at least on its own — and so eventually everything goes commercial. What we're stuck with now is just a bunch of platforms. Zoom is trying desperately to become Microsoft Office; Google Meet and Microsoft Teams are just features inside their companies' larger work platforms. WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and the rest are closed ecosystems. Your phone number has become a sort of universal username, but it still means we're all stuck with a dozen chat apps on our phone just to talk with our friends. And sure, if you want the lowest possible quality and worst possible feature set, you can always make phone calls and send text messages. Apple's iMessage system is probably the closest thing to a spiritual Skype successor in terms of its ability to work with lots of technologies, but that comes with plenty of its own problems and lock-in issues. All those years ago, Skype was right: we don't need another social platform or suite of work apps. We need a new layer for communication on the internet. We need something that operates between apps and devices, that doesn't care where you've registered an account. We need something that doesn't force us to put all our trust in a company that has quarterly results to worry about. What I'm describing is probably a terrible business, and a force for good on the internet. Skype was ultimately very much both those things. I stopped using it years ago, but I'll miss it anyway.
The Guardian
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
A Matter of Life and Death review – movie classic resuscitated with songs
The propaganda brief for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger on A Matter of Life and Death was to come up with a film to help smooth postwar relations between Britain and the US. We could certainly do with a bit of that now, although to fix our current impasse would probably take more than a love affair between a fated British fighter pilot and a steely American radio operator. It is a metaphysical story in which the life of Peter Carter (Thomas Dennis in the David Niven role) hangs on a heavenly court case and the love of June (Kaylah Copeland), whom he meets only after falling from the skies without a parachute. If this stage adaptation does not explain why we should revisit a story so deeply rooted in an era of loss, grief and reconciliation, it is no less intelligent and ambitious for it. In a script loyal to the idiosyncratic original, writer and director Theresa Heskins makes one key intervention. Drawing on a large cast of actor-musicians, she punctuates the production with period songs, the better to capture the mood of melancholy and high spirits experienced by a generation stalked by death while being compelled to live in the moment. That, at least, is the theory. Under Akintayo Akinbode's musical direction, the players are more sombre than celebratory, the vocals are often muted and even In the Mood has a maudlin air. The songs, though, are well chosen. The sentiments of numbers such as Blue Skies and When the Lights Go On Again fit the story's theme of hope for better times. 'We kiss and the angels sing,' croons Polly Lister, reflecting the blend of earthly and heavenly. The director's fidelity to the movie includes its switches from Technicolor to monochrome. There is no naked Pan-like goatherd, but there is a foppish French revolutionary official (Michael Hugo) and a stairway to heaven ingeniously suggested by the illuminated spokes of Laura McEwen's rotating set. What is missing is a sense of purpose. It is a reverential adaptation that emulates the strangeness of the original without striking out with a similar boldness of its own. At the New Vic, Newcastle-under-Lyme, until 19 April
