Latest news with #SympathyfortheDevil
San Francisco Chronicle
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Nicolas Cage reveals inspirations behind ‘The Surfer' and his unhinged characters
Nicolas Cage is riding the wave. ' The Surfer ' is the latest film in a late-career surge of excellence for the 61-year-old actor, who just a couple of years ago was considering retirement. 'I'm feeling very good about the work, perhaps more than I was even in the '90s,' Cage told the Chronicle in a video interview from his home in Los Angeles on the eve of his new movie's release. 'There are scripts coming to me now from young filmmakers that seem a lot more confident and brave, who take risks. That's always appealing because you might catch lightning in a bottle.' Set in Australia, Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan's 'The Surfer' has Cage's character hoping to close on the purchase of his childhood home once owned by his grandfather that overlooks his favorite surfing spot. But when he tries to catch a wave, he is thwarted by a tough surfer gang, leading to some very desperate actions. It follows 2021's 'Pig,' 2022's ' The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,' 2023's ' Sympathy for the Devil ' and ' Dream Scenario ' and last year's ' Longlegs,' among others as vehicles for Cage's unique unhinged style. Next week, the former San Francisco resident and nephew of filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola begins shooting David O. Russell's 'Madden,' in which Cage, in a bizarre bit of casting, plays Bay Area football and broadcasting legend John Madden. Q: One of your most distinctive early performances was in 'Wild at Heart' (1990), directed by David Lynch, who died in January. What did you learn from him? A: Obviously, I was saddened by his passing, but I was happy with the en masse response recognizing his contribution to cinema and what he cultivated and what he was able to accomplish with the power of a visual image. His surrealism was never weird for weird's sake; it was always in form, not unlike a dream that made you feel something after the movie was over and came back to you. His maestro was Federico Fellini, and I think David was the American Fellini, in that both artists were able to do something with cinema that nobody else really had mastered. He taught me the importance of enjoyment, of fun. I was one of these method actors who was so serious. And I remember I said to David, 'Is it OK if I have fun?' He said, 'Nic, not only is it OK, it's necessary.' That was like an anchor came off me, it was that kind of freedom. After the premiere, I screamed at him, 'You're the greatest!' Q: 'The Surfer' features one of your most desperate characters, but he is a man with a lot of pain. What was your inspiration for the role? A: 'The Swimmer' (1968) with Burt Lancaster for me was the model — both Lancaster's performance and John Cheever's short story. I felt that I had enough life experience to play it authentically and to inform the character with genuine emotions and frustrations. I also like the idea of a character who is not going to stop. There was an old Russian short story called 'The Overcoat.' This guy's just had this beautiful coat made, he doesn't have a lot of money, and then someone steals it and he goes on a tear to try to get it back. Q: What determines how far you go with a character? Is there a point where you pull back, or do you just keep going forward? A: The body and the mind and the heart tell me when it's not real or doesn't feel authentic. I am my own instrument, and I can tell when I'm out of tune or when I'm in tune going for something that feels right. I've always been an advocate of 'it's OK to go bigger' as long as it's informed with genuine emotional content and the audience will connect with it. You have many options on the palette and it's music, and this is a character and a story and an unusual narrative that allows me and my instrument to take it up a notch right up against the edge and see what happens. Q: Was there a specific scene in 'The Surfer' that for you was the key to your performance? A: One is when the Surfer goes back down to the beach and he says, 'Dude, that's my board, and I want it back,' and I added the 'dude' because that's a very California thing. You don't explain why he wants it back, that's not important. What's important is he's gonna get his board back. I like that. Q: You said in 2023 that you were close to retirement. It seems like you're on such a roll right now, have you reconsidered? A: I think what I was talking about was trying a different format, that I had done a lot of movies and that I wanted to try something else. I'm 61 and I've made I don't know how many movies, and at a certain point you have to find ways to stay interested. Maybe that means try a new format such as television or the stage, some other way to get the body moving again and get reinvigorated. Q: Do you ever see yourself moving back to San Francisco? A: I have fantasies about it. Sometimes I look at my old homes there and think, 'God, that was a nice time.' I remember my Uncle Francis' house on Broadway, thinking, 'How big was that house?' When I was in that house, I was maybe 3-feet tall. It seemed cavernous and Old World and Gold Rush, from another time. It's like how the Surfer feels about the house on the cliffs and his grandfather. I feel like that about San Francisco and my uncle's old house.
New York Times
01-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Case for Telling Total Strangers to Shut Up
I was raised by a movie talker. When I was a child, my dad and I went to our local theater every Wednesday to see whatever was out. If that week's offering was pure schlock, my dad and I would yuk it up. His humor, complemented by an insider's perspective afforded to him by a career as a writer and director, was incisive and perfect to me. Like a sidelined quarterback barking at the television on Super Bowl Sunday, he called out narrative inconsistencies or forced plot turns with ease, or pointed out actors' tics that escaped less practiced eyes. Though I lacked my dad's professional elegance and volume control, I mimicked this chatty habit for years — until my buddies and I went to see 'Sahara,' the 2005 Breck Eisner movie about treasure hunters searching for a Civil War-era ship in the desert. I was 14, and I considered talking through a movie a thrill and a continuation of a storied legacy. I assumed that my fellow audience members would appreciate my inherent hilarity, which was obviously of greater value than Eisner's desert tomfoolery. But halfway into my monologue lampooning the ridiculousness of a purposefully ridiculous movie, a person leaned over and let out a shush, her voice as harsh as the white static from a TV. I burst out laughing. Who was this high and mighty loner seeing 'Sahara' at 2 p.m. on a Saturday? I continued talking, and a few minutes later, she tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'Some of us actually work hard and pay good money to come to the movies.' My brain squelched with embarrassment, and I slumped into quiet. I became aware, for the first time, that not only was I not the funniest person in the theater; I was also downright annoying to everyone around me. Ever since, I've been a shusher, dedicated to telling people, first politely, then with more ardor, to shut the hell up. I'm shameless. Sometimes gleefully so. Once, I asked a group of drunk dads at a distillery playing the song 'Sympathy for the Devil' at impossible decibels on a portable Bose speaker if they could 'keep it down,' though I am still unsure if this was an act of public service or just my personal desire to never hear the Rolling Stones again in my entire life. Shushing was once commonplace, if a little snooty and silly. Now, however, a phone-addicted culture has made us all seemingly oblivious to just how annoying we are in public. Our ways of being annoying have worsened: People take pictures at the cinema, flash on; they watch entire movies on the train without headphones. As selfishness is normalized, calling people out for their bad behavior has become more fraught. There's an early episode of 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia' in which the Gang are shushed at a restaurant for their screeching. This leads the rageful Dennis to file an assault charge against the shusher. 'Shushing isn't assault,' a police officer tells Dennis. Yet some shushees often react like Dennis. I have been called a Karen, a snoop, a jerk and, at a recent screening of a three-and-a-half-hour Oscar-winning movie, a pejorative that cannot be issued in print. All for pointing out that, yes, there are other people around, and they can hear your voice, see the light from your phone. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
18-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Opinion - Democrats must strike a balance between strength and empathy
Empathy is an obscenity in Elon Musk's vocabulary. The words care, share and fair are not in the MAGA lexicon. The Tesla CEO exposed his contempt for compassion in an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan. The headline in the CNN digital story says it all, 'Elon Musk wants to save Western civilization from empathy.' The hit 1960s song by Jackie DeShannon, 'What the world Needs Now (is Love, Sweet Love),' is not in the rotation on Musk's Spotify playlist but 'Sympathy for the Devil' by the Rolling Stones probably gets lots of action. President Trump's enforcer told Rogan, 'The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit.' He went on to say, 'There they're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.' Musk pointed to seniors who are recipients of Social Security in the same interview. He portrays the program as a fraudulent 'Ponzi Scheme' even though Social Security has saved millions of Americans from deprivation and despair in their twilight years. He also took a shot at immigrants and accused them of exploiting the 'bug' in his uncaring authoritarian system. The very same people, like my great grandparents, who come to the U.S. seeking political freedom and economic opportunity for themselves and their children. The immigrants who made this a great nation built on their blood, sweat and tears. Foolish me, I always thought that the flaws in civilization were the destructive wars that cause senseless deaths, mass famine and widespread homelessness. Little did I know. You can make a strong argument that the greed that leaves millions in abject poverty to satisfy the whims of bloodless billionaires was the real bug in our behavior. I would have never guessed that empathy is the big problem facing the modern world. A student once asked the famous anthologist Margaret Mead what the first sign of civilization was. She replied that the first sign was a healed human femur. It was a sign that a wounded person must have received help from others. Helping someone else is where civilization starts. Musk may not have much sympathy for seniors, immigrants or hungry kids but he does have a soft spot for cruel and callous dictators who were responsible for the murders of tens of millions of people. In his now deleted diatribe that he shared on X, he wrote 'Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn't murder. Their public sector employees did.' Musk's attitude explains his buddy Trump's loving embrace of the Russian murderous dictator, Vladimir Putin. The Trump and Musk crusade against empathy is vividly apparent in wholesale draconian budget cuts. There have been untold Trump unfeeling cuts in vital federal programs, but one outrageous example stands out. Last week the U.S. Department of Education eliminated funding for a program which gave schools the money to buy fresh food for students from local farmers and fishermen. It put much needed money into the hands of cash-strapped farmers and put healthy food into the stomachs of hungry kids. It was a win-win for everyone except for MAGA brutalists. This is the worst of both worlds for struggling middle class and poor families. Working families are having an even harder time making ends meet from rising inflation, which Trump pledged to reduce on Day One of his second term. Meanwhile, their financial struggles will only get worse because of the president's call for blockbuster tariff increases and his destruction of the social safety net that protects families during tough times. The Trump faithful love to quote scripture but they never mention Jesus' Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of St. Matthew. 'Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they will be filled.' No one will ever confuse Trump and his courtiers with the Care Bears. Democrats ooze with empathy but don't show enough spine. My party needs to strike a balance between strength and empathy because uncaring Republicans under Trump never will. Brad Bannon is a national Democratic strategist and CEO of Bannon Communications Research which polls for Democrats, labor unions and progressive issue groups. He hosts the popular progressive podcast on power, politics and policy, Deadline D.C. with Brad Bannon. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Globe and Mail
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
Rip Gerber Releases Tribute to Eric Church ‘This Ranch Is My Church' – All Proceeds Donated to Chief Cares
Country-rock artist Rip Gerber has released 'This Ranch Is My Church,' a thank-you note to Eric Church. The song expresses gratitude to the country music star for his warm hospitality and pays tribute to his deep-rooted devotion to family, community, and country. Accompanied by an official music video and featuring a choral performance by the Golden Gate Men's Chorus, it celebrates faith, family, and the spiritual power of the great outdoors. All proceeds from the single are donated to Eric Church's charity Chief Cares to help rebuild the Western North Carolina communities that were devastated by the destruction from Hurricane Helene. 'This Ranch Is My Church' is the second single from Gerber's deeply intimate concept album, 'Three-Chord Town,' which explores loss and loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic, to be released on June 20, 2025. Gerber shares, 'I was inspired by a visit to Eric Church's Tennessee ranch, where I found myself immersed in the songwriter's circle of family and friends. The experience left me reflecting on the importance of family and the spiritual power of the outdoors. The song is my thank you to 'Chief'—that's what his band calls him—to express my gratitude and pay tribute to his deep-rooted devotion to family and country.' All sales and streaming proceeds from 'This Ranch Is My Church' will be donated 100% to Chief Cares, established by Eric and Katherine Church in 2013. Chief Cares aims to impact lives and make a difference not only in the United States but throughout the world. It is currently committed to helping rebuild the Western North Carolina communities that were devastated by Hurricane Helene. To capture the emotional depth of the song, Gerber brought together Nashville musicians, all recent graduates from the Berklee College of Music, and the world-renowned Golden Gate Men's Chorus (GGMC). 'Collaborating with Rip has been an absolute joy,' shares Joseph Piazza, Musical Director of the GGMC. 'Bringing the GGMC to fuse choral richness with Nashville's finest is a testament to how music transcends genres and to Rip's heartfelt creativity.' The song's chorus is a nod to Church's 'Desperate Man,' which drew inspiration from The Rolling Stones' 'Sympathy for the Devil.' The background vocals are reminiscent of Church's 'poo poo poo' vocalizations on 'Desperate Man,' which in turn were inspired by the 'hoo hoo' chants in 'Sympathy for the Devil.' 'Eric Church didn't just inspire me—his generosity moved me to step into my own journey as an artist. Instead of a thank you note, I wrote 'Chief' a love song—about his love for the land and his neighbors, and the divine power of nature and family,' Gerber concludes. 'This Ranch Is My Church' is available on all major streaming platforms starting February 26, 2025. Listen here: Media Contact Company Name: Secret Equations Publicity Contact Person: Rip Gerber Email: Send Email Country: United States Website:
Associated Press
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Skip Williams Unleashes a Thrilling New Novel—Sympathy for the Devil
BRIAN HEAD, UT, UNITED STATES, February 14, 2025 / / -- Buckle up for a high-octane ride into the underworld of crime, betrayal, and redemption! Acclaimed author Skip Williams invites readers to step into the shadows with his latest novel, Sympathy for the Devil—a relentless, pulse-pounding thriller that doesn't just tell a story; it throws you headfirst into the action. At the center of the storm is Jake, a contract killer with a talent for disappearing and a code that's as sharp as his aim. When a job goes sideways and the hunter becomes the hunted, Jake is forced to navigate a tangled web of mob bosses, double-crosses, and unexpected alliances. But in a world where trust is a luxury and survival is never guaranteed, even the devil himself might deserve a little sympathy. Blending nonstop action, razor-sharp dialogue, and a cast of unforgettable antiheroes, Sympathy for the Devil is a must-read for fans of gritty crime fiction, fast-paced thrillers, and morally complex characters. Every chapter hums with danger, deception, and the kind of tension that keeps you turning pages long into the night. What Readers Are Saying: 'A gripping, high-stakes thriller that never lets up—Skip Williams delivers a knockout!' 'A brilliant blend of action, suspense, and raw emotion. Jake is the kind of antihero you can't help but root for.' 'Like a Rolling Stones song in novel form—fast, edgy, and impossible to forget.' For those who crave the adrenaline rush of Michael Connelly, Don Winslow, or Lee Child, Sympathy for the Devil is the next book you won't be able to put down. About the Author – Skip Williams Skip Williams is a storyteller with a knack for crafting fast-paced, immersive thrillers that pull readers into worlds where morality is never black and white. His writing blends sharp wit, deep character development, and relentless suspense, making every novel an unforgettable journey. Whether he's weaving tales of crime, action, or redemption, Skip delivers narratives that keep readers hooked until the very last page. Sympathy for the Devil is his latest work, cementing his place as a rising star in the world of high-stakes thrillers. Get Your Copy Today! Other Legal Disclaimer:
