Entertainment
Cameron Diaz says she doesn’t care what she looks like anymore
Diaz, who turns 50 in August, stated the give attention to magnificence within the leisure trade felt poisonous.
“You simply begin to choose your self aside,” she stated.
However her present angle is extra relaxed. Diaz joked she barely washes her face regardless of having “a billion merchandise” in her residence.
“Twice a month if I am fortunate, I will be like, ‘Oh, I higher put this on. One time works, proper?’” she stated. “Is that each one I’ve to do? I am simply not in that place proper now like the place I put any power (into worrying about it).”
And he or she’s not judging those that are into it.
“Once more, I simply return to the lure of all of it, particularly in our society like what we worth, what we expect is essential,” Diaz stated. “Look, if it is essential to you, that is high quality.”
Diaz, who started her profession as a mannequin and starred in a number of hit films like “There’s One thing About Mary,” can also be a profitable creator and businesswoman. She stated she will be able to’t think about returning to appearing.
Movie Reviews
Brandon Rhiness’s ‘GROTESQUE 2’ (2024) – Movie Review – PopHorror
Recently I reviewed my new indie horror obsession Grotesque, which features slasher icon in the making Mildred Moyer. Director/writer Brandon Rhiness was kind enough to let me check out Grotesque 2 for review.
How does it hold up to the original? Read on for my thoughts.
Synopsis
Mildred Moyer is at it again, unleashing her unique brand of vengeance on a corrupt religious organization that took advantage of her and others.
Grotesque 2 was written and directed by Brandon Rhiness (Grotesque) from a story by Rhiness and Julie Whelan. The film stars Elizabeth Chamberlain returning as Mildred Moyer, Jaime Hill (Grotesque), Nick Gauthier (Hot Box), Julie Whelan (Grotesque), Natasha Hurlburt, Laura Fuentes (I’m Haunted 2), Jarvis Greiner (Grotesque), Chris Schuler (Grotesque), and Alice Wordsworth.
I really enjoyed getting to see Mildred Moyer return in Grotesque 2, though it kind of shattered the sense of happiness she found in the original. I liked that the story took its time to develop and spent time establishing the villains of the story and how truly awful they are. The villains are a corrupt religious organization who steals from those in need of prayer, and drugs their congregation into compliance. The fact that they were so awful made their deaths all the more satisfying.
Speaking of deaths, we get a ton of them here, one of my favorites being a woman who gets cut in half. The deaths lean heavily into comedy and Mildred Moyer’s trademark one liners are back. Some of them are pretty cringe but the film leans into it by having Mildred poke fun at just how bad some of them are.
I enjoyed how people kept telling Mildred that she looks like infamous serial killer Mildred Moyer and how she thought on her feet and hilariously figured out ways past it, like, “I have glasses and she didn’t.” I loved Mildred’s look in Grotesque 2 and how it was an inverse of her look in the first film. I thought it was cool that so many actors from the original returned as different characters. I loved how the story came full circle and tied everything back to the original and wrapped up some loose ends.
The one thing I didn’t really care for was the ending, which left me feeling pretty upset as it seems to mark a definitive ending to the series. Besides that one complaint I really enjoyed the hell out of Grotesque 2.
Final Thoughts
Grotesque 2 is a fun slasher sequel that leans into the comedy present in the original and brings the story full circle. Highly recommend.
Entertainment
Can arts festivals matter anymore? LA28 Olympics can prove they do, with Salzburg as inspiration
The well-run 1984 Olympics transformed Los Angeles. Not through the Games, which thrillingly came and went, but through the Olympic Arts Festival, which taught us to dream and inspired us to do. Forty year later, we have added Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles Opera, the Getty Center, the Soraya, the Geffen Playhouse, the Hammer Museum, the Wallis, the Nimoy, the Industry, L.A. Dance Project, Wild Up, the Broad museum and the Broad Stage. The Olympic Arts Festival turned us into an arts capital in a remarkably short period of time.
Now that Paris has symbolically handed the Olympic torch back to us, our Games in 2028 no longer seem so far away. By then, we will have added Frank Gehry’s new Colburn Center, a 1,000-seat concert hall with the potential of turning Grand Avenue into an avenue of the arts unlike any in the world. A short Metro ride away will be the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new Peter Zumthor-designed David Geffen Galleries.
This leaves the arts community excited and galvanized but also alarmed after Casey Wasserman, chairman of LA28, the private group putting on the L.A. Games, said following the closing ceremony in Paris: “We don’t have an Eiffel Tower. We do have a Hollywood sign.” Tom Cruise’s motorcycle tour from the boulevards of Paris to the Hollywood Hills in the ceremony’s tacky finale only increased concern. Meanwhile, the death on Sept. 30 of Robert Fitzpatrick, the force of nature behind the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, has reminded us what he accomplished.
Obviously, in a changed city and a changed world, we hardly require a replay of the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival. But what? Should the ’28 model resemble the current PST Art festival of exhibitions related to science? Funded by the Getty, institutions throughout the region have come up with projects — and we get whatever the cat drags in. Or might the recently appointed chair of the LA28 Cultural Olympiad, Maria Anna Bell, a former Museum of Contemporary Art board chair, and her advisor, Nora Halpern, an art historian and curator based in Washington, D.C., the last two decades, find novel inspiration from Fitzpatrick’s brilliantly curated festival?
The Cultural Olympiad (can’t we go back to the friendlier Arts Festival?) is special. It is the only aspect of the Olympics that needn’t be politicized or commercialized. The budget for 1984 was $20 million. The Times set the festival rolling as the main sponsor with a $5-million donation. Around $6 million came from ticket sales. The Olympics supplied the rest. Fitzpatrick used all of it as he saw fit.
Two days after the closing ceremony in Paris in August, I flew to Austria, where I spent two weeks at the annual Salzburg Festival. Its 62-million euro budget ($67.8 million) puts Salzburg on a similar scale to the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival when adjusting for inflation. More important, grand and consequential Salzburg markedly demonstrates what makes festivals matter.
A festival in Mozart’s picturesque birthplace at the foot of the Austrian Alps, a city that attracts hordes of summer tourists along with well-heeled audiences in formal dress, may not exactly suit L.A. But L.A., in fact, serves as an inspiration for Salzburg.
This year, Peter Sellars’ new production of Prokofiev’s opera “The Gambler” and Gustavo Dudamel’s concert with the Vienna Philharmonic were among the highlights.
The festival itself needs no contrived theme. Instead, it becomes, as did our 1984 Arts Olympic Festival, an activist lens onto the world. In 1992, while Sellars was the director of the Los Angeles Festival (which grew out of the Olympic Arts one), he began staging opera in Salzburg, helping revolutionize what had become a stodgy music industry event. Indeed, Markus Hinterhäuser, the festival’s visionary artistic director, told me that Sellars is his most important artistic guide today.
On my first day in Salzburg, I headed for an 11 a.m. concert featuring Riccardo Muti conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in Bruckner’s monumental Eighth Symphony. The full Festspielhaus, the festival’s largest hall, had a worshipful air. We listened in rapt, reverential awe, cozied by Vienna’s velvet strings, velvet winds and velvet brass woven together in a perfect tapestry of lush sonic textures and instrumental colors.
That evening, in an again packed Festspielhaus, Daniel Barenboim conducted the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in another monumental Eighth Symphony, Schubert’s “Great,” (confusingly known as Schubert’s Ninth outside Austria and Germany). In place of velvet and luxuriant lushness, there was fixating intensity and raw power. The ensemble was so grounded that the feeling here was of everyone giving everything they had to hold the symphony — and symbolically the world — together.
Both Eighths were occasions for community. The Divan is a training orchestra founded 25 years ago by Barenboim and Palestinian American scholar Edward Said to bring together young musicians from Israel and Middle Eastern Arab countries. The orchestra’s current members had spent the last year during the war in Gaza studying at the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin, learning to work through their profound differences for a common cause.
To witness them supporting one another musically and showing inspiring devotion to a frail Barenboim, suffering from a debilitating neurological disease, may be the only gleam of hope we have for peace. At the end of what the players clearly knew was a performance of a lifetime, they lingered onstage, hugging one another. Tying the day together, the Vienna Philharmonic concertmaster that morning was a 27-year-old Muslim violinist from Nazareth, Yamen Saadi, who who got his start at age 10 in the Divan.
This first day became an introduction to the way that knowing creation can bring together a wide range of sources that result in a brave and profound cultural diplomacy, which is a disastrous lost art. This was furthered in much of what I attended during the festival.
Three major opera productions in Salzburg threw needed light on Russia and Ukraine. Two were Russian operas based on Dostoevsky novels: Prokofiev’s little-known “The Gambler” and Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s all-but-unknown “The Idiot.” Presented as compelling theater, they brought in-depth insight into our often simplistic attempts to understand the Russian mind, with its complex aspirations, fears and insecurity that can lead to greatness, grandiosity or outright malevolence.
Sellars revealed “The Gambler” as the dazzlement of addictive behavior, a road map for losing one’s mind. In gripping, high-wire performances, American baritone Sean Panikkar as Alexei succumbs to roulette. Lithuanian star soprano Asmik Grigorian as Polina loses her mind to nihilism. Young Russian conductor Timur Zangiev barreled through Prokoviev’s restless score with compulsive and relentlessness virtuosity.
“The Idiot” is a nearly five-hour slog by a Polish-Russian contemporary of Shostakovich about another Dostoevsky outsider who succumbs to visions of grandeur. But Weinberg’s 1985 barely known gloomy opera is also a profound demonstration of how and why misplaced power can destroy society. And thanks to a terrific cast, led by sensational Ukrainian tenor Bogdan Volkov, and the vivid conducting of Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla’s sleekly modern production by Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski, “The Idiot” turned out to be Salzburg’s hottest ticket.
Unfortunately, the night I attended, Grazinyte-Tyla had taken ill and had been replaced by her assistant, Oleg Ptashnikov. But video of the production with the colorful Grazinyte-Tyla can be streamed via stage-plus.com and, as can “The Gambler,” on medici.tv.
What made Salzburg special and a little shocking was its daring belief in cultural diplomacy. This included bringing back Teodor Currentzis to lead a revival of an avant-garde production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” The controversial Russian-based Greek conductor has been banished from the majority of Western institutions. While never expressing support for the war in Ukraine, Currentzis is said to have received funding for his Russian ensemble from corporations with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But Currentzis is also controversial because he is, on one hand, an obsessive perfectionist and, on the other, a showy radical with highly original musical ideas. All of that shows up in the “Don Giovanni,” which came close to perfection and extreme reinvention.
The surreal, visually hypnotizing production by Italian director Romeo Castellucci made little effort to make narrative sense. What’s an upside-down car hanging from the ceiling got to do with anything? But somehow the imagery, mostly against a bare stage, focused attention on a performance in which every single note, sung or played, every movement, every physical object, seemed to have been thought through and was riveting.
This international cast, led by striking Italian baritone Davide Luciano as the Don, brought yet more Russians and Europeans together. The marvelous Utopia Orchestra in the pit was composed of leading players from top European ensembles.
There is much, much, much more to the Salzburg Festival. And months later it still influences how I view international relations and political chaos, how I contend with world leaders, how I vote.
Yes, we’ve got the Hollywood sign, a real-estate advertisement-turned-landmark. But Walt Disney Concert Hall is also a landmark.
There is no time to waste. Planning takes time. But Salzburg does it every year, and there should be no reason why we can’t make a festival and mean it.
Movie Reviews
Anora | Reelviews Movie Reviews
Going into Anora, I wasn’t sure what to expect but it
certainly wasn’t a screwball comedy. Yet, following an explosively erotic, wild
twist on the Pretty Woman cliché, writer/director Sean Baker guides his
movie into an extended period of warped comedy. By the third act, he returns to
a drama-based foundation, focusing on concluding with a modicum of closure but Anora
stands out as an airy experience full of surprises (big and small), all
anchored by Mikey Madison’s tremendous performance.
Madison is a revelation as the title character, stripper
Anora “Ani” Mikheeva, who lives in Brooklyn and works in an upscale club in Manhattan.
Madison has mastered the accent and attitude of someone eking out an existence
in Ani’s circumstances. The character is bold and brassy, taking shit from no
one (including her fellow dancers) and seizing any opportunity that comes her
way. Madison is fearless, seemingly comfortable with the nudity required for (numerous)
scenes in the film’s first 45 minutes (she reportedly felt so at ease with
Baker and her co-star, Mark Eydelshteyn, that she turned down the offer of an
intimacy coordinator) and showing an admirable capacity for physical comedy
during the film’s midsection. But her most remarkable moment comes during the
final scene.
Early in Anora, Baker, who has a gift for a you-are-there
filmmaking, takes the viewer behind-the-scenes at the strip club where Anora
works, providing glimpses of how the dancers view their work. The conversations
aren’t fundamentally different from what one might hear from servers in
restaurants or performers in a stage show. This is a job. They know how to do
it and how to skirt the rules to get the best tips. Anora is willing to do a
little extra on the side (off club grounds) to make some additional cash but
she’s not cheap and doesn’t perceive herself as a prostitute. In fact, she
bristles at being called a “whore” or “hooker,” evidence to the contrary.
Her fortunes, which are illustrated briefly with a shot of
her flat, take a turn for the better when the club owner introduces her to
Vanya (Eydelshteyn), the spoiled scion of a Russian oligarch who’s looking for
a good time with a woman who can speak Russian (one of Anora’s talents). Smitten
and unsatisfied with what she offers in a VIP room, Vanya asks for a meeting at
his mansion and the two are soon negotiating a deal where she will be his
exclusive, live-in “girlfriend” for a week (she gets $15K for the job). While
on a trip to Vegas, Vanya impulsively proposes and the two return to New York
as a wedded couple. This news alarms Vanya’s Armenian handler, Toros (Karren
Karagulian), who is ordered by Vanya’s irate parents to “take care of” the
situation. When his bumbling henchmen, Garnick (Vache Tovmasyan) and Igor (Yura
Borisov), arrive at the mansion, Vanya is initially stubborn and belligerent but
then runs away, leaving Anora to deal with the Three Stooges.
Vanya’s flight signals a shift in tone from the playful
romantic interaction between the newlywed couple to the comedic interactions
between Anora and her three captors. It’s a twist on O. Henry’s “Ransom of Red
Chief,” where the victim is more than the kidnappers can handle. Although this
segment probably goes on a little too long (the movie as a whole feels like it
could benefit from some trimming, mostly during the third act), it vacillates
between darkly amusing and laugh-out-loud funny. The thugs aren’t particularly menacing
and Anora never seems to be in danger. By the time Anora reaches its
final 40 minutes, the Baker shifts into a more grounded exploration of the emotional
toll of the experience on Ani.
In 2017, when Baker had his international breakthrough with The Florida Project, I remember being surprised at how engaging such a small, seemingly
simple production could be. I wrote the following: “The Florida Project feels genuine from start to finish and Baker
doesn’t wander onto a Hollywood-inspired detour despite many opportunities.” Some
of those same qualities are evident in Anora. By using handheld cameras
(but not in a way that threaten to bring on nausea) and favoring longer takes,
Baker opts for a gritty, intimate perspective to present a narrative that could
best be described as a twisted fairy tale. He navigates tonal switches and
story beats that could doom another production but which end up elevating this
one.
Anora has proven to be liked by both critics and
everyday movie-goers, at least those that give it a chance. (I saw it on its
local opening night and there were only a dozen attendees.) After winning the
Golden Palm at Cannes, it went on to capture the Audience Award at Toronto and
currently holds a 91 rating (Universal Acclaim) at Metacritic. But marketing
the film has proven tricky for distributor NEON. The movie’s essential
qualities don’t translate well to a two-minute trailer and the confusing platform
release strategy has left some viewers uncertain when it might open at a
theater near them. Here’s hoping the movie finds its audience because it’s one
of the freshest and most audacious films available in this year’s sparse
cinematic landscape.
Anora (United States, 2024)
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