Edinburgh film festival ditches red carpet for 'provocative debate'

Organisers aim to reset cultural agenda with war documentaries, art installations and experimental performance

One of the world's longest-running film festivals has abandoned red carpet photocalls and star-studded premieres in an attempt to rip up the traditional format seen at Cannes and Venice.

Next month's Edinburgh international film festival will instead feature a harrowing war documentary shown to British troops, 24-hour art gallery installations, an experimental performance event by Mike Skinner, and events curated by Gus Van Sant, Tilda Swinton and Bella Freud.

Formal red carpet photocalls for stars have been dropped by James Mullighan, the festival's new Australian director. Events would not be staged for their "guest wattage" or their "guest 'photobility' on a red carpet", he said.

The festival has also left its traditional home at the Filmhouse cinema and instead film-makers and artists will be invited to mingle with audiences in new venues at an Edinburgh University building used heavily as a fringe festival venue.

"Repetition in festivals, whether it's film, arts, music or whatever leads to boredom and staleness, whether from the perspective of the sponsor, from the media, from audiences or indeed film-makers themselves," Mullighan said.

The event, which has run for 65 consecutive years, would return to its roots by heavily featuring documentary films with an emphasis on conflict journalism screened in conjunction with the London war correspondents' club the Frontline Club and former BBC war reporter Martin Bell.

The Edinburgh film festival was first held in 1947, the same year the more prestigious Edinburgh international festival was launched, and showed 12 documentaries as a riposte to the arts festival's refusal to show films.

This year's film festival includes 63 feature film premieres, including films starring Brendan Gleeson and Kim Cattrall, Philip Seymour Hoffman's directorial debut, and a Derek Jarman season curated by Van Sant. Yet Mullighan claimed the most recent film festivals had lost sight of that founding ethos by focusing too heavily on formality and becoming a stage to promote studios' latest products.

The festival, said Mullighan, had failed to capitalise on its recent switch to June: a month which allowed it to use venues across the city which were vacant at that time of year. "Throughout its history it has been provocative, controversial, a little dangerous often, a debate leader and a culture setter but not lately," Mullighan said. "And we want to get that back, for all of us. Because we can and because we should. Because that's what the Edinburgh film festival has been and should always be seen to be: an agenda setter, not a reactor to other people's agendas."

Mullighan said his aim was to see "Edinburgh reset its cultural agenda for film as the brain of the British film industry."

The festival's final day, Saturday 25 June, will include a screening of a critically acclaimed Afghanistan war documentary, Hell and Back Again, to an audience of British soldiers and their families. Edinburgh is hosting this year's UK armed forces day parade by military units and war veterans.

Hell and Back Again, directed by Danfung Dennis, was partly shot with a digital camera strapped to his body: Dennis was able to run alongside US troops during combat, and film some of the most harrowing war footage ever seen, Mulligan said. He followed one injured US trooper home and documented his readjustment to life in America.

The documentary strand was being curated in collaboration with the Sheffield international documentary festival. It would include a portrait of chess legend Bobby Fischer, a biographical film of Bob Marley and a "powerful" study of climate change, Burning Ice, featuring Marcus Brigstocke, Jarvis Cocker and Martha Wainwright.

However, the festival would not include a provocative new Scottish documentary on Donald Trump's golf course in Aberdeenshire: Mullighan said Edinburgh audiences were too familiar with the Trump controversy and said he wasn't sufficiently impressed by the film.

Perhaps the most famous current Scottish-linked film, We Need to Talk About Kevin, starring festival patron Tilda Swinton and made by Scottish director Lynne Ramsay, could not be booked because its promoters said the festival's timing was not convenient and Swinton was unavailable.

Mullighan confirmed this year's festival would be smaller than in previous years for financial reasons: the drop in UK Film Council funding had left the festival with less money than his predecessor, Hannah McGill, had to spend.

Tickets for the 65th Edinburgh international film festival go on sale from Friday 20 May


guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/may/17/edinburgh-film-festival-ditches-red-carpet

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The Situation -- The FIRST Italian Make-Out Session

Filed under: The Situation, Paparazzi Photo, Hook Ups, Jersey Shore, The Facts Behind The Funny!, The Facts Behind The Funny Position 009

"Jersey Shore" grenade magnet The Situation took in some of the local flavor ... by sucking face with a cute but clueless blonde in Florence, Italy last night.

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Anyone for some d-bag parmigiana?

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Source: http://www.tmz.com/2011/05/17/the-situation-jersey-shore-florence-italy-blonde-kiss-make-out-suck-face/

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Kelsey Grammer Seeks Sole Custody Of Children

Radar Online reports that Fraiser alum Kelsey Grammer has filed for sole custody of his two children with ex-wife Camille Donatacci.

According to court documents, Grammer is asking the judge to grant him joint legal, and sole physical custody of daughter Mason, 9, and son Jude, 6; a move that Donatacci, calls "insensitive."

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Source: http://celebritybabyscoop.com/2011/05/17/kelsey-grammer-seeks-sole-custody-of-children

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Taylor Swift Remains Hopeful


It hasn't worked out with Jake Gyllenhaal, John Mayer or Taylor Lautner. But Taylor Swift remains a romantic at heart.

In a new interview with InStyle, the singer is asked about her take on romance and the fact that she pens so many songs about ex-boyfriends.

"There are no rules when it comes to love," she says. "I just try to let love surprise me because you never know who you're going to fall in love with. You never know who's going to come into your life – and for me, when I picture the person I want to end up with, I don't think about what their career is, or what they look like. I picture the feeling I get when I'm with them."

Taylor Swift InStyle Cover

But have the failed relationships taken a toll on her outlook? Dampened Swift's aspirations for love? No way, she says.

"I'm really a daydreamer... When it comes to 'happily ever after,' I always have a tendency to write a happy ending to my songs. That's probably wishful thinking on my part."

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2011/05/taylor-swift-remains-hopeful/

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Zoe Saldana Shows Off Three Looks In One Day In Cannes!

From casual chic to totally gorgeous, Zoe showed off so many looks in one day — which one was your fave?


While Zoe Saldana looked gorgeous in a white and red Armani Prive gown when she joined Angelina Jolie and Gwen Stefani at the Tree Of LIfe premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on May 16, that wasn’t the only get-up we saw on the stylish star!Click here to read more

Source: http://www.hollywoodlife.com/2011/05/17/zoe-saldana-cannes-film-festival-tree-of-life-premiere/

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GLEE's Matthew Morrison Joins NKOTBSB Tour As A Special Guest

Great news Glee fans, Matthew Morrison is joining the NKOTBSB summer tour as a special guest! Morrison will have to postpone some of his own solo gigs, but that?s just a small price to pay to go on such a huge tour. As for his New York show at the Beacon Theater, that will happen now on [...]

Source: http://perezhilton.com/2011-05-17-matthew-morrison-joins-nkotbsb-summer-tour-as-a-special-guest

Amanda Righetti Amanda Swisten Amber Arbucci Amber Brkich Amber Heard

MLB Legend Harmon Killebrew -- Dead at 74

Filed under: Harmon Killebrew, RIP, TMZ Sports

Minnesota Twins Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew passed away this morning after a battle with esophageal cancer.

Harmon Killebrew Cancer

The baseball legend died in his home in Scottsdale, Arizona with his wife Nita at his side.

Killebrew was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in December.

He announced in a press release last week that he was stopping treatment for the disease -- which had "progressed beyond [his] doctors’ expectation of cure."

He was 74.

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Source: http://www.tmz.com/2011/05/17/mlb-legend-harmon-killebrew-dead-at-74-minnesota-twins-hall-of-fame/

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Michael Ward obituary

News and portrait photographer with an eye for the unexpected and the authentic

Michael Ward, who has died after a long illness, aged 82, was a news photographer for almost 40 years and once calculated that his archive of prints and negatives covered 5,500 assignments, mainly though not exclusively for the Sunday Times. And yet he came late to his career and never felt confident that he completely understood it. Towards the end of his life, after half a century with a camera, he wrote that he knew "as much or as little about the processes of photography as a decent amateur". Technically, he knew he was far from accomplished. Aesthetically, he was never sure what separated a good picture from an indifferent one.

He had several exhibitions ? the venues included the National theatre and the National Portrait Gallery ? but he always remained suspicious about photography's claim as art. Nevertheless, many of his pictures are sympathetic and memorable. He had an eye for the unexpected and authentic, and as a portrait photographer he brought out the best in people; whatever their terror of the camera, few of Ward's subjects could resist his good looks and reckless, self-mocking charm.

Performance was a family inheritance. Ward was born in Streatham, south London, to parents who were prominent on the West End stage. His father, Ronnie Ward, had equal billing with actors such as John Gielgud, Rex Harrison and Edith Evans (who became Michael's godmother). His mother, Peggy Willoughby, danced and sang in the chorus line of revues that starred Gertrude Lawrence, Jack Buchanan and Noël Coward. The marriage quickly became inconvenient to both partners, who were self-absorbed and serially adulterous (one of Ronnie's many conquests was Tallulah Bankhead) and in their son's words "quite spectacularly careless" as parents. Aged three, he was sent to a boarding school in Ealing which, like those that followed, did little for his education. He never lived in a settled family environment until his early middle age.

Music became and remained a genuine passion. He won a piano scholarship and studied for three years at the Trinity College of Music in London, but decided he would never play well enough to make it his career. Acting seemed the obvious alternative. He joined the repertory theatre in Bromley and his looks began to win him small parts in films. He took Theo Ward as his professional name after his paternal grandfather, who was a musician and music-hall artiste, changing it subsequently to Lawrence Ward and, finally, to Rhett Ward.

In 1952, the American director Bernard Vorhaus gave him a break in a film called Fanciulle di Lusso (The Finishing School), which was shot in Rome. It was his first and last star part, though he married his leading lady, Susan Stephen, and persevered on the fringes of the British cinema for the next half-dozen years, acquiring friendships and connections that later helped establish him as a photographer.

His first published picture appeared in Women's Own magazine in 1958 and showed Stirling Moss's wife, Kate, watching the race in which her husband won the British grand prix ? shot on a Rolleiflex that the poorly equipped Ward had borrowed from the driver. Freelance commissions followed and Ward began to work regularly for the Evening Standard's show-business pages.

He joined the Sunday Times in 1965 and stayed with the paper until he retired 30 years later. He broadened his range to include news stories such as the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Aberfan colliery disaster in south Wales and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, as well as continuing with his portraits of musicians, visual artists, writers and actors ? a tremendous variety stretching from Gary Cooper through Julie Christie to Hugh Grant. Any reporter who worked with him was always glad to hear his cheerful "Hello there, Number One", a nautical greeting that had been inspired by his brief appearance in the 1957 film Yangtse Incident. In fact, his only line (on the bridge of HMS Amethyst, shortly before it was blown up) turned out to be "Aye, aye, sir."

Ward's abiding enthusiasms included elegant cars and powerful motorbikes. He owned several Rolls-Royces and taught his editor, Harold Evans, the best way to balance and ride a BMW. These were expensive hobbies to sustain on a staff photographer's salary, but Ward had a carefree approach to money. He was often in love and married five times: as a 19-year-old to a professor of music, Lettice Laird-Clowes; to Susan Stephen; to the model Fay Brooke; to Lisa Heseltine, with whom he had two daughters, Sam and Tasha; and finally, in 1976, to the actor and dancer Elizabeth Seal.

In 2006 he published a courageous memoir, Mostly Women, which disclosed that as a teenager he had had an affair with his mother. In Ward's description, she was a "sexually voracious woman" and he had no idea how to resist. What had taken place in Willoughby's Soho flat over several weeks in 1945 remained a traumatic secret until Ward eventually confided the facts to his wife. "At first she was shocked," Ward wrote, "and then she gave me such love by saying it wasn't my fault; I became physically lighter." He saw his final marriage as a personal salvation.

He is survived by Elizabeth, his daughters and six grandchildren.

? Michael Ronald Ward, photographer, born 15 January 1929; died 17 April 2011


guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/may/17/michael-ward-obituary

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Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster and the limits of loyalty

Jodie Foster has stuck by her old pal Mel Gibson, calling him the 'most loved actor in Hollywood'. But should she have cut him loose?

Jodie Foster may be a saint. Watching the actor in the full glare of a Cannes press conference this morning, where she was the very image of courtesy as she dipped in and out of her elegant, fluent French to field questions, it was hard not to wonder about the limits of loyalty and friendship. She was in Cannes to discuss The Beaver, the film she directs and co-stars in.

The elephant in the room, needless to say, was male lead Mel Gibson. His absence from the press conference was faintly laughably explained by "commitments in LA" but he was expected to show up later for the red-carpet premiere.

Foster, a long time friend of Gibson's, did her game best to dance elegantly around the stuff that everyone was thinking (aside from the fact that the film is Cannes' biggest turkey so far, that is).

That is: what was she doing working with a man who has been caught up in allegations of viciously anti-Semitic remarks and domestic violence? (The latter claims, though Gibson has maintained his innocence, recently ended with his pleading no contest to a charge of spousal battery.

Would you stick by a friend who had thus erred? Foster, at some risk of making herself look ridiculous, said that Gibson was the "most-loved actor in Hollywood" ? just pipping, she added, Chow Yun-Fat, "the second most loved actor in Hollywood", to the post. (Makes me think he must have done something really bad.)

Choosing her words carefully, she said: "I can't excuse Mel's behaviour. Only he can explain that. But I do know the man that I know, who is somebody who has been a friend for many years, who is probably the most-loved actor in Hollywood.

"He is kind and loyal and thoughtful," added Foster, "and I can spend hours on the phone with him talking about life. And he's complex, and I appreciate his complexity and what it brings to his work."

All of which made me think: is Foster wonderfully loyal, or stupidly loyal? At what point do friends cross a line such that they don't deserve one's friendship?


guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/charlottehigginsblog/2011/may/17/cannes-2011-melgibson

Brittany Lee Brittany Murphy Brittany Snow Brittny Gastineau Brody Dalle

Maria Shriver Creates TV Frenzy After Arnold Split

Filed under: Maria Shriver, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Celebrity Justice, Break-ups, Oprah Winfrey

TMZ has learned ... a swarm of television syndicators as well as networks are trying to snag Maria Shriver, in the wake of her split with Arnold Schwarzenegger ... and Oprah Winfrey is leading the pack.

051011_maria_schriver_getty_ex

Sources tell TMZ ... Oprah met with Maria last week, trying to convince her to become a talk show host on Oprah's OWN Network. We've also learned Maria is going to be a guest on Oprah's final show.

But that's just the beginning.  Big TV syndicators want Maria to do a daily talk show.  As for news organizations, they're trying to get Maria as well.  We're told NBC was lukewarm on the idea of bringing Maria back a few months ago, but the network's interested has intensified in the last week.


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Source: http://www.tmz.com/2011/05/11/maria-shriver-arnold-schwarzenegger-separated-severance-package-fathered-child-out-of-wedlock-decade-ago-house-staff-lied-confessed/

Beyoncé Bianca Kajlich Bijou Phillips Blake Lively Blu Cantrell