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| Sam a cheat, LiLo tweets Lindsay Lohan has accused on/off girlfriend Samantha Ronson of cheating on her. breakingnews.ie |
Guy Ritchie to launch his own record label The mockney film director is setting up Punchbowl Recordings, just so he can sign the Punchbowl Band, the house act at his pub called – surprise! – the PunchbowlFilm director Guy Ritchie is launching his own record label – all for the sake of his favourite pub band. Madonna's ex-husband will sign the Punchbowl Band to Punchbowl Records, a subsidiary of Universal Music, and their debut is expected on 1 March.Ritchie's motivation here is easy to understand. The Punchbowl Band aren't just signed to Punchbowl Records. They are also the house act at the Punchbowl, a pub Ritchie owns in London. And they appear on the soundtrack to his new movie, Sherlock Holmes, which happens to include a fight venue called – surprise! – the Punchbowl. In other words, it's part of a Punchbowl-related multimedia empire. According to ContactMusic, Ritchie is planning to launch a brewery and has trademarked various names, including Punch Bowl Beers, Punch Bowl Ale and Bitta Ritchie. All he needs to do now is to start, er, manufacturing actual punch."It's exciting to venture into the music industry," Ritchie said. "It's a tough place, but I've seen this band connect with people ... They have every chance of being embraced by a wider audience and I genuinely wish them the very best of luck with their debut album."The Punchbowl Band comprises Willy Barr, Brendan McAuley, Steve Mulhern and Daniel Gott. Although they play traditional Irish music, their press release suggests that they can use their bodhráns and pennywhistles on pop songs too. Quoth Justin Timberlake, apparently: "Jamming with the guys was the best fun I have ever had without a woman." Boom-tish!Guy RitchiePop and rockSean Michaelsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Washington lifts 'The Book of Eli' above the ordinary Directors: Albert & Allen Hughes breakingnews.ie |
Ginsberg's Howl resounds on film In 1955, Allen Ginsberg performed a poem about sex, drugs and race that became a battlecry for the US counterculture. It also led to an obscenity trial. B Ruby Rich on a new film about the epic HowlOn 7 October 1955, at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, Allen Ginsberg brought the house down with a performance of his hallucinatory new poem, Howl. Among other things, this epic work in four parts dealt with drugs, mental illness, religion, homosexuality – the fears and preoccupations of a generation. Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti were both in the audience. Ginsberg was 29 years old. Also present was the future choreographer and film-maker Yvonne Rainer. A teenager at the time, Rainer still clearly remembers that night: "Ginsberg, quite drunk, clean-shaven, in black suit and tie-less white shirt, holding a jug of rot-gut red wine, intoning and chanting the poem." Back then, the beats were in thrall to the jazz world; Ginsberg himself explained his poem as akin to "bop refrains".Eight years ago, film-makers Rob ÂEpstein and Jeffrey Friedman received a call from Ginsberg's estate asking them to make a documentary about Howl. With the 50th anniversary of the poem's publication (and subsequent obscenity trial) approaching, the estate wanted the best. Epstein and Friedman have, between them, won Oscars and Emmys for a Âlifetime of work including The Times of Harvey Milk, about the first openly gay man elected to public office in California; and The Celluloid Closet, based on Vito Russo's book about screen depictions of homosexuality. Ginsberg's estate knew the pair could deliver an in-depth documentary on time and on budget; plus, they were queer enough to understand the social pressures that formed the poet.Had things gone as planned, the film would have been released in 2007, and it would have been a Âdocumentary. ÂInstead, the hybrid drama that is Howl has its world premiere Âtomorrow, on the opening night of the Sundance film festival. Epstein and Friedman ended up overshooting their deadline by three years, losing themselves completely in what turned out to be a mad project, struggling to create something worthy of Ginsberg's incantatory work.The day after that first reading, ÂFerlinghetti sent Ginsberg a telegram offering to publish Howl. It became the third Âvolume in the Pocket Poets series, Âdedicated to bringing out paperback first editions of serious literature. But in 1957, a copy was purchased by Âundercover police at Ferlinghetti's City Lights bookshop in San Francisco, who then arrested Ferlinghetti and store manager Shigeyoshi Murao on the grounds of obscenity (one line in particular seems to have inspired the arrest: "who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy"). The charges against Murao were dropped, but Ferlinghetti was tried in what became a landmark case. (Ginsberg was never put in the dock; while Ferlinghetti fought the good fight, he took off for Tangiers.)An anarchist unlocks the pastEpstein and Friedman's bop-inflected film now mixes Ginsberg's original reading with a dramatisation of both the obscenity trial and a mercurial Âinterview Ginsberg gave to a Time Âreporter, as well as dreamy animation. "We interviewed everyone who was still around," explains Epstein, sitting in the San Francisco production office he shares with Friedman. They videotaped Ferlinghetti, now 90; Al Bendich, a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, who helped Âdefend the case; and Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg's lifelong partner. But Âsomehow they couldn't make any progress. "I showed [the footage] to my students," says Epstein. "And they just didn't respond." Their goal was to reach a new generation, and they weren't even close. With scores of Âbeat-generation documentaries already in existence, the film-makers just couldn't get excited about their own growing archive.Then they interviewed Tuli Kupferberg. The poet and anarchist features in Howl: he's the man who jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge and survives. Now 86 and still living in New York, Kupferberg proved to be the lynchpin that Âbegan to unlock the past. "It was there that I picked up a book with illustrations by Eric Drooker," says Friedman. Best known for his graphic novel Flood!, Drooker had collaborated with Ginsberg on a collection of illustrated poems in 1992. Suddenly, Friedman saw a new route into the past. "We Âfinally realised we had to make Allen young. This is all about his youth, but there was almost no footage of him then. Lots of photographs, but not film." So the film-makers decided to create an animation out of Drooker's Âillustrations. This would bring the poem to life, while actors would dramatise the reading, trial and interview.ÂHowl was a powerful affront to the bourgeois sensibilities of the late 1950s: as well as the illicit sex and drugs, its verses described a mingling of the races. Today, the big surprise is how explicit it remains. Howl wasn't just an anthem for the beats, nor an ode to drugs; it was primarily a celebration of homosexual love and lust. This, combined with Ginsberg's run-on sentences, peppered with slang, was too much for the conservative forces of the day. In court, Ferlinghetti was defended by attorney Jake Ehrlich (played in the film by Jon Hamm, Mad Men's Don Draper), while nine literary experts testified in his defence. The conservative judge decided the case in his favour; the poem, he said, was of "redeeming social importance".Friedman buried himself in the Âarchives of the 1957 trial, then did the same with all the interviews Ginsberg gave at the time; he edited these down into a script. To test it, Epstein and Friedman put on a staged reading of the trial at the ACT theatre. The crowd was transfixed: I was in the audience, and we couldn't believe how relevant this still was. Epstein and Friedman knew they were on the right track.Ginsberg's missing interviewAs there is no filmed record of the trial, its staging is the film-makers' own Âinvention. "We tried to find trial films of the time," says Epstein. "To Kill a Mockingbird was a big influence. We tried to think of what people in that circle were doing with film in the 1950s and 1960s. So we looked at Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason and Robert Frank's Pull My Daisy. That was the only place we found the young Allen. It was a conscious effort on our part to make a film that would be more Âprimitive than, say, Avatar."They also used a fabled Time Âmagazine interview with Ginsberg. Time had flown Ginsberg from Tangiers to Rome, where its reporter conducted the interview in a hotel room. Never published, never even located, this Âinterview proved the perfect device to drive the film. To recreate it, Epstein and Friedman simply shoehorned together all their favourite excerpts from Ginsberg's interviews at the time, stitching his words into one long, eloquent Âdefence of himself, his poem, and his generation. Like their animation, it's a great trick, one that allows Ginsberg, on the brink of turning 30, to speak for himself – out of the past, directly to us.Today, locals and tourists still make the pilgrimage across San Francisco to City Lights, largely on the strength of Howl. "We've probably sold a million copies by now," says the publisher's poetry editor Garrett Caples. "It really did build the publishing business here."As yet, the movie does not have a distributor. But luck tends to shine on Epstein and Friedman. Their timing – seemingly disastrous, as they missed the 2005-2007 commemorations – has turned out to be perfect. As Howl makes its debut, another trial is transfixing San Francisco. In a federal courtroom, with a conservative judge presiding, the trial over Proposition 8, banning gay marriage in California, is unfolding.Opening night at Sundance used to be the province of big crossover movies that linked the independent world and Hollywood. But the new festival director, John Cooper, is shaking things up. "I was inspired by this film," he says. "It's time to talk about art in America again, not just healthcare – because art really can change everything. We owe so much to Ginsberg."Allen GinsbergPoetryB Ruby Richguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Producers pick The Hurt Locker Producers Guild of America award revives Oscar hopes for Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq drama, while Screen Actors Guild follows Golden Globes script to reward Sandra Bullock, Jeff Bridges and Inglourious BasterdsThe ongoing battle of the ex-couple Oscar contenders took a fresh turn last night as Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker beat James Cameron's Avatar to win the best film honour at the Producers Guild of America awards in Los Angeles.Just a week ago, The Hurt Locker's Oscar chances looked dead and buried when it came up empty-handed at the Golden Globes while Avatar scooped the prizes for best director and best picture.But Bigelow can now take comfort from the fact that six of the past nine PGA winners have gone on to take the Academy Award for best motion picture. The director collected the statue alongside her co-producers Mark Boal, Nicolas Chartier and Greg Shapiro.Bigelow and Cameron were married from 1989 until 1991 and appear to have remained on cordial terms. "I thought Kathryn was going to win this," admitted Cameron on accepting his Golden Globe award for best director last week.The PGA also named Pixar's Up as best animated film and The Cove as best documentary.In other awards news, the Screen Actors Guild largely read from the Globes script at its annual ceremony on Saturday night. Sandra Bullock took the best actress award for The Blind Side while Jeff Bridges was named best actor for his turn as a drunken country-western singer in Crazy Heart."I love being an actor, pretending to be in the shoes of other folks," Bridges said on collecting the award. The veteran actor is now the heavy favourite to win the best actor Oscar statue in March.The supporting player awards went to Precious's Mo'Nique and Inglourious Basterds' Christoph Waltz, while Quentin Tarantino's blood-drenched war movie also won the award for best ensemble cast.OscarsKathryn BigelowJames CameronQuentin TarantinoSandra BullockJeff BridgesAwards and prizesGolden GlobesXan Brooksguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |