THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2014
lifestyle
M U S I C
&
M O V I E S
A minute with:
Ethan Hawke
on lessons from Robin Williams
I
t has been more than 25 years since a
young Ethan Hawke stepped on his desk
to salute his teacher, portrayed by Robin
Williams, in “Dead Poets Society.” Hawke,
43, has taken on some 50 roles since and
this year received his third Oscar nod for
best adapted screenplay for “Before
Midnight,” shared with Richard Linklater
and Julie Delpy. His 12-year “Boyhood” project with Linklater has won critical praise,
while his documentary on classical pianist
Seymour Bernstein has also been warmly
received at recent film festivals. Hawke
Ethan Hawke
spoke with Reuters about “Seymour: An
Introduction,” its underlying themes on art
and mentorship, and how Williams helped
him find his “barbaric yawp.”
Q: What were some of the biggest lessons you learned from Seymour?
A: One of the ways that (teachers and mentors) can be most helpful is helping us
see our blind spots, when we delude
ourselves. It’s so hard for us, as people,
to have real self-awareness about where
we’re deluded - little ways in which we
lie to ourselves, or have been lying to
ourselves for decades. And when you
work with somebody who really
respects you and who genuinely wants
you to grow, you feel that they can help
you to see where you’re hurting yourself.
Q: Do you think classical music is underappreciated?
A: All of the higher art forms are suffering ...
It’s like we’re literally indoctrinating our
children to be distracted all the time.
Q: How do you feel about classical music?
A: It’s the same way I feel about
Shakespeare. Is it wonderful to be educated about it? Yes, it is. But if you do
Shakespeare and you play it correctly,
high school students who’d never heard
Shakespeare will love it. They’ll laugh,
they’ll be moved, it’s beautiful and if you
hear Bach played well, it stops your
heart. You don’t need an education to
love that music.
Q: Seymour talks about the pitfalls of
perfecting technique at the expense
of the art. Do you see that in acting?
A: A lot of young people - talented people
- will come at it with this huge emotion
and it’s wonderful, but it’s completely
out of control. They don’t know when to
be funny, they don’t know when to be
serious, they don’t know when to be
emotional. The trouble with cinema is
they leave it up to the director to decide
all this stuff ... They can make a decent
performance out of it, because it’s all
edited. But when you act on the stage,
you have to do that for yourself.
Q: You played Todd Anderson in “Dead
Poets Society” opposite Robin
Williams. What was that experience
like?
A: I think the sadness with Robin is this person that brought the world so much joy,
and to have it be revealed that we didn’t
do the same for him. When we’re young,
it’s easier to find mentors and teachers
and “Dead Poets Society” is about that.
It’s about young people with a great
mentor who’s telling them to hear their
own voice: “What will your verse be?”
Something happened to me with Robin.
It’s the scene where he writes on the
chalkboard, “I sound my barbaric yawp
over the rooftops of the world,” which is
a Walt Whitman quote. And he wants
me to sound my barbaric yawp. It’s a
very difficult scene to play and the
director wanted to do it in one take. He
wanted it to have an authenticity and it
was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life. And when it was over,
Robin just held my hand, and whispered, “Remember this.” Very, very beautiful moment for me, you know? And
I’ve hunted, sought that moment out
again, all the time. My thoughts about
his passing were extremely sad, but it
was clear to me in 1988 that this is a person who was in serious pain, that he carried with him for decades. — Reuters
Film review
‘A Walk Among the Tombstones’
S
cott Frank’s detective thriller “A Walk
Among the Tombstones” is, at heart, a fully
old-fashioned pulp potboiler-set in the
convincingly ancient-feeling era of 1999 —
enlivened on one hand by a committed Liam
Neeson, playing a more cerebral version of his
usual avenging heavy, and soured by some predictable yet relentlessly sadistic savagery toward
women , this adaptation of Lawrence Block’s
novel ought to at least provide a healthy counterprogramming option at the box office.
Starting with a 1991 prologue, we’re introduced to detective Matt Scudder (Neeson), a
racial-epithet-spewing drunken cop straight out
of the Popeye Doyle school. Double-fisting
whiskey with his morning coffee, Scudder happens to be out of sight in a tavern when a trio of
armed assailants burst in and shoot the barkeep.
Scudder gives chase and takes out all three, only
later realizing a young girl was killed in the
crossfire.
Come 1999, Scudder has retired from the
police force and given up the drink, working as a
kindly unlicensed P.I. when he’s not telling his
story at AA meetings. Through a fellow addict,
he’s introduced to Brooklyn drug trafficker
Kenny Kristo (Dan Stevens), who hires him to
locate the two men who abducted his wife.
Kenny already paid the ransom, only for the kidnappers to lead him to a car with his wife’s
butchered body in the trunk. Now he simply
wants revenge.
Taking on the case, the technophobic
Scudder relies on his wits and shoe leather,
tracking suspicious types through the boroughs,
reading up on old cases in library archives, and
at times simply wandering the streets. Neeson’s
late-career evolution into one of modern cinema’s most reliable action stars has been something of an odd turn-possessed as he is of such
an inherent likability and an ineluctable kindness in his eyes-and it’s a pleasure to see him
allowed to play a quieter character here than the
rope’s-end brawlers he’s limned of late.
Along the way, he’s assisted by a sardonic
homeless teenager named TJ (Brian “Astro”
Bradley), who sleeps in the library and helps
Scudder with Internet research. (The impending
Y2K bug is a popular conversation topic
throughout.) The character is a bit hard to buyand he speaks with urban slang that would have
seemed suspiciously out of date 15 years agoyet his relationship with Scudder somehow
works, as TJ attempts to serve as a sort of assistant, having absorbed volumes of Hammett and
Chandler in his spare time. Gradually, the two
realize that Scudder’s current case is not the first
of its kind: A pair of kidnappers have been targeting the wives of drug dealers (who are
unlikely to go to the police) for months, always
viciously killing their captives once payment has
been received.
Shadowy boogeymen
It would hardly be an exaggeration to state
that every single female character of any note in
“A Walk Among the Tombstones” is either
stalked, mutilated, raped or murdered (in nongraphic yet disquieting, disturbingly stylized
detail), and none is granted more than a line or
two of dialogue along the way. (Curiously, the
literary Scudder’s love interest Elaine Mardell
has been cut from the adaptation, as well as previously attached cast member Ruth Wilson.)
Frank certainly never waters down the gruesomeness of the story’s violence, which is philosophically commendable, but the film he’s constructed is otherwise too much of a meat-andpotatoes genre exercise to bear the weight of
such horrors.
Part of the fault here may lie in Frank’s presentation of the killers, who spend the first half of
the film as shadowy boogeymen, only to be formally introduced as an apparent gay couple
reading the morning paper over breakfast.
Played by David Harbour and Adam David
Thompson, these two are hardly budding
Buffalo Bills, and Frank never figures out what to
do with their characters: Lacking any sort of recognizable motivations for their grotesque
crimes, the newly visible villains diffuse a degree
of the film’s tension and introduce an odd
undertone of oblique homophobia along the
way. In the film’s strangest scene, the two killers
are seen casing out a Russian drug lord’s house
when they happen upon his preteen daughter
(Danielle Rose Russell) crossing the street. They
stare in disbelief as she walks by, waving at them
in slow-motion, with Donovan’s “Atlantis” playing on the soundtrack, a sequence bizarrely
reminiscent of Bo Derek running across the
beach in “10.” — Reuters
US singer
Pharrell
Williams
performs on
stage during
his ‘Dear Girl’
tour at
the MaxSchmelingHalle in Berlin
on September
16, 2014. —AFP
Rihanna rips US network for
pulling song amid NFL scandal
P
op star Rihanna on Tuesday blasted a US
television network for wavering on
whether to use one of her songs in its
American football broadcasts, amid a furor in the
league over domestic violence. CBS had planned
to play Jay-Z’s “Run This Town,” featuring
Rihanna, at the start of its season-opening Today
Night Football program, which last week featured the Pittsburgh Steelers against the
Baltimore Ravens-whose star Ray Rice has been
banned from the National Football League over
knocking out his now-wife.
CBS dropped the song, as well as a comedy
segment, citing a need for the “appropriate tone”
to the broadcast. Apparently, it had the intention to use it in the opening of this week’s program. But Rihanna-herself the victim of a highly
publicized 2009 assault by singer and thenboyfriend Chris Brown-wasn’t impressed with
the move. “CBS you pulled my song last week,
now you wanna slide it back in today? NO, thank
you!” Rihanna wrote in an early morning tweet.
In this April 13, 2014 file photo pop star
Rihanna arrives on the red carpet for the
2014 MT V Movie Awards at the Nokia
Theater in Los Angeles. — AFP
“Y’all are sad for penalizing me for this,” she
tweeted. “The audacity.” Soon after the tweets,
CBS indicated the song was out for good. In a
statement that did not mention Rihanna directly,
the network said it would go in a “different direction” and use “our newly created ‘Today’s Night
Football’ theme music.”
CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus, speaking last week to Sports Illustrated, said the network had made changes amid criticism that the
professional sports world was slow to punish
Rice, who was filmed at a casino knocking out
the woman who is now his wife.
The network also cut a comedy segment from
Today’s broadcast as “we needed to have the
appropriate tone and coverage,” the executive
told the magazine. Brown pleaded guilty in 2009
to assaulting Rihanna, who suffered facial
injuries and was forced to cancel an appearance
at that year’s Grammy Awards. Rihanna later
resumed a relationship with Brown, shocking
many fans. — AFP
Asia documentary makers
ride wave of ‘civil awareness’
A
wave of “civil awareness” across Taiwan, Hong
Kong and China is inspiring more documentary
makers to unearth stories that otherwise would
not be told, according to an award-winning Taiwanese
director. “In the past two years, there has been this
prevailing value,” Kevin Lee Hui-jen told AFP. “This
awareness reflects citizens’ mistrust in their leaders.”
Lee said the trend is strongest in Taiwan, where the
public is increasingly wary of warming ties with China
which still considers the self-ruling island part of its territory awaiting reunification.
“Almost all social movements in Taiwan [now] have
some documentary filmmakers filming them,” he said.
In one example earlier this year, the Taipei
Documentary Filmmakers’ Union shot “The Day of
Uprising” as tens of thousands of students belonging
to the Sunflower movement occupied Taiwan’s legislature in protest at a cross-straits trade agreement with
mainland China. Lee, 45, said Taiwan’s Sunflower and
Hong Kong’s Occupy Central civil movements were
examples of a public actively questioning its leaders.
In Hong Kong public discontent has been growing
over rising inequality, increased political interference
and the perceived cosy relationship between the city’s
powerful business elite and Beijing. Hong Kong’s
Occupy Central movement threatened civil disobedience if China ruled out open elections in the former
British colony. Activists had their hopes for genuine
democracy dashed after China announced last month
that candidates for the city’s next leader in 2017 would
be vetted by a pro-Beijing committee and that only
two or three people would be allowed to stand. The
movement has since lost steam. “Democracy and freedom are universal values,” said Lee. “Amid the various
forms of political and economic pressure, can Taiwan
and Hong Kong safeguard their freedom? The key lies
in young people and ‘civil awareness’.”
Denied in China
Lee won the Grand Prize and Best Documentary at
this year’s Taipei Film Festival for “Unveil the Truth II:
State Apparatus”, his sequel to “Unveil the Truth:
Government Virus” (2013) which seeks to uncover
alleged bureaucratic mishandling of avian flu breakouts on the island. He is taking part in Hong Kong’s
annual Chinese Documentary Festival this month
showcasing 44 films.
Among those from China include a look at urban
encroachment on traditional farmlands and ways of
life; a reflection on the bitter legacy of conflict on a
small village in China’s Xinjiang province and the
impact of desertification in Gansu province. The irony
is that stringent censorship means mainland Chinese
audiences are rarely-if ever-given the opportunity to
watch such films. The Chinese government last
month shut down the annual Beijing Independent
Film Festival, which had scheduled a number of documentaries for screening, including Lee’s. China’s leaders under President Xi Jinping have taken aim at civil
society, imposing greater censorship in what analysts
call an effort to muffle dissent that is proving powerfully effective. “Filmmakers are having a lot of difficulties there,” said Tammy Cheung, a Hong Kong-based
documentary film maker and co-founder of the
Visible Records organisation, which stages the festival
giving Chinese filmmakers the chance to show their
work to a predominantly Chinese audience. “They
might take their films to international festivals but
they rarely get the chance to show them to their own
people,” said Cheung. “They are still trying to have
their voices heard.”
This picture taken on September 12, 2014 shows Taiwanese documentary film director Kevin
Lee Hui-jen posing for a photograph in Taipei. — AFP
‘Giving people a voice’
Hong Kong-based 32-year-old Jo Cheng, whose
mournful “Via Dolorosa” is screening at the festival,
trained her cameras on the plight of a Hong Kong
street sleeper in a city whose gap between rich and
poor is among the world’s widest.
“I didn’t really think of an audience when I started,”
she explained. “I was more concerned with learning
how to tell a story. But documentaries provide a platform for difference communities to ask questions and
find out answers.”
Lee, who started out as a television producer, said
cheaper digital filming equipment had “significantly
brought down the threshold for making documentaries”, meaning more were now being made.
Nevertheless director Cheng works various part-time
jobs to fund her films and struggles to attract financial
support due to limited prospects in terms of box office
returns and audience. “But documentaries and social
media are giving more people a voice, and allowing
more topics to be discussed,” she said. “I want to look
at issues that are covered up, and too protected.”
Lee added that when it came to China, getting subjects to go on record with an opinion was difficult due
to worries over any potential consequences. “But they
must never forget one thing: over-tolerance will
become servility; unchecked servility will make one
forget the importance of freedom,” said Lee. Hong
Kong’s Chinese Documentary Festival runs until
October 4. — AFP
DiCaprio selected as United
Nations Messenger of Peace
U
“It’s an honor to accept the role
nited Nations Secretaryof UN M essenger of Peace on
General Ban Ki-moon has desClimate Change and to support the
ignated Leonardo DiCaprio as
Secretary General in his efforts to
a UN Messenger of Peace with a special focus on climate change. DiCaprio,
address one of the most important
a longtime environmental activist, will
issues we face as a global commuaddress the UN. Climate Change
nity,” DiCaprio said. “I feel a moral
Summit on Sept 23. “Mr DiCaprio is a
obligation to speak out at this key
credible voice in the environmental
moment in human histor y it is a
movement, and has a considerable
moment for ac tion. How we
platform to amplify its message,” said
respond to the climate crisis in the
Ki-moon. “I am pleased he has chosen Leonardo DiCaprio
coming years will likely determine
to add his voice to UN efforts to raise
the fate of humanity and our planawareness of the urgency and benefits of acting et.” He also posted a Tweet on his Twitter
now to combat climate change.”
account: Honored to accept at this key moment
The actor’s Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation was for #Climate2014. RT @UN: Ban Ki-moon names
established in 1998 with the mission of protecting @LeoDiCaprio
M essenger
of
Peace
the Earth’s last wild places and implementing solu- http://t.co/GfOEvhlvA J Leonardo DiCaprio
tions for a more harmonious relationship between (@LeoDiCaprio) September 16, 2014 DiCaprio is
humanity and the natural world. He’s focused on one of 12 M essengers of Peace and one
protecting biodiversity, ocean and forest conserva- Goodwill Ambassador who advocate on behalf
tion and climate change.
of the UN. — Reuters