Boy is the Church of Scientology taking a beating this week…..
Crash director Paul Haggis made headlines on Monday, after he abandoned the controversial sect after more than 30 years over its anti-gay marriage stance. Now, Tommy Davis, the head of the Church of Scientology’s Celebrity Centre, is hitting the blogosphere for walking out of an [...]
The Bahamian judge presiding over the John Travolta extortion case has ordered a retrial, according to the Associated Press, citing possible juror misconduct.
Pleasant Bridgewater, a former member of the Bahamian Senate, and ambulance driver Tarino Lightbourne are accused of attempting to extort $25 million from Travolta following the death of his son, Jett, in [...]
American actor Tom Cruise and his wife Katie Holmes have helped actor John Travolta come back to public life with a top secret Church of Scientology party in England at the weekend.
Travolta, 55, who had stayed away from the limelight after the death of his son in January this year, was made guest of honour [...]
John Travolta and his wife Kelly Preston returned to a Bahamas courthouse on Wednesday, where the actor gave testimony in the trial of a pair of island medics charged with an extortion attempt made after the death of the couple’s son last winter. Travolta testified that the medic who attempted to extort money from his [...]
John Travolta described the moments before his son’s death in the Bahamas last January as he testified Wednesday against two people accused of trying to blackmail him with private information about that faithful day.
Travolta testified that he and wife Kelly Preston were awakened by a nanny at approximately 10:15 AM on Jan. 2, alerting them [...]
Tony Scott, director of Top Gun and the new Taking of Pelham 123 remake, tells Andrew Pulver about the lure of action movies, how he moved from painting to film-making, and the ‘R word’ – his brother Ridley
By Nick Bryant
BBC News
To the already long list of improbable White House get-togethers – Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, Princess Diana and John Travolta – we will be able to add the names of a black professor and a white policeman at the centre of a national uproar over race relations.
Cambridge police sergeant Jim Crowley and Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard scholar he arrested after responding to a report of a possible break-in at Mr Gates’s home, will sit down with Mr Obama on Thursday for a conciliatory beer.
Admittedly, it is tempting to view the invitation as the ultimate conflation of the age of Obama and the age of Oprah.
Aside from the choice of beverage, there is something very daytime television, something very soft focus, something very soft sofa, about this attempt to defuse the controversy.
Mr Gates was held for disorderly conduct, after he allegedly criticised police behaviour during the incident at the scholar’s home on 16 July. President Obama – a friend of Mr Gates – got involved in the case, saying that the police had acted "stupidily".
Yet startling and novel as Mr Obama’s attempts to diffuse the controversy are, he is merely upholding a long tradition. Presidential racial politics has often been conducted with gestures, symbols and photo opportunities, and this is but the latest example of a well-worn genre.
Obvious gestures
Even since the war, when black voters – or the Negro vote, as it was then known – became a potentially election-deciding force, presidents have embraced symbolic gestures, for the simple reason that they allow them to appeal to blacks without alienating whites.
Often the gestures have been rather obvious. Sometimes they have been so subtle as to be almost subliminal.
Alert to the growing strategic importance of the black vote in key northern battleground states, Dwight D Eisenhower invited the black contralto, Marian Anderson, to perform at his 1956 inauguration. It was a gesture especially redolent with meaning, since in 1939 she had been barred from singing at Constitution Hall in Washington.
His successor, John F Kennedy, happily extended a White House invitation to the world heavyweight boxing champion, Floyd Patterson, hoping it would compensate for his stubborn refusal to offer similar hospitality to Martin Luther King.
"Throughout the campaign, Mr Obama deliberately de-emphasised his race"
Black scholar arrest angers ObamaNot to be outdone by President Eisenhower, JFK also invited Marian Anderson to sing at his inaugural, but then went a few notable steps further by dancing with black women at the balls later on that night.
This kind of imagery has also been used in reverse, using more harmful symbolism.
Ronald Reagan delivered the first major speech of his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi – the town memorialised in the Hollywood movie, Mississippi Burning – where three civil-rights workers were brutally murdered in 1964.
The subject of his speech was "states rights", for some a euphemism for white supremacy.
In 1992, the then-Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, famously attacked the black singer Sister Souljah; and, more infamously, made sure he returned home to Little Rock mid-campaign to oversee the lethal injection of Ricky Ray Rector, a brain damaged black man who had killed a police officer.
Fears and grievances
These kind of techniques are so commonly deployed, largely because they can have such a dramatic effect.
Even as black leaders attacked him for his timidity on civil rights, Mr Kennedy enjoyed high approval ratings among black voters, partly because they had been such full participants in his inaugural celebrations.
Nothing underscored Bill Clinton’s moderate, New Democrat credentials than his attack on a black hip-hop artist.
So history suggests that it would be foolish to underestimate the reconciliatory potential of this Budweiser moment, however dubious it sounds.
After all, conflict resolution often turns on the mutual and public acknowledgement of each side’s fears and grievances, along with the photo-opportunity that accompanies it.
By extending this invitation, Mr Obama also appears to be signalling that neither Prof Gates nor Sgt Crowley were wholly in the right or wholly in the wrong.
The beer at the White House, then, marks an attempt to balance white fears about black lawlessness, whether real or imagined, with black middle-class grievances about white racism, whether real or imagined.
Throughout the campaign, Mr Obama deliberately de-emphasised his race. To be a history-defying candidate he became a history-denying figure, and left others to attach racial meaning to his candidacy.
Since winning the presidency, however, he has been much more expansive on the issue, starting with his victory speech at Grant Park in Chicago, where he located his achievement in the context of Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma, the climatic moments of the civil rights era.
During his recent speech before the civil-rights group, the NAACP, he made reference to these events to emphasise his theme of black self-improvement.
"I know that nine little children did not walk through a schoolhouse door in Little Rock so that we could stand by and let our children drop out of school and turn to gangs for the support they are not getting elsewhere," he said accusingly.
Biblical language
The Gates controversy has been harder for him to deal with because it deals with more awkward history and touches on the ambiguous legacy of the civil rights era.
White support for the civil rights movement started to wane when blacks demanded affirmative action and reparations. Conversely, racial profiling is an area where blacks feel they are still treated as second-class citizens.
This controversy not only taps into that milieu, but inadvertently brings together two unlikely protagonists: Prof Gates, one of America’s most eloquent advocates of affirmative action, and Sgt Crowley, who for five years taught a class on racial profiling at a local police academy which cautioned against stereotyping.
When you reach back into American history, you often find that racial progress has often come when the case for reform or reconciliation has been framed in Biblical language or used faith-based allegories.
Rev King’s I Have a Dream speech is the most obvious and glorious example.
Now Barack Obama is conjuring up a modern-day parable: the story of the professor, the policeman and the president. But can he turn beer into progress
Nick Bryant is the author of The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
By Nick Bryant
BBC News
To the already long list of improbable White House get-togethers – Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, Princess Diana and John Travolta – we will be able to add the names of a black professor and a white policeman at the centre of a national uproar over race relations.
Cambridge police sergeant Jim Crowley and Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard scholar he arrested after responding to a report of a possible break-in at Mr Gates’s home, will sit down with Mr Obama on Thursday for a conciliatory beer.
Admittedly, it is tempting to view the invitation as the ultimate conflation of the age of Obama and the age of Oprah.
Aside from the choice of beverage, there is something very daytime television, something very soft focus, something very soft sofa, about this attempt to defuse the controversy.
Mr Gates was held for disorderly conduct, after he allegedly criticised police behaviour during the incident at the scholar’s home on 16 July. President Obama – a friend of Mr Gates – got involved in the case, saying that the police had acted "stupidily".
Yet startling and novel as Mr Obama’s attempts to diffuse the controversy are, he is merely upholding a long tradition. Presidential racial politics has often been conducted with gestures, symbols and photo opportunities, and this is but the latest example of a well-worn genre.
Obvious gestures
Even since the war, when black voters – or the Negro vote, as it was then known – became a potentially election-deciding force, presidents have embraced symbolic gestures, for the simple reason that they allow them to appeal to blacks without alienating whites.
Often the gestures have been rather obvious. Sometimes they have been so subtle as to be almost subliminal.
Alert to the growing strategic importance of the black vote in key northern battleground states, Dwight D Eisenhower invited the black contralto, Marian Anderson, to perform at his 1956 inauguration. It was a gesture especially redolent with meaning, since in 1939 she had been barred from singing at Constitution Hall in Washington.
His successor, John F Kennedy, happily extended a White House invitation to the world heavyweight boxing champion, Floyd Patterson, hoping it would compensate for his stubborn refusal to offer similar hospitality to Martin Luther King.
"Throughout the campaign, Mr Obama deliberately de-emphasised his race"
Black scholar arrest angers ObamaNot to be outdone by President Eisenhower, JFK also invited Marian Anderson to sing at his inaugural, but then went a few notable steps further by dancing with black women at the balls later on that night.
This kind of imagery has also been used in reverse, using more harmful symbolism.
Ronald Reagan delivered the first major speech of his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi – the town memorialised in the Hollywood movie, Mississippi Burning – where three civil-rights workers were brutally murdered in 1964.
The subject of his speech was "states rights", for some a euphemism for white supremacy.
In 1992, the then-Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, famously attacked the black singer Sister Souljah; and, more infamously, made sure he returned home to Little Rock mid-campaign to oversee the lethal injection of Ricky Ray Rector, a brain damaged black man who had killed a police officer.
Fears and grievances
These kind of techniques are so commonly deployed, largely because they can have such a dramatic effect.
Even as black leaders attacked him for his timidity on civil rights, Mr Kennedy enjoyed high approval ratings among black voters, partly because they had been such full participants in his inaugural celebrations.
Nothing underscored Bill Clinton’s moderate, New Democrat credentials than his attack on a black hip-hop artist.
So history suggests that it would be foolish to underestimate the reconciliatory potential of this Budweiser moment, however dubious it sounds.
After all, conflict resolution often turns on the mutual and public acknowledgement of each side’s fears and grievances, along with the photo-opportunity that accompanies it.
By extending this invitation, Mr Obama also appears to be signalling that neither Prof Gates nor Sgt Crowley were wholly in the right or wholly in the wrong.
The beer at the White House, then, marks an attempt to balance white fears about black lawlessness, whether real or imagined, with black middle-class grievances about white racism, whether real or imagined.
Throughout the campaign, Mr Obama deliberately de-emphasised his race. To be a history-defying candidate he became a history-denying figure, and left others to attach racial meaning to his candidacy.
Since winning the presidency, however, he has been much more expansive on the issue, starting with his victory speech at Grant Park in Chicago, where he located his achievement in the context of Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma, the climatic moments of the civil rights era.
During his recent speech before the civil-rights group, the NAACP, he made reference to these events to emphasise his theme of black self-improvement.
"I know that nine little children did not walk through a schoolhouse door in Little Rock so that we could stand by and let our children drop out of school and turn to gangs for the support they are not getting elsewhere," he said accusingly.
Biblical language
The Gates controversy has been harder for him to deal with because it deals with more awkward history and touches on the ambiguous legacy of the civil rights era.
White support for the civil rights movement started to wane when blacks demanded affirmative action and reparations. Conversely, racial profiling is an area where blacks feel they are still treated as second-class citizens.
This controversy not only taps into that milieu, but inadvertently brings together two unlikely protagonists: Prof Gates, one of America’s most eloquent advocates of affirmative action, and Sgt Crowley, who for five years taught a class on racial profiling at a local police academy which cautioned against stereotyping.
When you reach back into American history, you often find that racial progress has often come when the case for reform or reconciliation has been framed in Biblical language or used faith-based allegories.
Rev King’s I Have a Dream speech is the most obvious and glorious example.
Now Barack Obama is conjuring up a modern-day parable: the story of the professor, the policeman and the president. But can he turn beer into progress
Nick Bryant is the author of The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
John Travolta insists his faith in the Church of Scientology is ”as strong as ever”, despite claims he is considering abandoning the bizarre religion.
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The 55-year-old actor has denied reports claiming he has abandoned The Church of Scientology after 34 years following the death of his son Jett last January. The 16-year-old died after suffering a [...]
Is John Travolta finished with the Church of Scientology?
The actor, who has been a follower of the controversial faith for 34 years, is rumored to be leaving the faith after its radical medical ideals prevented him from getting help for his16-year-old autistic son, Jett, who passed away six months ago.
“There have been strong [...]
Actor Denzel Washington has revealed that he had fun gaining weight for his new film ‘The Taking of Pelham 123’ because he could feast on whatever junk food he desired.
“Getting there was such fun. Milkshakes, hamburgers… middle of the night a little Haagen Daz (ice cream). Anything I wanted just eat, eat, eat,” the Daily [...]
Lights! Camera! Dongle! As Tony Scott’s remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 proves, the movies’ relationship with modern computing is often strained. It’s time for Hollywood to uninstall updates, says Damon Wise
Tony Scott is possibly the most modern director working in Hollywood today. His films move so quickly, look so restless, and take place in a world so contemporary, you know that not only were they made in the last 12 months, they might actually have been made in the last five minutes. Scott doesn’t care about posterity, he cares about right now. But with his remake of The Taking Of Pelham 123 – originally a talky, character-based heist thriller from 1974 – he’s made a schoolboy error. There are many ways to signify modernity in such a reboot – mention the fate of the Twin Towers, show an iPod, even have a flashmob party – but to have your leading man hunched over his laptop breaks one of the commandments of modern film: thou shalt not Google.
Hollywood hates the internet because it makes Hollywood redundant. Hollywood is about action and LOUD, INTENSE DIALOGUE!!! It is about confrontation and conflict, sexual frissons and personal interaction. It is not about websites, Wi-Fi and Fatso The Keyboard Cat. But in the new-look Taking Of Pelham 123, after a promising opening in which John Travolta’s tattooed ex-con commandeers a packed subway train and kills a few commuters just to prove his hijacker credentials, our braying antihero is shown staring at his laptop all the time. For reasons that will never satisfactorily become clear, he’s playing some sort of game with the stockmarket that will pay much higher dividends than the $10m ransom he is demanding. Whatever. But it is a measure of the ubiquity of the internet these days that it’s really quite painful to see anyone actually using it.
Since the terrible 1995 Sandra Bullock conspiracy movie The Net, Hollywood has been surprisingly coy about the World Wide Web, using computer interfaces in reserve simply to move the plot along. In the days of film noir, the telephone was a staple device, but the mysteries of a one-sided conversation (“OK … ” Click! Brrrrrr … ) just do not translate in this world of SMS, email and Skype. Indeed, the only true romcom of the WWW age remains You’ve Got Mail, a 1998 remake of a 1940 James Stewart vehicle in which two workmates who hate each other fall in love via pseudonymous emails, just as their predecessors fell in love via anonymous, handwritten letters – a cute formula that was nicely subverted in Miranda July’s Me And You And Everyone We Know (2005), in which a sexually jaded gallery owner falls for the smutty chatroom talk of a little boy.
But there’s not a lot in between. Emails don’t generate much emotion, and this was used to great effect in the 2006 French thriller Tell No One, in which a widower accused of murdering his wife receives a cryptic email, eight years later, showing the woman very much alive. From here, though, the film reverts to type. Though it starts in cyberspace, it ends with shootings and car chases, much like any American equivalent. Because there’s only so much the internet can do, and for the most part these days, the internet is simply used as shorthand for research, replacing the old horror movie/thriller device in which suspicious parties visit the vaults of local newspapers to find out the details of past crimes, or pull out a book to investigate a hunch. Even The Da Vinci Code, the most soporific “thriller” ever made – in which its star boards a double-decker London bus and says, in all seriousness, “I’ve got to get to a library … fast!” – didn’t bother wasting our time with much internet faffing, preferring instead to rope in some random youth with a WAP phone and a browser.
Indeed, although Ken Loach’s recent film Looking For Eric drew plaudits from largely male critics who were blinded by the sight of football superstar Eric Cantona walking and talking, sometimes even at the same time, not many noticed that the film itself was really quite a gimmicky step back for one of British cinema’s normally most nuanced directors. Not only did it climax in a vigilante free-for-all which, in Cannes, had Quentin Tarantino punching the air (a put-it-on-the-poster seal of approval for anyone else), but the film was bogged down by a happy-slapping subplot involving gangsters, camcorders and YouTube.
This might be Loach’s bid to stake some kind of claim on modernity, but it’s worth noting that even Hollywood has cottoned on to the fact that such modernity is anathema to drama. How many films have you seen in which mobile phones are broken, don’t get a signal or run crucially out of juice? How many films have you seen in which a simple down/upload takes an excruciating amount of time while morally ambiguous character actors pad closer and closer? And how many films have you seen in which a code is refused, re-entered, changed and finally accepted in a font-size so big that even Mr Magoo would see it? Let’s face it, the entire Da Vinci Code could easily have been solved using a combination of Wikipedia, 192.com and Yahoo.
Another ghastly modern trope that The Taking Of Pelham 123 uses is the webcam. In a nod to the growing phenomenon of “citizen journalism”, one of the passengers has conveniently left his laptop open, providing a live feed to his girlfriend, who takes it straight to the news networks. Something similar worked pretty well for last year’s first-person-POV monster flick Cloverfield, but it’s perhaps no coincidence that the last time a computer webcam provided a major point in a mainstream movie was probably 1999′s American Pie, which found a horny teenager trying to broadcast a live sex tape to his mates. But even with its cyberspace trimmings, that movie degenerated into a plain, old-fashioned Hollywood morality tale, and by the final reel the webcam has all but been forgotten.
There are, however, exceptions. Modernity can and has been used to great effect, in remakes too, and not just to emphasise the new “newness”. DJ Caruso’s Disturbia (2007), despite its horrible title, updated Hitchcock’s 1954 classic Rear Window and largely succeeded, simply by placing its teen hero under house arrest. Tagged and confined to quarters, this volatile kid becomes defined by what technology will and won’t let him do: his electronic tag means he can’t leave the front and back yards, but the denial of phone and computer shrinks his capacity for defence when faced with a neighbour who may or may not be a killer. The same goes for Tony Scott’s own Enemy Of The State (1998), a loose remake of The Conversation in which Will Smith’s hapless lawyer becomes a victim of a virtual assault that robs him of his identity.
In The Taking Of Pelham 123, however, the use of wireless technology is crass to the point of embarrassing, taking great lengths to explain how Travolta’s character gets a signal down in the bowels of the New York transport system when, quite frankly, it would be more helpful to see Travolta’s character as anything more that just a two-dimensional psycho with a Vaio. It’s worrying that, in 2009, we’re expected to be distracted from the implausible dialogue, hollow special-effects action and lame plotting – all less convincing than they ever were in the ingenious 1974 original – simply because the bad guy’s got a laptop and a dongle. A very poor show indeed.
• Citizen Kane (1941) “Now available to buy on eBay!!! One child’s sledge, hand carved. Named ‘Rosebud’. Formerly owned by Charles Foster Kane. Believed missing; slightly singed. Only one in existence. NO RESERVE.”
• Psycho (1960) From Mysinglefriend.com: “Mrs Bates has this to say about Norman: ‘If you’re looking for a great time, then I recommend you get in touch with my son. A hard worker, he likes reading, dressing-up and taxidermy. Painted sluts need not apply!”
• Pacific Heights (1990) From Craigslist: “Located in sunny San Francisco, this delightful newly refurnished apartment is situated on the basement floor of a traditional building. No sociopaths, please. Smoker preferred. Must love dogs!”
• The Commitments (1991) From the Commitments’ MySpace page: “Thanks for the add, guys! Keep up the good work! There is a market for what you’re doing, you know!”
• Shallow Grave (1994) “Attention criminals on the run! PayPal lets you send money to anyone with email. PayPal is free for consumers, and works seamlessly with your existing credit card and current account … ”
• The Lost World (1997) “Google Earth 6.0 features abandoned sites of prehistorical interest (believed missing) … “
• I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998) “Hey, guys, I’ve
just Yahooed the capital of Brazil and it says it’s Brasilia. It’s not Rio
De Janeiro at all. Hmm, I think we’re being set up … “
• The Truman Show (1998) From Truman Burbank’s Twitter feed: “Outsideviewer@Truman: Hey dude ur parents r totally lying 2 U; U live on TV man … “
• Titanic (1997) From weather.com, circa 1914: “Large passenger ships
sailing in the Atlantic Ocean are advised to be aware of a large iceberg
400 miles east of Newfoundland. Proceed with caution!”
• The Taking Of Pelham 123 is out on Friday
It seems everyday, some controversy about the subway makes it in the papers, whether it’s about good new leadership or bad old leadership; whether it’s…
American actress Kelly Preston is said to have thrown herself into her role in upcoming movie ‘Casino Jack’ in order to cope with the heartbreak following the tragic death of her son Jett.
Preston, 46, and her hubby John Travolta, 55, were devastated when the 16-year-old died from a seizure while the family vacationed in the [...]
