Month: April 2018

Deep inside mountains along the China-Myanmar border, a 26-year-old ethnic Lisu villager, surnamed Zhang, sharpens his crossbow arrows to prepare for a hunt.

For Zhang and many other Lisu, a mostly Christian minority who inhabit the border region, the crossbow is an indispensable part of their culture dating back to 200 BC.

In a country that often bans the sale of kitchen knives during political summits, it’s still normal to see ethnic Lisu openly carrying the weapon in public.

Despite a decades-old hunting ban, law enforcement remains lax and Zhang and his friends still hunt birds and rodents for sport. Before the ban, Lisu hunters traditionally went for larger game such as bears and wild boar.

Lisu technically must have a crossbow license, which are regulated by district crossbow associations.

As more young people move to urban areas for work, Cha Hairong, head of the Liuku Township Crossbow Association of Lushui city, fears the crossbow is dying out.

Cha wants to preserve the tradition by promoting crossbow shooting as a sport and attract new enthusiasts far beyond the Nu River Valley.

“Our people’s crossbow culture must enter the National Games of China. It must enter the Asian Games. It must enter the Olympic Games! So that people all over world will understand our people’s culture,” said Cha.

The Lushui government has said it is committed to the preservation of the crossbow culture.

Crossbow tournaments offering cash prizes have been held in recent years in a bid to boost interest in the sport.

Some competitors simply enjoy the camaraderie at these events.

“This is just a time where we come here to chat and tell stories,” said Zuo Zhenfu, 27, who attended a crossbow tournament in late March.
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Fired FBI director James Comey’s memoir that details his private meetings with U.S. President Donald Trump sold some 600,000 copies in all formats in its first week, its publisher said on Tuesday, the latest in a series of best-selling political books.

Comey’s “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership,” has so far outpaced Hillary Clinton’s campaign memoir “What Happened” and journalist Michael Wolff’s behind-the-scenes White House expose “Fire and Fury” in opening week sales, according to industry figures.

Publisher Flatiron Books, a division of privately-owned Macmillan, said it has printed more than 1 million copies of Comey’s book, which has made national headlines.

Flatiron did not say whether the first week sales were global or limited to the United States.

Comey has been on a media blitz, sitting for numerous television and radio interviews, while also on a book tour that has seen him appear before sold-out audiences of more than a thousand.

The book has drawn Trump’s ire as Comey compared the president to a mob boss who stresses personal loyalty over the law and has little regard for morality or truth.

Trump dismissed Comey in May last year while the FBI was investigating allegations Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion between Russians and Trump’s campaign.

Trump has repeatedly denied any collusion.

“A Higher Loyalty,” which is billed as Comey’s thoughts on leadership, was atop Amazon.com’s bestseller list for several weeks before its release.

Clinton’s “What Happened” sold more than 300,000 copies, including hardcover, e-book, CD and digital audio, in its first week after publication in September 2017, according to CBS Corp-owned publisher Simon & Schuster.

Wolff’s portrayal of a disorganized West Wing filled with strife and aides questioning the president’s fitness to lead debuted in January with some 28,000 in sales.

Higher-than-expected demand led Macmillan imprint Henry Holt & Co to order up 2.1 million copies in its first week.

Wolff’s book has sold nearly 975,000 print copies, and Clinton’s memoir has sold some 511,000 total print copies, according to NPD BookScan.
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Summer starts early this year in Hollywood with the potentially record-breaking release Thursday of Avengers: Infinity War, and the marquee Marvel superheroes couldn’t be coming at a better time.

The box office for the year is down nearly three percent, and the industry is looking to redeem itself after last summer, which, despite hits like Wonder Woman, had its worst performance in more than a decade. Although all studios are embracing the year-round blockbuster schedule and massive hits can emerge in any month, like Black Panther in February, It in September and Star Wars in December, with work and school vacations, nothing can beat the summer’s potential.

This summer movie-going season, which typically runs from the first weekend in May through Labor Day, could get things back on track. Two of the most profitable franchises have major films on the slate. The Walt Disney Company and Marvel have Avengers: Infinity War (April 27) which some experts are predicting will score the biggest opening of all time, and Universal Pictures is releasing the sequel to the fifth-highest domestic earner of all time, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, on June 22.

And as with every summer, there are more than a handful of sequels and familiar brands coming to theaters, including: Deadpool 2 (May 18); Solo: A Star Wars Story (May 25); The Incredibles 2 (June 15); Sicario: Day of the Soldado (June 29); The First Purge (July 4); Ant-Man and the Wasp (July 6); Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (July 13); The Equalizer 2 (July 20); Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again! (July 20); and Mission: Impossible — Fallout (July 27).

But Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Fritz whose new book The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies, examines the current state of the industry, notes that while the big, franchise, tent-pole films are always the highest-grossing and that films like Jurassic World 2 and Avengers: Infinity War will be sure-fire hits, oversaturation is possible too. 

“People do like to see the big franchise tent-pole films,” Fritz said. “But even if the studios make more of them, people are not going to more movies. The more of them there are, the more they are competing for the same box office dollars and as a result you see more flops.”

According to Box Office Mojo, in 2017, movie ticket sales were at a 25-year low, and competition for audience attention is only intensifying. Netflix has a whole slate of summer films too, from an Adam Sandler and Chris Rock comedy (The Week Of, April 27) to the WWII-set adaptation of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. This year, too, has shown a concentration of box office dollars on just a few films — Black Panther, Fritz noted, accounted for 23 percent of the ticket sales in the first three months of the year.

And it is at least part of the reason why many studios are touting the diversity of their slates beyond the spectacle of superheroes and blockbusters.

“Today, it’s even more important that there is a wide variety of films out there, films that are provocative, that are thrilling, that obviously are entertaining and that you’re presenting them in new and exciting ways,” said Jim Orr, Universal Pictures’ president of domestic theatrical distribution. “We have right now a theater-going audience who is discerning and I think we need to keep that in mind with everything we put forth.”

Universal has Jurassic World and Mamma Mia! sequels, sure, but it is also releasing Dwayne Johnson’s action-thriller Skyscraper and its indie arm Focus Features has films like the dark dramedy Tully (May 4), with Charlize Theron, Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman (Aug. 10) and documentaries about Mr. Rogers (Won’t You Be My Neighbor, June 8) and Pope Francis (May 18).

Warner Bros., home of Wonder Woman, Batman and the other DC Comics superheroes, doesn’t even have a major DC film on the slate this summer (aside from the animated Teen Titans GO! To the Movies, July 27). Instead, its slate boasts films like the star (and female)-driven Ocean’s 8, with Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Rihanna and others, comedies like Tag (June 15) and Life of the Party (May 11), and an adaptation of the popular book Crazy Rich Asians (Aug. 17).

“The business just gets spread out over 12 months,” said Warner Bros. domestic distribution president Jeff Goldstein. “It’s not about one particular season and for a studio, it’s about opportunistically dating your movies in a way to maximize your box office on any given film.”

Beyond Ocean’s 8 there are a number of gender-flipped reboots and bawdy female-led comedies, like Overboard (May 4) with Anna Faris, the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels remake The Hustle (June 29) with Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson, Book Club (May 18) with Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen, and The Spy Who Dumped Me (Aug. 3) with Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon.

And action fans can look forward to Mark Wahlberg as an intelligence officer trying to smuggle a police officer out of the country in Mile 22 (Aug. 3) and Jason Statham fighting a shark in The Meg (Aug. 10).

Audiences thirsting for more unconventional fare may just have to look a little deeper for the potential hidden gems, like Uncle Drew (June 29), a comedy about an aging basketball team competing in a street tournament, with Lil Rel Howery, Kyrie Irving and Shaquille O’Neal, and Hereditary (June 8), a trippy horror about the strange things that start happening when a family’s matriarch dies.

Sundance breakouts coming this summer include Eighth Grade (July 13) from comedian Bo Burnham, which follows an eighth-grade girl around her last week of middle school, Blindspotting (July 20) about a police shooting in Oakland, and Sorry to Bother You (July 6) also Oakland-set, but with a quirkier sci-fi edge.

There’s the almost too-strange-to-be-true The Happytime Murders (Aug. 17) from Brian Henson and starring Melissa McCarthy, where puppets and humans co-exist and a private eye takes on the case of a puppet on puppet murder.

And then there’s Hotel Artemis, the directorial debut of Iron Man 3 screenwriter Drew Pearce. It’s an original action-thriller about a hospital for criminals set in a dystopian, near-future Los Angeles with a star-studded cast including Jodie Foster, Sterling K. Brown and Jeff Goldblum that Global Road Entertainment is releasing on June 8. Pearce said there was no way he could have gotten it made in the studio system.

“Hopefully this is a rallying cry. It’s not a sequel, it’s not based on a comic. It’s not a reboot. It’s its own eccentric and hopefully loveable beast of a movie,” Pearce said.

“I think what we’ve seen in the last year is movies with real personality are actually what an audience is crying out for, whether that’s tiny movies that made good like Get Out or taking the superhero blockbuster like Thor: Ragnarok and essentially making a quirky New Zealand comedy out of it,” he said. “I think there’s a real appetite for something that’s just a little different and a little less cookie-cutter.”
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Online streaming services such Spotify and Apple Music have become the recording industry’s single biggest revenue source, overtaking physical sales of CDs and digital downloads for the first time, a trade group said on Tuesday.

The rapid growth in streaming music services in recent years has led to a recovery in the fortunes of the global recorded music industry, which enjoyed its third year of positive revenue growth, according to a report by industry body IFPI.

Figures released in IFPIs Global Music Report 2018 show total recording music revenues for 2017 rose to $17.3 billion, up 8.1 percent from the previous year.

Improving finances have led to a tentative re-evaluation of the music industry by stock market investors, who had shied away from the struggling media category for much of the past decade due to a wave of piracy by users and major technology shifts.

Just in the past month, streaming music subscription leader Spotify of Sweden held a record-setting public stock offering. France’s Vivendi, the owner of Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest music label, said last week it was mulling an IPO.

Tencent Music Entertainment (TME), which attracts three-quarters of China’s booming music streaming market, has been reported by The Wall Street Journal to be eyeing a listing later in 2018. TME is controlled by internet giant Tencent .

Industry leaders say the growing adoption of paid music streaming services is enabling the market to reach new regions of the world while helping weaning a generation of music fans away from free or pirated music.

“We estimate that only half the worlds population lives in a thriving music environment and we want to bring the streaming revolution to all of it,” Stu Bergen, from Warner Music Group, told reporters in London.

During the 15 years ending in 2014, music sales plunged by 40 percent to $14.3 billion after music file-sharing services such as Napster ravaged sales of CDs while the rise of download services like Apple iTunes failed to offset those declines.

IFPI – The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry – charts the recent recovery to the rise of streaming music. It said there were 176 million users of paid streaming subscription services in 2017.

Streaming subscriptions in 2017 accounted for 38 percent of recorded music revenue, up from 29 percent in 2016. The streaming business expanded 41 percent, offsetting a 5 percent decline in physical sales and a 20 percent drop in download revenue.

Despite these improving finances, revenues for 2017 are still only 68.4 percent of the markets peak in 1999, IFPI said.

Latin America and China saw the biggest market growth, with a rise in overall music revenue of 17.7 percent and 35.3 percent respectively. The United States, Japan, Germany, Britain and France are the world’s top five music markets by revenue. Brazil ranked No.9 and China was No.10 in 2017, IFPI said.

IFPI renewed calls for governments to tackle the “value gap” between the value created by some digital platforms such as Google’s YouTube for their use of music and what they pay those creating and investing in it. Rival Facebook has been gearing to launch its own music video sharing service.

“Things are looking good but there’s a structural fault in the system. Until we fix it, it will always be a struggle, said IFPI Chief Executive Frances Moore.

Ed Sheeran ranked as the top global recording artist overtaking Drake, who slipped to No. 2 and Taylor Swift who ranked third, according to the IFPI.
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Tibetan exiles marking the 60th year of the Dalai Lama’s arrival in India after fleeing his homeland say they have successfully safeguarded Tibetan culture and preserved Tibetan identity, which Tibetan leaders warn is threatened by Chinese rule in their homeland. Some 70 schools run by the Tibetan exile administration in India, which is home to the largest Tibetan refugee community in the world, are at the heart of those efforts.
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A rare 6th century mosaic depicting the St. Andrew that was taken from a looted church in the Cyprus’ breakaway north has been returned after four decades, the head of the island nation’s Orthodox Christian Church said Monday.

Archbishop Chrysostomos II said that the artistry that went into the mosaic coupled with its rarity made the work a symbol of Cyprus’ “stolen heritage.”

It is among only a handful of mosaics to have survived a period during the 8th and 9th centuries when many Orthodox icons were destroyed.

The mosaic showing a bearded St. Andrew — among Christ’s first Apostles — was one of several that went missing from the Church of Panayia Kanakaria after Cyprus split into ethnic Greek and Turkish sides in 1974.

A Turkish art dealer, Aydin Dikmen, was arrested a quarter-century later for selling that piece and others from Kanakaria Church, as well as artworks from other churches.

Most of the Kanakaria Church mosaics have now been repatriated with the exception of one of St. Luke.

London-based Greek Cypriot art dealer Maria Paphiti located the St. Andrew mosaic in 2014 after another dealer asked her to verify the origin. When the dealer was informed that the mosaic belonged to the Cyprus Church, he agreed to return it as long as his expenses were covered.

Paphiti reached out to Greek Cypriot businessmen Roys Poyiadjis and Andreas Pittas for help covering the cost of the mosaic’s repatriation, which came to 50,000 euros ($61,200.)

Archbishop Chrysostomos honored the three of them Monday during a ceremony at Cyprus Church headquarters.

Cyprus hosts a second mosaic of the same rarity and time period depicting the Virgin Mary. A third resides in the Orthodox monastery of Saint Catherine at the foot of Mount Sinai.
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The United Arab Emirates will finance a $50.4 million project to rebuild Mosul’s Grand al-Nuri Mosque, famous for its eight-century-old leaning minaret, that was blown up by Islamic State militants last year, the United Nations said Monday.

Reconstruction and restoration of the mosque and al-Hadba minaret will be in partnership with the U.N. cultural agency UNESCO, Iraq’s culture ministry and the International Center for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), Dubai’s media office said in a Twitter post.

Islamic State demolished the Grand al-Nuri Mosque, which dated to the 12th century, in the final weeks of the U.S.-backed Iraqi campaign that ousted the jihadists from Mosul, their de facto capital in Iraq, last July.

The protracted and fierce urban warfare largely reduced the historic landmarks of Iraq’s second city to rubble.

Paris-based UNESCO said the project would take at least five years, with the first 12 months focused on clearing districts of debris. Other sites including historic gardens will be rebuilt, and the plan includes the building of a memorial and museum.

Mosul needs at least $2 billion of reconstruction aid, which would unblock streets and rebuild destroyed homes among other things, according to Iraqi government estimates. About 700,000 of Mosul’s population, estimated at 2 million before Islamic State seized the city in 2014, is displaced.

It was from the medieval mosque in mid-2014 that Islamic State’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a self-styled “caliphate” spanning parts of Syria and Iraq that the jihadists had overrun in a shock offensive.

The mosque was named after Nuruddin al Zanki, a noble who fought the early crusaders from a fiefdom that covered territory in modern-day Turkey, Syria and Iraq. It was built in 1172-73, shortly before his death, and housed an Islamic school.

By the time renowned mediaeval traveler and scholar Ibn Battuta visited two centuries later, the minaret was leaning.

The tilt gave the landmark its popular name — the Hunchback.

The minaret was composed of seven bands of decorative brickwork in complex geometric patterns that have also been found in Iran and Central Asia.
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Mel Brooks is just two months shy of his 92nd birthday and he still carves out time for movie nights with his pal Carl Reiner. The two just recently got together to watch a restoration of the 1938 Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland classic “The Adventures of Robin Hood.”

Classic film and proper presentation are important to the legendary comedian and filmmaker, especially in the age of streaming. This week, Brooks will be on hand to kick off the ninth annual TCM Classic Film Festival at the TCL Chinese Theater Thursday night in Hollywood with a special screening of the first film he ever directed: “The Producers.”

Brooks spoke to The Associated Press about the film, streaming and even “The Last Jedi.” Remarks have been edited for clarity and brevity.

AP: Congratulations on this new restoration of “The Producers.”

BROOKS: I’m very thrilled. TCM, these are people I really admire and I love them and God bless them for keeping all the movies that I grew up with still alive, still available. I don’t think anybody else does it, or does it as well. When they said they wanted to open their festival with the 50th anniversary of “The Producers,” I got very excited.

AP: The film has only grown in esteem too. Why do you think it’s endured?

BROOKS: Oh it’s very simple and it sounds a little egotistical, but it’s because it’s very good. The only test — real test — it’s not critics. It’s never critics. The only test is whether a movie is still around after 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years and in this case 50 years. So, you know, I know, it must be a good movie or no one would care about it 50 years later.

AP: And Martin Scorsese will be there on opening night too to get the Robert Osborne Award.

BROOKS: He was gracious enough to give me my lifetime achievement trophy at the American Film Institute. I love Marty Scorsese. As a matter of fact, this is a true story, when I was in pre-production on “The Producers,” this is a true story and he will never admit it but he and Harvey Keitel were two little ragamuffins who for some reason followed me around when we were in pre-production 50 years ago. I think they were putting together a movie called “Mean Streets” or something. It was pretty weird. But I really admire him. I admire not only his outrageous talent, “Raging Bull” is magnificent, but I admire his love and dedication to the art of movies. He’s really one of the great moviemakers of our time.

AP: Like Scorsese, you also have an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema.

BROOKS: Yeah well I’m old, that’s the secret. The secret is I’ve lived a long time. There’s a lot of people who love film. I’ve been around, so there isn’t a movie you could name that either I or Carl Reiner couldn’t give you a chapter or verse on.

AP: Do you keep up with current movies? Do you get out to the theater or watch them at home?

BROOKS: I don’t like to watch movies at home. I don’t like to watch movies on TV. I really like going to the theater. I like the community experience, especially if it’s a comedy. I like being in the dark and being transported into different worlds, it’s very important to me. And now there’s a thing that’s replaced it. It’s called streaming. I’m afraid to make another movie because I don’t want it to be seen by millions of people on a telephone. Comedies must be seen by at least 100 people in some kind of theater. It’s really heartbreaking to me. You know, movies are still good. Acting is still good. Directing is still good. Writing is still good. It’s where they’re seen that just really gets me.

AP: Is it a little bittersweet to be celebrating the 50th anniversary of “The Producers” without Gene Wilder and (composer) John Morris?

BROOKS: Yeah. It’s heart-rending but it’s what it is. And I’m glad that there will be a lot of young people in the audience who will actually understand it. I kind of understand “The Last Jedi.” I kind of understand it. There were two or three battle scenes, two big fights where I don’t really know who’s fighting and why they’re fighting, you know? But thank God for “The Empire Strikes Back” because I have something I can refer to. So I know some of the names. I know Han Solo. I know some of the names. But I don’t know why they’re fighting, I don’t really know.

I have a grandson, he’s 13 and he knows all the names. He says to me things like, “If you’ve gone to Jakku you’ve gone too far.” And I say well, “What is Jakku?” and he said, “Well it’s a planet.” I really don’t know these planets anymore. Jakku. Ok. But it’s all right. I’m catching up. Young people like big wild future fights. Fighting in the future. I kind of like it too. It’s better than fighting at 47th and Broadway, you know? Two guys get out of a car? Yeah, future fights are much better than two guys in a car. Anyway, you’ve got to ask me two more questions because I’ve got more things I’ve got to get done today.

AP: Well, I’ll keep it to one big one. What sort of impact do you think you’ve had on American comedy?

BROOKS: One never really sees themselves in relationship to the wide world. It’s rather impossible to judge your impact on moviegoers, your impact on people who like your films or who like your television. It’s serious. When they tell me, I’m glad to hear it, but frankly I’ve got to tell you honestly, I walk past the mirror and I say that’s a cute old guy. I don’t think it’s me! I’m not a cute old guy. I’m still 35, you know? We really can’t see ourselves and judge ourselves in relation to other people.
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