Category: Новини

Millions celebrate by dancing, exchanging food and drink, and smearing each other with colorful powder
…

new york — Ghostbusting is still a good business. 

“Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” collected $45.2 million in ticket sales over the weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday, handing Sony Pictures the studio’s first No. 1 film since last summer. 

The opening weekend for “Frozen Empire,” in 4,345 theaters, was nearly exactly the same as the $44 million launch for “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” in 2021. “Afterlife” rebooted the franchise with a sequel built around the descendants (Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace) of Harold Ramis’ Egon Spengler, along with Paul Rudd’s seismologist Gary Grooberson. 

Neither film has been a hit with critics, but audiences have been more receptive. “Frozen Empire” garnered a B+ CinemaScore from moviegoers, a tick down from the A- score for “Afterlife.” “Frozen Empire” isn’t assured of profitability, but it will hope for sustained business over spring break. 

“Ghostbusters” films tend to make a low impact internationally. In 25 overseas markets, “Frozen Empire” added $16.4 million. 

The latest “Ghostbusters” cost about $100 million to make. After Jason Reitman took over directing duties from his father, Ivan Reitman, to helm “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” “Frozen Empire” is directed by Gil Kenan, co-writer of “Afterlife.” 

Those two sequels took “Ghostbusters” in a more family-oriented, albeit PG-13 rated, direction, with original cast members Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson and Bill Murray returning in supporting roles. After the 2016 female-led “Ghostbusters” prompted a backlash, Sony rebooted the franchise. 

The weekend’s other new wide release was “Immaculate,” the horror film starring Sydney Sweeney as an American nun at a remote Italian convent. The film, released by Neon following a premiere at SXSW, debuted with $5.4 million on 2,354 screens. Sweeney’s ascending star power helped make “Anyone But You” one of the most successful rom-coms in years. But “Immaculate,” an independent production that cost less than $10 million to make, isn’t getting the same bounce. 

“The movie features the popular Sydney Sweeney, but horror movies are not cast-driven,” wrote David A. Gross for the consulting firm Franchise Entertainment Research. “They’re driven by the hook: the evil doll, the wicked smile, the invisible or silent presence, the found footage, the possessed child. That’s what terrifies the horror crowd. The hook is not completely clear here.” 

The No. 2 spot went to “Dune: Part Two,” which continues to hold well. The Denis Villeneuve-directed sci-fi sequel starring Timothee Chalamet added $17.6 million in its fourth weekend of release, bringing the Warner Bros. release’s domestic total to $233.4 million. Overseas sales are just as strong, adding up to a $574.4 million worldwide haul. 

After two weeks atop the box office, Universal’s “Kung Fu Panda 4” slid to third place with $16.8 million over its third weekend. The well-performing DreamWorks animated sequel is up to $133.2 million domestic. It debuted with $25.7 million in China, where the movies have historically been popular. When the 2008 “Kung Fu Panda” was released, its success partly inspired China to expand its own film production. 

Estimated ticket sales are for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday. 

1. “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire,” $45.2 million. 

2. “Dune: Part Two,” $17.6 million. 

3. “Kung Fu Panda 4,” $16.8 million. 

4. “Immaculate,” $5.4 million. 

5. “Arthur the King,” $4.4 million. 

6. “Late Night With the Devil,” $2.8 million. 

7. “Imaginary,” $2.8 million. 

8. “Love Lies Bleeding,” $1.6 million. 

9. “Cabrini,” $1.4 million. 

10. “Bob Marley: One Love,” $1.1 million.
    …

MONTREAL — American figure skating star Ilia Malinin is a world champion — and a world-record holder.

Malinin put on a dominant display that included a jaw-dropping six quad jumps — including his patented quad axel — to snag the men’s singles crown Saturday night at the world championships.

After placing third in Thursday’s short program, the 19-year-old scored a world record 227.79 in the free program while skating to the Succession soundtrack to bring his total to 333.76 — more than 20 points than the rest of the field.

Malinin dropped to the ice in disbelief after presenting his routine to a rowdy Bell Centre crowd that cheered and clapped the whole way.

He dethroned two-time defending world champion Shoma Uno of Japan, who fell to fourth (280.85) after missing two quad jumps to start his program.

Yuma Kagiyama of Japan won silver (309.65) and Adam Siao Him Fa of France claimed bronze (284.39). Siao Him Fa climbed from 19th to third with an awe-inspiring display of his own, which included a backflip.

Earlier Saturday, 2022 Olympic champions Madison Chock and Evan Bates of the United States defended their ice dance world title with a season-best total score of 222.20.

Canada’s Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier won silver (219.68) and Italy’s Charlene Guignard and Marco Fabbri claimed bronze (216.52).

It’s Montreal’s first time hosting the event since 1932. The city was supposed to stage the 2020 championship but the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the competition.

Boston will hold the 2025 competition.
…

NEW YORK — Babar author Laurent de Brunhoff, who revived his father’s popular picture book series about an elephant-king and presided over its rise to a global, multimedia franchise, has died. He was 98.

De Brunhoff, a Paris native who moved to the U.S. in the 1980s, died Friday at his home in Key West, Florida, after being in hospice care for two weeks, according to his widow, Phyllis Rose.

Just 12 years old when his father, Jean de Brunhoff, died of tuberculosis, Laurent was an adult when he drew upon his own gifts as a painter and storyteller and released dozens of books about the elephant who reigns over Celesteville, among them Babar at the Circus and Babar’s Yoga for Elephants. He preferred using fewer words than his father did, but his illustrations faithfully mimicked Jean’s gentle, understated style.

“Together, father and son have woven a fictive world so seamless that it is nearly impossible to detect where one stopped and the other started,” author Ann S. Haskell wrote in The New York Times in 1981.

The series has sold millions of copies worldwide and was adapted for a television program and such animated features as Babar: The Movie and Babar: King of the Elephants. Fans ranged from Charles de Gaulle to Maurice Sendak, who once wrote, “If he had come my way, how I would have welcomed that little elephant and smothered him with affection.”

De Brunhoff would say of his creation, “Babar, c’est moi” (“that’s me”), telling National Geographic in 2014 that “he’s been my whole life, for years and years, drawing the elephant.”

The books’ appeal was far from universal. Some parents shied from the passage in the debut, The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant, about Babar’s mother being shot and killed by hunters. Numerous critics called the series racist and colonialist, citing Babar’s education in Paris and its influence on his (presumed) Africa-based regime. In 1983, Chilean author Ariel Dorfman would call the books an “implicit history that justifies and rationalizes the motives behind an international situation in which some countries have everything and other countries almost nothing.”

“Babar’s history,” Dorfman wrote, “is none other than the fulfillment of the dominant countries’ colonial dream.”

Adam Gopnik, a Paris-based correspondent for The New Yorker, defended Babar, writing in 2008 that it “is not an unconscious expression of the French colonial imagination; it is a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination and its close relation to the French domestic imagination.”

De Brunhoff himself acknowledged finding it “a little embarrassing to see Babar fighting with Black people in Africa. He especially regretted Babar’s Picnic, a 1949 publication that included crude caricatures of Blacks and American Indians — and asked his publisher to withdraw it.

De Brunhoff was the eldest of three sons born to Jean de Brunhoff and Cecile de Brunhoff, a painter. Babar was created when Cecile de Brunhoff, the namesake for the elephant’s kingdom and Babar’s wife, improvised a story for her kids.

“My mother started to tell us a story to distract us,” de Brunhoff told National Geographic in 2014. “We loved it, and the next day we ran to our father’s study, which was in the corner of the garden, to tell him about it. He was very amused and started to draw. And that was how the story of Babar was born. My mother called him Bebe elephant (French for baby). It was my father who changed the name to Babar. But the first pages of the first book, with the elephant killed by a hunter and the escape to the city, was her story.”

The debut was released in 1931 through the family-run publisher Le Jardin Des Modes. Babar was immediately well received, and Jean de Brunhoff completed four more Babar books before dying six years later, at age 37. Laurent’s uncle, Michael, helped publish two additional works, but no one else added to the series until after World War II, when Laurent, a painter by then, decided to bring it back.

“Gradually I began to feel strongly that a Babar tradition existed and that it ought to be perpetuated,” he wrote in The New York Times in 1952.

De Brunhoff was married twice, most recently to the critic and biographer Phyllis Rose, who wrote the text to many of the recent Babar publications, including the 2017 release billed as the finale, Babar’s Guide to Paris. He had two children, Anne and Antoine, but the author did not consciously write for young people.

“I never really think of children when I do my books,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2017. “Babar was my friend and I invented stories with him, but not with kids in a corner of my mind. I write it for myself.” 
…

ROME — Maurizio Pollini, a Grammy-winning Italian pianist who performed frequently at La Scala opera house in Milan, has died. He was 82.

Pollini died Saturday, La Scala said in a statement. The announcement didn’t specify a cause of death, but Pollini had been forced to cancel a concert at the Salzburg Festival in 2022 because of heart problems.

During a six decades-long international career, Pollini’s repertoire expanded beyond the standard classics. He embraced early 20th-century masterpieces by Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern and postwar modernists such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono.

La Scala defined the pianist as “one of the great musicians of our time and a fundamental reference in the artistic life of the theater for over 50 years.”

Pollini was considered a pianist with unique intellectual power, whose unrivalled technique and interpretive drive compelled listeners to think deeply.

He was born in Milan on January 5, 1942, into a family of artists. His father, Gino Pollini, was a violinist and a leading rationalist architect. His mother, Renata Melotti, sang and played the piano, as did her brother, Fausto Melotti, who was also a pioneer of abstract sculpture.

“I grew up in a house with art and artists,” Pollini said in an interview. “Old works and modern works coexisted together as part of life.”

Pollini began giving concerts before his 10th birthday, performing Chopin’s Etudes at age 14 and then winning the International Chopin Piano Competition at 18, as the youngest foreign pianist among a group of 89 contestants.

Arthur Rubinstein, president of the jury, reportedly said that the young pianist “already plays better than any of us.”

After his first international recognition, however, Pollini put his career on hold to study, explaining that performing right away would have been for him “a little premature.” 

“I wanted to study, get to know the repertoire better, play the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms,” he said.

In the late 1960s, Pollini participated in improvised concerts in factories and programs for students and workers at La Scala, conducted by longtime friend Claudio Abbado.

During his long international career, he also collaborated with other famous conductors, including Riccardo Muti, Daniel Barenboim and Riccardo Chailly.

Pollini performed his first American tour in 1968. From the 1970s to the ’90s, he made a series of recordings with the Deutsche Grammophon label, becoming a celebrated interpreter of classics like Beethoven, Schumann and Schubert.

His albums won several awards, including a Grammy in 2007 for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without orchestra) for Chopin: Nocturnes.

He is survived by his wife, Marilisa, and his son, Daniele, also an acclaimed pianist and conductor. 
…