Category: Новини

Fans of an Indian movie star with a cult following thronged movie theaters and celebrated with dancing and prayers as his latest film hit screens on Thursday.

Hundreds of avid supporters of Rajinikanth, one of India’s biggest movie superstars, carried photo cutouts and flower garlands as they made their way to a theater in Mumbai to watch his latest film, Jailer. The first screening began at 6 a.m. local time.

When Rajinikanth appeared on screen, the theater stopped the movie for a minute as fans danced and cheered, rejoicing in his return after a period of two years.

Popular movie stars are treated like gods in India, often worshipped like deities by their fans.

Rajinikanth is one of Asia’s highest-paid actors, known for his superhero stunts. He enjoys a devoted fan base that cuts across generations and even continents. His films have broken box-office records in India and in countries like Malaysia and the United Kingdom, both of which have large Tamil-speaking populations.

Born Shivaji Rao Gaekwad, the actor today uses only one name. He once worked as a bus conductor for three years before attending acting school. He started in small roles as villains in Tamil cinema and worked his way up, before landing roles in Bollywood, the Hindi-language film industry based in Mumbai.

Some offices in the southern cities of Chennai and Bengaluru declared Thursday a holiday so his fans could watch the movie.

“Scientists say that time machines are not possible, but Rajinikanth has the power to take us back to childhood,” said one fan named Arun, who watched the movie on opening day in Mumbai.

In Jailer, Rajinikanth plays a prison warden who learns that a criminal gang is trying to rescue its leader from the prison, and he sets out to stop them.

Rajinikanth, 72, has acted in more than 160 movies spanning more than five decades in several Indian languages, including Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali and Malayalam.
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When faced with the task of painting a giant mural at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, artist Esmeralda Vasquez found it was best not to do it alone. More than 160 volunteers helped out, as reported in this story by VOA’s Natasha Mozgovaya.
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The 75th Emmy Awards ceremony is postponed to Jan. 15, the Television Academy and broadcast network Fox said on Thursday, as Hollywood writers and actors strike over labor disputes with major studios.

The Emmys were originally slated to air on Fox on Sept. 18, and nominations for the highest honors in television were announced in July, just before the dual work stoppage was declared.

Hollywood actors last month joined film and television writers who have been on picket lines since May after negotiations between the Writers Guild of America and major studios reached an impasse.

It is the first time that both the writers’ and actors’ unions have gone on strike together since 1960, effectively halting production of scripted television shows and films and impacting businesses across the entertainment world’s orbit.

HBO drama “Succession,” the story of a family’s cutthroat fight for control of a media empire, leads the nominees for television’s Emmy awards alongside fellow HBO show “The Last of Us,” a dystopian videogame adaptation.

Others competing for best drama include HBO’s “Game of Thrones” prequel “House of the Dragon,” vacation-gone-wrong story “The White Lotus” and Star Wars series “Andor.” Previous nominees “Better Call Saul,” “Yellowjackets” and “The Crown” are also in the mix.

The Emmy Awards will be broadcast live on Fox from the Peacock Theater at LA Live on Jan. 15. The Creative Arts Emmys — a class of awards recognizing technical and similar achievements — will take place on Jan. 6 and 7.

The show will be executive-produced by Jesse Collins, Dionne Harmon and Jeannae Rouzan-Clay of Jesse Collins Entertainment.
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Sixto Rodriguez, who lived in obscurity in the U.S. only to find musical success in South Africa and a stardom he was unaware of, died Tuesday in Detroit. He was 81.

Rodriguez’s music career flamed out early in the U.S., but it took off after the singer and songwriter became the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man.

His death was announced on the Sugarman.org website and confirmed Wednesday by his granddaughter, Amanda Kennedy.

He died following a short illness, according to his wife, Konny Rodriguez, 72.

A 2013 Associated Press story referred to Rodriguez as “the greatest protest singer and songwriter that most people never heard of.”

His albums flopped in the United States in the 1970s, but — unknown to him — he later became a star in South Africa where his songs protesting the Vietnam War, racial inequality, abuse of women and social mores inspired white liberals horrified by the country’s brutal racial segregation system of apartheid.

Swedish filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul’s documentary Searching for Sugar Man presented Rodriguez to a much larger audience. The film tells of two South Africans’ mission to seek out the fate of their musical hero. It won the Academy Award for best documentary in 2013.

Rodriguez was “more popular than Elvis” in South Africa, Stephen “Sugar” Segerman said in 2013. The Cape Town record store owner’s nickname comes from the Rodriguez song Sugar Man.

As his popularity in South Africa grew, Rodriguez lived in Detroit. But his fans in South Africa believed he also was famous in the United States. They heard various stories that the musician had died dramatically.

In 1996, Segerman and journalist Carl Bartholomew-Strydom set out to learn the truth. Their efforts led them to Detroit, where they found Rodriguez working on construction sites.

“It’s rock-and-roll history now. Who would-a thought?” Rodriguez told The Associated Press a decade ago.

Rodriguez said he just “went back to work” after his music career fizzled, raising a family that includes three daughters and launching several unsuccessful campaigns for public office. He made a living through manual labor in Detroit.

Still, he never stopped playing his music.

“I felt I was ready for the world, but the world wasn’t ready for me,” Rodriguez said. “I feel we all have a mission — we have obligations. Those turns on the journey, different twists — life is not linear.”

Konny Rodriguez said the couple met in 1972 while both were students at Wayne State University in Detroit and married in the early 1980s. Although still married at the time of his death, the couple had been separated for a number of years, she said Wednesday while looking through some of Sixto Rodriguez’s memorabilia.

“He loved college. He was born to be taught, to teach himself,” Konny Rodriguez said. “The music was more to bring people together. He would play anywhere, anytime. That’s where I noticed him. He was walking down Cass Avenue with a guitar and a black bag. He was a really eccentric guy.”

The two albums she said he recorded in 1969 and 1971 “didn’t do well.”

“I’m sure that was still in his head,” Konny Rodriguez added. “Then in 1979, I picked up the phone and it was a guy with an Australian accent who said Rodriguez ‘must come to Australia because he’s very famous here.'”

She said they toured Australia in 1979 and 1981 and later learned about the impact of his music in South Africa.

“Apartheid was going on,” she said. “Frank Sinatra had a full-page ad, ‘Do not go to South Africa.’ We didn’t.”

After the end of apartheid, Sixto Rodriguez did travel to South Africa and perform in front of his fans there, she said.

“He did so well in South Africa. It was insane,” Konny Rodriguez said.

Sixto Rodriguez later pursued royalties he did not receive from his music being used and played in South Africa.

Some of Rodriguez songs were banned by the apartheid regime, and many bootlegged copies were made on tapes and later CDs. 
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Robbie Robertson, The Band’s lead guitarist and songwriter who in such classics as “The Weight” and “Up on Cripple Creek” mined American music and folklore and helped reshape contemporary rock, died Wednesday at 80. 

Robertson died in Los Angeles, surrounded by family, “after a long illness,” publicist Ray Costa said in a statement. 

From their years as Bob Dylan’s masterful backing group to their own stardom as embodiments of old-fashioned community and virtuosity, The Band profoundly influenced popular music in the 1960s and ’70s, first by literally amplifying Dylan’s polarizing transition from folk artist to rock star and then by absorbing some of Dylan’s own influences as they fashioned a new sound immersed in the American past. 

The Canadian-born Robertson was a high school dropout and one-man melting pot — part-Jewish, part-Mohawk and Cayuga — who fell in love with the seemingly limitless sounds and byways of his adopted country and wrote out of a sense of amazement and discovery at a time when the Vietnam War had alienated millions of young Americans.

The Band started out as supporting players for rockabilly star Ronnie Hawkins in the early 1960s and through their years together in bars and juke joints forged a depth and versatility that made them able to take on virtually any kind of music.

Stellar start 

Besides Robertson, the group featured drummer-singer Levon Helm, bassist-singer-songwriter Rick Danko, keyboardist singer-songwriter Richard Manuel and all-around musical wizard Garth Hudson. They were originally called the Hawks but ended up as The Band — a conceit their fans would say they earned — because people would point to them when they were with Dylan and refer to them as “the band.” 

They remain defined by their first two albums, “Music from Big Pink” and “The Band,” both released in the late 1960s.  

The rock scene was turning away from the psychedelic extravagances of the Beatles’ “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and a wave of sound effects, long jams and strange lyrics.  

“Music from Big Pink,” named for the old house near Woodstock, New York, where Band members lived and gathered, was for many the sound of coming home. The mood was intimate, the lyrics alternately playful, cryptic and yearning, drawn from blues, gospel, folk and country music. The Band itself seemed to stand for selflessness and a shared and vital history, with all five members making distinctive contributions and appearing in publicity photos in plain, dark clothes. 

Through the “Basement Tapes” made with Dylan in 1967 and through the group’s own albums, The Band has been widely credited as a founding source for Americana or roots music. Fans and peers would speak of their lives being changed.  

Eric Clapton broke up with his British supergroup Cream and journeyed to Woodstock in hopes he could join The Band, which influenced albums ranging from The Grateful Dead’s “Workingman’s Dead” to Elton John’s “Tumbleweed Connection.” The Band’s songs were covered by Joan Baez, the Staple Singers and many others. 

Like Dylan, Robertson was a self-taught musicologist and storyteller who absorbed everything American from the novels of William Faulkner to the scorching blues of Howlin’ Wolf to the gospel harmonies of the Swan Silvertones.  

At times his songs sounded not just created but unearthed. In “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” he imagined the Civil War through the eyes of a defeated Confederate. In “The Weight,” with its lead vocals passed around among group members like a communal wine glass, he evoked a pilgrim’s arrival to a town where nothing seems impossible. 

At Woodstock

The Band played at the 1969 Woodstock festival, not far from where they lived, and became newsworthy enough to appear on the cover of Time magazine. But the spirit behind their best work was already dissolving. Albums such as “Stage Fright” and “Cahoots” were disappointing even for Robertson, who would acknowledge that he was struggling to find fresh ideas. While Manuel and Danko were both frequent contributors to songs during their “Basement Tapes” days, by the time of “Cahoots,” released in 1971, Robertson was the dominant writer. 

They toured frequently, recording the acclaimed live album “Rock of Ages” at Madison Square Garden and joining Dylan for 1974 shows that led to another highly praised concert release, “Before the Flood.”  

But in 1976, after Manuel broke his neck in a boating accident, Robertson decided he needed a break from the road and organized rock’s ultimate sendoff, an all-star gathering at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom that included Dylan, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Muddy Waters and many others. The concert was filmed by Martin Scorsese and was the basis for his celebrated documentary “The Last Waltz,” released in 1978. 

Robertson had intended The Band to continue recording together but “The Last Waltz” helped permanently sever his friendship with Helm, whom he had once looked to as an older brother. Helm accused Robertson of greed and outsized ego, noting that Robertson had ended up owning their musical catalog and calling “The Last Waltz” a vanity project designed to glorify Robertson. In response, Robertson contended that he had taken control of the group because the others — excepting Hudson — were too burdened by drug and alcohol problems to make decisions on their own. 

“It hit me hard that in a band like ours, if we weren’t operating on all cylinders, it threw the whole machine off course,” Robertson wrote in his memoir Testimony, published in 2016. 

Solo career, soundtracks

The Band regrouped without Robertson in the early 1980s, and Robertson went on to a long career as a solo artist and soundtrack composer. His self-titled 1987 album was certified gold and featured the hit single “Show Down at Big Sky” and the ballad “Fallen Angel,” a tribute to Manuel, who was found dead in 1986 in what was ruled a suicide (Danko died of heart failure in 1999 and Helm of cancer in 2012). 

Robertson, who moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s while the others stayed near Woodstock, remained close to Scorsese and helped oversee the soundtracks for “The Color of Money,” “The King of Comedy,” “The Departed” and “The Irishman” and the upcoming “Killers of the Flower Moon.” He also produced the Neil Diamond album “Beautiful Noise” and explored his heritage through such albums as “Music for the Native Americans” and “Contact from the Underworld of Redboy.” 

Robertson married the Canadian journalist Dominique Bourgeois in 1967. They had three children before divorcing. His other survivors include his second wife, Janet Zuccarini, and five grandchildren.
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Modernist structures designed by African Americans targeted for preservation
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