Category: Новини

The hit new “Spider-Man” became the first billion-dollar-grossing film of the pandemic era over the Christmas weekend, reaching the milestone while holding firmly to the North American box office top spot, industry watcher Exhibitor Relations said Sunday.

“Spider-Man: No Way Home,” British star Tom Holland’s third solo outing in the wildly popular role, has grossed $467.3 million in North America and $587 million internationally, raking in more than $1 billion over 12 days and proving analysts’ predictions that it could reach the milestone sum. 

It rocketed to that benchmark at a speed only matched by 2015’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” according to industry outlet Variety, and comes even as the rapid spread of the omicron COVID-19 variant casts a pall over holiday outings worldwide.

Sony’s latest installment to the comic-inspired series took an estimated $81.5 million in North America for the three-day period over the Christmas weekend, holding its top spot after scoring the third-biggest domestic opening of all time with more than $260 million, smashing early estimates. 

Its debut box office sales trailed only 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame” ($357 million) and the previous year’s “Avengers: Infinity War” ($258 million), according to the BoxOfficeMojo website.

With an estimated $23.8 million, “Sing 2,” Universal’s star-studded animated jukebox musical follow-up to “Sing,” was this weekend’s runner-up.

It beat out two other new series installments: “The Matrix Resurrections” from Warner Bros, which sees Keanu Reeves reprise his iconic role as Neo, underperformed at $12 million.

In fourth place, also earning less than expected, was 20th Century’s spy prequel to the “Kingsman” films, “The King’s Man,” with $6.4 million. 

Lionsgate’s “American Underdog” — based on the true story of Kurt Warner, who went from stocking shelves at a grocery store to National Football League MVP — slid in at number five on its opening weekend with an estimated $6.2 million. 

Rounding out the top 10 were:

“West Side Story” ($2.8 million)

“Licorice Pizza” ($2.3 million)

“A Journal for Jordan” ($2.2 million)

“Encanto” ($2 million)

“83” ($1.8 million)
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Three members of the K-pop superstar group BTS have tested positive for the coronavirus after returning from abroad, their management agency said.

RM and Jin were diagnosed with COVID-19 on Saturday evening, the Big Hit Music agency said in a statement. It earlier said another member, Suga, tested positive for the virus on Friday.

All three received their second shots in August, the agency said.

BTS is a seven-member boy band. The four other members are J-Hope, Jungkook, V and Jimin.

According to the agency, RM has exhibited no particular symptoms, while Jin is showing mild symptoms including light fever and is undergoing self-treatment at home. The agency said Friday that Suga wasn’t exhibiting symptoms and was administering self-care at home in accordance with the guidelines of the health authorities.

RM had tested negative after returning from the United States earlier this month following his personal schedule there. But he was later diagnosed with the virus ahead of his scheduled release from self-quarantine, the agency said.

After returning to South Korea this month, Jin underwent PCR tests twice — upon arrival and later before his release from self-quarantine — and tested negative both times. But he had flulike symptoms on Saturday afternoon before he took another PCR test that came back positive, the agency said. Media reports said he also had traveled to the U.S.

Suga, who has had a number of personal engagements in the United States during the band’s official time off, was diagnosed with COVID-19 during quarantine after returning from the U.S., the agency said.

The agency said it will continue to provide support for the three members for their speedy recovery. It said it will cooperate with the requests and guidelines of the South Korean health authorities.

Since their debut in 2013, BTS has garnered global recognition for their self-produced music and activism, which includes giving a speech at the United Nations and publicly calling out anti-Asian racism.

BTS was named artist of the year and favorite pop duo or group, and also won the favorite pop song award for Butter at the American Music Awards in November. In October, the group’s collaboration with British rock band Coldplay, My Universe, hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was BTS’ sixth Hot 100 No. 1. 
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President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden brought some Christmas Eve cheer to hospitalized children who aren’t well enough to go home for holidays.

It’s longstanding tradition for first ladies to visit Children’s National Hospital at Christmastime, but Joe Biden’s visit on Friday was a surprise. It marked the first time that a sitting president had joined the fun, the White House said.

The Bidens are set to help a group of children making lanterns as part of a winter craft project. Jill Biden will also sit by the Christmas tree and read “Olaf’s Night Before Christmas” to the kids. Video of her reading will also be shown in patient rooms throughout the hospital.

The Walt Disney Co. provided copies of the book for each patient so they can follow along with the first lady, the White House said. Each book includes a White House bookmark designed by her office.

The annual tradition of a hospital visit by the first lady dates to Bess Truman, who served in the role from 1945-1953.
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“There is nothing in the world like the food you can find in Louisiana,” Chef Isaac Toups, owner of popular New Orleans restaurant Toups Meatery, told VOA. “It’s such a unique mix of so many different cultures that converged here from around the globe. They brought their ideas about food with them and made a cuisine that is unparalleled.”

Immigrants’ culinary influences span centuries in New Orleans, a port city near the mouth of the Mississippi River. From French colonists who were the first Europeans to permanently settle in the area in 1699 to Vietnamese immigrants in the 1970s to recent arrivals from all over the world, newcomers have continually added to the DNA of local cuisine.

 

Liz Williams, founder of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum and author of New Orleans: A Food Biography, says there’s something unique about the way cultures – and cooking – have melded in this Southern city compared with other places in America.

“You can find every food in the world in New York City,” Williams said. “Go two blocks that way for this type of cuisine and six blocks the other way for that type of cuisine.”

New Orleans, by contrast, has spawned a gastronomical melting pot. Or, to use a local analogy, a gumbo.

“There’s no ‘New York City cuisine’ because all those immigrant groups didn’t meld together,” she said. “In New Orleans, though, all of these different immigrant cuisines have been influenced by New Orleans food and influenced New Orleans food. There’s a melding, merging and updating that seems to be constantly happening here that doesn’t happen in other places.”

Early settlers

Mention Louisiana cooking, and most people think of Creole cuisine, Cajun cuisine or some mixture of the two.

“When the two foods were first being established in Louisiana in the 18th century, they were two distinct cuisines from two distinct regions,” explained chef Donald Link, owner of several New Orleans restaurants all under the banner of the Link Restaurant Group. “Creole food was being created in New Orleans while Cajun food was in the more rural, southwestern part of the state.”

Creole culture in New Orleans arose from a mixture of the early French settlers, Spanish immigrants who followed shortly after, enslaved people taken from Africa and the Native Americans who were already here. Once the United States purchased Louisiana from France in 1803, waves of Anglo-Americans came to New Orleans as well as thousands who fled the Haitian Revolution taking place at the same time.

The confluence created a unique mix of cultures that is reflected in local cooking to this day.

“New Orleans is often called the most northern city in the Caribbean, and there was a lot of influence coming from Spanish-controlled Latin countries,” explained Link. “They brought their rice, beans, guisados and stews. And then the French brought their boudin and fricassees and all these celebrated techniques, and Africans had gumbo, which comes from the West African word for okra. It all came together to make what we call Creole food.”

Creole food is considered a cosmopolitan cuisine. It often features rich sauces, local herbs, ripe tomatoes and local seafood.

“You use what you have available to you,” said Brad Hollingsworth, owner of longtime New Orleans favorite Clancy’s. “Here, that means all these great, fresh fish from the Gulf of Mexico: speckled trout, pompano, red snapper, redfish, flounder and all the way down the line.”

Hollingsworth said cuisine from Creole culture is more focused on sauces than its Cajun counterpart. That, he said, is in large part because of the city’s ability to attract settlers from more cosmopolitan, cultured areas of France.

“They brought with them the French mother sauces that we really lean into at Clancy’s,” Hollingsworth said. “Bechamel, velouté, espagnole, hollandaise and tomato. We use them to complement our local fish or meat. It’s a combination of using what is geographically available and the techniques of the immigrant groups who came here.”

Cajun food, on the other hand, is known for being more rustic. It features meat-heavy, all-in-one-pot dishes like jambalaya and the rice-filled, spicy pork blood sausage known as boudin.

The Cajuns were also largely originally of French descent, but these French-influenced immigrants came from backcountry parts of Acadia in Canada rather than the major cities of France. They were forced out of Canada by the British in 1755, and about 3,000 arrived in rural Louisiana, where they interacted with German immigrants, Native Americans and enslaved people – all of whom added their own culinary influences.

“Cajun cuisine was more of a country food, while Creole cuisine was more of a city food,” said Toups, who grew up in the part of Louisiana known as Cajun Country, about two-and-a-half hours west of New Orleans. “That’s because the Cajuns were French fur trappers, not French-trained chefs like you might find in the city. As a poorer immigrant group, we had to add things to make our meals last. Fortunately, the region had tons of rice, which is why you find rice in our classics like boudin, jambalaya and gumbo.”

Continuing the evolution of a food

During the 19th and 20th centuries, thanks to improved methods of communication and better transportation, the two cuisines began to merge and inspire each other. They also continued to be influenced by other groups

German immigrants, for example, brought their passion for sausages to Cajun food, which helped create Louisiana’s famed spicy andouille. But the next big addition to the local food scene came when nearly 300,000 Italian immigrants – most of them Sicilian – moved to the city between 1884 and 1924.

“If you look at stuffed peppers in other places, they’re usually prepared with rice,” said Liz Williams, who will be releasing the book, Nana’s Creole Italian Table in March 2022, “but in New Orleans, our veggies are stuffed with breadcrumbs. That’s an effect of the Sicilians who arrived here.”

Red gravy, the Creole adaptation of tomato sauce – similar to how Creoles use a roux in gumbo as a thickener – and the introduction of sno-balls, made from shaved ice, to New Orleans are further examples of how New Orleanian and Sicilian cuisines merged.

“In Sicily and lots of Europe, it was common during hotter months to walk up a mountain to collect snow that you could flavor with syrup for a summertime treat,” Williams said. “In America, most places use crushed ice for more of a frozen sherbet. In New Orleans, however, shaved ice is used because it emulates more of what our Sicilians knew back home.”

In more recent decades, Mexican immigrants came to New Orleans to help rebuild after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. They, too, left an impact on their new home – not just on the cuisine, but also the way it’s served.

New Orleans is now dotted with dozens of taco trucks it didn’t have before the storm.

“Because the local ingredients are different here,” Williams explained, “so are the items sold. You’re not going to find fried oyster tacos in many places in the world, but you can find them in New Orleans.”

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Pots and pans in kitchens across one of the world’s most unique food cities clatter with creations that can’t be found anywhere else. At two-time James Beard award-winning chef Alon Shaya’s restaurant, Saba, Louisiana blue crab is a local addition to a traditionally Mediterranean hummus. Popular Indian restaurant Saffron NOLA adds curried seafood and basmati rice to gumbo, Louisiana’s state dish.

And Dong Phuong Bakery, an institution formed in 1982 after thousands of Vietnamese refugees arrived in New Orleans after the Vietnam War, has forever changed how many residents think of two of their most prized foods. Dong Phuong and their unique king cake – topped with cream cheese icing because bakery owner Huong Tran didn’t want her cake to be as sweet as the ones with traditional sugar icing – is one of the most popular in the city. Also, the bakery’s bread is sold by the thousands to restaurants across the city. The beloved Louisiana po’boy sandwich is now often made with Vietnamese-style banh mi bread instead of the more Louisiana-standard French bread.

“We came here as refugees with nothing, so of course it makes us so proud to have our new home appreciate what we can add to the food here,” explained Linh Tran Garza, president of Dong Phuong Bakery. “But we’re also continuously influenced by our home, as well.”

Garza points to the emergence of Viet-Cajun cuisine as proof that the two cultures are evolving with each other.

“It’s a great thing, I think. We should always be paying attention to the community and seeing how we can get better, give customers what they want, or create some new amazing food.”

Liz Williams said that is something New Orleans is especially able to do, perhaps more so than any other American city, because of its past.

“I think it has to do with us being originally colonized by the French while much of the rest of America was colonized by the British,” she said. “The British have a way of doing things and, historically, exercise less flexibility. The French, however, are more curious and more eager to make great food. They see it as an art, and they welcome new inspiration. The Creoles sought and welcomed that inspiration centuries ago, and I think our culture continues to do it today.”
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Keenan Scott II made his Broadway acting debut this week in “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” which is a remarkable milestone. It’s even more remarkable when you consider he also wrote it.

The actor-turned-playwright was pressed into acting duties at the last moment Tuesday night to keep his show open while all around Broadway battles spikes in COVID-19. He saved at least one performance.

“Like any other actor, I’ve always wanted to make my Broadway acting debut in whatever show wanted to hire me,” Scott says. “I did not know it was going to happen like this and on my show during the same season.”

His heroic efforts saved the night but it wasn’t enough. Late Thursday, COVID-19 claimed “Thoughts of a Colored Man,” joining “Waitress” and “Jagged Little Pill” as shows closed this winter due in part to rising infection rates.

Scott’s path to the stage was frantic on Tuesday. He had left the theater and was on a subway platform waiting for a train to take him home to Brooklyn when he got the call from producers: Come back to the John Golden Theatre right now.

Two non-COVID-19 illnesses had already stretched the seven-person cast but now an actor had tested positive for COVID-19. While everyone waited for a PCR result to see if it was a false positive, Scott was being readied.

He was hooked up to a microphone, crewmembers were piecing together a costume for him and checking his shoe size. A stage manager printed out the script and Scott highlighted his lines. At 7:55 p.m., the second test came back — positive.

Five minutes later, Scott was onstage.

 

“It was just beautiful to be up there with my brothers — we are all family now — and for me to be able to step in to save the show for that night so the audience can get what they deserve. They purchased tickets. They’re traveling to come see us. They are also battling and trying to stay diligent with being safe with this new variant but still wanting to come out and support us.”

“Thoughts of a Colored Man” is made up of related vignettes and set over the course of a single day in Brooklyn, where seven Black men discuss gentrification, violence, racial and sexual identity and what it means to be part of a community. Several characters, ranging in age from late teens to mid-60s, have specific themes to illustrate — Wisdom, Anger and Happiness.

Scott went on as Wisdom, a 65-year-old man. While the playwright had performed various characters in his play over the years at workshops and festivals, he had never played Wisdom before. But he knew the blocking and cues, and had originally trained as an actor and was a slam poet. He went on with a script in hand.

“That was a challenge of sorts, but it was really great to be up there. The actor me always wanted to be up there,” Scott says. “There wasn’t even enough time for me to get nervous or even wrap my head around what was what was happening. I think if I would’ve known the day before or something like that, you know, there’s time for nerves to build.”

Multiple Broadway shows, including “Hamilton,” “Aladdin,” “Mrs. Doubtfire” and “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” have called off performances in recent days because of breakthrough virus cases in their all-vaccinated casts and crews.

 

Other creators who have gone into their own Broadway shows include Sara Bareilles slipping into “Waitress,” Sting in “The Last Ship” and Green Day’s frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, who made several onstage visits to his show “American Idiot.” But they all had days or weeks to prepare.

“My wife actually said, ‘Are you proud of what you did tonight?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ Because as a performer, I know how hard it is even when you have four weeks of rehearsal and you’re fully prepared,” Scott says. “So to do what I did in a short amount of time — you know, half a costume, being able to hit my mark, hit the lights, hit most of my cues, being able to engage with my actors — I was truly proud of what I did.”
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For over four decades, novelist Dan Hurley has been writing 60-second-long stories about New Yorkers he met on the street. But apart from amusing passers-by with his literary talent, Hurley also happens to be an award-winning science writer. Anna Nelson met with Hurley on the streets of the Big Apple. Anna Rice narrates her story. Camera: Natalia Latukhina, Vladimir Badikov, Dmitry Vershinin, Alexander Barash
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