Monthly Archives: January 2022

In the second exclusive interview that we filmed with Richard Rogers, the late British architect explained the story behind the Centre Pompidou that he designed with Renzo Piano and the controversy it generated.

The interview is one of a series Dezeen filmed with Rogers to coincide with a retrospective of his work at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2013.

Rogers, who passed away at the age of 88 last month, was one of the world's best-known architects and a pioneer of high-tech architecture.

Among his most notable works was the Centre Pompidou, an inside-out cultural centre in Paris that he completed in 1977 with Italian architect Piano, a fellow high-tech pioneer.

In this interview, filmed at the Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners studio in London, Rogers recalled the tumultuous process of designing the Centre Pompidou, which was initially "vilified" before becoming "the most visited building" in Europe.

However, he also described the flak he received from people who hated the building. He recalled a conversation with a woman who struck up a conversation with him outside the centre: "I said that I designed it and she hit me on the head with her umbrella."

Read on for a transcript of the interview below:

"The Pompidou it was actually called Beaubourg when we did the competition, and Pompidou when Pompidou [the former president of France] died a year before completion was a competition for a museum, a library, a music centre and design centre. I'm going to say in the centre of Paris but in a very rundown area.

"When we did our first studies, it showed that there was no public space nearby. So, we created this big piazza. I think there were 681 entries. Strangely enough, there were no other ones with a big piazza.

"The piazza is really critical to the workings of the Pompidou and in a sense, it was a Fun Palace, using a very well known phrase by Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price of the post-war era, shall we say, it wasn't just a building.

"So the idea was you had a public space horizontal, and you'd go up the facade of the building in streets in the air and escalators sloping across it. So the whole thing became very much dynamic. People come to see people as well as to see art and people come to meet people. So we wanted to make that as packed as a theatre.

"And on the facade in those days was an electronic screen that could connect up with any other museum or cultural centre. We had it all going very well until Pompidou died and Giscard [the subsequent president of France] came along and he said those terrible words that sunk it with no hands.

"He said, 'but what side, the left or the right control it?' and I said 'oh, it's not political'. And he said, 'can't pull my leg, it's a political weapon. I don't want it'. So that died.

Architects and creatives remember "superstar" architect Richard Rogers

"Having said that, what Renzo and I had worked out was, of course, the French are fantastic at promenading. So they promenade through the facade, they promenaded through the piazza, and then all these other people came. It was attacked, vilified whilst we were designing, from the first day onwards. Nobody said one kind word until it opened and when people started to queue up, then it became open.

"I remember once, standing outside on a rainy day, and there was this small woman with an umbrella she said, 'do you want to have shelter?' and I said, 'yes, thank you'. We started talking as one does in the rain. And she said, 'what do you think of this building? The Pompidou'.

"Stupidly, which I'd never normally do, I said that I designed it and she hit me on the head with her umbrella. That was just typical of the general reaction of the people, especially during the design and construction stage, destroying their beautiful Paris.

"And of course, you know, it does not fit in within the sense of what was Paris. All good architecture is modern in its time. Gothic was a fantastic shock; the Renaissance was another shock to all the little medieval buildings.

"I come from Florence and the Strozzi palace, which is one of the largest palaces in Florence, which is, I suppose, four storeys going eight storeys, and there's a famous document of one of the neighbours saying 'you're building a building completely out of scale with ours', a tower next to it. Because, of course, from one to eight is a big difference.

The shock of the new is always rather difficult to get over

"So changes, the shock of the new is always rather difficult to get over. Though it's much better, it's got better, partly because I'm older, people looking at the buildings of mine and Renzo's, they either love them or hate them, so they're more used to it, but boy was that hard.

"So then we said, 'okay, we'll have fantastic flexibility'. The one thing we knew about this age is it's all about change, if there's one constant, it's change. So we said that 'we will make massive floors', which were in fact the size of two football pitches with no vertical interruptions, structure on the outside, mechanical service on the outside, people movement on the outside and theoretically you can do anything you want on those floors.

"We didn't say where the museum should go, where the library should go, and of course, the library changed radically because when we started there were books and by the time we finished it books were almost finished because it was IT.

"So again, that's about change, because you needed it to have a library, you needed it to have different types of spaces, all these racks of books, you know, more or less go, and so on. Which is typical of an evolving, lively institution, whether it's an office building or even a house, it has to respond.

"And today's buildings, unlike shall we say the buildings of the past when we used to say architecture is like frozen music, actually, I would suggest today, architecture is more like jazz, dynamic jazz, jazz that you can interpret in different ways within a beat in a framework. So we were looking also at that as the whole modern art and modern thinking was going.

Centre Pompidou is high-tech architecture's inside-out landmark

"Renzo and I, well we've been very close friends, we met about two years before we did Pompidou and now we speak at least once a week and we go sailing together so we're very, very close. It's quite difficult to divide us.

"If you look at our earlier work, we did the house in Wimbledon for my parents, which is a single storey house and steel and it's highly insulated, it's transparent, the bathrooms are in a very compact way, everything can move, all the partitions can move. You can see a link from that to the Pompidou. The difference of about 1,000 times the scale.

"If you look at Renzo's work, beautifully structured work. He's done some wonderful laboratories, tremendous engineering, construction processes and buildings. His father was a contractor, a major contractor.

"If you put those together, you could argue that it sort of goes in that in that direction. Of course, it's not true, because he probably could have gone in another direction.

We wanted to make a building that clearly was of our period

"We wanted to make a building which clearly was of our period, which caught the zeitgeist of the now. The big thing in those days, the 60s, is the student movement and in France, it is said that Pompidou had a plane revving up because he thought he'd lost the war against the students, the intellectuals, and the workers.

"Literally, with that, that moment changed history, certainly for Europe. And it looked as though there'll be a revolution. In fact, it didn't happen. But of course, we captured some of it in the building. The facade on the building, if you look more carefully, which, I've talked about the screen, was very much about the riots. It was very much about Vietnam.

"I met my wife, with other friends who were escaping the draft, not that she was but her friends were. There was a highly active period of politics. And you could argue that was also part of the concept that this is a dynamic period, a period which we know will change but we want to catch what's going on at the moment.

"Now, having said that, we rationalised it like hell. I mean, if you look at the written documents, there are very much documents which tell you about the building. Now some are post rationalisations, some are rationalisations, shall we say.

"But overall, yes, we said we will put the building not as you want it, in those days in the middle of the piazza, but actually on one side to give the people a place to meet, we'll put it on the street because we'll keep the nature of the long street.

It is a place for the meeting of all people

"We need a movement system which is dynamic, I hate going up in sort of internal lifts with people's heads in my stomach or vice versa. I mean, why not give them the view? Movement should be celebrated.

"Now is moving celebrated? How much is that something that is intellectual, how much is it something that you feel, you can't divide those things. So we had those concepts.

"There were the Metabolists in Japan who were working, there was Archigram in England. I went to school with Peter Cook in the Archigram movement. And all those were definitely influences.

"The piazza in Siena. I don't think we'd go to look at the piazza in Siena, I think we didn't even realise we'd done a piazza sloping a bit like Siena until we did it. But of course, in our minds, Siena must have been there and many other wonderful Italian piazzas.

"The whole idea of Pompidou was that it is a place for the meeting of all people. And the success of it was that the French took it over and it was the most visited building certainly in Europe."

Read the rest here:

Woman "hit me on the head with her umbrella" says Richard Rogers - Dezeen

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid warned on Monday during an online press conference that one of the greatest threats Israel faces in the new year will be charges of apartheid by U.N. groups with sports the first area affected. Their effort will be to get organizations to take Israel out of sporting and cultural events, he said.

To counter this expected trend, Israels Ministry of Foreign Affairs would devote considerable resources in 2022 to countering those efforts, he said.

The concern here from the foreign ministry is that you have three or four different legal proceedings in which allegations of apartheid have been made and that at least one of them may end up endorsing these allegations, Yuval Shany, professor of international law at Hebrew University and research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, told JNS.

He said Israel faces charges of apartheid at 1) the U.N.s Commission of Inquiry, which has an open-ended mandate to look into allegations of Israeli discrimination; 2) the Geneva-based U.N. Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), which is reviewing a Palestinian Authority complaint against Israel accusing it of apartheid; and 3) the International Criminal Court (ICC), where certain Palestinian groups have submitted allegations concerning Israeli practices in the West Bank being a form of apartheid.

All of these tracks are aimed essentially at obtaining a legal, or quasi-legal, finding that Israeli practices amount to systemic discrimination or a form of apartheid in international law, he said.

Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, told JNS that the Commission of Inquiry is the primary threat. The commission was established by the Human Rights Council following Israels 11-day conflict with Hamas in the Gaza Strip last May. Neuer said it has become standard practice for the United Nations to investigate Israel for alleged war crimes after each round of fighting, but this time the commission is unprecedented in its scope.

It will investigate so-called systematic discriminationmass discrimination within Israel and the territories, he said. Its quite clear that its going to accuse Israel of apartheid. This inquiry has no end, meaning it doesnt last six months or a year. It will be reporting twice every year.

Neuer said the new mandate in which the commission is authorized to continuously investigate Israel is inspired by the zeitgeist in America where accusations of systemic discrimination have become the fashionable trend. He sees the focus on racism as a modern form of anti-Semitism, noting that Jews have been attacked throughout history as being opposed to whatever society identified as the highest virtue. Today, in 2022, anti-racism is the highest virtue, and so its not accidental that Israel is accused of being intrinsically racist, he said.

Shany, who noted that the apartheid charge has been leveled at Israel for some time, wouldnt speculate as to why its gaining momentum now. He agreed that its possible that the political temper in the United States is a contributing factor but said its probably a combination of many reasons.

Pnina Sharvit Baruch, a senior research associate at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) and head of its program on law and national security, told JNS that Israels opponents have at least one practical reason for pushing apartheid charges.

She said the two reports that will be produced by the Commission of Inquiry and the Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination are designed to push the new ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, to prioritize the investigation against Israel started by his predecessor, Fatou Bensouda. Khan is more pragmatic than Bensouda, she noted, and based on his own comments, Im not sure he would like to put our case at the top of his priorities, she said.

So this would be an attempt, first, to push him into pursuing the investigation and, second, to try to persuade him to include in the investigation also claims about apartheid because apartheid is one of the crimes against humanity included in the Rome Statute, she explained, referring to the treaty that established the ICC.

Of course, more generally, its part of the campaign against Israelto try to get more countries, organizations and companies to boycott Israel, to divest from Israel under the whole idea of the BDS movement, she said.

She doesnt see a way to stop these U.N. bodies from condemning Israel, noting that the United Nations has appointed South African Navi Pillay, known for her hostile views to Israel, as head of the Commission of Inquiry. She said its a disturbing development. Apartheid had been considered going too far, and now theres an attemptit might succeed, tooto put it within legitimate criticism against Israel. I think thats very bad for Israel.

As for Lapids belief that sports and cultural events would be the first target, Shany agreed that Lapid was right in pointing out that this is going to put wind in the sails of the BDS movement and basically render cultural, educational, sports relations with Israeli counterparts as politically unacceptable in the eyes of increasing segments of the population.

Neuer went further. He said in the United States, during the recent Gaza conflict, legislators like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) condemned Israel. (She had tweeted: Apartheid states arent democracies.)

During that time, Jews in America were being attacked on the streets in Los Angeles, in New York and elsewhere, and that was in connection with the war that was happening in Israel, said Neuer. Accusing the Jewish state of being an evil apartheid state is a means to delegitimize and demonizeand even physically attackJews. I think this cannot be underestimated. Exclusions from certain international bodies would be only the tip of the iceberg.

The post Lapid: Israel will face increasing allegations that it is an apartheid state in 2022 appeared first on JNS.org.

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Lapid: Israel will face increasing allegations that it is an apartheid state in 2022 - Cleveland Jewish News

New Release Wall

Wes Andersons latest film, The French Dispatch (20th Century Studios), was such a dizzying, fast-moving, visual feast that it begs to be viewed again on physical media, if only to pause on each impeccably art-directed frame to catch details you missed. In that context, the movie could be about anything, really, and wed just be content to look at it. But it does happen to be about the golden age of American literary magazines, full of archly drawn intellectuals, all of whom are portrayed by a stunning roster of A-list stars delivering Andersonian dialogue in the deadpan manner weve all come to know and love.

Also Available:

The Addams Family 2 (Universal Pictures Home Entertainment) The sweethearts of creepy and ooky return in an animated family feature.

Antlers (Searchlight Pictures) Guillermo del Toro produced this atmospheric horror film starring Keri Russell, Jesse Plemons, and a mysterious forest entity (see: name of movie).

Last Night in Soho (Universal Pictures Home Entertainment) Anya Taylor-Joy shares a consciousness with Thomasin McKenzie in this psychological horror film from Edgar Wright.

Spencer (Neon) Pablo Larrains moving a-few-days-in-the-life biopic of the late Princess Diana allows Kristen Stewart to shine, yet again, as one of her generations best actors.

New Indie

Elisabeth Moss isnt playing Courtney Love in Her Smell (Gunpowder & Sky), and her fictional band isnt Hole in this harrowing exploration of rock stardom and addiction. Then again, shes not not Courtney Love, and that band is basically Hole, but who cares, really? Moss tears it up and delivers the kind of raging, aggressive, obnoxious, tender, and sorrowful performance for which actors usually find themselves nominated for this or that award. If you can handle being inside this characters tortured head for 135 minutes, then maybe youre the one whos Courtney Love.

Also Available:

Broadcast Signal Intrusion (Dark Sky Films) Harry Shum Jr stumbles onto a sinister 90s video conspiracy.

Ida Red (Saban/Paramount) Melissa Leo is a terminally-ill woman in prison who turns to son Josh Hartnett for help.

This Games Called Murder (Kino Lorber) Ron Perlman as a shoe designer (!) in this dark, violent satire about life as we know it.

Zeros and Ones (Lionsgate) 2021 action drama from Abel Ferrara, with Ethan Hawke as a soldier on a mission.

New Foreign

Between Jackie and Spencer, director Pablo Lorrain made Ema (Music Box Films), a dance-drama hybrid starring Mariana di Girolamo and Gael Garca Bernal as a couple dealing with the emotional reverberations of the adopted child that they returned years earlier. Mixing Lorrains visual and emotional styles with a driving reggaeton beat, this one-of-a-kind musical makes a unique entry in the filmography of a fascinating contemporary stylist.

Also available:

The Dry (RLJE Films) Eric Bana is on the hunt for answers to a murder case gone cold.

Escape from Mogadishu (Well Go USA Entertainment) Diplomats find themselves trapped in the middle of a Somali civil war in South Koreas Oscar entry.

Golden Voices (Music Box Films) A Russian couple, both voice actors, move to Israel and find their careers on the rocks.

Hive (Zeitgeist Films) Acclaimed drama from Kosovo about a single mother struggling to keep her family together.

The Man with the Answers (Artsploitation Films) Two young men, one Greek and one German, hit the road and find love in this LGBTQ drama.

Memory House (Film Movement) Folklore, contemporary politics, and magical realism swirl through Joao Paulo Miranda Marias Cannes Film Festival hit.

Only the Animals (Cohen Media Group) A French murder mystery in the snow. As smart as Fargo, minus the laughs.

Roh (Film Movement) Quietly shattering horror from Malaysia about a strange, prophetic girl who points a family to their doom.

Saint-Narcisse (Film Movement) Canadian queer punk icon Bruce LaBruces latest involves identical twin brothers looking for, and finding, love in an unlikely place.

Sleep (Arrow Video) David Lynch, Franz Kafka, and Grimms fairy tales are the reference points for this psychological horror film from Michael Venus.

Weathering With You (GKIDS) A young boy in Tokyo meets a girl who can change the weather in this fantasy anime from director Makoto Shinkai (Your Name) now making its North American 4K debut.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Film Movement) Three womens lives intersect in this acclaimed film from Japanese auteur Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car).

New Doc

Garrett Bradleys searing, poetic documentary Time (The Criterion Collection) examines the inequities of the U.S. prison system, particularly as they apply to Black men, through the decades-long struggle of Fox Rich and her ongoing efforts to get her husband out of jail. Its a beautiful portrait of love, of parenthood, and the ways in which people can build new lives for themselves when the system is seemingly designed to crush them.

Also available:

ABBA Forever: The Winner Takes It All (Wienerworld) A charming documentary about the most beloved pop band in the world, and just in time for their first album in 40 years.

Dick Johnson Is Dead (The Criterion Collection) The loving and inventive story of a filmmaker who helps her aging father prepare to die.

The Great Postal Heist (Cinema Libre Studio) A fiery documentary about the struggle of a 30-year post office clerk and the downsizing of the oldest federal agency in the U.S.

Little Girl (Music Box) Thoughtful and gentle documentary about an 8-year-old transgender child named Sasha.

Moments Like This Never Last (Utopia) A look into the world and career of the late street artist Dash Snow.

Try Harder! (Greenwich Entertainment) The stress endured by, and pressures placed upon, students vying for spots at elite colleges will make you wonder why anyone bothers.

New Grindhouse

Whether youre a newcomer or an old-school fan of kung fu cinema, youre going to love Shawscope Volume One: Limited Edition Box (Arrow Video). This limited edition box set showcases a dozen titles from the godfathers of Hong Kong martial arts filmmaking, the Shaw Brothers. You get King Boxer (aka Five Fingers of Death), Mighty Peking Man, The Five Venoms, and more, all restored and remastered, with fresh subtitle translations and bonuses like original mono audio tracks, interviews, deleted scenes, and alternate versions. Its a feast.

Also available:

Arrebato (Altered Innocence) Late-70s Spanish horror classic championed by Pedro Almodvar is, as you might imagine, a mind-altering trip.

The Awakener (Shout Factory) A Brazilian agent tries to fight political corruption and winds up with a fight on his hands.

The Card Player (Scorpion Releasing) Dario Argentos 2004 internet serial killer thriller is a late career high.

Disciples of Shaolin (88 Films) Another classic 70s Shaw Brothers martial arts mindbender, starring Sheng Fu.

The Djinn (RLJE Films) A mute boy makes a wish and winds up with a monster in his home.

Double Walker (Cranked Up) A young womans ghost is on the hunt for the person who killed her.

Final Justice (MVD Rewind Collection) Walking Tall king Joe Don Baker stars in this 80s cult classic (MST3K approved!) about a Texas sheriff battling the mafia.

Halloween Kills (Universal Pictures Home Entertainment) Michael Myers stabs more people and turns the community of Haddonfield against itself.

The Midnight Swim (Yellow Veil Pictures) Sarah Adina Smiths debut feature is a mysterious story about a bottomless lake, a missing mother, and the daughters who embark on an incredible journey.

Shock (Arrow Video) Mario Bavas final film, a 1977 masterpiece of psychological horror, lives up to its title.

Street Fighter (Mill Creek Entertainment) Jean-Claude van Damme breaks out of the video game into live-action kicking alongside Raul Julia in this new steelbook edition.

The Superdeep (Shudder/RLJE) This Russian thriller follows a research team who find more than they bargained for when they decide to burrow into the earth.

The Toolbox Murders (Blue Underground) The driller-killer exploitation classic gets the 4K treatment.

An Unquiet Grave (Shudder/RLJE) A man asks for his sister-in-laws help to bring his late wife back from the dead.

The Vampire Lovers (Scream Factory) Vintage gothic horror from the legendary Hammer studios, the brand you trust for lady vampires with extravagant eye shadow.

The Way (Gravitas Ventures) A woman on death row undergoes a spiritual transformation.

New Classic

Dad Cinema doesnt come any more entertaining than The Great Escape (Kino Lorber Studio Classics), making its 4K debut. This eminently watchable saga about a real-life WWII POW-camp prison break has wit, stakes, suspense, and one of the great sausage-fest ensembles ever assembled, including Steve McQueen (instantly achieving icon status, with the help of a very cool motorcycle), James Garner, Richard Attenborough, James Coburn, Donald Pleasance, Charles Bronson, and David McCallum.

Also available:

Akira (Funimation) The anime touchstone that influenced the genre for decades to come makes its North American 4K debut.

All My Sons (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) Burt Lancaster and Edward G. Robinson star in this noir drama, based on the Arthur Miller play, about crime and consequences.

Breaking In (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) Bill Forsyth (Local Hero) directs John Sayles late-80s crime comedy about an aging burglar (Burt Reynolds) trying to teach a novice (Casey Siemaszko) the robbery ropes.

The Celebration (The Criterion Collection) One of the highlights of the Dogme 95 movement was this blistering drama about a family reunion where all the painful secrets of the past get aired in public.

China (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) Japan invades China, but the movie is more interested in Loretta Young falling in love with Alan Ladd.

Corinth Films Historical Drama Collection (Corinth Films) Get your European historical drama on with these five contemporary classics: Within the Whirlwind, Calm at Sea, The Chronicles of Melanie, Remembrance, and Habermann.

The Crime of the Century (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) B-movie classic involving an ex-con exposing the titular misdeed.

Dancing With Crime / The Green Cockatoo (Cohen Media Group) Innocents get mixed up with murder in this double feature of classic British thrillers.

Double Door (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) 1934 family drama about rich New Yorkers in the grip of a matriarchs domineering ways.

Expresso Bongo (Cohen Media Group) The movie that launched the pop career of British icon Cliff Richard, and yes, its got lots of bongos, daddy-o.

Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema V (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) Hard-boiled is the new happy with these vintage downbeat classics: The Midnight Story, Outside the Law, and Because of You.

Gambit (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) If you can get past Shirley MacLaines semi-yellowface (her character is Eurasian), she and Michael Caine have fun with this twisty comedy caper.

Golden Earrings (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) A spy finds love in this WWII drama starring Ray Milland and Marlene Dietrich.

A Hard Days Night (The Criterion Collection) The Beatles became movie stars with this one, and its no wonder. (Now in 4K.)

Impasse (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) 1969 World War II action film with Burt Reynolds hunting for hidden treasure in the Philippines

Journey to Shiloh (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) Seven men go on a cross country trek to fight the Battle of Shiloh in this 1968 Civil Warthemed western (which features one of Harrison Fords earliest screen appearances).

Juice (Paramount) A new 4K steelbook highlights Tupacs acting debut, which charges up this teenage crime drama that also features a young Queen Latifah.

Laughing Heirs (Kino Classics) 1933 Max Ophuls comedy about a wine estate heir who wont inherit a thing if he touches a drop of alcohol.

The Lover (Capelight Pictures) Jane March and Tony Leung Ka Fai star in the Marguerite Duras adaptation that had arthouse audiences coming back for more forbidden love-affair action; when it was released in 1992, it was one of the first Western films since Sessue Hayakawas silent-screen heyday to present an Asian man as a sexual romantic lead.

The Mafu Cage (Scorpion Releasing) Karen Arthurs oddball cult film with Carol Kane, Lee Grant, and a house full of primates.

Marias Lovers (Kino Lorber) Nastassja Kinski has a lot of men on hold in this romantic drama from Andrei Konchalovsky.

The Naked Ape (Code Red) A 1973 experience of a film with live-action and animation exploring the evolution of humanity. (Features a postThe Rifleman Johnny Crawford and a pre-Dallas Victoria Principal, both game.)

The Piano (The Criterion Collection) Jane Campions masterpiece, starring Oscar-winners Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin, alongside Harvey Keitel and Sam Neill. (Now in 4K.)

The Pink Jungle (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) James Garner and George Kennedy fight for diamonds and a woman in South America.

The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (Walt Disney Home Entertainment) The one that started it all, just so you know who to blame. (Now in 4K.)

Red Angel (Arrow Video) Yasuzo Masumaras searing 1966 anti-war film still packs a wallop

Rich and Strange (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) Early Alfred Hitchcock drama about a couple who find that an inheritance leads to more trouble than they expected.

The 7th Dawn (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) William Holden leads a cast of characters caught up on opposing sides of a Communist insurgency in Malaya after World War II.

Shake Hands with the Devil (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) James Cagney fights with the I.R.A. against British forces in this 1959 historical drama

The Sherlock Holmes Vault Collection (The Film Detective) Even before Basil Rathbone famously took over the part, the legendary sleuth was already a cinema staple in these four British features from the 1930s.

Sparrows (MVD Visual) New restoration of a 1926 social-issue drama starring Mary Pickford.

Three Women (Kino Classics) Not to be confused with the Robert Altman film of the same name, this silent Ernst Lubitsch drama concerns a mother and daughter involved in a love triangle.

Through the Decades: 1960s Collection (Mill Creek Entertainment) A dizzingly varied collection of films in one 60s-themed box the highlight is Arthur Penns Mickey One, an existential-neurotic-jazz gangster drama with Warren Beatty, but theres lots to enjoy here, including Who Was That Lady?, The Notorious Landlady, Under the Yum-Yum Tree, Good Neighbor Sam, Lilith (starring Beatty and Jean Seberg), Baby, the Rain Must Fall, Genghis Khan, The Chase, Luv, How to Save a Marriage (and Ruin Your Life), and Hook, Line and Sinker.

Through the Decades: 1970s Collection (Mill Creek Entertainment) Youll want this assortment for the two Barbra Streisand movies (The Owl and the Pussycat and For Petes Sake) and the rollicking Jane FondaGeorge Segal heist comedy Fun with Dick and Jane, but theres plenty more to enjoy here, including A Walk in the Spring Rain, $ (Dollars), The Anderson Tapes, Brother John, The Horsemen, early Stephen Frears comedy Gumshoe, and The Stone Killer.

New TV

Naysayers might have originally decried the series as a gimmicky spin-off from a beloved movie franchise, but here we are at Cobra Kai: Season 3 (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment) with Season 4 new on Netflix and the show continues to build an audience while cleverly retweaking everything we thought we knew about the iconic characters played, then and now, by Ralph Macchio, William Zabka, and the rest of this talented ensemble.

Also available:

Billions: Season 5 (CBS/Paramount) The battle of wills in the world of high finance never ends!

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Liberation Hall) A priest on trial for heresy in this 1958 TV adaptation of the Thornton Wilder novel starring Hume Cronyn and Judith Anderson and directed by Robert Mulligan.

Inherit the Wind (1999) (Kino Lorber Studio Classics) Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott remake the classic play and film for TV.

Read more from the original source:

What's New on DVD in January: The French Dispatch, Her Smell, Martial Arts Classics, and More - TheWrap

THE TRAGEDY OF THE GREENS corruption by neoliberalism is that they simply cannot grasp how completely theyve been seduced. At its heart, the problem is one of generational experience and perspective. The younger generation of Greens, the ones currently in control of the organisation, simply have no experiential connection to the zeitgeist out of which their movement was born. Their entire adult lives have been lived in the shadow of the neoliberal revolutions of the 1980s and 90s. What came before the revolution has been dismissed by its architects and disciples as existing outside the realm of common sense. Those who preach the values and aspirations of those pre-revolutionary times offer news from nowhere and no one is listening.

They could, of course, learn the origin stories of radical environmentalism by entering imaginatively into the historical circumstances out of which it was born. Historians do this all the time. Watch Mary Beards television series on Ancient Rome and it will soon become clear how thoroughly an intelligent and inquisitive human-being is able to not only comprehend, but also inhabit, the past. Beard talks of being captured by the history of the Roman world from the moment she read Tacitus chilling judgement of his own people: They make a desert and they call it peace.

The problem with the generations that have grown up in the 40 years since Thatcher and Reagan destroyed the post-war social-democratic settlement, is that they have been convinced the past has nothing useful to teach them.

Like the early cartographers who wrote Here Be Monsters in the blank spaces of their maps, the neoliberal ideologues tell frightening tales about the times before their Year Zero. Anxious to dissuade those contemplating their own voyages of historical discovery, they warn that only bad and mad things lie beyond the well-charted shorelines of the present. Sadly, they have been remarkably successful. The past remains one of the very few foreign countries that millennial influencers have no interest in visiting not least because they do things differently there.

One of the principal reasons for the neoliberals success is that their own ideologically-inspired break with the post-war world was strengthened immeasurably by the natural inclination of young people to dismiss the world in which their elders were raised as hopelessly pass. Ordinarily, such youthful disdain is reserved for the fashions, art and music of the recent past so lacking in the manifestly superior tastes of the present. What the Neoliberals merged so successfully, however, was this essentially harmless generational scorn with their own deep ideological hostility towards the ideas and institutions of the entire modern era.

When Baby Boomers like Catherine Delahunty and Sue Bradford condemn the younger generations of Greens for abandoning the foundational beliefs and principles of the Green Movement, all these younger Greens hear is an ideological version of Taylor Swift cant hold a candle to Joni Mitchell. Or, Where is your generations Godfather? Wheres your Catcher in the Rye? Your Sergeant Pepper? Social-democracy, the Club of Rome, Rachel Carson, Earth Day 1971: Catherine and Sue might just as well be touting the virtues of a dusty vinyl version of Greatest Hits of the 1960s and 70s. Okay Boomer.

Lacking a firm grasp of recent history, the generations at the end of the alphabet do not understand that while their parents and grandparents might have laughed at the RSA Generations stuffy conformism, and marched against nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War and Apartheid sport, they had nothing but admiration for the extraordinary structures of social care which these earlier generations had built. Moreover, they were full of gratitude for the fact that their own lives would be fuller and more prosperous as a result. The Boomers grew up in the shadow of fascism and genocide. They knew what the generation preceding their own had beaten back and they loved them for it.

Discouraged from accessing the past, the younger Greens will struggle to understand the extraordinary exhilaration of encountering their own movement for the first time. New Zealand was the first nation to encounter a green political party. Inspired by the Club of Romes Limits To Growth, the Values Party spoke, for the first time, of constructing a future guided by humility and restraint. To hear Tony Brunt and his successors talk about limiting economic growth, and expanding the time in which people could simply be themselves, was to envisage a world beyond tomorrow. This was news from a somewhere humankind had yet to reach.

The worst crime against History which the Neoliberals have committed, however, is to convince young people that the past was a stinking cesspit of privilege, prejudice and oppression. That their ancestors were monsters wiping out indigenous peoples even as their axes and machines laid waste to the forests, lakes, rivers and streams which had sustained them for millennia. By painting the past as a hellscape of irredeemable horror, the tiny fraction of one percent who lord it over the rest of humanity, Paul Simons loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires are robbing us of the means to rescue the future.

Is there horror in the past? Is it full of murder and rapine? Of course it is but no more than the horror that daily disfigures the present. Nor are evil deeds all that the past has to show us. Amidst the horror there is heroism. Amidst the murder and rapine there is also empathy and courage, creativity and love.

Human-beings do not suffer injustice meekly, they rise against it again and again and again. Down through the centuries reformers and revolutionaries have dreamed dreams and seen visions. Slavery was abolished. Women were enfranchised. Children were removed from coalmines and cotton mills.

When the armed constabulary invaded Parihaka in 1881, not all Pakeha cheered nowhere near all. In the end, Apartheid fell. Eventually, gay sex was decriminalised. The past is not simply a catalogue of horrors. It is also an endless source of inspiration and hope.

The Neoliberals would shut the younger generations off from that hope and inspiration. The neoliberals would have us believe that this is as good as it gets. They have almost convinced James Shaw and Marama Davidson that the future can only be reached with tiny steps. On a warming planet that is rapidly running out of time, that is deadly advice.

Catherine and Sue, and all those who stand with them, are right: this is no time for tiny steps. Humankind has made giant leaps before all the way to the moon. But the booster rockets that push us towards the future are fuelled by the knowledge of what human-beings have achieved in the past.

Clio, the Muse of History, is traditionally depicted perusing the book of humanitys past glories. At need, however, she will put down her book and take up a sword.

Never has that need been greater.

Only when we remember who we are, where we have come from, and what we have achieved, will we find the strength to drive Clios liberating sword through neoliberalisms black and befouling heart.

The rest is here:

News From Nowhere If the Greens are to have a future they must listen to their past - thedailyblog.co.nz

The wine industry is emerging from yet another chaotic year of conducting business in the middle of a global pandemic. Between catastrophic weather events (including California wildfires, devastating April frosts in France and Italy, and flooding in western Germany) and global supply chain disruptions, plus the growing threat of price inflation, instability has often felt like the only constant.

Despite it all, however, the outlook for 2022 is far from bleak. With restaurants steadily on the rebound and off-premise sales continuing their post-pandemic boom, the industry is once again proving its endless capacity for creativity, adaptability, and resilience. There are many reasons for optimism, says Ian Downey, the executive vice president of Winebow Imports. The market will be more responsive to the bold, the new, and the innovative in the year to come.

In that indomitable spirit, explore six key trends that will continue to shape the wine worlds trajectory in 2022whatever else the year may bring.

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Poll a cross-section of wine professionals across all sectors of the industry, and the consensus is unanimous: Supply chain issues will continue to disrupt all aspects of the trade in 2022, causing inevitable price inflation and shortages for familiar brands.

While weve already seen these issues impact the Champagne market, fueling fears of inevitable gaps through the holidays and beyond, experts expect the effects to be much more widespread. Our industry is no different than others that have been impacted by supply chain difficulties, and we are starting to see inflationary prices from our winery partners that will go into effect in 2022, explains Rocco Lombardo, the president of Wilson Daniels. Were definitely headed into an interesting time with regards to managing costs and margin structure.

Faced with rising prices, shipping delays, and limited inventory, buyers will increasingly be forced to look beyond the usual tried-and-true options. While thats bound to create no shortage of headaches, Christopher Struck, the beverage director for ililis New York and Washington, D.C. locations, predicts that the situation will incentivize restaurants to turn to boutique wholesalers that carry alternatives to the usual large brand names.

In my experience, smaller distributors will be more inclined to hustle and get you what you need, explains Struck. They also tend to work with independent, conscientious growers that better align with my ethos as a buyer.

Vanessa Conlin, MW, the chief wine officer at Wine Access, agrees. In her view, 2022 will set the stage for up-and-coming regions and producers to gain newfound visibility and market share. These shortages actually offer a chance to get lesser-known wines in front of consumers who would have otherwise reached for familiar things like Burgundy or Napa Cabernet. As these European benchmark items become more difficult to secure, were going to see other regions making a play to fill the gap, says Conlin. Thats welcome news for regions eager to break through.

The world of wine has long conformed to a fixed set of stylistic categories, grouped primarily according to color. But as a younger generation of boundary-pushing winemakers across the globe explore an array of alternative winemaking approaches and techniques, those once-stable classifications are beginning to blur.

Were seeing more and more people making these experimental wines that dont have a firm definition, explains Chris Leon, the owner of Leon & Son retail shop in Brooklyn, New York and Grand Rapids, Michigan. He draws a parallel between the previous fashion for genre-defying macerated whites, or orange wines, and a recent interest in co-ferments, produced by fermenting multiple grape varieties (both red and white alike) together in one vessel.

Bright, fresh, and eminently crushable, the resulting wines successfully blur the line between pale red and dark ros, but couldnt be more attuned to the current chillable red zeitgeist. According to Leon, we can expect to see more of this stylistic ambiguity in the future. The rise of this style of wine feels very apropos at a time when people are increasingly willing to sidestep strict classifications or labels and simply take things for what they are, he says.

There once was a time when the natural wine counterculture operated within a few clusters of activity confined to large coastal cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. With a growing number of small-scale, natural-focused importers, however, the movement is quickly making inroads into parts of the country that had long been dominated by large national distributors and corporate-owned brands.

Case in point: the Raleigh-based distributor Kellogg Selections, run by former New York sommelier Jeff Kellogg. Emblematic of this larger shift, he moved south in 2017 with the goal of introducing independent and, in many cases, low-intervention producers (such as Beaujolais Mee Godard or Californias Birichino Winery) to consumers across the Carolinas.

I knew there was a real thirst among consumers here to drink things other than Napa as a category, but there werent enough people filling that void, explains Kellogg. My favorite part of selling these kinds of wines in the Carolinas is that Im able to introduce natural wines to people for the first time. I get to provide that experience all the time to buyers who were previously working in places that just made sure they were checking off the usual boxes of California Chardonnay or Argentinian Malbec.

With interest in the category steadily expanding across the United StatesWe dont see interest in natural wine slowing down at all in 2022, observes Sally Stewart of Colorados Denver Wine Merchantthe movement has officially passed from fringe to an essential pillar of wines new mainstream. As that evolution continues to unfold, the naturalist gospel is poised to convert a whole new demographic of consumers, many of whom never considered themselves wine drinkers. If were talking about the market in our region, so many people are coming to wine from other beverage categories, especially craft beer, says Kellogg. In my mind, natural wine has so much more room to grow.

According to off-premise sales data from Nielsen, the sparkling wine category grew by more than 13 percent among American drinkers over the past two yearsan upward momentum that shows no sign of abating anytime soon, even with the threat of Champagne shortages and price hikes.

Unsurprisingly, Champagne sales have dominated the premium sector of the sparkling market, with sales between January and August jumping 11.9 percent compared to the same period in 2019, according to Reuters. But value-driven options have fueled much of the categorys surge in popularity. Were seeing the same dynamism with our Prosecco Superiore, our Crmant dAlsace, and our premium domestic sparkling wine, reports Lombardo.

As drinkers gravitate towards these more affordable forms of fizz, theyre finally knocking the category off its holidays and special occasions pedestal and reclaiming bubbles as part of the everyday drinking repertoire. Though still extremely niche in terms of national sales, one alternative sparkling wine style has played an outsize symbolic role in that transformation: cloudy, crown-capped ptillant-natural.

Theres been a steady interest in pet-net throughout the year, not just on holidays,says Eric Moorer, the sales director at Washington, D.C.s natural-focused Domestique Wine. If his experience on the sales floor had taught him anything, its that the categorys appeal has yet to peak, helping to make the wider bubbly landscape more democratic. As somebody who has always championed sparkling wine as an everyday wine, pt nat has made that conversation much easier for me, he says. People no longer believe that sparkling wine is for Fridays and Saturday nights; theyre popping open bottles of pt-nat on Mondays and Tuesdays.

Even as the world has largely reopened, online wine sales have remained strong. But the future of the ecommerce sector now faces an important challenge: namely, how to find creative ways to drive digital engagement and retain their recently acquired customer base.

The key to maintaining that growth? Convincing customers that shopping for wine online can be every bit as gratifying as seeking recommendations from a trusted neighborhood wine merchant. We gained a lot of new customers during the pandemic, so a lot of what we did over the past year was try to set ourselves up to deliver a better experience than customers were able to get in a traditional store or retail environment, says AJ Resnick, the chief experience officer at Wine Access.

Critically, as Joshua Lincoln, the senior commercial directorEurope, for Vivino, points out, digital platforms enjoy a distinct advantage: a treasure trove of data with which to customize the consumers experience. To him, capitalizing on that ability will be the wave of the future for the ecommerce space. Weve got more data than any store manager could ever keep in their head, so we can actually be way more personalized than any single individual, he explains. The real winners in the e-commerce space over the coming five to 10 years will be the ones like us, who focus heavily on this aspect of personalization.

With prices rapidly rising, the pre-pandemic trend of smaller, more focused wine lists will surely extend into 2022. At the same time, though, we can also expect beverage programs to become exponentially more experimental, moving beyond the established templates and reference points that were once considered the industrys standard. In particular, as sommeliers feel increasingly empowered to depart from expectations, theyre radically reconsidering conventional wisdom about what it means to run a successful by-the-glass program.

To Dallas-based sommelier Tiffany Tobey, the glass pours she offers function as a critical form of research and development, allowing customers to explore more obscure expressions in a non-threatening and cost-effective format. My by-the-glass program is geared towards a completely different compilation of regions and off-the-beaten-path stuff, she explains. Im offering stuff by the glass that people have never heard of before, but theyre still willing to try it because the rest of my list still contains plenty of the familiar favorites that make them feel comfortable.

At the two restaurants he oversees, Struck has adopted a similar approach. I think theres too many self-fulfilling prophecies with beverage directors who insist that you set yourself up for failure if you dont offer certain specific reference points by the glass, he says. That may have been true in the past, but not so anymore. I mean, weve already entered a whole new era of dining, havent we?

Zachary Sussman is a Brooklyn-based wine writer whose work has appeared in Saveur, Wine & Spirits, The World of Fine Wine, Food & Wine, and The Wall Street Journal Magazine, among many others. A regular contributor to Punch, he was formerly selected as the Champagne Louis Roederer Emerging Wine Writer of the Year. He is the author of The Essential Wine Book (2020) and Sparkling Wine for Modern Times (November, 2021) from Ten Speed Press.

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6 Wine Industry Trends to Watch in 2022 - SevenFifty Daily