She has an Academy Award for playing Virginia Woolf in The Hours, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and she graced a 2009 Australian postage stamp. You’d imagine that Nicole Kidman would sigh wearily at the prospect of winning Yet Another Bafta. Instead, she greets the news of a nod for her supporting turn in Lion as if she’s won the lottery. There can’t be much space left in her good glass cabinet, surely?

“Ooh, no, I definitely have a space,” she says, excitedly. “And I can’t wait to tell my daughters.”

Deep into awards season, Kidman has already raised eyebrows with a jolly appearance at the Golden Globes ceremony, a shindig that is seldom mistaken for a temperance rally. At least one reliably hysterical tabloid was horrified by reports that the 49-year-old – a Guess Your Age app would say 33, tops – had crashed a boring red carpet interview with Tom Hiddleston and had – oh, the humanity – brushed pizza crumbs off her dress. We should expect no less from the woman who greeted the furore over The Paperboy – a film in which she memorably relieves herself on Zac Efron – with a shrug of her freckled shoulders.

“Oh dear,” she says, with her tongue firmly in cheek. “When I’m at press conferences and whatever, my dry Australian humour doesn’t always translate. But that’s how we do most things: with humour. And at my age, I’m coming into that place where I think: Ah, who cares? I can be who I want to be. I do have an earnest side. But it’s calming down.”

Otherworldly creatures

I’m not sure what I was expecting from Nicole Kidman. For much of her life – and mine – she was one of the most photographed women in the world. As long ago as Dead Calm, made when she was only 21, she looked like a natural-born movie star. Perhaps as a by-product of her vast celebrity, she has often seemed as ethereal as the otherworldly creatures she portrayed in The Others, Birth and Rabbit Hole.

But in real life she’s . . . well, real. Years and distance have not wearied her Australian accent and irreverence. And she certainly has the gift of the gab. It is often noted that Kidman – who was married to Tom Cruise from 1990 to 2001 – doesn’t discuss Scientology. She certainly covers all other bases. Half an hour into our conversation and I could write a book. We’ve covered everything from the rising traffic levels in Nashville to shooting Far and Away in Kerry. I know her Irish family left the Dingle peninsula for Australia in 1839. I know her sister, Antonia Kidman, a journalist and TV presenter, has just finished a law degree. I know that Jane Campion’s nickname for Kidman is “Unicorn”.

“I’ve always done things a bit differently,” she laughs. “My mum always says I was left in the garden. That I’m a changeling. And I say: ‘Mum, that’s terrible!’ But she insists it’s a compliment. That it just means I’m a bit different from the rest of the family.”

A changeling unicorn?

“Oh yes. I’ll take that.”

The rarity of that species may account for Kidman’s disarming demeanour. She far more fun than you might have guessed and about 10 times more emotionally available: “I do do things differently,” she nods. “I cry very easily. I understand other people’s emotional states very easily. I see that same empathy in my oldest daughter. She’ll sit there watching a movie and she’ll be heartbroken. And she’ll take a long time to recover. I was that kid, too.”

Feminist and proud

Nicole Mary Kidman was born in Honolulu, to Antony Kidman – a celebrated biochemist, clinical psychologist and author – and Janelle Ann, a nursing instructor, scientific editor and member of the Women’s Electoral Lobby. She was raised feminist and proud in Sydney, an upbringing that would allow for greater versatility as a performer.

“I’m just not attached to my physical identity,” she says. “When I have to play a character, I really relish physical change. As an actor, that’s what you’re supposed to do. That’s what we were taught at drama school. Change the way you walk. Change the way you talk. Change your physical being. Change your nose. Trouble is, when a woman does it, it’s a big deal. Oh, she’s got different hair! I don’t care about that. If you’re trying to play someone like Virginia Woolf, you sit down with others and say: show me how I can become this person.”

She’s more than her appearance but she is, nonetheless, happy that she “looks Irish”. If she has one regret, she says, it’s getting out the straightening iron too early and too often on her red curls.

“I just played someone with natural curly hair and no make-up,” she says. “What a relief! My littlest daughter has the exact same hair I did. I look at that hair now and think: ‘Ooh, you’re not to do anything to that beautiful hair.’ Now my curls are just frizz really. I wish I had valued them before they got that way. I can sneak up on my daughter to touch hers. But she tells me to leave them alone.”

Kidman’s last years in the Hollywood whirlwind – post-Cruise, there was some highly publicised stepping-out with Robbie Williams and Lenny Kravitz – were defined by “a lot of exposure” as she delicately puts it. It could have been worse: she did skip town before TMZ, social media and Rottweiler paparazzi took hold. “I was lucky because I navigated a lot of loss and pain, but I didn’t have to do it as publicly as many actors have to nowadays,” she says. “It’s definitely a different territory now. I’m not sure I would have managed that.”

She laughs: “Luckily, I’m not as interesting as I used to be.”

Gypsies

These days, Kidman savours a “quieter, nourishing pace of life” in Nashville, Tennessee, with the New Zealand-born country singer Keith Urban, her husband of 10 years, and their two daughters, Sunday (7) and Faith (5). The family are close – if Nicole is on set, the rest of the clan come with. Ditto when Keith goes on tour. “We’re gypsies,” she says. “We can get up and go anywhere at any time. The concept of home for us, is us. As long as the family is together then we’re home.”

When she won an Evening Standard award for her turn as X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin in the West End production of Photograph 51 last year, she was keen to share the credit. “I brought it home and said: ‘We’ve won this. We earned this together because you moved to England so that I could do this. This belongs to our family.’”

Movie lore tells us that the sets of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and Lars von Trier’s Dogville were not the jolliest of working environments. Kidman, a tireless cheerleader for auteur-driven cinema, is having none of it.

“I’m drawn to visionaries,” she says. “For me, an auteur is someone educated enough to micro-manage cinematography, editing, lighting – every single step of the process. Other people are there to augment and facilitate their vision. And it’s a massive advantage to work with someone who has a vision. Because you have a leader. You are part of a larger thing. I’ve always said that Kubrick was a philosopher. As is Jane Campion. As is Sofia Coppola, who I’ve just finished working with. I’m drawn to those people.”

Idiosyncratic

Kidman cheerfully describes her recent work – think Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert or the incoming Yorgos Lanthimos curveball The Killing of a Sacred Deer – as idiosyncratic. “I’ve never been one for the mythology of the hero,” she says. “I’m wired to like flaws and tragedy. For as long as I can remember, I have always been slightly offbeat.”

The feelgood drama Lion is an exception to the rule. Based on an irresistible true story of an Indian-born, Australian-adopted boy who uses Google maps to find his birth parents, this gorgeously emosh tear-jerker stars Kidman as the adoptive mother of the cross-continent trekking hero (Dev Patel). It was an important project for Kidman, who has come at motherhood every which way: she adopted two children with Tom Cruise, and has two biological children with Keith Urban, one through traditional means and one via surrogacy.

“This is the purest form of maternal love I’ve done on screen,” she says. “Unconditional. Very warm. Once the bond is formed with a child and you are the mother, everything is different. I don’t know that you can fake that. Maybe a great actress could. But I needed to draw on what I knew.”

How did her own experiences with adoption shape her performance?

“They were everything. The primary thing being that desire for the birth mother to know that everything is okay. You’ve had this child, you’ve lost this child, and I want you to know that your child is safe. That’s a strange and powerful union between women. Sometimes, it takes a village to raise a child. And that’s a very beautiful thing.”

Source http://bristoldailynews.co.uk/2017/01/20/nicole-kidman-at-my-age-i-think-ah-who-cares/

We all witnessed a bit of history last night at the Oscars, with the chaos of the Best Picture announcement. The aftermath of any historical event provides us with the opportunity for education, to learn something that was not known before, so we may be better equipped for the future ahead.

After the confetti of the 89^th Oscars had settled, I realised there was only one thing to be learned from it: white people in the arts are completely unprepared for the tidal wave of talented people of colour bearing down upon them all, unprepared for their genius to finally be given the limelight. It’s like when you realised that Cordelia is actually a really smart and cool character, but Buffy and the rest of Scoobies refused to ever acknowledge that fact to their own detriment (I realise the irony of using a very white TV show to make this point).

You could see this in the way that host Jimmy Kimmel joked about Oscar winner Mahershala Ali’s name, and what he would call his newly-born daughter ‘given his name is Mahershala’. Something normal, you know. I know I would love main focus of comments after I’ve just made history being the first African-American Muslim man to have won an Oscar to be something about weird my name is, what a fun way to be reminded that no matter how astronomical your achievements might be, if your name’s not directly lifted from the Bible (New Testament only) or the list of names you’re allowed to call your children if you’re going to send them to private school (I’m looking at you Casey, but with minimal eye contact because you’re terrifying), you will always be treated like an outsider.

Anyone with a name that doesn’t appear on Lou Bega’s Mambo No. 5 knows exactly what this feels like. If I had a dollar for every time a white person asked me how to pronounce my full name I’d probably have just enough to buy a 7-Eleven frozen slurpee, because that’s how many times people have taken the time to acknowledge they’re unfamiliar with something foreign, but that they are willing to learn and are cool about it.

On the other hand, a dollar for every time I’ve had to grin and bear someone mispronouncing my name or wondering aloud about how ‘different’ it sounds would mean I could afford a plane ticket to a place where I wouldn’t have to hear that shit any more. I even wrote a whole show about how I sometimes call myself ‘Michelle’ because it’s just easier than having to deal with white people (or their permeating cultural supremacy) not being able to handle anything slightly outside their well-patrolled borders.

There’s a difference between acknowledging difference and using it as a weapon, wielding it like a blunt sword to make terrible jokes because that’s the only way you know how to deal with the unfamiliar. Jimmy Kimmel’s continuous allusions to what is and isn’t an acceptable name last night – oh yeah there was more than one, is sad and unfortunate, but in the way that it makes me worried about white people. Yes, I’ve progressed from being angry to feeling sorry for them, like my feelings for Kevin Rudd, or the cast of Married at First Sight.

Jimmy Kimmel is the deer in the headlights of progress, and while the long-maligned non-white, non-straight, non-Christian folk are busy collecting awards at one of the most prestigious celebrations of the arts in the world, Kimmel handles it by acting like he’s been living under a nice rock while progress and globalisation were happening right outside. You clearly missed the ‘always be prepared’ memo at Boy Scouts, Jimmy.

But it wasn’t just Kimmel either. What happened before the cast and crew of Moonlight were finally allowed on stage to accept their win for Best Picture was unfortunate, but it also went on for far longer than it should. The La La Land crew milled about stage for a good while even after they were told “no you didn’t win, this was a mistake”, Warren Beatty saw fit to ramble about how this mistake actually happened, even though it really wasn’t an explanation, but rather an exoneration for himself, all while the true winners of the night – who should’ve been up there from the start – had to patiently wait their turn.

It was pretty clear that even when they’re told “this space is not meant for you any more”, privileged people feel pretty comfortable taking their own sweet time with moving out of that space. It’s like being told to leave the squash court because other people want to have a go, but they can’t believe other people also play squash (yes this is the whitest game I could think of).

And I don’t blame them – it’s what they’re used to and have always known. But what happens when they realise other people not only like playing squash, but that they have been doing so for ages and are actually really awesome at it? What happens when those scales start to be tipped, as they were last night?

I know people of colour are prepared to deal with whatever may happen – be it the backlash or the adulation and rewards that they’ve always known they deserved – because unlike the privileged, we’re always prepared; we’ve always had to be. Whatever happens, it’s obvious that we’re not going anywhere and wins like this will only become more common. I can only hope that people like Jimmy Kimmel can get used to it, and soon.

source: http://www.sbs.com.au/comedy/article/2017/02/28/oscar-casual-racism-about-non-white-names-goes-jimmy-kimmel

Marvel comics has removed a book from circulation after a fan backlash against some Koranic messages in the artwork.

In two vignettes of X-Men Gold #1, Indonesian artist Ardian Syaf coloured several hidden references to passages of the Koran and to Muslim protests against the Christian governor of Jakarta.

The verses were referenced using numbers in two different illustrations.

They were perceived as intolerant by some fans, who complained to Marvel about what they called “anti-Christian and anti-Jewish messages”.

On Saturday, Marvel issued a statement to Sky News denying previous knowledge of the hidden messages and adding “disciplinary action is being taken”.

“The mentioned artwork in X-Men Gold #1 was inserted without knowledge behind its reported meanings,” Marvel said.

Marvel assured Sky that “the implied references do not reflect the views of the writer, editors or anyone else at Marvel and are in direct opposition of the inclusiveness of Marvel Comics and what the X-Men have stood for since their creation”.

“This artwork will be removed from subsequent printings, digital versions, and trade paperbacks and disciplinary action is being taken,” they added.

:: Is Marvel’s push for more diversity harming profit?

In the book, Jewish X-Men character Kitty Pryde is seen talking to a crowd, with the “Jew” portion of the word “Jewellery” over her head, and the numbers 212 and 51 in the background.

The number 212 is often used as a reference to the Muslim protest against the Christian governor of Jakarta on 2 December 2016, which the artist admitted on his Facebook page to draw inspiration from.

“This is a special memory for me,” he wrote in response to online criticism.

“The number is a peace act, when a governor did blasphemy to our holy book,” he added.

“I don’t hate Jews or Christians, I worked with them for 10 years. A lot of good friends too. For all that happened I apologise sincerely.” he wrote.

The numbers “5:51” are seen in another vignette of the comic book as well. They are on a top that Russian mutant Colossus is wearing while hitting a ball with a bat.

They reference a Koranic passage which reads: “O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you – then indeed, he is [one] of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people.”

The verse was used by Jakarta’s governor in 2016, and led to mass protests by the country’s conservative Muslim population.

Contacted by Sky News, Marvel has not yet revealed if the artist will continue to collaborate in the X-Men Gold series, or what kind of disciplinary action has been taken.

Source: https://www.964eagle.co.uk/news/world-news/2264891/marvel-pulls-comic-over-hidden-koranic-messages/

She hands Portman a bouquet of ugly flowers. “I believe you are Tonya Harding, baby!” Jones screams.

First sketch: the constitutional convention in 1776, where the Boston patriots, lead by Portman (and Rachel Dratch, who’s popping by), are celebrating their Bunker Hill victory in obnoxious style.

“Frankly, I’m willing to lose this whole war if it means not seeing them win again,” says a man in a tri-cornered hat played by Kyle Mooney. Then there’s a cameo from Tina Fey as the leader of a Philadelphia contingent, who plan to “punch a police horse”. This all seems kind of mean to football fans. Maybe football fans deserve it? Maybe I need to learn more about football fans than what I’ve seen in Friday Night Lights.

Portman and cast members march out one at a time in a mediocre Stranger Things sketch (Portman plays Eleven, of course) but this is far surpassed by what’s next. Portman has made a sequel to her iconic 2006 rap and it’s hilarious, especially when she appears as an aggro Queen Amidala.

“Say something about the motherfucking prequels, bitch,” she says through bleeps, brandishing a gun, before Andy Samberg sings a quick bridge and Portman sticks a Times Up pin in the middle of Beck Bennett’s forehead. It’s an instant classic.

Musical guest! Dua Lipa sings New Rules. Her backup singers are wearing dresses that look like the silk bathrobes you get when you’re a bridesmaid for one of your sorority sisters.

Weekend Update opens with the memo. You know, the memo.

“First of all,” says Michael Che, “you know damn well Donald Trump didn’t read this memo. It’s four pages long.”

Cecily Strong and McKinnon are here as Catherine Deneuve and Brigitte Bardot, to explain why French actresses have pushed back against the #MeToo movement.

“I don’t want romance to die,” says Strong, while McKinnon stares into space.

“Free Harvey Weinstein,” McKinnon says, at last. “Why does a woman have a breast? It’s for a man to grab and pull.”

The next guest is Pete Davison, who joins to talk about his experience making a TV commercial, which is quite sad. “What happened to your hand?” says Jost, looking at a bandage.

“I punched a door,” says Davison, “because I’ve got mental problems.”

The final guest: Che’s “neighbor Willie”, played by Thompson, who’s here to cheer us up about the season. For Valentine’s Day he bought “one of those super-realistic dolls off the internet”. She came in a black bag with a zipper and has a toe tag. Is this the first necrophilia joke in my career as an SNL correspondent? Wow.

Next! “My butt is my face and my face is my butt,” says Beck Bennett. He’s an alien to Portman’s glamorous spaceship captain, and they’re about to make love in a space bedroom. “You’re talking out of your butt?” she says. “Yes,” he says, “like every other man.”

“Has your butt always been your face?” she says.

“Sometimes you just have to put on a brave ass and accept that life can be a real facehole.”

It’s an inspired performance from them both.

The next sketch, in which Portman plays a Nickelodeon host with a sore throat, falls a bit flat in comparison.

Moving on: apparently Melania Trump likes Strong’s portrayal of her, so she’ll love this skit in which Strong meets the ghosts of various First Ladies. Portman plays Jackie Kennedy, of course.

“All First Ladies have a platform,” she says, “yours is bullying, and mine is little hats.”

“No First Lady has been more humiliated than me!” Melania says, but then Hillary Clinton (McKinnon) appears.

“I feel your pain,” she says, “but you married him, and like America you had a choice, so don’t choose to eat 7-11 sushi and then come to me and say, ‘Something’s wrong!’”

“Maybe being first lady just means being with someone you don’t really like who doesn’t treat you very well,” Martha says.

“Speak for yourself,” says Michelle Obama (Jones). “My arms rule … and I can be president whenever I want.”

Portman wears a Ms magazine t-shirt to introduce Dua Lipa’s second song – a righteous fashion choice. Lipa sings Homesick while sitting on a piano.

And finally: Portman, Strong and Gardner are analysing their love lives over martinis in a bar.

“Am I being too picky?” says Portman. “Yes,” says Bryant – she’s sitting next to them in a mousy blonde wig and a Carhartt jacket. “I’m here to meet a guy I’ve been catfishing, but he didn’t show,” she says. This sketch feels a little under-realized, which is perhaps why it’s the last one.

And that’s going to be the last one for some time: SNL is going on hiatus during the Olympics. But don’t worry: NBC really is sending Leslie Jones to cover it.

Source https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/feb/04/saturday-night-live-natalie-portman-queen-amidala-rap

These vignettes might sound a little familiar, either as deliberate echoes of Blade Runner or examples plucked from a one-size-fits-all generic cyberpunk techno-dystopia. So it’s a little disappointing that Altered Carbon – Netflix’s luxurious 10-part adaptation of Richard K Morgan’s 2002 sci-fi novel – serves up all of these totemic scenes within its first two episodes. Restaging such familiar material almost feels ritualistic, as if to intentionally summon fond memories of Ridley Scott’s deathless future-noir or its monumental 2017 sequel.

As cultural consumers, we have been bombarded with variations of this future on and off for more than 25 years. Via movies, animation and video games, cyberpunk has become so shopworn that it has become essentially a nostalgic period setting. True to the source material, Altered Carbon takes pains to position itself as hardboiled entertainment, with lurid firearm ultraviolence, chemically enhanced sex and cynical tough-guy narration from its diamond-hard lead, Takeshi Kovacs. But in its own neon-soaked, techno-addled, C-word-dropping way, Altered Carbon initially feels rather cosy, like Downton.

It does, at least, have an additional gimmick. For decades, humans have had the ability to digitise their consciousness. Die and you can simply be restored from your most recent cloud backup, your identity squirted back into a new “sleeve”. This could be a perfect clone of your younger self, the first step in a daisy-chain to immortality. Or you could take someone else’s body for a test-drive: a bodybuilder, a dancer, maybe even a significant other. In Altered Carbon’s far-flung future of 2384, this tech has already been around for more than two centuries. It is a marvel so commonplace that it is seen as banal. Instead, what impresses is the ingenuity with which humans continue to pervert sleeve technology to their own ends, for personal gain or transgressive sexual gratification.

For Kovacs, a convicted war criminal turned prickly sleuth (played, mostly, by recent Robocop Joel Kinnaman), this tech also offers a chance at parole. After spending 250 years with his consciousness filed away in a digital prison’s trash folder, Kovacs is abruptly decanted into a taut new body and tasked with solving the murder of the world’s richest man.

After setting out its stall, Altered Carbon kicks its plot into gear and starts to distinguish itself from the cyberpunk pack in some intriguing ways. Kovacs finds an unexpected ally in an AI hotelier whose chosen hologram form is a highly strung Edgar Allen Poe, replete with great taste in carpets, vintage clothing and heavy weaponry. It’s a pleasingly oddball note. A later episode seems to relish the stomach-churning possibilities of torture in a virtual environment indistinguishable from reality, but leavens its cruelty with an unexpectedly heartwarming side story involving a family Halloween party.

Many of the show’s pleasures are down to good casting: if you’re looking for a ruthless near-immortal to effortlessly lord it over everyone, then James Purefoy – channelling the Dionysian cunning of his Mark Antony in HBO’s Rome – is perfect.

Can Altered Carbon function as a cynical, sexy cyberpunk shoot-’em-up and a meditation on the consequences of severing the connection between mind and body? Or, like some of its illegally duplicated sleeves, is it simply a soulless copy of what came before? Only the faceless AI that tots up Netflix’s viewing data will ever know whether it is a genuine hit, but if you don’t mind some viscera mixed in with your existential mysteries, it does deliver a punchy sci-fi fix.

Altered Carbon is available on Netflix

Source https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/feb/05/altered-carbon-has-cyberpunk-discovered-life-beyond-blade-runner