Posted on 09/05/2004 2:57:30 PM PDT by El Conservador
VENICE, Italy (AFP) - US actor Tim Robbins took the film version of his ribald anti-Bush play "Embedded/Live" to the Venice film festival, while audiences delighted in Indian director Mira Nair's colourful adaptation of Thackeray's classic novel "Vanity Fair".
Robbin's angry satire about the Bush administration's war in Iraq (news - web sites) and the complicity of the mainstream US media in its reporting from the early days of the war is the polar opposite of Nair's sumptuous examination of race and class.
"Embedded" was born as a play in a 30-seat theatre in Los Angeles in July 2003 and has been playing to audiences for the past year in LA and New York.
The movie is the film of an actual performance of the play, in places intercut with scenes of the destruction of war and its casualties.
The major news organisations are bitterly attacked in the play for slavishly following the US military's official line in their reports from correspondents embedded with soldiers in Iraq.
In his research for the play, Robbins said he delved into stories from the Guardian and Independent newspapers in Britain which "reported entirely different stories than the ones we were seeing in the United States".
Britain may currently have more journalistic integrity in its media, "but you should be careful because I believe there's an effort to send your journalistic integrity down the same road as ours went," he told a press conference in Venice.
"That has to do with who owns -- and how many own -- a newspaper, or media outlets that can inform opinion."
At one point, he says, the danger is that "debate stops and becomes a rhetoric, it becomes propaganda".
Robbins, who won an Oscar for Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River" and a best actor award at Cannes for Robert Altman's "The Player", has been "doing theatre" since the age of 12, and later worked for a theatre company in New York before turning to film.
"For me its a place where I can learn. Go back to school. Challenge myself. Doing work without asking permission, I can set my own agenda. I don't have to raise millions and millions of dollars" for a film.
"Embedded/Live" opens in London on Thursday and will also shortly begin an eight-state tour of small town America, where support for the war was at its greatest, before the bodies of almost 1,000 US soldiers began coming home.
Robbins' film is being shown out of competition in Venice, while Nair is among the contenders for the Golden Lion which she won with "Monsoon Wedding" in 2002.
Nair's movie is an examination of race and class starring Reese Witherspoon as Thackeray's thoroughly modern heroine Becky Sharpe, an orphan who claws her way to the top of 19th century English society.
"I have loved Thackeray since I was a young girl in India, and my first reaction was that Becky Sharpe was a lot like us -- she didn't like the cards that society had dealt to her.
"She wanted to make her own deck and she found her own way," the director said.
The film is much more than a costume drama with swooning damsels, sabre-rattling scoundrels and drawing-room intrigue, however.
"Becky Sharp is an ultimate modern woman," said Nair.
"We decided, out of respect for Thackeray, to be not so reverential it restricts you," added Witherspoon, who successfully tamed her American twang for the part. "So that means you can be interpretive, you can be contemporary."
It is also an examination of "the intersection of colony and empire", which takes Nair back to her roots, with scenes shot in India.
"So for me there was not an imposition of my own culture just simply because I happen to be from India. It was really paying homage to Thackeray, who wrote India like a gold thread right through the novel from beginning to end."
AFAIK, you can still spew anti-American blob without fear of retribution...
Imagine. Listening to the correspondents who are actually with the troops rather than calling Michael Moore to get the story.
Oh my god! What if the film convinces thousands of undecided Venetians to support Kerry ???!!!
As I recall, even the liberal media said the play sucked eggs.
He needs to quit doing "Theatre" and start living in the real world....
Arrogant stuff like this is reasons why people my age and younger (im 24) dont really pay any attention to the arts or "Theatre"
what a snob
Dear Mr. Robbins: if you can talk the way you do about the country you are a citizen of, thank an American soldier.
Let's ask this: Tim, in your wisdom, could you see fit to give us a few words on Beslan and what it means for civilized people?
I guess sedition by American new organizations weren't despicable enough for Timmy.
I've repeated his words here before to hoist him by his own petard, but here goes:
"How can he be so obtuse? Is it deliberate?"
I guess he had to take it overseas because not enough people here want to hear his garbage. He almost makes me not want to watch "The Shawshank Redemption" again.
"Liberals" is shorthand for "Wild-eye, foaming at the mouth, nutcases".
It's kind of sad, really.....you have to be pretty old to remember a time when the Democrat Party was actually a decent group of people.
T. Robbins = turd
Trajan88
The DemoCrappers have not been decent since the turn of the century, the 20th century, most people that remembered any decent Demos are long gone!
Robbins's play didn't float here, so he's gone searching for another audience who will like it. Loser, loser, loser. He should have taken it to the friendly audience at the Guardian-- mightta had a chance there. /utter disdain
well dang, I am just crushed that the play didn't make it to Montana. Here we would have just LOVED to watch the play..... ahhahahhahahahahahahahaahahhahahahahahahahahahahahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaa....
NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT ... Tim Robbins is such a loser.
Any chance we can get Robbins on the Kennedy No Fly List?
Some of Tim Robbins work is paid for by a little know organization, Public Theater. It's a subsidiary of PBS, so YOUR tax dollars pay for this cr*p.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0116-05.htm
Let's not hold this against Thackery, one of my favs.
Any way we can get him to stay there with it?
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