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Sunday, September 15, 2013
Saturday, September 14, 2013
Friday, September 13, 2013
Shkendije Mujaj bej seks kur dua me shqiptaret (VIDEO)
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
SPORT , Qatar World Cup 2022: Top clubs 'open' to winter tournament
Europe's leading clubs have stated that they are "open" to the possibility of a winter World Cup in Qatar in 2022.
Fifa chief Sepp Blatter has called for the tournament to be moved because of concern over how players would cope in summer temperatures of 40C and above.
Monday, September 2, 2013
Cannes behind the scenes
Cannes behind the scenes
Alec Baldwin and director James Toback’s documentary Seduced and Abandoned gives an insight into the festival – and the film industry in general.
Art in China: Down but not out
China became the world’s largest art market in 2011 – then sales plummeted. But reporting from Hong Kong, Georgina Adam still hears the cash registers ringing.
Anthony Caro: Man of steel
The sculptor's retrospective opens in Venice this week. In archive interviews, he talks about making 'feeling objects' – and his work being used as a bike rack.
Rite of Spring: I predict a riot
Stravinsky’s ballet caused outrage at its premiere in 1913. One hundred years on, Clemency Burton-Hill asks: why exactly were audiences so scandalised?
Venice Biennale: A world of art
Pictures from the global art world jamboree – including works by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and an installation featuring actor Milla Jovovich in a glass box.
Take a walk on the wild side
‘Outsider art’ at the Venice Biennale challenges the commercialisation of contemporary art, writes Alastair Sooke.
Brand it like Beckham
Is a move into fashion on the cards? And what might his label be like? Robb Young sorts through the footballer's wardrobe in search of clues.
After Earth: On shaky ground?
M Night Shyamalan’s new film, After Earth has opened to poor reviews. Tom Brook talks with its star, Will Smith and discusses media criticism with the director.
Porsche’s secret stash
Crouched down behind the car you see above, I'm stumped. I have the nagging feeling I've seen this clip somewhere before, but right now I can't place it.
It's not a regular car part, though. Ah, got it, it's the front clamp from an old wire ski binding - don't ask me how I know this, but I'm fairly sure no one else here can identify it.
"Do you know what this is?" comes a voice at my shoulder. I stand up, ready to reveal my disturbingly in-depth knowledge of ancient ski equipment, but before I can fix my features to smug, he continues, "It's from an old ski binding. The engineers were having difficulty holding the engine cover of the 910 down safely, and, over dinner one night, Mr Piëch spoke about this to his good friend Mr Geze, whose firm made these bindings, and this was the solution."
Dieter Landenberger is manager of Porsche's archives and a man who probably knows more about Porsche's history and heritage than the Porsche family themselves. This is fortuitous, as I'm currently in a warehouse containing many curious Porsches, most of which I'm struggling to identify. There is a reason I'm here. Porsche has a museum (if you haven't been and happen to find yourself in Stuttgart, go. It's amazing. Especially the escalator) but the 80 cars there are just the tip of a 500-strong iceberg. All of which have to be stored somewhere.
This is the somewhere. It's not far from the museum, just another industrial building in an industrial corner of an industrial city. It used to house a production line, but will soon store an entire back catalogue of automotive greatness (and not-so-greatness). I say soon because the ink on the lease is still wet. That's right, TopGear is here to help Porsche move its family jewels into a new home. Let's hope its insurance policy is up to date.
Big shiny trucks arrive, doors are opened, glimpses of cars appear and ramps are lowered. A man jumps on to a bright red Porsche tractor of considerable vintage and concours condition. There's a typically agricultural noise accompanied by a localised and particularly noxious fog cloud. When it clears, the tractor is revealed to be towing a totally see-through Cayenne Hybrid out from the transporter's interior. If Porsche were really concerned about CO2 emissions, this would surely be happening the other way round...
I lend a hand and loosen the ratchet strap on a Type 597 Jagdwagen military jeep. It lurches backwards, at which point some German expletives occur and I realise that old cars don't necessarily have effective handbrakes. Nor are they in perfect nick. Some are decidedly moth-eaten in fact, like the battered 906 that seems to have crashed headlong through each and every one of the 46 intervening years.
It looks properly battle scarred, all peeling bonnet badge, shagged upholstery and rotting composite panels. It's possibly my favourite car in the whole place, a story behind each ding and wrinkle. Dieter looks it over sympathetically and says: "It would be a shame to over-restore this car, we want to keep the authenticity of these cars alive. That, for us, is a big challenge."
I'm glad to hear him say it. Glad, too, that most of these cars are in less than pristine condition. The majority smell musty inside, dust is evident, they look like they've lived a bit. Or at least been in storage for a while. They jar with the polished floor and fresh paint that's been daubed around here. But this facility is evidence of how seriously Porsche takes its back catalogue. This, surprisingly, is a relatively recent phenomenon. The firm only started keeping the first and last cars from each production run a few years back. It's now making up for lost time by going on the open market and buying important cars back. It recently got hold of a 993 Cabrio. From Julio Iglesias. Yeah.
The Acura NSX supercar enters sharper focus
As Dan Carney wrote on the first day of press previews for the 2013 Detroit auto show, Honda and its luxury division, Acura, remain mum on product details until they are good and ready to share them.
In keeping with this practice, Acura used its time here to offer a further glimpse of the NSX supercar, which it plans – yes, plans – to launch in coming years.
Acura MDX Prototype, shown on Tuesday in Detroit. (American Honda)
“As we move toward the production NSX, our goal is to achieve a more emotional experience,” said Acura chief designer Jon Ikeda during the brand’s press conference on Tuesday.
Ikeda emphasised refinement and the synergy of man and machine as touchstones of the NSX development process. Having broken cover at the 2012 Detroit auto show and secured a cameo appearance in The Avengers film last year, the NSX concept that emerged on Tuesday had grown darker, cast in a deep metallic grey. It features Honda’s first stab at an interior – and it looks every bit as bespoke as that of the $250,000 McLaren MP4-12C supercar, with liberal application of carbon fibre and rich red leather.
Powertrain details are still being held close, but Acura has indicated that the NSX successor would feature a mid-mounted engine as part of a hybrid powertrain that sends power to all four wheels.
On the sales-volume end of the spectrum, Acura also displayed the MDX Prototype, appearing all but ready to enter production. The concept maintains the same profile as the current MDX sport crossover, reserving most of its advances to the engineers. The MDX will feature an advanced 3.5-litre, direct-injected V6 engine, and a choice of front- or all-wheel drive.
The eventual MDX production vehicle will begin sales in the US by mid-year, the brand said, at a price to be announced
Cadillac luxury, recharged
The Cadillac ELR may prove to be a high-water mark for plug-in hybrids, or another false start.
When the Chevrolet Volt, the ELR’s commoner cousin at General Motors, began a staggered sales roll-out across the United States in 2010, demand was so fierce that some dealers charged thousands of dollarsover the car’s suggested $41,000 price.
Fast forward to summer 2012, when the average price for gasoline in the US was lower than it was in 2010, and those same dealers were offering rebates to clear languishing Volts from their lots.
Early Volt adopters purchased a technological marvel that looked little better than a pre-bankruptcy GM economy car. But those who awaited a reconciliation between high style and high technology have now been rewarded with what could be the hybrid of their dreams.
The ELR begins with the powertrain principle of the Chevrolet Volt. A 16.5-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack gives the dashing wedge ofMichigan machinery enough power to travel 35 miles on electricity alone. When the batteries are depleted, a 1.4-litre gasoline motor kicks in to recharge them, buying the driver an additional 300 miles of travel.
To this, Cadillac adds a hand-sewn leather interior, chrome brightwork, LEDs and a body seemingly fashioned from stone. The ELR is a looker.
What Cadillac does not add is urgency. During its official introduction at the Detroit auto show on 15 January, Bob Ferguson, Cadillac’s global vice president, said GM would begin producing the ELR for the North American market late this year, with a targeted sale window of early 2014. European admirers must wait even longer, perhaps more than a year after US sales begin, much as they did for the Vauxhall-Opel Ampera, the European equivalent of the Volt.
Given the ELR is based on a four-year-old concept vehicle called theConverj, the delay is as surprising as it is disheartening.
Another red flag is the ELR’s as yet unknown price. A premium of $20,000 over the Volt would not be unexpected, given the Cadillac’s superior breeding. Even for plug-in converts, that may prove too dear a tithe to extract – regardless of what gas stations may be extracting from us in a year’s time.
Until then the ELR remains a glinting bauble of virtue, waiting for its moment to be loved or spurned.
Disruptive beauty at the 2013 Concorso d’Eleganza
Italian dreams
Every spring, the collector-car hive mind shifts to the shores of Lake Como, in northern Italy, where the Concorso d’Eleganza takes place on the gracious grounds of the Villa d’Este hotel. Amid the judged classes in the concours is a category for concept cars and prototypes – some making their global debuts and others engaging in victory laps after debuts on the auto-show circuit.
The 2013 edition of the concours brought the eight following concepts and pre-production prototypes, each looking fit for an Italian count.
Week in pictures: Frankfurt calling
Volkswagen to go electric in Frankfurt
The German automaker will bring two electric models to the 2013 Frankfurt motor show on 10 September. Unlike Nissan, which built its Leaf EV on a dedicated platform, the e-Up and e-Golf share architecture with their respective internal-combustion counterparts. Volkswagen estimates that with the e-Golf’s 24.2-kilowatt-hour battery pack – virtually the same size as that in the Leaf – the hatchback will travel 118mi, while the e-Up’s 18.8kWh pack is pegged at 99mi. The company has not yet divulged pricing or export markets for the cars. (Photo: Volkswagen Group)
Revenge Wears Prada ‘gets fashion all wrong’
The sequel to The Devil Wears Prada is now out in US bookstores. But are representations of the fashion world in popular culture selling us a false image?
When Lauren Weisberger’s Revenge Wears Prada landed on my desk, I was wary. I’ve never read The Devil Wears Prada, Weisberger’s bestselling roman à clef about her time as an assistant to Anna Wintour. But like a lot of people who work in fashion, the novel has dogged me.
When, for instance, I run into high school acquaintances, the first thing they ask when I say that I’m a fashion editor is whether my life is just like The Devil Wears Prada. “How so?” I ask. They then articulate some vision of a fashion industry comprised entirely of skinny girls in stiletto heels, catty gay men, and Wintour-ish bosses with ice picks for hearts. Look, I say, for the umpteenth time: There’s some truth to those stereotypes, but for the most part, the people who do well in the fashion industry are sharp, incredibly creative, and above all, very, very hard-working.
There are enough pop culture phenomena that traffic an image of fashion as a pit of campy vipers. As far back as the 1957 film Funny Face, with Audrey Hepburn, fashion folk have been portrayed as peerless superficialists – people who care only for the glamorous and the new. In Funny Face, at least, the parody was cheerful. British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous came at the topic with daggers drawn, and while its satire was often apt, no one mistook it for reality.
Whereas today, ‘reality’ fashion programming creates all manner of confusion, inasmuch as the people on those shows create caricatures of themselves. Think of Heidi Klum on Project Runway, doing Wintour lite with her dry “Auf Wiedersehen” dismissal of losers. Or Rachel Zoe, who acts – on her eponymous TV show, at least – as though being a simpering diva were some kind of qualification for fashion industry success. Trust me: It’s not.
Better the devil you know
And then, of course, there’s The Devil Wears Prada, which gave credibility to every other over-the-top portrayal of the industry, because it was reported from deep inside the belly of the beast. I haven’t read it but I did see the film - and I confess that I enjoyed it. When I received the advance copy of Revenge Wears Prada, I had a sneaking suspicion I might just like this book, too. A knowing send-up of my fashion milieu? Seemed like just the ticket for an upcoming long-haul flight.
Before I took off for the airport, I made one additional effort to put my Prada-ambivalence aside. I rang up Kelly Cutrone, to get her take on the differences between fashion as it’s represented in pop culture, and the fashion industry as it exists in real life. If anyone could speak to that subject, it would be Cutrone. As the founder and CEO of the public relations and brand strategy firm People’s Revolution, she’s worked with numerous luxury brands and staged countless fashion shows. But Cutrone also plays the part of Kelly Cutrone on TV: she’s a judge on America’s Next Top Model, and Lauren Conrad and Whitney Port interned for her in reality TV show, The Hills.
“I don’t think it is exaggerated,” Cutrone tells me, when I ask her whether she too found herself disabusing people of the picture of fashion they encounter in books or on TV. “Imagine you’re the person standing in line at the airport behind an insane fashion PR, who’s screaming at a customs agent because the coconut shell bikini Steven Klein is supposed to shoot the next day just got confiscated by Fish and Wildlife. I have been that PR,” Cutrone says.
“Reality is in the eye of the beholder. She perceives the ridiculous; what I behold is the specificity of fashion. Much of what outsiders perceive as fashion bitchiness is really just a heightened sense of detail. To work in fashion at a certain level, you have to see the subtleties of images and clothes in a way most people don’t. For a photographer or art director, that might mean picking the best shot out of a dozen takes that look almost exactly the same. A stylist has to know how to pin a dress so that it hangs with a certain attitude, and when I review a fashion show, I need to notice that the shape of a shoulder is different from the season before. It’s like a form of aesthetic OCD.
“Yeah, it’s very precise, the fashion industry,” Cutrone agrees. “And everyone’s working to create beauty, which is just completely intuitive, and you either get it or you don’t. And if you don’t, you get left behind, because frankly, fashion is insanely competitive, and we’re all playing for keeps. It’s a gazillion dollar industry, for god’s sake.”
Taking the plunge
So, girded by my conversation with Cutrone, I cracked open Revenge Wears Prada. The villainess of The Devil Wears Prada is Miranda Priestly, editor-in-chief of Runway magazine and the world’s most haughty and unrelenting boss. At the close of the first book, our heroine, Andy Sachs, has had her fill of the torment of being Miranda’s junior assistant, and quits her job, in the middle of Paris Fashion Week.
Revenge Wears Prada commences a decade later, with Andy now the editor-in-chief of an independent, aspirational bridal magazine called The Plunge. Andy herself is about to be wed, to the handsome scion of a blue chip family. Everything is coming up roses.
Except…. spoiler alert: Miranda Priestly re-enters the frame. In her new role as the editorial director of luxury publishing house Elias-Clark, she approaches Andy with the poisoned chalice offer to acquire The Plunge, for gobs of money. And thus, havoc is wreaked.
Weisberger’s book is risible because the author doesn’t seem to realise that Andy Sachs’ true antagonist isn’t Miranda Priestly - it’s Andy Sachs. Ten years after leaving her job with Miranda, Andy still has nightmares about her. She decides - instinctively, and without a moment of self-doubt – that taking the acquisition offer is the wrong thing to do, but she cannot bring herself to articulate her reason to either her best friend, with whom she co-founded the magazine, or to her adoring husband. She can’t articulate a reason because she has none. Miranda is evil - end of story. Andy never seems to entertain the possibility that Miranda Priestly has all this godlike clout because she’s very good at her work, or that she’s firm in her opinions because success has given her confidence in them. All that matters is that Miranda is not nice.
In Weisberger’s schema, Andy is very nice - but I take issue with that. Not only does she seem to lack the courage of her convictions, she appears to have none. What she has instead are insecurities: she’s not thin enough, not stylish enough, not posh enough for her mother-in-law’s approval. She’s a name-dropper, and an eager consumer of one percenter lifestyle porn.
The single most compromised thing about the fashion industry, is the way it operates as an engine of consumer desire. Andy has no truck with that, and yet the whole point of The Plunge is to tease brides-to-be with fantasy weddings they could never afford. That strikes me as pretty obscene. And on the other hand, the single best thing about the fashion industry is the fact that it’s a ‘gazillion dollar industry’ that prizes creativity, often in misfit, subversive form. If Andy is in any way attuned to art, or ideas, Weisberger declines to show it.
I’d rather work for Miranda Priestly any day.
Lovelace tells the story behind an infamous porn film
A new film tells the story behind the famous 1970s porn film, Deep Throat, focusing on the life story of its star, Linda Lovelace.
Lovelace looks at the tale behind one of the few porn films to crossover to a mainstream audience.
It also focuses on the life of its star –real name Linda Boreman – examining issues of exploitation and violence as she is cruelly manipulated by her husband and manager, Chuck Traynor.
Amanda Seyfried stars in the title role, while Peter Sarsgaard plays Traynor. Tom Brook talks with the stars of Lovelace about the phenomenon of Deep Throat and the experience of filming the difficult domestic violence scenes.
Sculpture of ancient Rome: The shock of the old
The Romans loved art full of violence and sex. But where modern viewers see smut and gore, ancient eyes may have seen something different, writes Alastair Sooke.
It must have been bliss to be an archaeologist during the 18th Century, when the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum were rediscovered. Take the Villa of the Papyri outside Herculaneum: 85 sculptures were uncovered at this site alone between 1750 and 1761.
But it could be awkward too. Imagine how the excavators must have felt when they unearthed the most infamous of these sculptures in the presence of the king of Naples and Sicily on a spring day in 1752. Carved from a single block of Italian marble, it showed the wild god Pan making love to a goat. With his right hand, Pan grabs the nanny goat’s tufted beard, yanking forward her head so that he can stare deep into her eyes. The king was not amused.
Unlike most of the 18th-Century finds from Herculaneum and Pompeii, the sculpture was hidden away, available to view only with the monarch’s permission. Yet, from the moment of its discovery, the statue generated curiosity as well as horror. It quickly became a fashionable sight for Englishmen gallivanting around Europe on the Grand Tour. The 18th-Century English sculptor Joseph Nollekens produced a terracotta replica from memory – though his bug-eyed animal is far more surprised by Pan’s attentions than the Roman goat, which seems almost complicit.
Without realising, Nollekens had stressed the scene’s undertones of bestiality and rape – even though the original may have appeared much less violent to the Romans. Different cultures view the same things in different ways. Art that we consider shockingly erotic or violent was commonplace in the Roman world.
Now, the sculpture of Pan and the goat is setting pulses racing once again. On loan from the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, where it is usually shown in the ‘Secret Cabinet’ alongside other erotic material from the ancient Roman world, the statue features in the British Museum’s major exhibition Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum, currently on show in London. A discreet label forewarns visitors that the exhibition “contains sexually explicit material”.
Grim gardens
Today it is tempting to view the sculpture as a piece of vile erotica – but I’m not so sure. The Villa of the Papyri also contained a library full of hundreds of scrolls, suggesting that the man who owned the sculpture was sophisticated and well-read.
Perhaps he was also a provocative pervert who enjoyed scandalising his guests. But even a cursory acquaintance with the Roman world suggests that this wasn’t necessarily the case. Today some people decorate their gardens with gnomes. The Romans preferred sexier, gutsier, more bloodthirsty subjects. Elsewhere in the British Museum’s exhibition, we encounter two sublime marble sculptures depicting tense stags hollering with fear as they are overcome by snarling hunting dogs. The hounds gnash at the ears of their prey, using their claws to gouge deep into flesh.
These sculptures aren’t lewd, but they are extraordinarily violent. While we can appreciate the way in which the sculptor arranged a chaotic subject into coherent forms, they still seem like strange choices for garden ornaments, by our standards. So does a nearby marble statuette of a pot-bellied Hercules, clearly the worse for wear following a drunken banquet, about to take a pee.
But the Romans couldn’t get enough of this sort of stuff. One of my favourite Roman sculptures is the Hanging Marsyas. This presents the bearded satyr, Marsyas, bound to a tree. He is about to be flayed alive as punishment for challenging the lyre-playing god Apollo to a musical contest (inevitably, he lost). Several sculptures depicting this scene have survived, including a handful carved from purple-veined marble, which offers a grisly sense of the bloody flesh about to be revealed by the torturer’s knife.
It is a similar story with the famous Laocoon, that tangle of thrusting limbs, lightning-quick sea serpents and agonised expressions that has haunted the Western imagination ever since it was discovered in Rome and deposited in the Belvedere courtyard of the Vatican by Pope Julius II in 1506. This moving marble sculpture of the Trojan priest Laocoon and his two sons struggling to escape from the coils of their fate, forever frozen in the throes of anguish, has inspired countless artists and writers, from Michelangelo to Dickens.
It puzzles me that the Romans, who valued integrity and gravitas, were so obsessed with gore. After all, their gladiatorial games and spectacles in the arena involving wild beasts and condemned criminals were nothing but a form of ritualised human sacrifice. Ancient Rome was a curious mixture of civilisation and barbarism.
Saucy sculpture
As the sculpture of Pan and the goat attests, sex pervaded Roman culture as much as violence. A year and a half ago, I visited Pompeii, while filming a BBC documentary series called Treasures of Ancient Rome. While it wasn’t surprising that one of the town’s brothels was painted with sexually explicit frescoes, I did find it bizarre that so many buildings were decorated with plaques depicting erect phalluses.
It used to be thought that these pointed the way to one of Pompeii’s many brothels: according to some estimates there were as many as 35 in a town with a population of around 12,000 people. But most scholars now believe that the phallus functioned as a kind of amulet, warding off evil forces.
This would explain its ubiquity in contexts that we might find surprising: in the exhibition at the British Museum, for instance, there is a curious object known as a ‘tintinnabulum’, or wind chime, consisting of a winged phallus (with lion feet, as well as its own phallus and phallus tail), from which five bells have been suspended. Although it was discovered in Pompeii, a similar object would not have looked out of place in the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, tinkling from the boughs as visitors looked at the sculpture of Pan having sex with a goat.
Exhibitions such as Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum offer the tantalising impression of proximity to our ancient forebears. A bronze bust of a Roman banker is so creased and lifelike that we believe we can grasp his character. A bone vessel still contains pink pigment that a Roman matriarch probably used to rouge her cheeks.
But then a sculpture such as that of Pan making love to a goat plunges us back into darkness and uncertainty, and makes the chasm of two millennia feel as abyss-like as ever. We will never be able fully to comprehend what the sculpture meant to the Romans who first saw it. Where we see smut or rape, perhaps they saw comedy or even tenderness. All we can say with certainty is that their attitudes towards sex and violence differed radically from ours. Understanding the past is an elusive, ever-changing quest.
Alastair Sooke is an art critic for The Daily Telegraph
Concorde: A 20th Century design classic
A decade after its final flight, Jonathan Glancey pays tribute to that most glamorous of aircraft – and argues for it as an icon of the 20th Century.
Concorde flew for the last time ten years ago. This supremely elegant airliner has yet to be replaced and, in an age of ubiquitous flying buses, cheap flights and long-term recession, perhaps it never will be. Glamorous and exclusive, a technological marvel and a thing of daunting beauty, Concorde belonged to an era that has vanished in a cloud of burned kerosene.
In 2003, there were still people willing to pay through the nose-cone to eat a lunch of canapés, fillet of beef, crème brulée, cheeses and petit fours washed down with four varieties of champagne while the Rolls-Royce Olympus-powered jet scythed through the stratosphere at Mach 2. Through the aircraft’s small windows, passengers could see dark blue space above them and the curvature of the Earth below. At 60,000-ft, they cruised twice the height of Jumbo jets, faster than a bullet and faster than the speed (1,070mph at the Equator) the Earth rotates.
A time machine of sorts, Concorde flew so very fast across the Atlantic that its passengers landed – according to their watches – before they had taken off. The pencil-thin aircraft generated so much heat in the process that its fuselage stretched by up to twelve inches in flight.
Of course, there was a price to pay for this aerial Grand Prix. Fares were for plutocrats, Hollywood stars and those who had saved up for years rather than those in search of cheap holidays in the sun. The aircraft guzzled fuel and it was – although not from the inside – very noisy.
Its presence was unmistakable: Concorde could always be heard before it was seen. That trademark thunderous rumble, as if Jove himself was pushing the clouds apart, caused heads to crane from city streets. “Look! There’s Concorde”, normally blasé Londoners would say, as if there was just the one of these compelling aircraft.
Concorde was a rather singular aircraft. Just fourteen out of the twenty built went into service. When the Anglo-French design made its public debut in Toulouse in 1967, two years before its maiden flight, there was talk of seventy-four orders from sixteen airlines. Pan-Am went so far as to take adverts in the British press welcoming the “aircraft of the future”. The future of flying was, in fact, to be anything but Concorde, or Pan-Am.
How different things had seemed in 1956 – just two years after the Spitfire last flew in regular service with the RAF – when the supersonic programme that launched Concorde took flight. This was the New Elizabethan age when British design and technology were still world-beating, an era in which the talk was of ever higher, ever faster flight.
Entente cordiale
Teaming up with their French rivals, British engineers designed one of the most astonishing aircraft yet to fly, a machine marrying mechanical sorcery with ravishing looks. A much-hyped American rival from Boeing was never built, while the Soviet Tu-144 lookalike never made the grade: one of the sixteen built crashed in front of the world’s cameras at the 1973 Paris Air Show.
Meanwhile, Concorde’s maiden flight in 1969 was within weeks of that of Boeing’s 747 Jumbo jet. Although very safe – just one crashed in a flying career spanning thirty-four years – Concorde was never very profitable even in its best years, unlike the double-deck Jumbo and the airbuses that followed in its wake.
In its last years in service, Concorde’s essentially analogue technology – banks of 1950s-style dials and switches watched over by a Flight Engineer as well as a Captain and First Officer – seemed old-fashioned.
Concorde had only been operated on a regular basis by two airlines, British Airways and Air France. After one of the Air France Concordes crashed shortly after take-off from Paris Charles de Gaulle on 25th July 2000, killing all 100 passengers and nine crew, faith in this peerless and ageing aircraft began to wane. Passenger numbers fell, while maintenance costs rose. BA flew the last Concorde in passenger service on 26th November 2003 and although Sir Richard Branson made a bid for the supersonic fleet, it was not to be. This truly was the end of everyday civil supersonic flight.
A fine romance
Concorde, though, was the stuff of romance in flight, a quality today’s airline executives have little time for. “The problem with aviation is that for fifty years it’s been populated by people who think it’s this wondrous sexual experience; that it’s like James Bond and wonderful and we’ll all be flying first class when really it’s just a bloody bus with wings.” So said Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s Chief Executive Officer, in 2012. He was campaigning for “standing room only” cabins for passengers who would be charged as little as £1 for flights within Europe. “Most people just want to get from A to B. You don’t want to pay £500 for a flight.”
And, yet, for the twenty-seven years British Airways flew Concorde in daily service, there were always people - two and a half million passengers in all - willing to pay a premium to fly by one of the most sensationally beautiful aircraft of all time.
Concorde more than deserves its place in design's hall of fame: no passenger aircraft has ever been so fast, so thrilling and so sensationally beautiful, a flying machine imbued with engineering elegance and yet with the enticing visual simplicity of a perfect paper dart.
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Is the Oscars race overwhelming Toronto Film Festival?
As the Toronto Film Festival approaches, is it in danger of being overshadowed by Oscars speculation? Tom Brook reports.
Every film festival can be defined by the talk among attendees. In Cannes, discussion routinely centres on who will win the Palme d’Or – the festival’s top prize. In Sundance there’s ongoing chatter over new discoveries and which film has won a distribution deal. And in Toronto – which opens this week – the conversation revolves increasingly around the Oscars race, and those festival films likely to be contenders.
Oscars hype at Toronto, where some 290 full-length features will be screened, seems to grow by the year. There’s already a fast-growing fascination with the Academy Awards race, months before the ceremony takes place. Among Hollywood’s Oscars forecasters, Toronto is viewed as a major strategic event – the place where the studios launch what they hope will be the winning films. Scott Feinberg, lead awards analyst at the Hollywood Reporter, says: “Anybody who is interested in the Oscar race has to either attend or pay attention to what happens at the Toronto Film Festival. It’s become a very important role in the Oscars race.”
Some films seeking Oscars attention will bypass Toronto this year – but there are plenty of Academy Awards hopefuls being screened. It’s already being predicted that the drama August: Osage County, starring Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts, has Oscars potential, as has the opening night film The Fifth Estate, which has Benedict Cumberbatch portraying WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Matthew McConaughey is also being tipped for an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of an Aids activist in the picture Dallas Buyers Club. All this buzz is being generated before many of these films have even been screened.
Right on time
One reason why Toronto plays such a pivotal role in the Oscars race is timing. The festival takes place at the end of blockbuster season just as the studios are beginning to release their more serious autumnal fare – in other words, the kind of pictures that can win Oscars. With more than 1,000 accredited members of the press in town, a premiere in Toronto can give a hefty –kick-start to a picture hoping for Oscars glory.
The first time I noticed Toronto’s key role in the Oscars campaign was in 1999, when American Beauty took the festival by storm. The masses of publicity it generated carried it through to the Academy Awards ceremony in 2000, where it won Best Picture and four other Oscars.
Scott Feinberg notes there’s a strong correlation between a film being launched at Toronto and it ending up with an Oscar. “Seven of the last thirteen Best Picture Oscars winners played at Toronto,” he says. “Crash, No Country for Old Men, Slumdog Millionaire, The Hurt Locker, The King’s Speech, The Artist and Argo. For Best Picture winners that’s an unbelievable ratio. No other festival comes close to that.”
Media friendly
Toronto is also particularly effective at launching Oscar campaigns because the media is so enthusiastic and happy to go along with the hoopla. Alicia Quarles, a US entertainment correspondent for E! News who’ll be on the red carpet in Toronto, says the press is “incredibly interested in possible Oscar contenders. That’s what we go to Toronto for. You see as many movies as you possibly can. You know, you say: ‘Hey is this an Oscar movie?’”
The Hollywood studios who are peddling their Oscar hopefuls really descend on Toronto en masse to take advantage of the mostly friendly media presence. This year, Warner Bros, Disney, Universal and Paramount – as well as The Weinstein Company and studio offshoots Focus Features and Fox Searchlight are among the Hollywood entities in town – most holding press junkets to promote their films to journalists.
Toronto, which welcomes the studios and their films, is mindful that matters could get out of hand. “You want to make sure that that just doesn’t overwhelm the festival,” says its director, Piers Handling, “that it’s not just about those studio junkets. And I think we’ve tried to do everything we possibly can to make sure that Toronto’s a balanced festival with representation from countries around the world.”
Even so, films not fodder for the Oscars machine can get left out. It can be tough for smaller, more challenging international pictures– the directors and their publicity handlers have to work extra hard to get their films seen by journalists. And the focus of many reporters isn’t on the films at all. Gui de Mulder, a film correspondent from Canal+ in Spain, says: “I think the US press is a little pathetic. The mainstream media is very, very frivolous – sometimes I’m embarrassed to be next to them on the red carpet because they ask questions that are really embarrassing: ‘Oh my God! Oh my God! What are you wearing?’”
Some see the festival transformed from its original role when it was founded in 1976. “The Toronto Film Festival began very much as an alternative to mainstream cinema,” says Toby Miller, author of Global Hollywood 2, who has long followed trends in the film industry. “It was about trying to get away from Hollywood domination, to support local filmmaking and other international cinemas. What’s happened in the case of Toronto in recent years is that it’s become a marketing device for Hollywood.”
The festival’s director Piers Handling disagrees. “There’s no way that we as a festival or organisation will ever succumb to becoming purely a mouthpiece for any one cinema – most importantly Hollywood.” He sees it as a battle. “It’s a long fight, a good fight, all we can do is show as many other films that are going to have absolutely no potential at all for Oscars or for awards season, the films that take risks, the films that are international in scope, to keep that kind of alternative independent cinema alive.”
There are many different forces at work that have led to the Oscars race, and Hollywood’s sway over the press has limited way it often covers the festival. “You can certainly blame this to a certain extent on individual journalists,” says Toby Miller, “but I would lay more at the door on the lack of adventurousness of editors and proprietors who are very often thinking of their audiences in extremely restrictive and unsophisticated ways.”
But blogging and the growth of social media are ensuring the festival is covered outside the constraints of the mainstream press – and that’s certainly going to help many films.
Ultimately the fascination with the Oscars race that’s going to emerge from Toronto in the next few days can benefit everyone at the festival. Without the studios peddling their Oscar hopefuls, far fewer journalists would be in town – and the less chance there would be for an enterprising reporter or critic to stray away from the pack and stumble onto a fresh film that goes on to become a glorious unexpected hit.
Thankfully, it happens almost every year.
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