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September 26, 2001

- Peoplenews article on Maya Fienne's Fashion show

Now then girls, please form an orderly queue for Maya Fiennes's clothes. For her first show, Brave, Maya sent down London's It-most clothes horses, Petrina Khashoggi, Lisa Barbuscia and Lisa Butcher, in a dazzling array of Sri Lankan-inspired clothes with the most covetable belts around. After the show, at the 21st Century Theatre in Westbourne Grove, the models slouched in jumpers as the enthusiastic crowd, including Petrina's boyfriend Joe Bamford, Martha Fiennes and Voyage's Rocky Mazzili, leapt up to congratulate Miss Maya.

- Found an old article by Phillip McCarthy from the Movies Today website about Enemy at the Gates with no new information except:

But he says: "I don't think, because I've made a couple of films, that everyone wants to hear my opinion on every topic of the day.

Alec Guinness came to my drama school once and he was a hero of mine and I've seen all his films.

But for me there's more to learn about him from what's on the screen than digging into his childhood and that sort of thing. But that's probably just me."

September 21, 2001

- Small report about Maya's fashion launch in InStyle UK, October 2001 (we posted the pics on our Family Photos respectively Maya Fiennes Page):

Fiennes Dining
When one of the famous family throws a party, Kyle MacLachlan and other buddies come to celebrate.

Maya Fiennes, sister in law of Ralph and Joseph, and wife of composer Magnus, celebrated the launch of her fashion collection, Planet Maya, with a casual supper party for friends - including Sex and the City's Kyle MacLachlan, Lisa B (last seen in Bridget Jones's Diary), Nathaniel Parker, and Nadia Swarovski, of the crystal dynasty. The setting is the Chelsea home of yoga guru Cat de Rham, and the food supplied by hip caterers Urban Productions. "The great thing about London," says MacLachlan, "is that people entertain at home. In New York, everyone eats out." Joss sticks are lit, guests try on Maya's T-shirts and champagnes is drunk into the night.

- Empireonline.co.uk reports on September 18 about "British Actors To Strike" which could effect Joe's project as well.

Hollywood may have successfully weathered the threat of strike action during negotiations with the Screen Actors Guild this summer, but the British film industry may not prove so fortunate. After a year of negotiations, actor's union Equity has made the decision to pursue strike action over disagreements concerning bonus payments.

The union has instructed members to refuse all work on UK productions from December 1. Names like Julie Walters, Simon Callow and Ricky Tomlinson have all pledged their support to the action, which could bring the British film industry to a standstill.

Ewan McGregor, also a strong supporter of the move, told BBC Online that he was "tired of making producers and distributors rich while I and my fellow actors are exploited."

The strike could have serious implications for a number of upcoming productions including the 20th James Bond movie. However, mortified Harry Potter fans need have no fear of an impromptu end to Harry's second year at Hogwarts. Separate negotiations are being had with Warner Bros to ensure that Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets remains firmly on track.

The negotiations concern actor's right's to bonus fees when films are shown on television or sold on video or DVD. At present, unlike their American counterparts, British actors receive a one-off flat fee for their work and receive no additional payment for subsequent screenings. Equity is seeking arrangements similar to those in the US where actors receive monetary rewards relative to the success of individual films.

September 10, 2001

- Court of King Tony takes centre stage

By Cassandra Jardine
The Telegraph
(Filed: 08/09/2001)

LABOUR outshone a silk-bedecked Elsinore at a charity gala evening at the Young Vic. Led by King Tony, his wife, Queen Cherie and young prince Euan, the Labour establishment were out in force for Peter Brook's Hamlet. The attendant Lords Bragg, Hollick, Rogers and Puttnam led a throng of those who, in less reverent times, might be known as Luvvies for Labour.

Joseph Fiennes (star of Shakespeare in Love), Derek Jacobi, Hugh Laurie, Richard E Grant, Jude Law and Sadie Frost led the off-stage theatricals who watched Adrian Lester play the Prince.

Among the court minstrels present on Thursday were Andrew Motion, the poet laureate, Sting's wife Trudie Styler and son Jake, Jonathan Dimbleby and his wife, Bel Mooney, Michael Frayn and, later, ex-Spice girl Emma Bunton and the boy band, Damage.

The dress code was smart but informal and Cherie Blair cut an appropriately dark but bohemian figure dressed "cap a pie" in floor-length black leather, a £2,000 number by a new young British designer, Rachel Robarts.

Shirt-sleeved but regal, Tony Blair led a standing ovation for the HIV positive speaker from Body and Soul, who moved the whole audience when she described the haven the charity provided to her children.

There were, however, a few raised eyebrows when David Lan, the Young Vic's artistic director, praised his theatre - which needs total refurbishment - for being "classless".

At other times that may be true of the tiny South Bank venue with notoriously uncomfortable seats and wonky air conditioning, but this was a night of champagne socialism, courtesy of Moet and Chandon.

Surrounded by supporters, no one was rude enough to glance at the Prime Minister when Hamlet spoke his concerns about "the insolence of office".

Nor were there whispers about foot and mouth or the NHS when the Prince spoke of "enterprises of great pith and moment" that "lose the name of action".

The play, cut to two and a half hours, was performed without interval. Mr Blair himself did not yawn, even though he is known to have rather more populist taste in theatre than his wife, but he went straight home afterwards.

Clutching quarter bottles of champagne with straws, the rest of the audience walked, or took bicycle rickshaws, to a car park in Blackfriars for a party.

Fellini could not have done more to turn this prosaic setting into a fitting venue. Two thousand candles lit the artful and edible table decorations.

Dinner was provided (not free) by that most admired New Labour eatery, The Ivy. Asparagus and artichoke salad with quails eggs and walnuts, followed by herb-roasted halibut with samphire and girolles, softened the revellers up for the auction.

No shooting weekends or nights in Disneyworld were up for grabs, but diners could stick up their hands for the chance to trail around after Lord Bragg for a couple of days.

The 11 lots including Yorick's skull and Peter Brook's manuscript notes for his production of Hamlet raised a total of £40,000. Altogether the night raised £200,000 to be split between the theatre and Body and Soul.

Mr Lan said: "The gala sent a massive charge of electricity through the Young Vic. We were thrilled by the huge wave of support from so many different worlds."

As revellers tired themselves out dancing to DJ Funki on a terrace overlooking the Thames, a queue was already forming of those prepared to spend the night in the cold, without candles or champagne, queuing for the seats for the following night. How classless they must have found it all.

September 7, 2001

- Blairs raises cash for Young Vic
by Luke Leitch (This is London online)

Tony, Cherie and Euan Blair helped to raise cash at a celebrity-studded party in support of the Young Vic.

The Prime Minister, Young Vic regular Cherie and their son Euan were among the crowd at the Young Vic gala evening in aid of the theatre and the Aids charity Body and Soul. Others included Ewan McGregor, Peter Brook, acting couple Jude Law and Sadie Frost, Joseph Fiennes and Michael Frayn. The Blairs were unable to go on to the party and auction after the performance of Brook's Hamlet, but they hobnobbed in the green room with pop star Sting's wife Trudi Styler and son Jake Sumner.

Lord Bragg, actors Richard E Grant and Derek Jacobi, Hamlet star Adrian Lester, poet laureate Andrew Motion and Baroness Jay joined in the post-dinner auction under railway arches in Blackfriars.

Highlight lots included Yorick's skull and Peter Brook's manuscript notes from his Hamlet, sold for £3,500. Stephen Daldry announced storyboards and the first draft of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge - and then outbid everyone with £1,500 to claim it for himself. The evening raised around £200, 000 for the theatre.

September 5, 2001

- Tickets for the Toronto International Film Festival, featuring "Dust" are on sale:

Single tickets for Festival screenings go on sale today, Wednesday, Sept 5th at the Festival Box Office, Toronto Eaton Centre, Level One, Dundas Mall. All available advance tickets are $23.55 for VIACOM Gala films and $13.00 for all other films. Single tickets are subject to availability at the time of purchase.

September 4, 2001

- An exerpt from "Fast-talking Woody wades in"
Alexander Walker's report in today's "This is London" online

Milcho Manchevski's Dust, also a part-British production, isn't a disaster: far from it. But it's a film with very disturbing racist overtones. My own question about this at the director's press conference caused such a dust that Manchevski - a winner in Venice in 1994 with Before the Rain - refused to answer me. It stars Joseph Fiennes and the Australian actor David Wenham as a pair of late 19th century American cowboys mixed up in Macedonia's independence revolt against the rule of the Ottoman Empire.

It's being promoted as a spaghetti Western, Sergio Leone-style. But it appears to have a more insidious and contemporary political agenda: the cowboys can been seen as representing mercenary America getting involved in overseas civil wars in which it has no standing.

The Turks are treated as gibbering hyenas in red fezes, indiscriminately and repugnantly caricatured. The fact that Turkey is currently pushing its claim to become a European Union member - a move that wouldn't be welcomed in Manchevski's native Macedonia, or in Greece, either - makes Dust's timing not just unfortunate, but downright suspicious.

September 2, 2001

- Indiewire VENICE 2001:
"Dust" in the Wind; Manchevski Defends Lido's Lackluster Opener
by Belle Burke

31 August 2001
The screening of "Dust" was already running late, time having been allowed for the paparazzi and public outside the Palazzo del Cinema to feast their eyes on the available celebrities (of whom there were few), and no doubt in the vain hope that more seats would fill up (the festival is being boycotted by members of the government). A further delay was caused when stage props in front of the screen, which were supposed to glide smoothly up out of sight refused to do so, occasioning perhaps the only spontaneous laughter of the evening.

Finally, when the figurative dust settled, we were able to see Milcho Manchevski's "Dust," his second feature film completed seven years after "Before the Rain," which received numerous awards including Venice's Golden Lion in 1994 and an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film. Much anticipated, "Dust" could reasonably be called an epic in several senses of the word, not necessarily for its length, which comes in at slightly over two hours, but for its sweep in time and space, going from the early 20th century to the present time and ranging back and forth from early frontier days in the American West and the Macedonian revolution in the Balkans during the same period to the gritty underside of contemporary New York and the present-day violence and upheavals in Macedonia, with side glances at Paris in 1902 and an earlier New York in 1945. These are all connected by a story line deliberately "fractured" by Manchevski, who refers to his filmmaking technique as "cubist storytelling."

The 42-year-old director (whose roots are Macedonian but who has lived in New York for many years) sees no problem in multiple points of view; he calls "Dust" a "Balkan western" or "maybe an Eastern." By enlarging his scope, however, he appears to have lost, or temporarily misplaced, the beautiful economy of "Before the Rain," with its minimal dialogue and attendant ambiguities, cinematography and soundtrack all working in the service of the story. With the camera dwelling on lushly-colored scenes, "Dust" lingers particularly on various forms of slaughter, an insistent musical score, and an unbelievable finish that is also regrettably sentimental.

Manchevski defends his use of cliché (good brother, bad brother), saying that he plays with it deliberately and prefers to call cliches by another name: archetypes. The characters are certainly archetypal: the two frontier brothers, Elijah and Luke, are in love with the same woman, bad brother runs away, eventually becoming a mercenary in the Balkans; meanwhile, in present-day New York, an inept but persistent young thief, Edge, breaks into the apartment of an old woman, Angela (the marvelous Rosemary Murphy, stealing every scene she's in) who wounds him and forces him, first at gunpoint and later with the promise of gold, to listen to a story which begins -- where else? -- on the American frontier. This theme continues throughout, but Manchevski says that we are not to accept the story line, as stories vary with the teller and the way in which they are told.

The problem, however, is not with the ideas of this brilliant, well-informed, innovative filmmaker, but with the realization. Manchevski may have chosen too large a frame for his storytelling -- some of the best scenes are the ones between Edge and Angela -- and proceeded to fill it with too much death and destruction, corruption and cruelty. And perhaps the American genres so attractive to filmmakers all over the world fare better in American hands? (Spaghetti westerns, which Manchevski says he grew up on, are different because they weren't meant to be taken seriously.) Not only do the frontier scenes in "Dust" not always ring completely true, but I'm reminded of last year's Venice entry, Kitano's "Brother," when he transported Japanese yakuza to Los Angeles with less than happy results.

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