Singer Demi Lovato started realising how queer she really was as she got older.
“My fans react when I colour my hair. If they didn’t like it, I saw it,” Lovato told Glamour magazine, reports femalefirst.co.uk.
Talking about the time she dyed her hair pink in 2014 and shaved half her head, Lovato said the negative response saddened her.
She said: “It reignited that fear inside of me of being who I really am.”
Lovato noted how cutting her hair represented “a symbolic shedding of the heteronormative box (she) was confined in for years.”
She added: “When I started getting older, I started realising how queer I really am. This past year I was engaged to a man, and when it didn’t work, I was like, ‘this is a huge sign’. I thought I was going to spend my life with someone. Now that I wasn’t going to, I felt this sense of relief that I could live my truth.”
Miley Cyrus took to social media to cherish some throwback memories from her life and one image features her with her ex boyfriend Nick Jonas as they go on a roller coaster ride. “You just had to be there,” Miley captioned her post.
Nick looks cute as he flaunts his long curly hair. He sports a casual T-shirt as he is seated besides a seemingly excited Miley. Even as Miley’s post brought back fonder memories of ‘Niley’ fans, some questioned why she shared his throwback picture on social media.
Earlier, in 2019, Miley had shared screenshots of direct messages she’d sent to Nick on social media. Nick’s wife, actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas had responded to the post in the comments section and wrote, “Lol. Hahaha.. Hubby is right. These posts r (lit).” This had earned Priyanka much praise from fans as she came across as a understanding wife.
Nick and Miley were rumoured to be dating at the height of their stardom years ago, when she was a popular actor on TV show Hannah Montana and Nick was a musician with the Jonas Brothers.
Years later, while Miley went on to marry and subsequently divorce actor Liam Hemsworth, Nick has settled with Priyanka after their December 2018 wedding.
On the work front, Nick has currently announced that his third solo album, titled Spaceman. The album with 11 tracks is scheduled to hit the stores on March 12.
Nick will perform the tracks from his album for the first time on the popular show Saturday Night Live, besides hosting the show on February 27.
For Bollywood, beautiful women have fair skin, according to an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based computer analysis which reveals that conception of beauty has remained consistent through the years in the film industry centred in Mumbai.
The automated computer analysis was led by Indian-origin researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the US.
The research revealed that babies whose births were depicted in Bollywood films from the 1950s and 60s were more often than not boys; in today’s films, boy and girl newborns are about evenly split.
In the 50s and 60s, dowries were socially acceptable; today, not so much.
The researchers, led by Kunal Khadilkar and Ashiqur KhudaBukhsh of CMU’s Language Technologies Institute (LTI), gathered 100 Bollywood movies from each of the past seven decades along with 100 of the top-grossing Hollywood moves from the same periods.
They then used statistical language models to analyse subtitles of those 1,400 films for gender and social biases, looking for such factors as what words are closely associated with each other.
“Most cultural studies of movies might consider five or 10 movies,” said Khadilkar, a master’s student in LTI.
“Our method can look at 2,000 movies in a matter of days.”
For instance, the researchers assessed beauty conventions in movies by using a so-called cloze test.
Essentially, it’s a fill-in-the-blank exercise: “A beautiful woman should have BLANK skin.”
A language model normally would predict “soft” as the answer, the researchers noted.
But when the model was trained with the Bollywood subtitles, the consistent prediction became “fair”.
The same thing happened when Hollywood subtitles were used, though the bias was less pronounced, said the study.
To assess the prevalence of male characters, the researchers used a metric called Male Pronoun Ratio (MPR), which compares the occurrence of male pronouns such as “he” and “him” with the total occurrences of male and female pronouns.
From 1950 through today, the MPR for Bollywood and Hollywood movies ranged from roughly 60 to 65 MPR.
Looking at words associated with dowry over the years, the researchers found such words as “loan,” “debt” and “jewelry” in Bollywood films of the 50s, which suggested compliance.
By the 1970s, other words, such as “consent” and “responsibility,” began to appear. Finally, in the 2000s, the words most closely associated with dowry — including “trouble,” “divorce” and “refused” — indicate noncompliance or its consequences.
“All of these things we kind of knew,” said KhudaBukhsh, an LTI project scientist, “but now we have numbers to quantify them. And we can also see the progress over the last 70 years as these biases have been reduced.”
The findings were presented at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence virtual conference earlier this month.
Cast: Kingsley Ben-Adir, Eli Goree, Leslie Odom Jr, Aldis Hodge
One Night in Miami may be – just like Kemp Powers’ play that it is based on — a chamber piece unfolding on a single night, mostly in a hotel room, although director Regina King (best known for her television credits) in her feature debut for Amazon Prime steers away from monotony by taking us out now and then to give captivating facets about her four black stars. For example, we watch Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) boxing world title holder Sonny Liston out of the ring to clinch the heavy weight trophy. It is 1964. It is Miami.
It is that night of victory when four black friends – Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), musician Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr), champion football player Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and of course Cassius get together to celebrate the historic win.
While we see the four having a friendly banter – sometimes arguing, sometimes ready to get into a little fist-fight – King takes us away to Sam’s concert in which his competitor plays mischief. He mucks up the microphone so that Sam would not be heard in a huge auditorium filled to its brim by a deliriously cheering crowd. Sam begins to tap his feet and clap, asking the people to follow him, while he tries to croon at the top of his voice.
Back inside the hotel room, Malcolm warns Sam that he would last only as long as the white people want him. Sam would always have to play second fiddle. So, you must come on your own, write your own songs, says Malcolm, a Muslim, who has convinced Cassius to switch his religion. On the same night, he announces to the journalists gathered outside the hotel that he would henceforth be called Cassius X. It is only later he changes his name to Muhammad Ali.
Also intricately woven into the narrative is the huge prejudice that whites in America have against blacks. We see this in a very subtle but unmistakable manner when Jim goes visiting an elderly family friend. His daughter offers him lemonade, and the man is all praise for the young man’s talents on the field. He talks about how their two families have had a long relationship. But when the girl asks her father to help move a furniture inside the house, Jim offers a hand. No, says the man, we do not let blacks inside! The father uses a derogatory term, crushing the young man’s self-respect. A troubling instance, of double standards.
Those were days when the Civil Rights Movement was gaining ground in the US, and there was a lot of opposition to giving blacks equal rights – a picture which is not very different today with African-Americans still being made to feel inferior, still at the receiving end of violence and injustice.
King’s work is superbly gripping, much like some of the chamber pieces that our own Satyajit Ray made when he was not in the best of health. There is not a moment when the narrative sags, not a moment when your attention is allowed to waver as the four friends, essayed by fine actors, chat and argue and come out with their deepest of fears. Even while Malcom, a Muslim himself, is getting set to induct Cassius into the fold, the older man is unhappy with the leadership of the Nation of Islam. Malcolm is thinking of quitting this organisation and opening one himself. Regina paints Malcom’s dilemma with feeling, and she also explores how each of the friends is fighting his own battle with racism. Narrated with a strong sense of purpose, One Night in Miami is certainly one of the good movies I have seen in recent months.
(Gautaman Bhaskaran is a movie critic and author of an autobiography of Adoor Gopalakrishnan)
Cast: George Clooney, Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Tiffany Boone, Demián Bichir, Kyle Chandler, Caoilinn Springall, Sophie Rundle, Ethan Peck
One can be an amazing actor, but a dumb director. We have seen many. But we had hoped that George Clooney could be an exception – a great actor and equally adept at direction. . He was, in the beginning. His 2005 Good Night, and Good Luck was gripping with its black-and-white images dramatising the tussle between television newsman Edward R. Murrow and US Senator Joseph McCarthy. It was a lovely piece of work that took us into the world of news broadcast of that era. Clooney’s The Ides of March in 2011 was as gripping with a story about the selfish political culture that cared little for the masses. But when he made The Monuments Men three years later about how Nazis stole art and how an attempt was made later to retrieve it, Clooney fell off the cliff!
His latest outing, The Midnight Sky, now on Netflix, is as disastrous. It is doomsday for Earth in 2049 that has been ravished by poisonous radiation. Nearly all the inhabitants are dead. But scientist Augustine Lofthouse (played by Clooney) stays at his Arctic post. In any case, he has not many days left. He is suffering from a terminal illness. Staying on, he is hoping to make contact with any space mission that may be returning to Earth to try and warn it about the cataclysmic event. There is just one up there, Aether, which is coming back after finding a new planet, K-23, which looks like being habitable.
The rest of The Midnight Sky, adapted from Lily Brooks-Dalton’s 2016 sci-fi novel “Good Morning, Midnight,” is all about how Lofthouse tries to contact Aether. We have on board a few like Sully (Felicity Jones) and Commander Tom Adewole (David Oyelowo). They are a couple and expecting their first child, and the other crew members keep thinking of a name for the baby girl.
In the meantime, Lofthouse finds that there is a stowaway in his post – Iris, just seven played with a touch of beautiful innocence by Caoilinn Springall. After initial irritation, the two bond. She is not mute, but refuses to talk. And Clooney is of little help, with his greyish beard looking like a glum Santa Claus, depressed and dejected. So very unlike his own real character and the kind of dashing films he made or acted in.
The Midnight Sky has some gorgeous visuals, but in times like these when the world is passing through a crisis, do we need a plot like this – dreary and infusing a sense of hopelessness in us?
The film may be science fiction, some kind of fantasy fairytale, but beyond this, I can merely wonder why the heck did a man like Clooney, who is so full of life, so spirited, make a movie that is disastrously depressing and may push the little joy we now have — with Christmas and New Year on us — out of our lives.
Maybe Clooney was trying to tell us, folks watch out, respect the planet (global warming, etc), otherwise it will kick you. But he could have done it with some fun, some hope, not this kind of dark despair.
(Gautaman Bhaskaran is a movie critic and author of a biography of Adoor Gopalakrishnan)
