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With ‘Across the Spider-Verse,’ Phil Lord and Chris Miller ‘blow the doors open’

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With 'Across the Spider-Verse,' Phil Lord and Chris Miller 'blow the doors open'

Aside from the inverted skyline, the only giveaway that something is off in one of the most striking images of “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” is the ponytail that’s sticking straight up in the air.

Gwen Stacy (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld) and Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) have just reunited in the “Into the Spider-Verse” sequel. After giddily swinging through New York skyscrapers, they perch themselves on the underside of a clocktower ledge. Their view is ours: An upside-down city, shimmering in the distance.

“Everything is the wrong way, but if feels right,” says Phil Lord, who wrote and produced “Across the Spider-Verse” with Christopher Miller.

In the movies of Lord and Miller, a filmmaking duo since they met in college at Dartmouth, down is frequently up, and up is often down. They’ve turned seemingly terrible ideas — a Lego movie, a “21 Jump Street” movie — into original works of antic, innovative comedy. One of their crowning achievements, the Oscar-winning “Into the Spider-Verse,” took a hatchet to superhero movie conventions. Spider-Man, for the first time, was a biracial kid from Brooklyn. He was also, thanks to a mosh pit of multiverses, just about anyone, or anything, you could think of. 

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“With that mask that covers an entire body and face, you can imagine yourself in that suit,” says Miller. “The whole goal of this trilogy was to let everybody feel like it could be me, and show as many different types of people — and animals — being Spider-Man as possible.”

It took nearly five years, a crew of a thousand and a cavalcade of Spider-People, but the second chapter of Miller and Lord’s “Spider-Verse” series has arrived. It might be their masterpiece. In “Across the Spider-Verse” — an eyeball-delighting, electrically animated whirligig of color and sound — Lord and Miller set out not just to surpass the high bar of their 2018 original but upend big-studio animation and the more-of-the-same expectations of sequel-making.

“It was an opportunity to show the limitless possibilities of animation in a studio film,” says Miller. “For too long, the studios were mandating that these films all look the same. And we wanted to blow the doors open on that.”

“Across the Spider-Verse” certainly blasted expectations on opening weekend. It debuted with $120.5 million, way above tracking estimates and more than triple what “Into the Spider-Verse” launched with. What was once a quirky minor player in the hulking world of superhero movies has turned into not just a blockbuster but a genuine pop-culture sensation and, maybe, a new high point in comic-book movies.

“When you have the confidence of the audience like I hope we have from the first movie, you sort of want to use it as a springboard to take more chances,” says Lord. “We couldn’t justify doing this with any other story or any other point in our careers. We were like: Let’s swing the biggest bat we can.”

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“Across the Spider-Verse,” directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson, continues the story of Miles, now a veteran crime-fighter but also a teenager with an increasingly strained relationship with his parents. They remain unaware of his secret identity.

But much isn’t straightforward in “Across the Spider-Verse,” which Lord and Miller penned with David Callaham. There are countless other parallel Earths, each with their own Spider-Person. One is Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld), Spider-Man’s traditional love interest who’s now a potent force, herself. Worlds collide, many times over.

There’s also a Spidey collective that keep these universes in balance by making sure certain canonical moments happen for each hero. There may be wide latitude in who can be Spider-Man, but a foundation of formula must be obeyed.

This battle with Canon is in many ways Lord and Miller’s fight, too. They’ve spent their careers deconstructing convention and inverting tropes. They have sometimes pushed right up against Hollywood’s limits. In mid-production on “Solo,” the Han Solo standalone “Star Wars” film, they were famously replaced after a clash over the film’s tone.

“Across the Spider-Verse,” a part two ending in an abrupt cliffhanger, plunges directly into the question: So what is gospel for Lord and Miller? Is anything?

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“Who seeks to become an artist in order to be a column that upholds the temple?” says Lord, laughing. “That’s no fun.”

The “Solo” kerfuffle might have been their “Network” moment. (“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale.”) Instead, Lord and Miller have, if anything, doubled down on their devotion to tearing up Hollywood playbooks.

“We have a natural aversion to the dangers of nostalgia. It can be a calcifying effect on people,” says Miller. “There’s a lot of anger and hate coming out of wanting to preserve things the way they’ve always been. That’s not how society works. We need to keep evolving and making things new and growing. We can’t just perfectly preserve the past.”

“The movies you love were all daring in their time,” adds Lord. “The idea isn’t to copy them. It’s to be as equally daring as ‘Snow White’ or ‘Toy Story’ or ‘Jaws.’”

Their collage-like films, like Michael Rianda’s family road trip “The Mitchells vs. The Machines,” are often in some way contemplating humanity in increasingly digital worlds. Lord and Miller were behind the meme-turned-movie “Cocaine Bear” earlier this year.

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Set to a modern hip-hop beat and chock-full of ever-changing shocks of color that channel the 2-D art of comic books, “Across the Spider-Verse” summons multiverses with the ease of a keystroke. But it does so far more playfully, disorderly and distinctly un-algorithm-like. Striving for originality, they say, is “how to keep the robots guessing.”

“The AI isn’t going to generate something new and original,” says Miller, who along with Lord, is an outspoken Writers Guild member in the current strike where artificial intelligence is a top issue. “It’s going to just do an imitation of the things that came before it. It’s our job as humans to keep making things new.”

But as dizzying as “Across the Spider-Verse” can be visually, the imagery is ultimately in service of its central characters’ inner lives. To the 28-year-old Moore, Miles’ appeal isn’t that he’s exceptional. It’s that he’s recognizably ordinary.

“There are young Black kids that are just like Miles. Regular, cool, kinda nerdy, weird, loveable kids. Same thing on the Hispanic side,” says Moore. “People want to meet him. My lines at Comic-Con are insane.”

Moore never received a script for either film, just a sense of major plot points. Three times a month, for four years, he would go into a recording booth for six-hour sessions with Lord, Miller and the directors.

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“They’ll play with it for hours. We’ll do another session where they lock in on whatever they like the most and then they’ll play with it again. It’s really like they’re having fun, more than anything,” says Moore. “The whole project is being treated like a passion project. It doesn’t feel like someone is watching over them.”

At the same time, “Across the Spider-Verse” grapples with not just the responsibilities of Spider-Man (Miles) but of his anxious, doubting parents (Brian Tyree Henry and Luna Lauren Vélez) and Gwen’s disapproving father (Shea Whigham). It’s a coming-of age-story, but as Miller says, “the parents have to come of age, too.”

“And what makes someone legitimate?” says Lord. “Do you seek that outside of yourself? Or can you simply seek your own approval? Miles is like all of us hoping for validation outside. But it can never really satisfy you. You have to take it on yourself. Even though the movie ends in a cliffhanger, I think that’s what he achieves. It’s an epic action movie where the story is really internal. He’s the MacGuffin.”

Some of the same questions exist for Lord and Miller, both 47 and increasingly prominent power players with a long pipeline of projects in development. Later this summer they have the R-rated dog comedy “Strays” in theaters. Even a live-action movie for Miles is in the mix.

“You always feel like an outsider even if you’re working inside these big companies,” says Miller. “Otherwise, you become the Empire.”

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“Beyond the Spider-Verse,” the third film in the trilogy is due out in less than a year, on March 29. It will bring to a conclusion Miles’ looming battle with Spider-Man Canon. Just how far Miles — and Lord and Miller — are able to stretch the Marvel webslinger will be put to a final test.

Given who’s behind these films, don’t put a lot of money on Canon emerging victorious.

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France probes racist backlash against Nakamura over Olympics

France probes racist backlash against Nakamura over Olympics

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France probes racist backlash against Nakamura over Olympics

 French investigators have opened an inquiry over alleged racism against French-Malian pop superstar Aya Nakamura following reports she might perform at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, prosecutors said Friday.

With the Paris Olympics still months away, the host country has already won gold in a category it truly owns: divisive racial controversy with “made in France” flair.

That’s how public broadcaster France Inter summed up a row over unconfirmed rumours that Aya Nakamura would perform an Édith Piaf song during the Games’ opening ceremony in front of a crowd of 300,000 gathered along the River Seine.

Nakamura, 28, has become a global superstar for hits like “Djadja”, which has close to a billion streams on YouTube alone. On the international stage, she is the most popular French female singer since Piaf sang “La vie en rose”, a rare case of a French artist whose songs reach well beyond the Francophone world.

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She is also the proud face of the neglected banlieues (suburbs) of Paris, which have produced many of France’s best-known icons of music and sport – and which will soon host the Olympic Village.

On paper, tapping her for the curtain-raiser of “the biggest show on earth” is a no-brainer.

But the mere suggestion triggered a vitriolic response from members of France’s ascendant far right, for whom Nakamura is unfit to represent France. Their sometimes racist arguments have in turn prompted outrage and bafflement, leading government ministers to wade into a debate that has had precious little to do with music.

“If this were about music, we wouldn’t even have a debate – Nakamura is France’s biggest pop star, full stop,” said Olivier Cachin, a prominent music journalist who was among the first to speak out on social media in defence of the singer.

“But it’s not about music. It’s about the colour of her skin,” he added. “It’s racism, pure and simple.”

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‘You can be racist but not deaf’

The controversy follows media reports that Nakamura discussed performing a song by Piaf during a meeting with President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysée Palace last month – though neither party has confirmed the rumour.

On Saturday, a small extremist group known as the “Natives” hung a banner on the banks of the Seine that read: “No way, Aya. This is Paris, not the Bamako market” – a reference to Nakamura’s birth in Mali’s capital.

The next day, the singer’s name was booed at a campaign rally for the far-right Reconquête party of Eric Zemmour, the former pundit and presidential candidate who has been convicted of inciting racial hatred. In a bizarre rant, Zemmour claimed “future babies (…) don’t vote for rap, nor for lambada, nor for Aya Nakamura: they vote for Mozart!”

Nakamura has responded to the vitriol, writing on social media: “You can be racist but not deaf… That’s what hurts you! I’m becoming a number 1 state subject in debates… but what do I really owe you? Nada.”

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The singer was backed by the Olympics’ organising committee, which said it was “shocked by the racist attacks” levelled at “the most listened-to French artist in the world”.

Sports Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra also expressed her support on social media, telling Nakamura she had the people’s backing, while Culture Minister Rachida Dati raised the matter in the French National Assembly, warning that “attacking someone purely on racist grounds (…) is unacceptable; it’s an offence”.

On Friday, Paris prosecutors said they were investigating allegations of racist attacks against the pop star following a complaint filed by the anti-racism advocacy group Licra.

For Whites only

For Karim Hammou and Marie Sonnette-Manouguian, co-authors of a book charting 40 years of hip-hop music in France, Nakamura’s elevation to a “state subject” is part of a concerted strategy of exploiting cultural events to serve the far right’s reactionary, identity politics.

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“The pattern is always the same: far-right leaders voice outrage on social media, until the controversy is picked up by a larger audience in the media and the mainstream right,” they said in written remarks to FRANCE 24.

“Rappers and R&B singers are routinely used as scapegoats in debates that go well beyond them,” they added. “The real question being raised here is that of the participation of people of immigrant background (…) in French culture and in enriching its language and modes of expression.”

If Nakamura were White, there would be no such debate, added Bettina Ghio, who has written several books on the language of French rap, the country’s most popular musical genre – but one that has long been frowned upon by politicians and the musical establishment.

“The far right cannot bear the idea that non-white people of immigrant descent can represent France on the international stage – let alone sing from the repertoire of White artists,” she explained.

Ghio cited the case of Youssoupha, a French rapper of Congolese descent, who suffered similar attacks when his song “Ecris mon nom en bleu” (“Write my name in blue”) was chosen as the unofficial anthem of the French national team at the men’s Euro 2021 football tournament.

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“The Nakamura controversy should not be isolated from past incidents in which the far right has taken aim at artists and athletes based on the colour of their skin,” she said, pointing to the frequent slurs levelled at the racially diverse French squads that won the football World Cups in 1998 and 2018.

Lilian Thuram, the Caribbean-born former international who was part of the Black, Blanc, Beur (Black, White, Arab) squad of 1998, spoke in defence of Nakamura in an interview with France Info radio on Tuesday.

“When people say she’s not fit to represent France, I know exactly what criteria they have in mind because the same arguments were used against me,” said the retired player, an outspoken campaigner against racism in France. He said the question of whether Nakamura should perform at the Olympics was being presented the wrong way.

“If you ask people whether the most popular French artist in the world should perform at the Olympics, a majority would say ‘yes’,” he added. “Like it or not, she’s the best. And that’s why she should represent France.”

A cosmopolitan mix

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Thuram noted that Nakamura was often mistakenly labelled a rapper, a habit he attributed to racial and class-based prejudice.

“Why do people think she’s a rapper? Because she’s Black,” he said. “It’s as if we were discussing some random artist from the suburbs and not France’s biggest star. It’s insulting.”

Nakamura’s music mixes R&B with the highly danceable rhythms of Afrobeat and Carribean Zouk. But right-wing criticism of her work sometimes echoes the prejudice aimed at France’s thriving rap scene, a driver of vociferous social criticism for the past three decades.

“The far right cannot stand the criticism of France’s colonial history voiced by rappers,” said Ghio. “Zemmour has made hateful comments on television about rap, describing it as a subculture for illiterates … that wrecks the French language.”

Zemmour’s deputy Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the niece of rival far-right leader Marine Le Pen, made similar comments on Tuesday, stating on BFMTV that, “Aya Nakamura does not sing in French. She does not represent French culture and elegance.”

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Such claims are “preposterous”, said Cachin, for whom the pop star “simply speaks today’s French, rich in slang and expressions, and does so very well.” He added: “Other more mainstream artists do this as well, without attracting the same kind of scrutiny.”

Nakamura, whose real last name is Danioko, sings in French, but her lyrics borrow heavily from argot, the French slang, as well as English, Arabic and Bambara, the Malian language spoken by her parents. Her cosmopolitan mix is inspired by her upbringing in a family of griots, Malian poets steeped in music.

The term “Djadja”, from her breakthrough hit, refers to a liar who boasts about sleeping with her. It has become a rallying cry for female campaigners against sexism and sexist violence. “Pookie”, the title of another hugely popular song, comes from the French slang term poucave, meaning a snitch.

“Her songs bring vitality to the French language, because there’s a lot of research into sounds and rhythms, and adopting new terms that are popular with youths, particularly in the suburbs,” said Ghio. She drew a parallel with prominent rappers PNL, who experiment with accents, placing them elsewhere in words to generate new sounds.

“To ignore their work is to consider French as a dead language that hasn’t changed one bit over the past 40 years,” Ghio said, adding that she looked forward to hearing Nakamura experiment with Piaf’s repertoire.

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Piaf in the banlieue

The scion of poverty-stricken street performers, Piaf was also once derided for her unorthodox style and frequent use of slang terms that postwar elites frowned upon.

“Popular music has always been attacked by bourgeois commentators and self-styled guardians of proper French language,” said Hammou and Sonnette-Manouguian.

“In her day, Piaf was frequently criticised for her performances, her physique and her morals,” they added, denouncing attempts to create a “false opposition” between the legendary 20th century singer and Nakamura.

Piaf has long been revered in the urban music scene of the Paris suburbs, sung by rapper JoeyStarr and remixed in Matthieu Kassovitz’s seminal film “La Haine”.

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Associating her with Nakamura would be a chance to link the past and present of French popular music, said Ghio, “from the working-class, bohemian Paris of Piaf to today’s post-colonial banlieues with their African diaspora”.

Echoing that theme, the left-leaning daily Libération spoke of “building bridges between generations” and a chance to demonstrate “France’s gratitude towards artists that contribute to its global clout, be they from Montmartre or Aulnay-sous-Bois (a poorer suburb north of Paris)”.

Nakamura’s position as a target of racist, sexist and class-based attacks has made her the unwitting champion of causes she never claimed to carry.

The pop star, whose playful songs touch on relationships, flirting and female friendships, has consistently steered clear of politics. She has previously declined to describe herself as feminist, suggesting such a label would sound “fake”.

But she has also proved her mettle in facing down a torrent of abuse throughout her still-burgeoning career.

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“When you’re a non-White woman in a patriarchal society shaped by its colonial past, you need to find the words to defend yourself,” said Binetou Sylla, producer and owner of Syllart Records, pointing at Nakamura’s social media post this week.

“It’s possibly the first time she uses the word ‘racist’ in a tweet,” Sylla observed. “But she had no choice.”

The music producer stressed Nakamura’s bold personality, adding: “She’s unapologetic, with a loudmouth, provocative side that is also very French – and which further winds up her racist critics.” The racist campaign against Nakamura has now made it imperative that she performs at the opening ceremony, Sylla said.

“If Aya steps aside, if she doesn’t open the Games, it will be France’s loss. That much is certain,” Libération argued, describing Nakamura as a rare “element of French soft power in a pop culture dominated by English and Spanish.”

A curtain-raiser without Nakamura would also mean handing a victory to the far right, added Cachin.

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“Of course she has to perform now,” he said. “Whether she sings from her own repertoire or from Piaf’s or (Charles) Aznavour’s or all of them at once, it doesn’t really matter. Either way, she’ll be in her right.”  

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Sania Mirza, son Izhaan Mirza observe Ramazan with traditional zeal

Sania Mirza, son Izhaan Mirza observe Ramazan with traditional zeal

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Sania Mirza, son Izhaan Mirza observe Ramazan with traditional zeal

Indian tennis star Sania Mirza keeps the fans updated with her routine activities.

Sania is sharing her day-to-day activity on Instagram for last few months in a bid to move on from her bitter past.

She is now a single parent after parting ways with former captain of Pakistan cricket team Shoaib Malik in January this year.

The Muslims are observing Ramazan across the world and Sania Mirza shared some pictures of her son marking the holy month.

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Sania is currently living in Dubai with her son Izhaan Mirza-Malik.

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Fatima Bhutto welcomes baby boy, names him after father Murtaza

Fatima Bhutto welcomes baby boy, names him after father Murtaza

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Fatima Bhutto welcomes baby boy, names him after father Murtaza

Fatima Bhutto, who is the granddaughter of former PM Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, announced the happy news of her baby boy’s birth on Instagram.

She has named the new born baby as a tribute to her late father.

“Graham and I are so happy to share the news of the birth of our baby boy,” wrote the delighted new mother on her Instagram handle as she shared her joy with her fans, asking them to keep her and her family in their prayers.

“We wanted to give our son a name that would bestow him with courage and kindness as he makes his way through the world,” she added.

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“I wanted a name that would act as an inspiration to him in his life but also one that would cloak him in love and strength, a name that he could wear with the knowledge that it was given to him from deep within his mother’s heart and soul to protect him throughout his life, to give him in equal measure both grace and fearlessness, a sense of his homeland and of joy. Every time I thought of what name might do that, I always came back to my beloved father’s name. Please keep us in your prayers,” she mentioned in the post.

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