lifestyle THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2013

Music & Movies

eith Urban had made eight albums over the past two ‘American Idol’ inspiration decades when he began recording his latest, “Fuse,” and Urban said he got some of his inspiration for “Fuse” from the Kthe Australian country singer figured it was time to make advice he gives out to contestants on Fox’s television singing some changes. “I just wanted to start in a place that was com- contest “American Idol,” where he serves as a judge. He will join pletely uncharted waters for me,” the 45-year-old Grammy win- singers Jennifer Lopez and Harry Connick Jr. on the panel for the ner said in an interview ahead of the album’s release on Tuesday. upcoming 13th season of the show. “I really wanted to challenge So Urban, the husband of Oscar-winning actress and fellow myself musically, expanding the boundaries of my sound, Australian Nicole Kidman, sought out a new group of songwrit- rhythm and melody, while still remaining true to who I am,” he ers and producers. “The whole journey was me trying to meet said. The release of “Fuse” is aided by lead single “Little Bit of these people and get in the studio with them,” Urban said. For Everything,” which was put out in May and cracked the top 10 on “Fuse,” Urban worked with nine different producers, including the country chart. The song shows Urban is experimenting with Butch Walker, best known for his production work with rock and different genres, as the upbeat tune takes a strong pop music pop acts such as Fall Out Boy and Katy Perry, his long-time col- approach with a hint of hip-hop mixed in. laborator Dann Huff and R&B hitmakers Benny Blanco and the Urban’s new single “We Were Us,” a duet with Miranda Norwegian duo Stargate. Lambert, also is an example of the singer taking a new tack. The “I cut about 25 songs and certain ones just kept hitting me a song, which Urban produced with Nathan Chapman, who way where I felt very strong about them for their energy and helped shepherd Taylor Swift’s career from country into main- what they were saying,” said Urban, who was also nominated for stream pop, begins with a traditional picked banjo but quickly the top male vocalist Country Music Association award on turns into a soaring pop-rock song. “I called Miranda and she Tuesday. “Slowly this particular group of 16 songs started to real- liked the song and she came in and sang it,” Urban said. “Then ly come together for me.” “Fuse” is expected to perform much people started saying I couldn’t have Miranda sing first. I was like Urban’s albums from the past decade, reaching the top of like, ‘Why not? It sounds fine.’ It’s a duet. She’s not a backing the US Billboard country music chart and in the top five of vocalist.”— Reuters Billboard’s 200 album chart. Keith Urban performs on NBC’s “Today” show on Tuesday in New York. — AP

ared Leto’s return to acting started, as so many previously only experienced Rayon. The actor sought things do, with a flirtation. It had been five years out transgender people to listen to their experiences, Jsince Leto last acted (the sci-fi indie “Mr Nobody”), a intent on not playing Rayon as a stereotypical, one-lin- movie career put on hold while his band, 30 Seconds to er-spewing drag queen.”I saw the part as not a cross- Mars, unexpectedly surged in popularity. The possibility dressing drag queen but someone who wanted to live of playing Rayon, a transgender person dying of AIDS their life as a woman,” says Rayon. “In my initial meetings for the film “Dallas Buyers Club,” came to him while he before I accepted the part, I made that pretty clear that was on tour in Europe. After initially dismissing the that was really important to me.” Leto was particularly chance, Leto read the script and he reversed course drawn to the film for the chance to work alongside immediately. When he met with the director Jean-Marc McConaughey, whom he says he wanted to “get in the Vallee via Skype, he was already trying on Rayon. ring with.”—AP “I used it as a test for myself,” Leto said in an inter- view. “I got some lipstick. We said hello and then I reached over and grabbed the lipstick and I proceeded to put it on. He was kind of like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ I took off my jacket and I had a little pink sweater on.” Vallee was properly seduced. He offered Leto the part the next morning. The based-on-a-true story “Dallas Buyers Club” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival over the weekend, ahead of its Nov. 1 release from Focus Features. It stars Matthew McConaughey as Ron Woodroof, a Texas man who after being diagnosed with HIV and giv- en days to live in 1986, is frustrated by the federal Food and Drug Administration’s available treatments and begins illegally importing drugs from Mexico and else- where. Though he’s initially homophobic toward Rayon, they become friends and business partners. The per- formances by McConaughey and Leto, both of which involved dropping dozens of pounds (Leto shed more than 30 pounds), were roundly applauded in Toronto and hailed as likely Oscar nominees. “I can’t believe five years went by,” the 41-year-old Leto says of his return to yan Guzman and Briana Evigan are set to star in Returning dancers from “Step Up: Revolution” include Marc the big screen. “It’s amazing to me.” Summit’s “Step Up 5,” which Trish Sie will direct from a ‘Marvelous’ Inniss, Nolan Padilla, Phillip Chbeeb, Bianca Leto founded the rock trio 30 Seconds to Mars with script by John Swetnam, the studio announced on Brewton, Tony Bellissimo, Josue ‘Beastmode’ Figueroa and This Sept 9, 2013 photo shows Jared Leto, a cast member in the R his drummer brother Shannon Leto in 1998, but it was Tuesday. In addition to Guzman and Evigan, several actors and Brandy Lamkim. Adam Shankman and Jennifer Gibgot are film “Dallas Buyer’s Club,” at the Toronto International Film their 2005 film record, “A Beautiful Lie,” which brought dancers from the previous installments of “Step Up” are return- producing via their Offspring Entertainment banner, whose Festival in Toronto. — AP mainstream success, selling more than a million copies ing to reprise their roles in the fifth film in Summit’s franchise. Matt Smith is executive producing. Production starts Sept 19 in the US. The band has since released two albums, The full list includes Adam Sevani and Alyson Stoner as in Vancouver and Las Vegas. Erik Feig, Meredith Milton and including “Love, Lust, Faith and Dreams” earlier this year. Moose and Camille, Misha Gabriel as Eddy, Stephen ‘tWitch’ Jina Jones will oversee the project for Summit. — AP “We had more success than we ever dreamed of with 30 Boss as Jason, Mari Koda as Jenny Kido, Chris Scott as Hair, Luis Seconds to Mars. We were playing the biggest shows of Rosado as Monster and Chadd Smith as Vladd aka Robot Guy, our lives,” Leto said. as well as Martin Lombard and Facundo Lombard as the But Leto threw himself into the role of Rayon. Vallee Santiago Twins. said the premiere was the first time he met Leto, having

ilmmaker Mohamad Malas unveiled at the Toronto film festival this week a movie shot in his Syrian Fhomeland, as conflict raged all around him. Malas said in an interview with AFP that he wrote and got gov- ernment approval to film his “Ladder to Damascus” (Soullam ila Dimashq) prior to the eruption of violence that has gripped Syria since 2011. After the start of the insur- gency, the Syrian writer-filmmaker adapted his script to reflect unrest that has claimed more than 100,000 lives. The film started as a love story about a young woman who moves to Damascus and meets an aspiring film direc- tor. It opens what one festival organizer called “a captivat- This 1995 photo provided by the Institute for Policy Studies shows Subcomandante Marcos, leader of the This 2010 photo provided by the Institute for Policy ing window into the psyche of ordinary Syrians grappling Zapatista Army of National Liberation, left, and Saul Landau in Chiapas, Mexico. — AP Studies shows award-winning documentary filmmaker with a historic upheaval.” In the film, 12 young Syrians pur- Saul Landau. suing jobs and studies are brought together as boarders at the same century-old home in the Syrian capital, even as violence fills the streets of Damascus. Malas’s script is populated with Syrians of various reli- gions and backgrounds, each describing personal experi- ences as the fighting closes in on them. The film also aims aul Landau, a prolific, award-winning documentary film- His documentaries tackled a variety of issues, but each me what my next film was going to be,” Landau recalled. “I through allegory to confront the role of cinema in times of maker who traveled the world profiling political leaders contained one underlying theme: reporting on a subject that said, ‘I’d like to do one on you.’” In 1971, Landau and fellow turmoil, Malas said. “It was impossible to ignore the Slike Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Chile’s Salvador Allende and was otherwise going largely unnoticed at the time, whether it filmmaker Haskell Wexler traveled to Chile for a rare US inter- goings-on around us,” the filmmaker said through an inter- used his camera to draw attention to war, poverty and racism, was American ghetto life, the destruction of an indigenous view with Allende, who had just been elected his country’s preter. has died. He was 77. Landau, who had been battling bladder Mexican culture or the inner workings of the CIA. “We tried to president and who would die two years later in a military “I didn’t want to wait for the revolution to end to talk cancer for two years, died Monday night at home in Alameda, take on themes that nobody else was taking on and that were coup. Although he made more than three dozen films, Landau about it.” He calls the movie “his own personal form of California, with his children and grandchildren, said colleague important,” Landau told The Associated Press in July. His most said he never set out to be a filmmaker. “I didn’t set out to be protest” for democracy and freedom of expression, adding John Cavanagh, director of the Institute for Policy Studies in acclaimed documentary was likely 1979’s “Paul Jacobs and the anything,” he said in July. “I just fell into it.” Landau graduated that at 68, he is too old to march and wave placards in the Washington, where Landau had worked for many years. Nuclear Gang,” which examined the effects of radiation expo- from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and after moving streets. Malas encouraged his actors to improvise dialogue The director, producer and writer of more than 40 docu- sure to people living downwind from Nevada’s above-ground to San Francisco he was at various times a film distributor, throughout the film and to speak in their own words mentaries had continued to work almost until his death. He nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s. author, playwright and member of the San Francisco Mime about what was happening in Syria. “I had them tell their regularly submitted essays to the Huffington Post and else- The film received a George Polk Award for investigative Troupe. own stories,” he said, adding that it is “difficult to call the where, sometimes writing from his hospital bed, according to reporting and other honors. It took its name from Landau’s Two of his earliest books, “The New Radicals” and “To Serve film fiction.” At the same time, he decries labels such as his son, Greg. He was also working on a documentary on friend Paul Jacobs, who contracted cancer that he believed The Devil” (both co-written with Jacobs), led to his being “docudrama,” saying the film does not fictionalize actual homophobia in Cuba. Even in his final weeks, as his health was was caused by radiation exposure. He died before the film was approached by a San Francisco public television station that events, but instead offers commentaries on the way war failing, Cavanagh said, Landau would become energized completed. Landau told the AP one of the documentaries he wanted a report on ghetto conditions in Oakland. The result disrupts daily life. Filming under a shroud of secrecy and whenever the conversation turned to how people could was most proud of was “The Sixth Sun: Mayan Uprising in was his first documentary, 1966’s “Losing Just The Same.” A fre- danger to his crew in Damascus was “very difficult and improve humanity. Chiapas,” which looked at the 1994 rebellion by the impover- quent commentator on radio and television in later years, complicated,” he said. He said he was never sure if his crew “He knew he’d made a contribution and he was happy ished indigenous people of southern Mexico. Landau traveled Landau was also a professor emeritus at California State and cast would show up for filming, and at the end of each about that, he was happy, but he wanted to talk about how to to Chiapas to interview, among others, the masked revolu- Polytechnic University, Pomona, where he taught history and day, he worried about whether they would get safely make the world a better place,” Cavanagh said Tuesday, recall- tionary leader known as Subcommandante Marcos. His 1968 digital media. — AP home. The film, which premiered here on September 8, is ing an hours-long discussion the two had earlier this year. documentary “Fidel” gave US audiences one of their earliest the only Syrian production being shown at the Toronto fes- “When we got into that is when he really got animated and close-ups of the revolutionary leader who installed tival this year.—AFP full of life, it was fascinating to see.” Landau authored 14 Communism in Cuba. books. While most covered issues like radical politics, con- It came about after a brief meeting with Castro, who told sumer culture and globalization, one of them, “My Dad Was Landau he had seen a news report he had done on Cuba the Not Hamlet,” was a collection of poetry. year before. “He said he liked the film very much and asked