Angelina Jolie, partner to Brad Pitt, is the star of several blockbuster movies. Among them Girl Interrupted and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, coincidentally where she met Pitt. But perhaps her most well known portrayal was as the buxom Lara Croft, in the Tomb Raider films. During the shooting of the first movie, much of which was shot on location in Cambodia, Jolie came to witness the beautiful environment, immersive culture, and rampant poverty of the nation. This, she says, opened her eyes and was her stepping stone into humantiarian work.
After Cambodia, Anglina Jolie took a trip to Sierra Leone and Tanzania in 2001, and it was there that she first became actively involved in humanitarium causes. The purpose of that fateful trip was to discover first hand the conditions that refugees must suffer. Angelina was so shocked that shortly after, in August 2001, she was appointed Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, otherwise known as UNHCR.
The UNHCR assists over 20 million refugees in 120 countries around the world. They were created to protect and safeguard the well-being and rights of refugees. They believe that refugees have a right to seek asylum in another country and will actively seek to engage nations to integrate and support those refugees. Thus far, in only 5 decades, they have helped over 50 million people in the world.
Angelina’s contribution has greatly assisted in generating more widespread attention to this worthy cause. As a goodwill ambassador, her role is to communicate to, and provide a focus on refugees by generating mass-media attention. Though in Jolie’s case this is not merely superficial. She actually spends much of her own time and is genuinely affected by their misery. On her trip to Ecuador, Jolie wrote of the suffering, “People's lives are truly in danger – not just in the sense that you feel your town is unsafe – their lives are actually being threatened and their houses are being burnt down.”
To further increase public awareness, Jolie has released several personal journals of her experiences during field visits. More information can be found at unhcr.org.
As well as the physical effort that Jolie contributes, her foundation with partner Brad Pitt, called the Jolie-Pitt Foundation recently donated USD$1 million to groups working in Darfur. Darfur is a region in war ravaged Sudan, which Jolie has visited three times already.
Jolie now plans to spend most of her time in humanitarian efforts, revealing that she splits her actress her salary three ways; a third for savings, a third for living expenses and a third for charity. Considering she commands a high pay packet for movies, as well as product endorsements, that equates to a considerable amount donated.
Jolie has two adopted children, and is currently thinking of a third. Maddox, a cambodian refugee boy she adopted in 2002, and Zahara, an ethiopian refugee girl. She also has a child with Brad Pitt, named Shiloh.
Together with Pitt, Jolie has stated that she will continue to promote and actively engage in humanitarian causes, as well as pursuing her acting ambitions.
When The Pulitzer Prizes were announced, the not entirely delightful news is that no Pulitzer was awarded in drama.
While the decision is unsettling, the prudence of it must be acknowledged, since, affection for the theater and those who make it aside, there was no drama to consider.
Let us have the courage to ask why and, along the way, try our best to understand everybody’s culpability or innocence.
If you keep tabs on Broadway, just so you’ll know if, by some surprising concatenation of events, a drama you might actually be interested in seeing comes along, you know that the usual fare this past season was once again a series of enthusiastically promoted trifles.
But the financial realities on Broadway make it exceedingly chancy for producers to put up anything that isn’t already proven at the box office and, even more importantly, with the critics, who can even disable a previous box-office success. All very understandable. The producers are not in the business of nourishing unproven works, no matter how worthy they may suspect or be advised they are. Not understandable.
The small and regional theaters are seldom managed by people who have any sense of what mainstream appeal might be or they very likely wouldn’t be working in a little or regional theater. Perfectly understandable.
Even if a small or regional theater puts up a work that might attract a wider audience than the reliable coterie whose interests are decidedly offbeat, the likelihood that a well-known critic or even a second-string critic will show up is discouraging. Understandable. During the theater season, little theaters put up shows with withering frequency in New York and all over the country. The critics whose names people might known do not flock to any production that doesn’t have some kind of major preproduction cache. Their primary job is to review the little shows in the big venues, not the remotely possible big show in a little venue, and their secondary job, should they occasionally be inspired to assume its obligations, is to cherry pick smaller productions that present some precondition of influential interest. Also understandable.
The current crop of critics, when confronted by a work in any theatrical venue that smacks of being mainstream, are unlikely to find it suits their own offbeat temperaments. Not understandable. It is such temperamental selectivity that prevented, among countless lesser knows, a relatively mainstream playwright like Arthur Miller from getting a rave review during the last two or three decades of his life, and even a popular confectioner like Neil Simon from getting one for many years.
The inescapable fact is, offbeat people usually prefer offbeat works. Very understandable. We’re all human.
But what would be really refreshing is for a major critic or two to surface whose tastes would incline them to help nourish intelligent theater that deals with the major text and subtext of contemporary mainstream American life. Once we were fortunate enough to have them, like the legendary Brooks Atkinson and the more recent Walter Kerr, we could be far more hopeful that mainstream works would have a chance of surfacing. After all, critics are the first significant audience for any work, and so they are necessary partners in the attempt to rejuvenate intelligent and widely relevant American theater.
As for the playwrights, we must understand their plight, too. Simply put, comes the hopeful new playwright with a mainstream sensibility, where can he hope to find an outlet? And, if he does, can he hope to have a critic show up, let alone one who is on the same page with his sensibility? Quite a rare – and, year after year, an apparently impossible – combination.
Even Actors Equity is aligned against the poor talented soul. Should the playwright somehow find a theater that will put us his or her work, he or she will get what is known as a showcase presentation, which provides for four weeks of rehearsal and a four-week run, possibly extended to five weeks. Since the rehearsals must be conducted with actors who have to participate in their spare time, due to the meager honorariums showcase appearances provide, it’s difficult to get a production that does the work justice. And a four-week run simply is not long enough to build word of mouth.
Between the scarcity of venues that have a predisposition toward a playwright who has a sensibility that might reach mainstream America, the difficulty of getting a production that showcases the work in a way that renders whatever excellence it may hold, the brevity of the run, and the scarcity of critics who might arrive, compounded by the unlikely prospect that any who do might appreciate it, can we blame the playwright who finally decides that he’s involved in a hopeless puzzle that, at best, is merely baby sitting him as an intellectual. Is it any wonder that he may sulk between disappointing efforts and finally walk away into a writing career where there is some hope of getting somewhere. Understandable, at least.
So there you have, as best as we can explain it, why no Pulitzer was awarded for drama.
But we could never leave you without whatever hope there might be.
The one factor that hasn’t yet entered contemporary theater that has influenced, for better or worse, film and television, is the advent of the self-funded writer-producer. Considering the gauntlet that faces the mainstream playwright without his or her own resources, such a writer-producer, maligned as he may initially be as self-aggrandizing by the theatrical establishment, may be the only hope left.
Meanwhile, we must reluctantly admit, better not to award the Pulitzer at all than to award it to a trifle, masquerading as a piece of consequence. At least, some sort of standard has been indicated.
While motion picture films have been around for more than a century, film is still a relative newcomer in the pantheon of fine arts. In the 1950s, when television became widely available, industry analysts predicted the demise of local movie theaters. Despite competition from television's increasing technological sophistication over the 1960s and 1970s, such as the development of color television and large screens, motion picture cinemas continued. In the 1980s, when the widespread availability of inexpensive videocassette recorders enabled people to select films for home viewing, industry analysts again wrongly predicted the death of the local cinemas.
In the 1990s and 2000s the development of digital DVD players, home theater amplification systems with surround sound and subwoofers, and large LCD or plasma screens enabled people to select and view films at home with greatly improved audio and visual reproduction. These new technologies provided audio and visual that in the past only local cinemas had been able to provide: a large, clear widescreen presentation of a film with a full-range, high-quality multi-speaker sound system. Once again industry analysts predicted the demise of the local cinema. Local cinemas will be changing in the 2000s and moving towards digital screens, a new approach which will allow for easier and quicker distribution of films (via satellite or hard disks), a development which may give local theaters a reprieve from their predicted demise.
The cinema now faces a new challenge from home video by the likes of a new DVD format Blu-ray, which can provide full HD 1080p video playback at near cinema quality. Video formats are gradually catching up with the resolutions and quality that film offers, 1080p in Blu-ray offers a pixel resolution of 1920?1080 a leap from the DVD offering of 720?480 and the paltry 330?480 offered by the first home video standard VHS. The maximum resolutions that film currently offers are 2485?2970 or 1420?3390, UHD, a future digital video format, will offer a massive resolution of 7680?4320, surpassing all current film resolutions. The only viable competitor to these new innovations is IMAX which can play film content at an extreme 10000?7000 resolution.
Despite the rise of all new technologies, the development of the home video market and a surge of online piracy, 2007 was a record year in film that showed the highest ever box-office grosses. Many expected film to suffer as a result of the effects listed above but it has flourished, strengthening film studio expectations for the future.
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