Diane Keaton’s nail clippers for $960: what’s behind the new boom in celebrity estate auctions?

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With beloved stars’ personal items increasingly up for grabs after they die, a new generation of fans are bidding on everything from bowler hats to dog bowls From Diane Keaton’s bowler hats and polka dot scarfs, to Gene Hackman’s used paint brushes, to Terence Stamp’s love letters from Jean Shrimpton and even Matthew Perry’s black leather wallet (his credit cards and AAA membership card still inside), fans are being offered – at a price – increasingly personal items from the estates of dead celebrities. The growing trend for auctions of deceased famous people’s personal items – which has boomed ever since the hugely popular Marilyn Monroe estate sale in 1999 – has even attracted its own portmanteau: “deleb” as in dead celebrity. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/4Yh215g via IFTTT
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A Dry White Season review – Marlon Brando heads starry cast in ground-breaking apartheid drama

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This first Hollywood studio feature with a black female director is a compelling account of a South African who turns against the ruling caste

In the late 80s, there were a number of films about apartheid South Africa that somehow made the black experience dramatically subordinate to white liberal activism. Chris Menges’s A World Apart from 1988 had Barbara Hershey as the white campaigner based on anti-apartheid activist Ruth First; the year before that, Richard Attenborough’s excruciatingly well-intentioned Cry Freedom was supposedly about the friendship between white journalist Donald Woods (Kevin Kline) and Steve Biko (Denzel Washington), but contrived to put Woods at the centre of the action, all but forgetting about Biko. Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season from 1989, now released on Blu-ray, looks on the face of it to be the same sort of thing. And yet this movie is much tougher and shrewder on what it would actually mean for white people in apartheid South Africa to side against their own caste.

Donald Sutherland plays well-regarded white schoolmaster and former rugby star Ben Du Toit, who lives comfortably and is entirely content with the racist world of South Africa; he is deeply troubled, however, when his black gardener Gordon (Winston Ntshona) tells him his son has been beaten and then taken away by police – and decent, thoughtful Du Toit is radicalised by what he finds out. Janet Suzman plays his thin-lipped wife who disapproves of her husband’s unaccountable and dangerous soft-heartedness. German star Jürgen Prochnow plays the chilling secret policeman Captain Stolz, while John Kani plays lawyer Julius, and Marlon Brando almost walks off with the whole movie as progressive barrister Ian McKenzie who is hired by Du Toit to challenge the brutal regime in court. This is a role showcasing Brando’s remarkably effective, quasi-Shakespearean English accent, which snaps his entire performance into shape.

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