Latest news with #Fosse
Daily Record
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Period drama with 'amazing chemistry' fans say is 'just like Downton Abbey'
The biographical period drama takes a look at the life and career of beloved children's author Beatrix Potter Chris Noonan's 2006 biographical period drama, Miss Potter, delves into the life and career of the much-loved children's author Beatrix Potter. Incorporating animated sequences of familiar characters from her globally acclaimed children's tales, Miss Potter intertwines anecdotes and experiences from Beatrix Potter's own life, presenting them in a heartwarming and captivating way for the big screen. Penned by Richard Maltby Jr. , the Tony Award-winning director of the Broadway musical revue Fosse, Miss Potter features Renée Zellweger in the lead role. It also features Ewan McGregor portraying her fiancé and publisher, Norman Warne, as well as Lloyd Owen taking on the role of Beatrix Potter's solicitor, William Heelis. Miss Potter raked in over $35.8million worldwide, against a production budget of roughly $30million. In recognition of Renéer's stellar performance, the Bridget Jones Diary actress was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture Comedy or Musical and a Saturn Award for Best Actress for the film. The biographical drama brings to life the story of Beatrix Potter, the cherished author and illustrator of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, reports the Express. Set in the early 20th-century England, Miss Potter delves into author Beatrix Potter's life as she confronts challenges in publishing, societal pressure, family expectations, and personal tragedies. Navigating through these hurdles with determination and inventiveness, Beatrix Potter cements herself as a distinguished icon among children's writers of all time. The film received a medley of responses, garnering a 68 per cent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. While critics were divided, one acknowledged the leading performances: "...boasts terrific work from both Renée and McGregor that's heightened by their palpable chemistry together.." Another provided more subdued feedback: "Enchanting, perhaps, but a long, long way from meaningful." One reviewer compared the period piece to the highly acclaimed Downton Abbey, describing it as: "Always accessible in a Downton-Abbey-goes-to-Play-School kind of way, as evidenced by Renée Zellweger's chipper portrayal of Potter as a bustle-skirted bundle of squinty smiles and sudden blushes." Conversely, Renée's interpretation of Potter was warmly received, with praise noting: "Portraying a real-life hero can be a tough assignment. "But Zellweger breezes through the role, flashing her puckish grin, talking in her soft, breathy voice and giving very human face to one of the most beloved figures of English letters." Audience reviews for the film were decidedly split; one fan expressed their approval, saying: "Chris Noonan did an excellent job of keeping it authentic. "Zellweger fits this perfectly, a truly unique character of her times. Amazing cinematography and a stellar cast, all outstanding in their character. "Lovely to look at and filled with perseverance and true grit. Filled with fantastic ideas and wonder. "Remarkable indeed." In contrast, another viewer was far from impressed, remarking: "Extremely odd and extremely dumb. "The script for this biopic is a mess." Miss Potter marked Renée's debut as an executive producer. In conversation with IndieLondon about her experience, Renée shared: "It was a terrible idea and I'll probably never do it again [laughs]. No, I'm just joking. "It was a really interesting learning opportunity and I asked the guys if they would be interested in that kind of partnership because I really wanted us to get through creatively with these guys. They said OK, so we did." One enthusiastic viewer labelled 'Miss Potter' as their ultimate film choice, penning: "It's one of my favorite movies - I would watch it over and over again. It's very sweet and charming. "I love how brave and enchanting she was." Yet, another spectator was scathing in their critique of Renée's take on Beatrix Potter, bluntly stating: "Renée Zellweger is a disaster. "A totally artificial and preposterous performance."
Yahoo
04-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
New legislation updates laws for working minors in WA
May 3—DUPONT — Washington State Governor Bob Ferguson recently signed Senate Bill 1644 into law, establishing enhanced safety and health regulations for minors employed in both agricultural and non-agricultural industries. Ferguson signed the bill on International Workers' Memorial Day at the Western Washington Sheet Metal Joint Apprenticeship Training Committee's DuPont campus. The legislation, which passed the House with a 60-35 vote and the Senate with a 37-12 vote, aims to address increasing incidents of injuries and violations of child labor laws. Sponsored by Representative Mary Fosse, D-Everett, the bill emerged after the revelation of statistics highlighting a rise in child employment and associated accidents. According to the Department of Labor & Industries, injury claims by minor workers in Washington rose by 60% between 2009 and 2023. During this time, employment for 16-19-year-olds increased by over 30%, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2024, around one-third of Washington's 16-19-year-olds had jobs. "Our laws haven't kept pace with the protections minors clearly deserve," said Fosse during the bill signing. "Outdated laws and a lack of meaningful accountability for violators are putting children at risk of injury and exploitation." SB 1644 introduces stricter penalties for employers who violate child labor laws, with fines ranging from $100 to $71,000, depending on the severity of the violation. It also mandates that the L&I revoke an employer's minor work permit after a serious violation leading to severe injury or death, thereby prohibiting them from hiring minors for a designated period. This revocation, lasting a minimum of 12 months, is intended to deter employers from infringing upon minors' safety and welfare. The bill also requires L&I to conduct safety and health consultations at worksites before granting certain variances that would allow minors to perform jobs typically restricted based on age. With the signing of this bill, Washington joins several other states reevaluating their child labor laws amidst rising concerns about workplace safety. Supporters of the bill argued that it is a necessary step in modernizing outdated child labor laws. "This legislation is about ensuring that our children are not subjected to unsafe working conditions," Fosse said. She expressed gratitude for the collaboration between labor organizations and legislators that made the enactment of the bill possible. However, some lawmakers raised concerns about the potential consequences of the new regulations. Representative Tom Dent, R-Moses Lake, who opposed the bill, voiced apprehensions that increased restrictions could lead to fewer job opportunities for young people. "We're making it harder for our young people to work and learn how to work. If we don't allow them to gain this experience, they won't know how to take direction or work under supervision," Dent said. Senator Judy Warnick, R-Moses Lake, echoed Dent's concerns, stating that the stringent requirements might dampen interest in hiring youth, particularly in rural communities reliant on seasonal agricultural labor. "I grew up on a farm where we hired high school students to help. This legislation makes it more difficult for employers to take on younger workers," Warnick said. "It will leave many young people without job opportunities just as they're starting to explore career paths." The penalties articulated in SB 1644 have also drawn criticism for being excessively harsh. Warnick pointed out that increased fines might discourage smaller construction and agricultural companies from hiring young workers. "This creates a chilling effect on hiring youth, particularly in labor-intensive industries," she said. Nonetheless, Fosse maintains that the legislation strikes a balance between safeguarding minors and allowing responsible employers to provide job opportunities. "And it's not fair to our youth — or to all of the really reputable good businesses in Washington state — that when bad employers repeatedly violate minor worker rights and safety, they are still allowed to employ minors," the Everett Democrat said. This new law takes effect July 1, 2026.
India Today
30-04-2025
- Business
- India Today
Gemini 2.5 Pro is so good that it is Empire Strikes Back moment in AI fight between Google and OpenAI
At a time when OpenAI and its ChatGPT models have hogged all the limelight it is easy to forget that Google is the OG in AI. The company has been at it for over a decade, with its AI efforts largely spearheaded by researchers at DeepMind. In fact, the current AI revolution and breakthroughs are a direct result of a paper — and which has now attained a mythical reputation — called Attention Is All You Need. The paper was written by Google researchers. And yet, when we think of AI we think of OpenAI and ChatGPT. With Google Gemini 2.5 Pro, the latest model from the tech giant, this is changing. advertisementThe reason why OpenAI has hogged all the limelight is because it has been better at turning AI research into actual products. While Google has been the lab leader, OpenAI has been better at bringing its AI tools to the public. Google, in a way, was caught off-guard by ChatGPT 3 in 2022. The company scrambled to respond, and in a furry even ended up making a few mistakes. Its initial challenges to the GPT 3 were not good at all. In 2025, to use a much-cliched phrase, the Empire Is Striking Back. And it is doing so with the Gemini 2.5 Pro (experimental). Since it arrived on the scene a few weeks ago, the Gemini 2.5 Pro (experimental) has wowed its users. This is the first AI system from Google that feels as good as — and in many instances better — than the best tools available from OpenAI. And whether in actual use, or in benchmarks, the Gemini 2.5 Pro has excelled. Take a look at the benchmarks: advertisement But more than the benchmarks the new Gemini has impressed users. Social media — mostly X aka Twitter because that is where action is — nowadays is full of thumbs ups from people saying how Gemini 2.5 Pro excels at coding, or writing, or analysing documents. Unlike the recent ChatGPT 4o, which turned into a parrot eulogising and flattering its users, the Gemini has a measured tone and a more authoritative personality. It does not by any means sound unhelpful. Instead, it is measured in a way a professional helper would be. When I try an AI tool like Gemini, DeepSeek or ChatGPT, I usually ask it to write a paragraph or two in the style of Jon Fosse. Now, Fosse is a writer — and here I am talking of his work translated in English — who uses a minimalistic language and a sparse voice, but one which gets its force from the way the Norwegian writer creates rhythm with repetitions. For AI, coding is easy nowadays. It excels at logic. But writing a few lines of fiction is still a difficult job for it. And on that, it is very difficult for an AI tool to write a paragraph that reflects the style used by Fosse. They can write in Hemingway style — well, sort of — but not Fosse. In my experience, so far the only AI tool that has managed some sort of coherency in this has been the Gemini 2.5 Pro. advertisementThere is another reason why the Gemini 2.5 Pro is such a key AI tool. Unlike the best tools from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, the Gemini 2.5 Pro is free to use. In this aspect it is somewhat like DeepSeek R1. But unlike DeepSeek R1, which often found itself getting a hammering due to load on its servers, Gemini 2.5 Pro can probably handle millions of users simultaneously. The backend that powers Google services is one of the best, if not the absolute best, that any tech company has. In many ways, this makes the Gemini 2.5 Pro the first top-class AI model that most people in the world can as good as the Gemini 2.5 Pro is, there is another aspect to it, and that is how Google vs OpenAI is going to look like in future. So far it seemed that OpenAI was landing all the blows. But I have a suspicion that the Gemini 2.5 Pro is just the beginning of a counter strike. Google has some of the best AI researchers. It also has the kind of data that other companies can only dream of. And finally it has a massive scale — in everything — which OpenAI currently doesn't still needs to get better at showing its AI tools to people. For example, its NotebookLLM, which can turn a paragraph into a long podcast, is superb. Similarly, there are a number of other Gemini and Google AI tools that are top class in what they do. But they remain scattered across Google services and products, and in many cases accessing them requires — like literally — an engineering degree because Google has placed them in virtual silos that are accessible only to developers. But I feel these are the niggles that a company like Google will sort out in the coming months. The new Gemini interface in itself is a big improvement in terms of accessibility and user experience compared to what we had a year ago. A more pressing matter for Google was to prove that it could match ChatGPT and Claude. With the Gemini 2.5 Pro it has done that.
New York Times
12-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Night Sings Its Songs' Review: Scenes From a Miserable Marriage
When the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023, he joined the small circle of dramatists to have received that honor, including two men he is often compared to: Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Unlike Beckett and Pinter, however, Fosse is largely unknown in the United States — outside of shows like 'A Summer Day' in 2012 and 'I Am the Wind' in 2014, productions in supposedly cosmopolitan New York are few and far between. This makes New Light Theater Project's middling new take on Fosse's 'Night Sings Its Songs' at least noteworthy. Like much of his stage work, 'Night Sings Its Songs' — which premiered in Norway in 1997 and was staged in New York in 2004 by Sarah Cameron Sunde, a translator and Fosse evangelist — is simultaneously elliptical and brutally precise. The main characters in these scenes from a miserable marriage are the Young Man (Kyle Cameron) and the Young Woman (Susan Lynskey). They have been together since high school, and their new baby seems to have brought buried issues to the surface. He spends his days and, apparently, nights reading on the couch, and fruitlessly submits manuscripts to publishers. She's going stir crazy and eventually decides to head out on the town. At one point, she desultorily says of her husband: 'He is nice. But he understands little about nothing.' For most of the play, the couple's conversations revolve around variations on 'you never want to go out' (she) and 'who were you out with?' (he). They both suffer from a mutually soul-destroying postpartum funk, and it is grueling. In his Nobel acceptance speech, Fosse said that 'in my drama the word pause is without a doubt the most important and the most used word — long pause, short pause, or just pause.' The script for 'Night Sings Its Songs' includes stage directions and, yes, many, many requests for pauses, but no punctuation. Concretely, this means that a Fosse staging must hit an almost musical rhythm, inducing a kind of entranced fascination — the repeated motifs are like ostinatos in minimalist music. And that is where Jerry Heymann's production falls short. It struggles to settle into the particular groove the play requires, and leans into a fairly naturalistic approach that not only fails to sync up with the text, but often also tussles against it. Cameron and Lynskey also present as a little more mature than the roles call for. Among other issues, this undermines a scene with the Young Man's visiting parents, played by Steven Rattazzi (most recently Captain Andy in 'Show/Boat: A River') and Jenny Allen. 'Night Sings Its Songs' may look like a drama of domestic implosion, but it can't be staged as a straightforward one. The main protagonists are consumed by their neuroses and their acrimony toward each other, and are powerless against those feelings. (The one named character, Baste, played by Ken King, is a third party who provides an external perspective on the unraveling.) So as the play moves toward its seemingly ineluctable conclusion via a loop-like aggregation of confrontations, we should watch in horror, or at least anxiety. And yet the performance I attended was peppered by distractingly loud audience laughter. The reaction fits in with a larger phenomenon, observed at the movies as well, of snickering in the face of what is different or inscrutable, what breaks from commonly accepted aesthetic and narrative norms. With Fosse, you must be open to a pace and approach that are very different from those commonly found on U.S. stages, but that can deliver emotional payoffs. It seems that we are not quite there yet.
