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arcticdementor · 4 years

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Oscar Wilde supposedly said George Bernard Shaw "has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends". Socialist blogger Freddie DeBoer is the opposite: few allies, but deeply respected by his enemies. I disagree with him about everything, so naturally I am a big fan of his work - which meant I was happy to read his latest book, The Cult Of Smart.

DeBoer starts with the standard narrative of The Failing State Of American Education. Students aren't learning. The country is falling behind. Only tough no-excuses policies, standardization, and innovative reforms like charter schools can save it, as shown by their stellar performance improving test scores and graduation rates.

He argues that every word of it is a lie. American education isn't getting worse by absolute standards: students match or outperform their peers from 20 or 50 years ago. It's not getting worse by international standards: America's PISA rankings are mediocre, but the country has always scored near the bottom of international rankings, even back in the 50s and 60s when we were kicking Soviet ass and landing men on the moon. Race and gender gaps are stable or decreasing. American education is doing much as it's always done - about as well as possible, given the crushing poverty, single parent-families, violence, and racism holding back the kids it's charged with shepherding to adulthood.

…

For decades, politicians of both parties have thought of education as "the great leveller" and the key to solving poverty. If people are stuck in boring McJobs, it's because they're not well-educated enough to be surgeons and rocket scientists. Give them the education they need, and they can join the knowledge economy and rise into the upper-middle class. For lack of any better politically-palatable way to solve poverty, this has kind of become a totem: get better schools, and all those unemployed Appalachian coal miners can move to Silicon Valley and start tech companies. But you can't do that. Not everyone is intellectually capable of doing a high-paying knowledge economy job. Schools can change your intellectual potential a limited amount. Ending child hunger, removing lead from the environment, and similar humanitarian programs can do a little more, but only a little. In the end, a lot of people aren't going to make it.

So what can you do? DeBoer doesn't think there's an answer within the existing system. Instead, we need to dismantle meritocracy.

DeBoer is skeptical of "equality of opportunity". Even if you solve racism, sexism, poverty, and many other things that DeBoer repeatedly reminds us have not been solved, you'll just get people succeeding or failing based on natural talent. DeBoer agrees conservatives can be satisfied with this, but thinks leftists shouldn't be. Natural talent is just as unearned as class, race, or any other unfair advantage.

One one level, the titular Cult Of Smart is just the belief that enough education can solve any problem. But more fundamentally it's also the troubling belief that after we jettison unfair theories of superiority based on skin color, sex, and whatever else, we're finally left with what really determines your value as a human being - how smart you are. DeBoer recalls hearing an immigrant mother proudly describe her older kid's achievements in math, science, etc, "and then her younger son ran by, and she said, offhand, 'This one, he is maybe not so smart.'" DeBoer was originally shocked to hear someone describe her own son that way, then realized that he wouldn't have thought twice if she'd dismissed him as unathletic, or bad at music. Intelligence is considered such a basic measure of human worth that to dismiss someone as unintelligent seems like consigning them into the outer darkness. So DeBoer describes how early readers of his book were scandalized by the insistence on genetic differences in intelligence - isn't this denying the equality of Man, declaring some people inherently superior to others? Only if you conflate intelligence with worth, which DeBoer argues our society does constantly. It starts with parents buying Baby Einstein tapes and trying to send their kids to the best preschool, continues through the "meat grinder" of the college admissions process when everyone knows that whoever gets into Harvard is better than whoever gets into State U, and continues when the meritocracy rewards the straight-A Harvard student with a high-paying powerful job and the high school dropout with drudgery or unemployment. Even the phrase "high school dropout" has an aura of personal failure about it, in a way totally absent from "kid who always lost at Little League".

DeBoer isn't convinced this is an honest mistake. He draws attention to a sort of meta-class-war - a war among class warriors over whether the true enemy is the top 1% (this is the majority position) or the top 20% (this is DeBoer's position; if you've read Staying Classy, you'll immediately recognize this disagreement as the same one that divided the Church and UR models of class). The 1% are the Buffetts and Bezoses of the world; the 20% are the "managerial" class of well-off urban professionals, bureaucrats, creative types, and other mandarins. Opposition to the 20% is usually right-coded; describe them as "woke coastal elites who dominate academia and the media", and the Trump campaign ad almost writes itself. But some Marxists flirt with it too; the book references Elizabeth Currid-Halkett's Theory Of The Aspirational Class, and you can hear echoes of this every time Twitter socialists criticize "Vox liberals" or something. Access to the 20% is gated by college degree, and their legitimizing myth is that their education makes them more qualified and humane than the rest of us. DeBoer thinks the deification of school-achievement-compatible intelligence as highest good serves their class interest; "equality of opportunity" means we should ignore all other human distinctions in favor of the one that our ruling class happens to excel at.

So maybe equality of opportunity is a stupid goal. DeBoer argues for equality of results. This is a pretty extreme demand, but he's a Marxist and he means what he says. He wants a world where smart people and dull people have equally comfortable lives, and where intelligence can take its rightful place as one of many virtues which are nice to have but not the sole measure of your worth.

…

I'm Freddie's ideological enemy, which means I have to respect him. And there's a lot to like about this book. I think its two major theses - that intelligence is mostly innate, and that this is incompatible with equating it to human value - are true, important, and poorly appreciated by the general population. I tried to make a somewhat similar argument in my Parable Of The Talents, which DeBoer graciously quotes in his introduction. Some of the book's peripheral theses - that a lot of education science is based on fraud, that US schools are not declining in quality, etc - are also true, fascinating, and worth spreading. Overall, I think this book does more good than harm.

It's also rambling, self-contradictory in places, and contains a lot of arguments I think are misguided or bizarre.

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At the time, I noted that meritocracy has nothing to do with this. The intuition behind meritocracy is: if your life depends on a difficult surgery, would you prefer the hospital hire a surgeon who aced medical school, or a surgeon who had to complete remedial training to barely scrape by with a C-? If you prefer the former, you’re a meritocrat with respect to surgeons. Generalize a little, and you have the argument for being a meritocrat everywhere else.

The above does away with any notions of "desert", but I worry it's still accepting too many of DeBoer's assumptions. A better description might be: Your life depends on a difficult surgery. You can hire whatever surgeon you want to perform it. You are willing to pay more money for a surgeon who aced medical school than for a surgeon who failed it. So higher intelligence leads to more money.

This not only does away with "desert", but also with reified Society deciding who should prosper. More meritorious surgeons get richer not because "Society" has selected them to get rich as a reward for virtue, but because individuals pursuing their incentives prefer, all else equal, not to die of botched surgeries. Meritocracy isn't an -ocracy like democracy or autocracy, where people in wigs sit down to frame a constitution and decide how things should work. It's a dubious abstraction over the fact that people prefer to have jobs done well rather than poorly, and use their financial and social clout to make this happen.

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I think DeBoer would argue he's not against improving schools. He just thinks all attempts to do it so far have been crooks and liars pillaging the commons, so much so that we need a moratorium on this kind of thing until we can figure out what's going on. But I'm worried that his arguments against existing school reform are in some cases kind of weak.

DeBoer does make things hard for himself by focusing on two of the most successful charter school experiments. If he'd been a little less honest, he could have passed over these and instead mentioned the many charter schools that fail, or just sort of plod onward doing about as well as public schools do. I think the closest thing to a consensus right now is that most charter schools do about the same as public schools for white/advantaged students, and slightly better than public schools for minority/disadvantaged students. But DeBoer very virtuously thinks it's important to confront his opponents' strongest cases, so these are the ones I'll focus on here.

…

These are good points, and I would accept them from anyone other than DeBoer, who will go on to say in a few chapters that the solution to our education issues is a Marxist revolution that overthrows capitalism and dispenses with the very concept of economic value. If he's willing to accept a massive overhaul of everything, that's failed every time it's tried, why not accept a much smaller overhaul-of-everything, that's succeeded at least once? There are plenty of billionaires willing to pour fortunes into reforming various cities - DeBoer will go on to criticize them as deluded do-gooders a few chapters later. If billions of dollars plus a serious commitment to ground-up reform are what we need, let's just spend billions of dollars and have a serious commitment to ground-up reform! If more hurricanes is what it takes to fix education, I'm willing to do my part by leaving my air conditioner on 'high' all the time.

…

DeBoer spends several impassioned sections explaining how opposed he is to scientific racism, and arguing that the belief that individual-level IQ differences are partly genetic doesn't imply a belief that group-level IQ differences are partly genetic. Some reviewers of this book are still suspicious, wondering if he might be hiding his real position. I can assure you he is not. Seriously, he talks about how much he hates belief in genetic group-level IQ differences about thirty times per page. Also, sometimes when I write posts about race, he sends me angry emails ranting about how much he hates that some people believe in genetic group-level IQ differences - totally private emails nobody else will ever see. I have no reason to doubt that his hatred of this is as deep as he claims.

But I understand why some reviewers aren't convinced. This book can't stop tripping over itself when it tries to discuss these topics. DeBoer grants X, he grants X -> Y, then goes on ten-page rants about how absolutely loathsome and abominable anyone who believes Y is.

Remember, one of the theses of this book is that individual differences in intelligence are mostly genetic. But DeBoer spends only a little time citing the studies that prove this is true. He (correctly) decides that most of his readers will object not on the scientific ground that they haven't seen enough studies, but on the moral ground that this seems to challenge the basic equality of humankind. He (correctly) points out that this is balderdash, that innate differences in intelligence don't imply differences in moral value, any more than innate differences in height or athletic ability or anything like that imply differences in moral value. His goal is not just to convince you about the science, but to convince you that you can believe the science and still be an okay person who respects everyone and wants them to be happy.

He could have written a chapter about race that reinforced this message. He could have reviewed studies about whether racial differences in intelligence are genetic or environmental, come to some conclusion or not, but emphasized that it doesn't matter, and even if it's 100% genetic it has no bearing at all on the need for racial equality and racial justice, that one race having a slightly higher IQ than another doesn't make them "superior" any more than Pygmies' genetic short stature makes them "inferior".

Instead he - well, I'm not really sure what he's doing. He starts by says racial differences must be environmental. Then he says that studies have shown that racial IQ gaps are not due to differences in income/poverty, because the gaps remain even after controlling for these. But, he says, there could be other environmental factors aside from poverty that cause racial IQ gaps. After tossing out some possibilities, he concludes that he doesn't really need to be able to identify a plausible mechanism, because "white supremacy touches on so many aspects of American life that it's irresponsible to believe we have adequately controlled for it", no matter how many studies we do or how many confounders we eliminate. His argument, as far as I can tell, is that it's always possible that racial IQ differences are environmental, therefore they must be environmental. Then he goes on to, at great length, denounce as loathsome and villainous anyone who might suspect these gaps of being genetic. Such people are "noxious", "bigoted", "ugly", "pseudoscientific" "bad people" who peddle "propaganda" to "advance their racist and sexist agenda". (But tell us what you really think!)

…

This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I've vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is "I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away". And I understand I have at least two potentially irresolveable biases on this question: one, I'm a white person in a country with a long history of promoting white supremacy; and two, if I lean in favor then everyone will hate me, and use it as a bludgeon against anyone I have ever associated with, and I will die alone in a ditch and maybe deserve it. So the best I can do is try to route around this issue when considering important questions. This is sometimes hard, but the basic principle is that I'm far less sure of any of it than I am sure that all human beings are morally equal and deserve to have a good life and get treated with respect regardless of academic achievement.

…

That last sentence about the basic principle is the thesis of The Cult Of Smart, so it would have been a reasonable position for DeBoer to take too. DeBoer doesn't take it. He acknowledges the existence of expert scientists who believe the differences are genetic (he names Linda Gottfredson in particular), but only to condemn them as morally flawed for asserting this.

But this is exactly the worldview he is, at this very moment, trying to write a book arguing against! His thesis is that mainstream voices say there can't be genetic differences in intelligence among individuals, because that would make some people fundamentally inferior to others, which is morally repugnant - but those voices are wrong, because differences in intelligence don't affect moral equality. Then he adds that mainstream voices say there can't be genetic differences in intelligence among ethnic groups, because that would make some groups fundamentally inferior to others, which is morally repugnant - and those voices are right; we must deny the differences lest we accept the morally repugnant thing.

Normally I would cut DeBoer some slack and assume this was some kind of Straussian manuever he needed to do to get the book published, or to prevent giving ammunition to bad people. But no, he has definitely believed this for years, consistently, even while being willing to offend basically anybody about basically anything else at any time. So I'm convinced this is his true belief. I'm just not sure how he squares it with the rest of his book.

…

"Smart" equivocates over two concepts - high-IQ and successful-at-formal-education. These concepts are related; in general, high-IQ people get better grades, graduate from better colleges, etc. But they're not exactly the same.

There is a cult of successful-at-formal-education. Society obsesses over how important formal education is, how it can do anything, how it's going to save the world. If you get gold stars on your homework, become the teacher's pet, earn good grades in high school, and get into an Ivy League, the world will love you for it.

But the opposite is true of high-IQ. Society obsessively denies that IQ can possibly matter. Admit to being a member of Mensa, and you'll get a fusillade of "IQ is just a number!" and "people who care about their IQ are just overcompensating for never succeeding at anything real!" and "IQ doesn't matter, what about emotional IQ or grit or whatever else, huh? Bet you didn't think of that!" Science writers and Psychology Today columnists vomit out a steady stream of bizarre attempts to deny the statistical validity of IQ.

These are two sides of the same phenomenon. Some people are smarter than others as adults, and the more you deny innate ability, the more weight you have to put on education. Society wants to put a lot of weight on formal education, and compensates by denying innate ability a lot. DeBoer is aware of this and his book argues against it adeptly.

Still, I worry that the title - The Cult Of Smart - might lead people to think there is a cult surrounding intelligence, when exactly the opposite is true. But I guess The Cult Of Successful At Formal Education sounds less snappy, so whatever.

…

I try to review books in an unbiased way, without letting myself succumb to fits of emotion. So be warned: I'm going to fail with this one. I am going to get angry and write whole sentences in capital letters. This is one of the most enraging passages I've ever read.

School is child prison. It's forcing kids to spend their childhood - a happy time! a time of natural curiosity and exploration and wonder - sitting in un-air-conditioned blocky buildings, cramped into identical desks, listening to someone drone on about the difference between alliteration and assonance, desperate to even be able to fidget but knowing that if they do their teacher will yell at them, and maybe they'll get a detention that extends their sentence even longer without parole. The anti-psychiatric-abuse community has invented the "Burrito Test" - if a place won't let you microwave a burrito without asking permission, it's an institution. Doesn't matter if the name is "Center For Flourishing" or whatever and the aides are social workers in street clothes instead of nurses in scrubs - if it doesn't pass the Burrito Test, it's an institution. There is no way school will let you microwave a burrito without permission. THEY WILL NOT EVEN LET YOU GO TO THE BATHROOM WITHOUT PERMISSION. YOU HAVE TO RAISE YOUR HAND AND ASK YOUR TEACHER FOR SOMETHING CALLED "THE BATHROOM PASS" IN FRONT OF YOUR ENTIRE CLASS, AND IF SHE DOESN'T LIKE YOU, SHE CAN JUST SAY NO.

I don't like actual prisons, the ones for criminals, but I will say this for them - people keep them around because they honestly believe they prevent crime. If someone found proof-positive that prisons didn't prevent any crimes at all, but still suggested that we should keep sending people there, because it means we'd have "fewer middle-aged people on the streets" and "fewer adults forced to go home to empty apartments and houses", then MAYBE YOU WOULD START TO UNDERSTAND HOW I FEEL ABOUT SENDING PEOPLE TO SCHOOL FOR THE SAME REASON.

I sometimes sit in on child psychiatrists' case conferences, and I want to scream at them. There's the kid who locks herself in the bathroom every morning so her parents can't drag her to child prison, and her parents stand outside the bathroom door to yell at her for hours until she finally gives in and goes, and everyone is trying to medicate her or figure out how to remove the bathroom locks, and THEY ARE SOLVING THE WRONG PROBLEM. There are all the kids who had bedwetting or awful depression or constant panic attacks, and then as soon as the coronavirus caused the child prisons to shut down the kids mysteriously became instantly better. I have heard stories of kids bullied to the point where it would be unfair not to call it torture, and the child prisons respond according to Procedures which look very good on paper and hit all the right We-Are-Taking-This-Seriously buzzwords but somehow never result in the kids not being tortured every day, and if the kids' parents were to stop bringing them to child prison every day to get tortured anew the cops would haul those parents to jail, and sometimes the only solution is the parents to switch them to the charter schools THAT FREDDIE DEBOER WANTS TO SHUT DOWN.

I see people on Twitter and Reddit post their stories from child prison, all of which they treat like it's perfectly normal. The district that wanted to save money, so it banned teachers from turning the heat above 50 degrees in the depths of winter. The district that decided running was an unsafe activity, and so any child who ran or jumped or played other-than-sedately during recess would get sent to detention - yeah, that's fine, let's just make all our children spent the first 18 years of their life somewhere they're not allowed to run, that'll be totally normal child development. You might object that they can run at home, but of course teachers assign three hours of homework a day despite ample evidence that homework does not help learning. Preventing children from having any free time, or the ability to do any of the things they want to do seems to just be an end in itself. Every single doctor and psychologist in the world has pointed out that children and teens naturally follow a different sleep pattern than adults, probably closer to 12 PM to 9 AM than the average adult's 10 - 7. Child prisons usually start around 7 or 8 AM, meaning any child who shows up on time is necessarily sleep-deprived in ways that probably harm their health and development.

School forces children to be confined in an uninhabitable environment, restrained from moving, and psychologically tortured in a state of profound sleep deprivation, under pain of imprisoning their parents if they refuse. The only possible justification for this is that it achieves some kind of vital social benefit like eliminating poverty. If it doesn't, you might as well replace it with something less traumatizing, like child labor. The kid will still have to spend eight hours of their day toiling in a terrible environment, but at least they’ll get some pocket money! At least their boss can't tell them to keep working off the clock under the guise of "homework"! I have worked as a medical resident, widely considered one of the most horrifying and abusive jobs it is possible to take in a First World country. I can say with absolute confidence that I would gladly do another four years of residency if the only alternative was another four years of high school.

If I have children, I hope to be able to homeschool them. But if I can't homeschool them, I am incredibly grateful that the option exists to send them to a charter school that might not have all of these problems. I'm not as impressed with Montessori schools as some of my friends are, but at least as far as I can tell they let kids wander around free-range, and don't make them use bathroom passes. DeBoer not only wants to keep the whole prison-cum-meat-grinder alive and running, even after having proven it has no utility, he also wants to shut the only possible escape my future children will ever get unless I'm rich enough to quit work and care for them full time.

When I try to keep a cooler head about all of this, I understand that Freddie DeBoer doesn't want this. He is not a fan of freezing-cold classrooms or sleep deprivation or bullying or bathroom passes. In fact, he will probably blame all of these on the "neoliberal reformers" (although I went to school before most of the neoliberal reforms started, and I saw it all). He will say that his own utopian schooling system has none of this stuff. In fact, he does say that. He sketches what a future Marxist school system might look like, and it looks pretty much like a Montessori school looks now. That just makes it really weird that he wants to shut down all the schools that resemble his ideal today (or make them only available to the wealthy) in favor of forcing kids into schools about as different from it as it's possible for anything to be.

I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!

#scott alexander #substack #book review #fredrik deboer #public schooling #long #read the whole thing

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letterboxd · 5 years

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Greater Lovers: The Céline Sciamma Q&A.

“It’s a new narrative of love.” On the eve of its Valentine’s Day wide release, Dominic Corry puts your questions to the writer and director of our highest-rated romance film of the decade, Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Few films have more hearts beating on Letterboxd lately than Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which has a 4.4 average rating, was second only to Parasite as the highest-rated feature film of 2019, and holds the number one position on our official Top 100 Narrative Feature Films by Women Directors.

“This is one of the most emotionally intense viewing experiences I’ve had in a while, so I’m not ready to sum it up with a neat and tidy star rating,” wrote Trudie. “My body is still visibly shaken… yearning personified,” said Lucy. “I’m going to think about those last fifteen minutes for the rest of my life,” swooned Stephanie, speaking for us all.

Starring Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel, the film had a short Oscar-qualifying run in American theaters at the end of last year, and although it was criminally overlooked by the Academy (it was not France’s submission for International Feature, though it is up for ten Césars), it’s finally going wide on American screens on Valentine’s Day.

As a giant fan, it was a huge honor to personally convey all the Letterboxd love for Portrait of a Lady on Fire to Sciamma, and to take with me several of your questions. (Lucy, we read your entire comment to her: “I just wanted to thank Céline for Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It holds a very special place in my heart now and is my favorite film of the decade. I’m truly, eternally grateful.”)

Spoiler warning: several questions reference the nature of the film’s ending, without getting into specifics. And a warning for easy fainters: Kristen Stewart may have been brought up during this interview; and Céline has been reading your Letterboxd reviews.

Adèle Haenel (left) and Noémie Merlant in ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’.

What would you like to say to your Letterboxd fans who have fallen so completely in love with your film? Céline Sciamma: Well thank you! No, but really. Because what touched me the most is the fact that people will write about films. And that’s the beauty of this digital era. I’m paying a lot of attention about what’s going on around the film, what is being said. I’m really looking at things, so I’ve seen a lot of Letterboxd [reviews]. And I’ve seen that Letterboxd, at some point, used the emoji thing, which was really, really beautiful and fun [Sciamma is referring to the fire and picture frame emoji we added to our Twitter name at the time of the film’s release last year].

And the fact that people who were touched by the film would take the time to write about it, I think it’s something really beautiful, especially with this film, which is about how love is an education to art. Because art consoles from love, or makes us greater lovers. I find it beautiful that people would express their feelings and put their heart and their mind into cinema. As a young cinephile there was no internet, and I remember writing, just only for myself in little diaries, about film. And so I found it really, really important.

There’s one question we like to ask every filmmaker we speak to: what is the film that made you want to become a filmmaker? Well, the film that made me understand filmmaking, mise-en-scène, was The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Jacques Demy, as a director, his films in France, we see them when we are very young; he made Peau d’âne, which is a film that is shown to kids. He is such a great director. Definitely as a young kid—I was twelve years old—I found out that, okay, there’s somebody behind this with a vision. Somebody would paint a city like in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort. Somebody would paint a wall to make it sing the vision of somebody.

And when discovering mise-en-scène—the fact that there was a director, a vision of somebody—it really blew my mind. I remember I fell in love with the idea of cinema. So, you know, it’s not one film that makes you want to be a director. There are some films that connect you to the idea of cinema and vision and just make you crave for this idea.

Before this interview, we asked our community to submit questions for you. The first is from Letterboxd member ‘I’, who wants to know if you were inspired by any movie in the process of making Portrait of a Lady on Fire. When I’m writing a film, or just even just going with the idea of starting to dream about a film, I don’t watch films anymore, because it’s a very fragile moment. I’m trying to be candid and I’m trying to create this prototype and not to begin being in dialogue with the history of cinema.

But then when the script is done, and especially when we are talking with the team, with the DP, there are some films that can come up in the discussion. “Okay, we should we should take a look at that,” regarding one specific issue. For instance, with Portrait of a Lady on Fire, regarding the lighting, there was this idea, I mean you could definitely look at all the period-piece films and be like, “What about the candles? Are they in the frame? Are there a lot of candles? Are they on chandeliers? Or are they held?”

So, I’m thinking about that, this issue of the light in the candles. Night. Day. So me and [cinematographer] Claire Mathon, we had that discussion. So Kubrick, Barry Lyndon, we watched obviously.

And also at that moment I’m trying to watch, not specifically films that seem to be related, but films that give me faith in cinema. For instance, Jeanne Dielman by Chantal Akerman, which is such a radical film. I’m trying to get radical positions that have nothing to do with the film, subject-wise, but of people who firmly believed in the language of cinema, and were radical about it. I’m trying to watch radical films that renew your faith in cinema. I mean, they’re major pieces of art, but just give this feeling that you can be radical, you can be bold, and to get this excitement about, really, the language of cinema.

Many of our members are writing that Portrait of a Lady on Fire is the most romantic film ever made, and one of the best expressions of female desire ever put on screen. What’s the most romantic film you’ve ever seen? You know, it’s weird because when I think about it… film is emotional right? A lot of the things that come to my mind are films that are not necessarily pure love stories. This is gonna sound stupid, but E.T., for instance, is a great love story. This is a great love story for me, and one of the greatest endings in terms of how a relationship ends: E.T. has this idea that the breakup between the two characters is… they want the same thing. And that’s why they’re breaking up, because one is saying “come” and one is saying “stay”, which I think is the most heartbreaking breakup, not being a breakup.

I think there might be a new contender for most heartbreaking breakup. The ending of it is really climaxing. Because when we watch love stories, it’s harder, the frozen image of two people leaving in a car, you know, marriage, whatever. Like the romantic-comedy ending where they end up together, then that’s the end. Eternal possession as a promise of fulfilment. Or, it’s the tragic ending, where they will never [be together]. And I really tried to find another way [in Portrait of a Lady on Fire], like in E.T. you know, it’s two people saying “I love you” but not being together. It’s a new narrative of love.

So I’m always trying also to think about forms. Mulholland Drive is a film that definitely was also an inspiration, because it’s a film that creates its storytelling around an idea of love. Everybody said: “Oh this film is so hard to get”. [But] it’s really simple. It’s like the first part is a dream of a story that has already happened. And so Lynch created this, screenwriting-wise, he created this idea that those two women, they meet and suddenly they’re in bed together and one says “I think I’m in love with you”, which means that Lynch is telling us that “I love you” is always something you say in the past. And with Portrait of a Lady on Fire, I was thinking I have to create a form where “I love you” is something that always has a future. So that’s the kind of dialogue I have with films that inspire me.

And also Titanic. It has kind of the same structure as Portrait of a Lady on Fire: the presence of a love story but the memory of a love story. And also, not being together even though there’s a tragic death. It’s a love story about emancipation. And that’s so much what we’re trying to tell: it’s not about whether you end up together, or you don’t. A good love story isn’t about that, it’s about: did it give you emancipation?

This last question is from Pauline: “How much do I need to pay you to hire Kristen Stewart—who has just said Portrait was her favorite movie of 2019 and that she has seen all of your movies—in your next project? I’m ready to write the check, just say a number.” Well no, it’s not about the money. But I met Kristen Stewart a few months ago. So I mean, it’s already a start. We talked about cinema, and, and I really enjoyed talking about cinema with her, so…

‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ is in select US theaters now, and on wide release from 14 February. This interview took place in the English language and has had minor edits for clarity. With thanks to NEON, Cinetic Media and Ginsberg/Libby.

Related content

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#letterboxd #celine sciamma #portrait of a lady on fire #neon #neonrated #french cinema #female director #directed by women #adele haenel #noemie merlant #portrait nation

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worldticketsandhospitality · 3 years

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FIFA World Cup Packages: Uruguay head coach Oscar Tabarez dismissed after 15 years in role

Uruguay has sacked Oscar Tabarez after 15 years in control of the national side. His firing comes having lost their last four competitions in their FIFA World Cup qualifying group which has left them with a hard competition to make Qatar Football World Cup 2022. Tabarez's last game in control saw Luis Suarez and Co lose 3-0 to 10-man Bolivia, departure them three places below the involuntary qualifying positions.

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The 74-year-old grips the world highest for most games in charge of one national squad, with the defeat away to Bolivia being his 224th game in custody. A report from the Uruguayan Football Association (AUF) read: The AUF Management Committee informs that it has committed to firing the contract of Mr. Oscar Tabarez and other fellows of the coaching staff of the senior national squad.

We forcefully fast that this choice does not disregard the important influence of Tabarez on Uruguayan soccer. We gesture and identify the important honest achievements gotten in these 15 years, which once again placed Uruguay at the top of world football. We rapid our detail and appreciation for the expertise and dedication he showed during his time in control and the untold legacy that this fruitful period leaves in the history of the national squad.

The AUF Executive Committee has made this problematic decision under present situations, committed to the near upcoming and obtaining the outcomes we all hope for. Tabarez first achieved Uruguay from 1988 to 1990 in which his highlight was removing a Diego Maradona-inspired Argentina side in the 1989 Copa America - only to lose to Brazil in the final. For more to know about Qatar World Cup Tickets Click here

After 16 years away in which he achieved clubs including AC Milan, Boca Juniors, Cagliari, and Real Oviedo, he repaid to take charge for the second time in 2006. He guided the country to the semi-finals of the FIFA World Cup 2010, their best performance since charming the competition in its early days in both 1930 and 1950. Tabarez then controlled them to Copa America glory in 2011 which was the first time they had won the competition in 24 years.

After failing to victory their last five games, Uruguay is stuck in the seventh spot in the South American qualifying group, one point after fourth and fifth spot with just four competitions remaining. In the CONMEBOL group phase, the top four mechanically qualify for the finals, while the fifth spot is positioned into an international playoff.

There is some ease for Uruguay, despite their new form, in the shape of their future opponents. They have previously faced both Brazil and Argentina twice, the two sides that have previously qualified for Qatar Football World Cup, while they do not essential to face Ecuador, who look set to safe third spot.

The essential face both Peru and Chile, which currently occupy fifth and sixth spots, while their other two unresolved fixtures come against Venezuela and Paraguay, the two sides sat in the bottom two spots. If Uruguay does fail to qualify, it will be the first time since Germany 2006 they have not seemed at the FIFA World Cup.

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ev3v4hn · 3 years

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Cr Fashion E-book

Ten designers might be competing in the second season of the reality TV present created by Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn. The company expands its fashion portfolio, partnering with more than 25 manufacturers to rejoice 50 years of its Hilltop business. Canine companions will now discover every little thing they need to travel in style and luxury, sporting the fashion house’s emblematic FF monogram brand. Garment workers around the globe make every Fashion & Shopping thing from luxurious purses to fast fashion leggings. French luxury fashion model Yves Saint Laurent also faced this problem with its print ad proven in Paris in 2017. A female model is carrying a fishnet tights with curler-skate stilettos, virtually mendacity down with her legs opened in front of the camera. A see-by way of high worn together with pasties by a model at a fashion show in USA, 2017.

Designers are prepared for a return to fashion — however consolation nonetheless reigns supreme. The men’s and girls’s assortment includes life-style and on-court items. The French fashion home has a permanent relationship with the queen of flowers. The development has been gathering steam in the course of the pandemic, as lockdowns immediate customers to experiment with creating their very own designs at residence. Punk met Provence in Virginie Viard’s graphic cruise collection, proven against the limestone quarries of Les Baux-de-Provence.

Jill Biden Reprised Her Inauguration Gown For Her First Tackle To Congress

It may even permit us to keep our garments longer, which is good for our wallets and for the environment. Nonetheless, sustainable brands will not necessarily price more than brand-name clothes, for which we typically pay high prices for the picture, however hardly ever for the quality or the sustainability. Chemicals are utilized in every a part of the textile production for making fibers, bleaching and dyeing materials, and so on… When they arrive within the retailers, our garments nonetheless comprise a lot of chemical substances, even garments made of “one hundred% natural” fiber. Our skin is our body’s largest organ and absorbs anything we placed on it, together with chemical substances in our garments. Many cases of pressured labour have also been reported alongside the availability chain of the fashion industry. The collapse of the Rana Plaza in 2013, killing 1134 garment staff in Dhaka, Bangladesh, has revealed the unacceptable working conditions of the whole fashion industry to the world.

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These fashion houses have to stick to standards corresponding to preserving at least twenty staff engaged in making the garments, showing two collections per 12 months at fashion shows, and presenting a sure variety of patterns to costumers. Since then, the concept of the fashion designer as a celeb in his or her personal right has become increasingly dominant. In the late Nineteen Nineties and 2000s, low-value fashion reached its zenith. Online buying took off, and fast-fashion retailers like H&M, Zara, and Topshop took over the excessive road. These brands took the appears and design components from the highest fashion houses and reproduced them quickly and cheaply. With everyone now in a position to buy on-pattern clothes whenever they needed, it’s straightforward to understand how the phenomenon caught on. With many individuals working from house and social distancing for the foreseeable future, fashion brands have toned down their styling in favor of comfortable loungewear and clothes that works for sleeping and residing.

Signature Types For All Your Looks This Season

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You can construct cute casual outfits to put on to the seaside or the pool with fun swimwear and beachwear. Build the base of your outfit with a basic one-piece or present some pores and skin with a sexy monokini. If you’re more comfortable in a two-piece, you’ll be able to mix and match your tops and bottoms for a really customized look.

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Though totally different textile colors and patterns modified from year to year, the reduce of a gentleman’s coat and the length of his waistcoat, or the pattern to which a girl’s gown was cut, changed more slowly. Additionally, there is a long history of fashion in West Africa. The Cloth was used as a type of foreign money in trade with the Portuguese and Dutch as early as the 16th Century. Locally produced cloth and cheaper European imports had been assembled into new types to accommodate the growing elite class of West Africans and resident gold and slave merchants. There was an exceptionally strong custom of cloth-weaving in Oyo and the areas inhabited by the Igbo individuals. Fashion can be a supply of art, permitting individuals to show their unique tastes and styling.

A college of pros assist you to develop a foundation to your apply in design, marketing, PR, or merchandising.

Here’s how Rihanna, Lizzo, Ari Lennox and more are carrying this monochromatic type into spring.

Now, you can choose merchandise that look and feel nice whereas being kinder and gentler on the planet. Fashion is usually used to check with issues that are well-liked or fashionable, especially clothing. Products just like the Bendy present that eco-fashion could Fashion be more than just an expensive best. Thanks to Instagram accounts like @Gramparents and books like ‘Chinatown Pretty,’ milllenials and Gen-Z are coming to appreciate their gray-haired elders’ fashion sense. Here, three utterly simple steps to getting a wholesome, hydrated visage, care of dermatologists—plus, the one three products you need.

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bloginstahiphop-blog · 5 years

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Gareth Bale: Could Real Madrid man have 'David Beckham effect' in China?

Ryan Giggs saw first-hand how David Beckham was worshipped in East Asia when they toured countries such as China and Japan during their playing days at Manchester United. So when Giggs compared the hero's welcome Gareth Bale received in China with Wales last year to the fanfare which Beckham inspired in the Far East, he was speaking from a position of authority. "It's the same when Becks came into the team. He took the limelight away from me," Giggs said at the 2018 China Cup, where he was managing Wales. "Gareth would have been out here in the Far East plenty of times with Real Madrid. "Huge teams like United, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich - the players are used to the adulation they get, especially in this part of the world, because footballers are treated like gods." Bale 'very close' to leaving Real Madrid for China Bale mania hits China Why did Real Madrid fall out of love with Bale? Beckham remains a global icon of the game and his marketability owes much to his popularity in Asia, which rose to stratospheric levels when he represented England at the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea, and grew even greater after he joined Real Madrid a year later. ADVERTISEMENT Bale's then world record move to the Spanish giants in 2013 had a similar effect on his profile, evident as he was mobbed at Nanning Airport before last year's China Cup and then cheered wildly by the home fans even as he scored a hat-trick during Wales' thumping win over the hosts. Now the Welshman is "very close" to joining Jiangsu Suning in the Chinese Super League on a three-year deal. If such a transfer were to materialise, Bale would represent the league's highest-profile acquisition yet - as Beckham's 2007 move to LA Galaxy was for Major League Soccer. So how could Bale's potential move to China affect his own future, the perception of Chinese football and Wales' international prospects? Gareth Bale arrives for China Cup with Wales An historic moment for Chinese football? When Beckham joined LA Galaxy in 2007, MLS commissioner Don Garber proclaimed it "one of the most important moments for soccer in this country and perhaps the history of professional sport". Such hyperbole could have been a burden but Beckham's legacy included back-to-back MLS Cups for the Galaxy, a rise in the league's average attendances and a spike in interest in the MLS thanks to his celebrity status. Beckham certainly helped boost the profile of the MLS and, while other players may have been more influential on the field, his time at the Galaxy can justifiably be considered a watershed moment for domestic football in the United States. Players such as Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Andrea Pirlo and Frank Lampard followed Beckham to the MLS, and Chinese Super League bosses would hope Bale could have a similar impact on their competition. The league's highest-profile recruits so far have included the likes of Carlos Tevez, Didier Drogba and Hulk, earning some of the highest salaries in the world during their various stays in China. But Bale would dwarf all his predecessors, both in status and earning power. Having just turned 30, he is not at his peak but young enough to prosper at the top level for a few years, and his success with Real Madrid has enhanced his global marketability. That is why Jiangsu Suning are reportedly prepared to make Bale the first footballer to earn £1m a week. They are among the wealthiest of China's supremely rich clubs and, as their current foreign players are Brazilian midfielder Alex Teixeira and Italy internationals Eder and Gabriel Paletta, Jiangsu could be in the market for a bona fide marquee signing. Bale's time at the China Cup demonstrated his mass appeal in the country and, when he was asked about the prospect of moving to China, the Welshman did not rule anything out. "Whenever I come to China we always have such an amazing reception from the Chinese fans," Bale said at the time. "It's a great country with great people. I'm sure that if I ever did come I'll be looked after very well." David Beckham met Gareth Bale on Real Madrid's tour of the United States in 2017 Beginning of the end, or could Bale and Wales prosper? Some worry that a footballer's move to a league less prestigious than its European counterparts represents the beginning of the end of a career, holding out in the twilight years for one last big contract. That has traditionally been the case for most foreign signings in the Chinese Super League, though that trend appears to be changing. Brazil midfielder Oscar, for example, left Chelsea for Shanghai SIPG when he was 25, while his countryman, ex-Tottenham midfielder Paulinho, moved to Barcelona from Guangzhou Evergrande in 2017, albeit returning to the Chinese club a year later. Those two career paths would suggest the Chinese Super League is more than the lucrative retirement home it might once have been. Wales may also take encouragement from Marek Hamsik, Napoli's all-time leading goalscorer who joined Dalian Yifang earlier this year but remains as influential as ever as Slovakia's captain. The 31-year-old midfielder is his country's record cap holder and goalscorer and, when Slovakia faced Wales in a Euro 2020 qualifier in March, there were no indications that his move to China had diminished his ability. Beckham is another who continued his international career after leaving European club football, winning 19 of his 115 England caps after making his LA Galaxy debut aged 32. One contributing factor to Beckham's prolonged England career was the fact he had two loan spells at AC Milan during his five years at LA Galaxy. The dates of the MLS season overlapped with European leagues in a way which allowed Beckham to play for both clubs over the course of a year, even if it angered some Galaxy fans who questioned his commitment to the club. In theory, Bale could do something similar. The Chinese Super League runs between March and December, creating a potential window of opportunity to play in Europe during the winter. So if Bale felt he needed to be playing at the highest level to keep himself sharp for Wales, could this be a way of doing so in Europe while still accumulating great wealth in China? Like Beckham, that could be in Milan. Bale's purported suitors in China, Jiangsu Suning, are owned by Suning Group, which owns the majority of shares in Inter Milan. Bale's agent, Jonathan Barnett, has dismissed the suggestion of a permanent transfer to Inter this summer but, should a move to China materialise, a subsequent loan to the San Siro might not be beyond the realms of possibility. For the time being Barnett remains coy about the Wales forward's potential destinations, though he has told BBC Sport Wales he is "working on a few things" given Bale's increasingly likely departure from Real Madrid. There may be some who have reservations about a move to China but, as Beckham and others have shown, exploring new footballing worlds may not be a harbinger of the end but the dawn of a new era. SOURCE:https://www.bbc.com/ Read the full article

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deadcactuswalking · 5 years

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REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 8th December 2019

Top 10

This is a pretty easy week for me, thankfully, as not much has changed... well, apart from pretty much everything... except the top four, of course. “Dance Monkey” by Tones and I is at its tenth consecutive week at #1.

At number-two, we have “Before You Go” by Lewis Capaldi steady at the runner-up spot.

Similarly non-moving off of the debut at number-three is “Own It” by Stormzy featuring Ed Sheeran and Burna Boy. I’d say this could make a viable play for #1 in two weeks with the album release but I have my qualms, mostly because... well, you’ll see.

“Don’t Start Now” by Dua Lipa has not moved at number-four.

Arizona Zervas keeps climbing with “ROXANNE” up two spaces to number-five. As much as I hate to say it, this could clinch the top spot in the foreseeable future.

Billie Eilish is only slowly pushing herself down the chart, with “everything i wanted” down a spot to number-six.

“Memories” byhabm Maorith 5n is aipneone s;aceygw to nnujmberse0even bht who the hell cares

Now here’s the big story: “All I Want for Christmas is You”, the 1994 classic by Mariah Carey, straight off of its re-entry in the Top 40 last week, is up a whopping 26 spaces, probably the largest increase we’ve seen in months. It’s getting the #1, I’m guaranteeing it, in both the UK and US. It has virtually no competition. It’s getting there.

“South of the Border” by Ed Sheeran featuring Camila Cabello and Cardi B isn’t moving at number-nine.

At #10, we have “Heartless” by the Weeknd, a debut in the top 10 that I honestly expected to be higher, but nonetheless, it’s here and I’ll talk more about it later, but it’s the Weeknd’s 21st UK Top 40 hit and his eighth top 10.

Climbers

As I expected, there are no climbers to speak of here. You’ll see why.

Fallers

Well, here’s our first of three big lists to cover in this episode, as we have 14 fallers within the Top 40. Alright, let’s blast through them all: “Bruises” by Lewis Capaldi and “Down Like That” by KSI with Rick Ross, Lil Baby and S-X, both in the top 10 last week, are down five and seven spaces respectively to #11 and #17. “Good as Hell” by Lizzo isn’t far off, down seven spots to #19, and “Netflix & Chill” by Fredo is down five positions to #24... You know what, I’m typing too many words and too little numbers, here we go: “Turn Me On” by Riton, Oliver Heldens and Vula is down eight to #25, “Professor X” by Dave is down five to #27, “Must Be” by J Hus is down eight to #28, “Lights Up” by Harry Styles is down 14 to #29, “HIGHEST IN THE ROOM” by Travis Scott is down seven to #30 and “Ride It” by Regard featuring Jay Sean is down six to #31 – that’s five consecutive fallers. “Someone You Loved” by Lewis Capaldi is down eight to #34, “New Dior” by DigDat and D-Block Europe is down nine to #35 off of the debut last week, “Don’t Rush” by Young T & Bugsey with Headie One is down eight to #37, and finally, “Nice to Meet Ya” by Niall Horan is at #38, down 16 spaces from last week. The sad thing is that I think most if not all of these songs, excluding “Bruises” and “Down Like That”, have been hit by the Christmas explosion and prematurely lost their chart runs, which is kind of sad – I don’t see these tracks rebounding anytime soon.

Dropouts & Returning Entries

Now for our second list of 12 drop-outs, which is only slightly less than the last list. Don’t worry, these lists do get increasingly smaller... or decreasingly bigger, however you want to phrase it. Out from #27 is “Orphans” by Coldplay, “Watermelon Sugar” by Harry Styles is out from #28 (It’ll rebound due to the album release in the next two weeks), “God is a Dancer” by Tiesto and Mabel is out from #30, “Loyal” by PARTYNEXTDOOR and Drake is out from #31, “Liar” by Camila Cabello is out from #32 (It’ll rebound next week if nothing goes awry, although she has suffered a serious sophomore slump), “Gangsta” by Darkoo and One Acen is out from #33, “French Kisses” by ZieZie and Aitch is out off of the debut from #34, “Circles” by Post Malone is finally out from #37 and “Better Half of Me” by Tom Walker is out from #38. I don’t see many of these rebounding, although the releases of sophomore albums Fine Line and Romance could seriously help out Harry and Camila, and “Gangsta” and “French Kisses” seem like they could rise later on.

Edit: I forgot to note that “Can’t Fight This Feeling” by Bastille and the London Contemporary Orchestra is out from #39.

IT’S CHRISTMAS INNIT

Now for our final list, and our shortest, with only seven entries, although I will also recite the year they were produced just to show how insane these returns are every year. “Step into Christmas” by Elton John, from 1973, is back at #39, “Santa Tell Me” by Ariana Grande, from 2014, is back at #33, “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” by Michael Bublé, from 2011, is back at #32, “Merry Christmas Everyone” by Shakin’ Stevens, from 1985, is back at #26, “Do They Know it’s Christmas?” by Band Aid, from 1984, is back at #23, “Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl, from 1987, is back at #22, and “Last Christmas” by Wham!, also from 1984, is back at #13. Rest in peace to George Michael (Who actually contributed to two songs here), Kirsty MacColl and Rick Parfitt.

NEW ARRIVALS

#40 – “Falling” – Trevor Daniel

Produced by KC Supreme, Taz Taylor and Charlie Handsome – Peaked at #3 in Latvia and #41 in the US

I have no introduction for this. It’s just one of these TikTok songs and it’s produced by the new crop of trap-rap Internet Money-type guys. I don’t care for Lil Tecca or most of the crop surrounding him, so I doubt I’ll like this. This is Trevor Daniel’s first UK Top 40 hit and yeah, surprise, surprise, it’s not great. The bland guitar pick-up is good enough, but Trevor Daniel cannot sing and makes no effort to convince you that he can. The distorted sub-bass is just odd and honestly way too menacing and dark for a break-up song that paints itself not as a kiss-off, but more like a “Thank God I found someone else” song, so why isn’t this happier? The trap percussion is an FL Studio loop, and his delivery and cadence is mopey and pathetic. Everything here just feels painfully amateur, almost offensively so. This might be a lot worse than I’m giving off with my more apathetic tone here, but this is underdeveloped with a singular verse that somehow stretches out to nearly three minutes due to an overlong chorus. Yeah, no, I can’t stand this. Next.

#14 – “River” – Ellie Goulding

We’ve seen this before with Katy Perry’s “Cozy Little Christmas” last year. A week before the real Christmas kick-in, a new, mediocre Christmas-related song enters for the first time at an alarmingly high position by an increasingly irrelevant female pop star, that is exclusive to Amazon music for no other reason other than to bump sales and chart success, falsely implying that this song is successful. In the r/popheads thread about this chart, people upvoted a comment saying they didn’t even know Ellie Goulding had released anything – and I didn’t either, because it’s not on Spotify, Apple or even freaking TIDAL. It’s just on Amazon music, which is so odd to me but that is why I don’t have production info. No-one on Genius has bothered to download Goulding’s cover of a 1971 Joni Mitchell deep cut (I’m sure they just copy-pasted the original lyrics) to check the songwriting credits. The Wikipedia page for the song doesn’t have a separate section for Goulding’s version, and they did for the John Lewis advert rendition of “Can’t Fight This Feeling” that Bastille made with the London Contemporary Orchestra, a song that I forgot to even note myself until I realised it dropped out this week. In fact, I am protesting this song’s chart placement. Okay, that’s a bit far, but I’m not reviewing it, even if I could easily take a peep at a leaked YouTube re-upload. If it’s not on Spotify, it’s not on REVIEWING THE CHARTS.

#12 – “Blinding Lights” – The Weeknd

Produced by The Weeknd, Max Martin and Oscar Holter – Peaked at #3 in Lithuania and #11 in the US

It’s the Weeknd’s 22nd UK Top 40 hit: the double A-side with “Heartless” was released oddly, with “Blinding Lights” here being released days after and about a week after, was finally accompanied by a music video that’s really just an advertisement for Mercedes-Benz vehicles. Neither single got to experience their best possible tracking week in full, but nonetheless, both are still pretty high because it’s the Weeknd, and I’m actually somewhat excited for this. I’ve heard that it interpolates A-ha’s cheesy 80s synthpop classic “Take on Me”, and it wouldn’t be the first rendition I’ve heard of the song in 2019. That would be Weezer’s hilarious cover on both the Jimmy Fallon show (Where they played it with kids’ toys) and their “Teal Album”. Sorry, I bring Weezer up too much. Is the song good? Hell, yes. It starts with an overwhelming wave of ominous distortion before retro 80s synths quickly come in and an iconic, reverb-heavy drum pattern comes in that sounds awfully familiar – it’s probably also from “Take on Me”. The synth riff, as typical with 1980s synthpop, is hilariously grandiose and egregious, but the Weeknd kills it here as well, not letting the instrumental or even the freaking bongos playing during the verse shine over him or put him off. He blends in with the airy synth painting in the chorus, and it is gorgeous, it really is. I wish this was a tad catchier but that definitely will be a possibility for it to grow on me later on (Which hopefully it does, it’s already perfectly qualified for my best of 2020 list). The Weeknd’s vocals on the bridge are oddly powerful, and that last moment in the penultimate chorus where there is this epic beeping synth that rises until the synth riff drops once again is awesome. The pre-chorus is probably my favourite part, though, especially when the synths cut out for it to just be the Weeknd over the drums, right before the chorus kicks in. I love this so much, unexpectedly so, and I’m so glad it charted so high. I hope it survives the Christmas songs, though.

#10 – “Heartless” – The Weeknd

Produced by The Weeknd, Metro Boomin, Dre Moon and Illangelo – Peaked at #1 in the US

If “Blinding Lights” was the “pop” single, this is the “R&B” single. It’s very much like the Weeknd to release two singles harboured towards two different demographics and two different radio formats, and for both of them to be smash hits, although dropping them at the same time is a tad overwhelming. I can skip the pre-amble as I’ve already done that at the start of the episode, so does it deserve its (Likely single) chart-topping week on the Billboard Hot 100? Well, yeah, I’d say so definitely, this is pretty cool, although not nearly as good as “Blinding Lights” or really any of his songs by now. This really is only decent-tier Weeknd but, man, this guy’s too good. Metro Boomin is one of my favourite hip-hop producers, and he definitely makes his presence known here, with the watery synths in the intro being abruptly drowned out by massive 808 bass and a skittering trap pattern, as well as the Weeknd whispering “Sheesh” for whatever reason. Weeknd uses a very typical delivery for him here, one I’ve heard on his other massive #1 hits, “The Hills” and “Starboy”, but he still sounds charismatic as all hell, and rides the beat incredibly well, especially when those drum hits come in before pounding back into the groovy trap beat. Weeknd plays more into his cocaine-addict sex god persona here, but is pretty thorough and honestly kind of funny here (Despite sounding checked-out in the chorus’ whiny falsetto), as he’s “running through the [women] like a dog pound” and getting so much of said [women] that it’s falling out of his pockets... although he definitely doesn’t just glamorise the sour rockstar lifestyle, in fact he predicts himself to be jumping the shark in seven years (Or, alternatively, says he has already jumped the shark within his seven-year-long career). On both of these songs, however, I do feel that while they don’t run too long, they don’t really have that effective of a climax, even if both the final choruses are epic (This one going for a distorted, cluttered vocal samples to build up the dark sonic atmosphere replacing a plundering bass), and the bridges are kind of unnecessary. I’m not complaining that these songs exist though, they’re both pretty good at least. Welcome back, Abel, we missed you.

Conclusion

Best of the Week is going to the Weeknd for both “Heartless” and ESPECIALLY “Blinding Lights”, and Worst of the Week goes to Trevor Daniel for “Falling”. We’ll see next week a large amount of Christmas nonsense coming in once again, as well as the impacts of a certain unfortunate circumstance I’ve said my peace on with Twitter @cactusinthebank, which you can follow for more musical ramblings. See you next week.

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f1 · 1 year

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FACTS AND STATS: Red Bull records aplenty as champions take 250th podium

The headline stat was a record 12th race win in a row, but there were plenty more historic numbers behind Red Bull’s triumph in Hungary – as well as others up and down the grid. Here’s our round-up of the must-know stats from Sunday’s race in Budapest. Red Bull claimed a record-breaking 12th consecutive win, breaking McLaren's 1988 record. Red Bull simultaneously tied McLaren's 1988 record of winning the first 11 races of a season. Verstappen becomes the fifth driver in history to win seven consecutive races (after Alberto Ascari, Michael Schumacher, Sebastian Vettel and Nico Rosberg). RACE REPORT: Verstappen dominates Hungarian GP to give Red Bull a record 12th successive win It was Verstappen’s 24th race win since the start of 2022, tying Juan Manuel Fangio's career total and putting him one behind that of Jim Clark and Niki Lauda. Red Bull scored their 250th podium finish today. Today was Verstappen’s 30th consecutive classified finish, breaking Daniel Ricciardo's Red Bull team record. For Verstappen it was career win #44. He out-qualified the world champion, but Hamilton could not live with Verstappen in the race Verstappen led start-to-finish for the 11th time in his career today, tying him with Sir Jackie Stewart and Michael Schumacher. Verstappen’s 33.731s winning margin was the largest since Lewis Hamilton’s at the 2021 Russian Grand Prix. READ MORE: ‘What we’ve been doing is unbelievable’ – Verstappen hails ‘incredible’ moment as Red Bull make history with F1 victory sequence Lando Norris was second for the second race in a row. He had never previously taken consecutive podium finishes in his F1 career. His result was the first McLaren podium at the Hungaroring since Lewis Hamilton’s in 2012. Norris had never previously finished in the top six at the Hungaroring. READ MORE: ‘We’ve proved some people wrong’ – Defiant Norris happy with back-to-back podiums for McLaren With third place, Sergio Perez took his first career podium at the Hungaroring. Perez extended his advantage over Fernando Alonso in the championship to 32 points (Red Bull have never finished one-two in the driver standings). With P4, Hamilton took his sixth top-four finish in the last nine races. Hamilton missed the podium at the Hungaroring for the first time since 2017. Another race, another top-five finish for Piastri With P5, Oscar Piastri has back-to-back top-five finishes. Second in the early stages, Piastri also ran in his highest-ever position in a Grand Prix today. With P6, George Russell finished 12 places higher than he started – a career-best performance in terms of positions gained. Charles Leclerc – P7 – finished one place lower than he did in last year's race. DRIVER OF THE DAY: Perez's P9-to-podium charge gets your vote in Hungary Leclerc and Ferrari team mate Carlos Sainz finished seventh and eighth respectively – they finished ninth and 10th respectively last time out at the British Grand Prix. P9 was Fernando Alonso’s worst Hungaroring result since 2009. With P10, Lance Stroll finished in the points for the fourth time in the last five races. Both Alpines were out after two laps, meaning neither of the team’s cars reached the chequered flag for the second consecutive race. WATCH: Alpine suffer early double-DNF as Ocon and Gasly collide amid Turn 1 melee via Formula 1 News https://www.formula1.com

#F1 #FACTS AND STATS: Red Bull records aplenty as champions take 250th podium #Formula 1

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hellofastestnewsfan · 6 years

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This movie was not supposed to be good. Here’s the plot: A middle-aged cardiovascular surgeon’s wife is killed by a one-armed man, and said surgeon is sent to death row. But his bus crashes on the way to prison, then a train crashes into the bus crash, then Dr. Richard Kimble escapes to go on the run with five U.S. marshals on his heels. This is literally the opening 20 minutes of The Fugitive.

Not even the actors themselves were convinced The Fugitive was going to be good. Harrison Ford thought it would be his Hudson Hawk, Bruce Willis’s $51 million flop from 1991. Tommy Lee Jones, who plays the lead marshal, thought The Fugitive marked the end of his career. But then this action thriller, the one that was written off as quickly by its stars as its hero is by the law, became the third-highest-grossing film of 1993. And then it was nominated for seven (seven!) Oscars—including Best Picture. And then it actually won one of those Oscars (well, Jones did). Perhaps even more surprising is that this piece of $70 million popcorn amusement from the ’90s is still a cultural touchstone 25 years later, largely because action movies like it are so rare now.

A year before The Fugitive arrived, its director, Andrew Davis, didn’t think much of the genre. “The basic underpinnings don’t have any soul or value,” he told The New York Times. “They’re totally incredible so you don’t believe them. They’re dumb stories.” He himself had worked with Steven Seagal twice and Chuck Norris once, two icons of black-belted brawn that sparred with Hollywood for a spell, until they were knocked out by the metastasizing blockbuster industry. As Ty Burr wrote in his 2013 book on fame, Gods Like Us, “To protect that opening weekend and the larger investment, the [movie] business needed stars to be inclusive rather than divisive.” This, he notes, was “one reason why there was a gradual move away from the bulging ’80s cartoons like Stallone and Schwarzenegger toward more believable Everyman action heroes like Bruce Willis in the Die Hard films.” And, though Burr does not name him as an example, like Ford in The Fugitive.

The writer points to Ford as the first modern-star brand: “the action figure with attitude.” Whether as the rumpled and roguish Han Solo or the hunky scholar Indiana Jones, Ford had imbued the genre with sardonic sexiness. And by the early ’90s, he had appeared in no fewer than two thrillers—Presumed Innocent (1990) and Frantic (1988, as another Dr. Richard)—about men mixed up in crimes they were racing to solve. It was this man who eventually handpicked Davis to adapt the ’60s TV series The Fugitive after seeing his work in Under Siege, a film that prompted the Times to identify Davis as the “Director Who Blends Action With a Bit of Art.”

“Does this guy ever quit?” one of the marshals asks toward the end of The Fugitive, and the answer is no—both for Dr. Richard Kimble and for Davis. For two hours and 10 minutes, this film does not relent. Not even for a cup of coffee (that scene was cut), not even for some shopping (cut), not even for romance (also cut). There is no hanging out here. Everything rushes. If it isn’t the actors, then it’s the camera with a Where’s Waldo? view of Chicago, the hometown of both Kimble and Davis; if it isn’t the camera, then it’s the swelling orchestral music. And the urgency is a good thing because every pause introduces a new threat—a passing cop, a skeptical doctor, a nosy guard. Even the exposition speeds by. The instigating murder itself, presented in slo-mo monochrome over the opening credits, unravels in concert with Kimble’s interrogation and his conviction, a simultaneous chronology that compresses time. As Matt Zoller Seitz wrote of The Fugitive on rogerebert.com last year, “The multilayered, at times prismatic way that it delivers information feels like an evolutionary leap forward for thrillers.”

The Fugitive’s success relies as much on plausibility as it does on velocity. Despite the soaring set pieces, the film somehow manages to remain grounded in a kind of palpable reality. “It is just so nice to watch a movie about normal smart people instead of insane super geniuses,” The Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg tweeted in 2016. And though the characters’ antics could scarcely qualify as “normal,” significant portions of the film’s budget were spent on bypassing CGI in favor of creating real sets—like for the train crash ($1.5 million) and the dam jump ($2 million). Ford also insisted on performing his own stunts despite having a double and being 51. That is him flying through the air as if to jump from a train (on ropes, but still), that is him standing on the edge of North Carolina’s Cheoah Dam (a rope attached to his leg, but still), that is him limping through much of the film because he tore a ligament and refused to treat it. And that is him acting the hell out of everything in between.

“It’s the moments between actions that I think are really important,” Ford says on The Fugitive’s 20th-anniversary disc. With so little dialogue, the actor essentially resorts to silent-film acting, which is only buoyed by his hangdog handsomeness. “Rare among action heroes, Ford is believable both in control and in trouble, someone audiences can simultaneously look up to and worry about,” Kenneth Turan wrote in his 1993 Los Angeles Times review. Watch as Kimble, about a quarter of the way into the movie, painfully deliberates on the lip of that dam as U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerard (Jones) points his gun at him, waiting for Kimble to surrender because, Gerard posits, there’s no way this guy would do “a Peter Pan.” Right before that, their positions are reversed when Kimble grabs Gerard’s gun in the confusion of the dam’s water-logged tunnels. Face to face with the marshal for the first time, the doctor points the pistol at his pursuer and proclaims, “I did not kill my wife!” Gerard, his hands up, half-kneeling in water, a look of bafflement on his face, responds: “I don’t care!” To this, Kimble issues a faint smile: Game on.

While Kimble speaks through his actions, the man chasing him has all the best lines. Gerard was supposed to be a solo Javert-esque force, but Davis gave him an entourage to accentuate his leadership, and the result is some of the best banter in any contemporary action film. Jones, a Texan who graduated from Harvard with an English degree, had worked twice before with Davis, who knew Jones did a lot of rewriting and improvising. The cast—which was ethnically diverse because the director wanted to reflect the demographics of his birthplace—established their characters alongside Jones, coming up with dialogue on the fly. The four marshals include Jones’s right-hand man Cosmo, played by Joe Pantoliano, whom Davis told he cast because he needed “somebody who’s gonna have the stones to banter with Tommy Lee Jones.” Cosmo and the others highlight Gerard’s humanity and tenacity while also gift wrapping the film’s exposition in wit. One of the movie’s more frequently quoted lines, which Jones conjured the morning of the shoot, has him telling a marshal who claims he is “thinking”: “Well, think me up a cup of coffee and a chocolate donut with some of those little sprinkles on top, while you’re thinking.”

Gerard and Kimble’s symmetrical relationship is enunciated by the film’s six editors (all of whom were nominated for Oscars). Each chase scene cuts back and forth between the two characters. Even when the pursuit lets up and Kimble is contacting old friends and crisscrossing Chicago to find out why his wife was killed, Gerard’s investigation parallels his. As the film progresses, Gerard’s affinity for Kimble grows, too. “What makes their relationship fresh is that it is constantly evolving,” Gene Siskel observed in his Chicago Tribune review. Twenty minutes before the end of the movie, a neat flip occurs in which Kimble goes from being followed to being the leader. He directs Gerard to one of the men responsible for his wife’s death—Dr. Charles Nichols, Kimble’s colleague who actually wanted him dead in order to cover up a failed drug trial. Another flip takes place in the climactic showdown where Kimble confronts Nichols: Kimble saves Gerard’s life, despite believing that Gerard is intent on taking his. In the end, the marshal escorts Kimble out of the building as his protector.

Though The Fugitive established Chicago as the place to shoot, it’s perhaps more notable for being the best of a genre that no longer really exists: the character-driven Hollywood action movie for adults. As Davis told Mandatory in 2013, the industry has gotten to a point such that if a film “doesn’t have tons of eye candy where a 22-year-old in some other country can just enjoy watching it, then [it] hardly get[s] made.” This is the world of tentpoles and franchises and event cinema, a world in which everything must bow to the demands of accessibility.

While “old-man action” movies like Taken and The Equalizer could be considered descendants of The Fugitive, they lack its character development. Those thrillers that are character driven—say, No Country for Old Men or Hell or High Water—are less popcorn, more art. The Fugitive acts as a placeholder for a time when adults could be entertained by action heroes without being condescended to (see Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, The Firm, Patriot Games), which is why many viewers who saw the movie as kids in the ’90s, and who are adults now, wield it as a nostalgic marker of taste.

In 2015, the same year a Fugitive sequel was announced, the comedian John Mulaney released a special called The Comeback Kid in which he digressed mid-joke into an explanation of the original film’s plot. “Why does Kimble confront Nichols?” he asks. “Well, I know we all know this, but … ” And then he goes on to rehash it anyway because The Fugitive is the kind of movie that can be rehashed voraciously over and over and over again. Siskel watched it twice before reviewing it in 1993 and already wanted to see it again; Seitz saw it 10 times in the theater upon its release; and I have replayed it upwards of 30 times over the years. What I once believed to be a guilt-ridden affinity for a mindless puff of Hollywood excess, I now understand as an appreciation for a kind of modern-day moveable feast. As Gerard’s relationship with Kimble transformed, so too has mine. I thought I didn’t care, but I do.

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ultrasfcb-blog · 6 years

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Which

Between them, the highest six golf equipment have spent simply over £1bn this season

It’s simple to spend cash in soccer. Spending it properly is loads more durable.

On the very prime, the game is awash with spendthrift billionaire homeowners and ever-increasing tv revenues resulting in eye-watering switch charges.

To compete, it’s crucial that the highest golf equipment have thorough scouting, good recruitment, clever teaching and, above all, a supervisor who can mix all of this right into a profitable facet.

Over the previous two seasons, every of the Premier League’s ‘massive six’ – Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester Metropolis, Manchester United and Tottenham – have stored their supervisor. However which have delivered the perfect return on their switch outlay in that point?

Large six managers over previous two seasons Supervisor Membership Internet spend Factors Value per level Main trophies Pep Guardiola Manchester Metropolis £360.04m 175 £2.06m 2 (2017-18 Premier League & League Cup) Jose Mourinho Manchester United £261.67m 147 £1.78m 2 (2016-17 League Cup & Europa League, in 2017-18 FA Cup last) Arsene Wenger Arsenal £84.01m 135 £622,296 1 (2016-17 FA Cup) Antonio Conte Chelsea £73.46m 163 £450,674 1 (2016-17 Premier League, in 2017-18 FA Cup last) Mauricio Pochettino Tottenham £33.06m 160 £206,625 0 Jurgen Klopp Liverpool -£720,000 148 £0 0 (in 2017-18 Champions League last)

Manchester Metropolis

John Stones and Kyle Walker each value Man Metropolis giant charges

You do not spend cash like Manchester Metropolis with out attracting criticism. The barbs have been each overt (from rival followers) and veiled (none extra so than Manchester United boss Jose Mourinho’s January complaint that Metropolis “spend striker cash on full-backs”).

Metropolis are, at current, the alpha males of the market, within the Premier League no less than. In the course of the two seasons of Pep Guardiola’s reign on the membership they’ve spent £476m to usher in 23 gamers, together with an unprecedented Premier League outlay of £284m through the two switch home windows of 2017-18.

However Metropolis haven’t been throwing good cash after unhealthy – a previous failing of theirs and a gift one for some top-flight golf equipment. Their spending represents the necessity to overhaul areas of an growing older, under-performing squad and an costly however unwavering loyalty to the imaginative and prescient and skill of their supervisor, vindicated by means of this season’s supply of the most impressive of Premier League title wins and an accompanying Carabao Cup.

The Spaniard is clocking in at £2m a degree – the costliest of the large six – however for the experience he has introduced and the reminiscences he has offered in a league marketing campaign of arguably unparalleled brilliance, Manchester Metropolis, their followers and plenty of extra would say he’s priceless.

English title harder than Spain & Germany – Guardiola

Manchester United

Paul Pogba value Manchester United a then world report £89m charge in August 2016

In his two years at Manchester United, Jose Mourinho has continued the big-spending switch sample the membership have adopted searching for rediscovering their success below Sir Alex Ferguson. This has concerned lavish outlays on a small variety of signings – £314m on eight people previously two seasons, with solely Zlatan Ibrahimovic (free) and Alexis Sanchez (swap) costing them lower than a £30m charge.

Mourinho might bemoan his membership’s incapability to compete with Metropolis, each on and off the pitch, however they’ve finished pretty much as good a job as any to attempt to cling on to the coat-tail of Guardiola’s facet on each fronts.

The runners-up spot within the league is theirs, as is the prospect of a 3rd trophy in two years below the Portuguese after they face Chelsea within the FA Cup last on 19 Might. They have been additionally one in all simply two sides to beat Metropolis this league marketing campaign, and the only one to do so at the Etihad. They could not have purchased full-backs for striker cash, however United did bring in Paul Pogba in the summer of 2016 for what was then unprecedented cash for any player and the £76m on Romelu Lukaku last summer can also be greater than Metropolis have spent on a single participant of their historical past.

Mourinho’s facet haven’t sparkled within the league like Metropolis, but when he secures an FA Cup in eight days’ time, Mourinho could have received extra main trophies than Guardiola throughout their respective present tenures. Like a maverick TV cop, it’s possible you’ll not like Jose’s strategies, however he will get outcomes.

Arsenal

Arsene Wenger is leaving Arsenal this summer season after 22 seasons as supervisor of the membership

Lots has occurred within the 22 years of Arsene Wenger’s soon-to-end reign at Arsenal. The Frenchman arrived on the membership when the Premier League had but to totally conquer the globe’s TV market. His first season was the final of BSkyB’s preliminary broadcast deal, price £304m. Even accounting for inflation, that’s simply wanting £4bn lower than the present contract. Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich wouldn’t purchase Chelsea and rework switch spending on this nation for an additional seven years.

Working in relative parity with the remaining, Wenger’s capacity to identify an improvable discount enabled Arsenal to flourish for the primary eight years of his tenure. The zenith of this got here in 2003-04 with the ‘Invicibles’ season – Wenger’s third title triumph on the membership but in addition his final.

Because the Premier League panorama shifted across the Frenchman, the obvious monetary straitjacket positioned upon him grew ever tighter. Regardless of typically bringing in additional than he spent, he managed to maintain the membership aggressive to the board’s satisfaction – if not that of an rising variety of followers.

Nevertheless, one other important downturn in efficiency previously two seasons, ensuing within the Gunners failing twice to qualify for the Champions League, has lowered Wenger’s inventory to an insupportable degree for each membership hierarchy and supporters, now largely united within the perception that larger managerial worth lies elsewhere.

Chelsea

N’Golo Kante (left) was PFA Participant of the 12 months in 2016-17, whereas Tiemoue Bakayoko (proper) has struggled for Chelsea this season

Hit or miss. That is maybe one of the simplest ways to explain the Chelsea profession of Antonio Conte. Second solely to Manchester Metropolis when it comes to cash spent on gamers through the tenure of their present supervisor, the Blues have parted with £352m to recruit 14 gamers previously two seasons.

Nevertheless, they’ve additionally recouped important quantities, partly by means of a coverage of hoovering up younger expertise that may be shipped on at a revenue ought to they not match the invoice at Stamford Bridge. The successes are matched by the failures. For each N’Golo Kante coming in there was a Tiemoue Bakayoko, for each financially rewarding departure like Oscar there’s a squandered alternative like Mohamed Salah.

It’s a pattern mirrored on the pitch, the place Conte has presided over an impressive debut-season title win after which an enormous regression to possible Europa League qualifiers. Assuming they don’t pip Liverpool to fourth place, they may nonetheless salvage one thing from the season by profitable the FA Cup however as Arsenal have found earlier than them, that is scant reward for a facet with Europe-conquering aspirations.

Conte nonetheless presents comparatively good worth for cash however like his future at Stamford Bridge, that determine was trying loads more healthy 12 months in the past.

Tottenham

Harry Kane (left) value Spurs no switch charge however is now their most useful participant

“It is utterly unfair that the individuals, the media goes to check Tottenham with a membership like Manchester Metropolis, United or Chelsea,” mentioned Spurs boss Mauricio Pochettino in December final 12 months. “We’re in a exact opposite facet. I am not complaining about nothing. It is solely that I settle for our place and the place we’re.”

Tottenham might be “a exact opposite facet” to the likes of Metropolis, United and Chelsea. However due to Pochettino they proceed to rub shoulders with them on the proper finish of the highest flight.

In the course of the Argentine’s close to four-season reign at White Hart Lane (and Wembley), the membership have completed fifth, third, second, and are assured one other top-four place this marketing campaign.

Pochettino shouldn’t be infallible by any means (Vincent Janssen anybody?) however his tenure is suffering from gamers introduced in for a worth that’s now made a mockery of by their performances: Dele Alli, Toby Alderweireld, Ben Davies, Son Heung-min, Kieran Trippier, Victor Wanyama. Add to that the work he has finished with among the membership’s personal youth merchandise. Harry Winks has developed right into a full England worldwide on his watch, Harry Kane into one of the vital sought-after gamers on this planet.

Having amassed 294 factors in his time in cost, albeit at a relatively small internet spend, Pochettino’s failure to win a trophy suggests he might have taken Spurs so far as he can on their present funds. With a 3rd successive Champions League marketing campaign beckoning and a brand new 60,000-plus seater stadium on the horizon, Pochettino might not have to just accept Spurs’ place for for much longer. He’ll, although, need to ship.

Liverpool

Philippe Coutinho’s transfer to Barcelona final January has enabled Liverpool to show a switch revenue over the previous two seasons

As the one man in revenue on the listing, on the face of it Jurgen Klopp is the managerial discount of the century. The German has undoubtedly finished loads with the supplies at his disposal. There may be, although, important context surrounding that determine, headlined by one Philippe Coutinho.

The Brazilian’s sale to Barcelona in January for an initial £108m gives the highest-profile instance of how Liverpool have balanced their books by means of the (sometimes undesirable) big-money sale of gamers throughout Klopp’s time on the membership.

We’re speaking, although, a couple of snapshot in time through the cycle of any membership’s improvement. At present, this advantages Klopp following the balancing impact of Coutinho’s sale. We could possibly be offered with a really completely different end result in 12 months’ time, when the sizeable switch charge of Naby Keita is added to the stability sheet as a part of what might be two home windows of great outlay.

What’s to Liverpool and Klopp’s credit score is their capacity to determine and drive a tough discount on gamers they will then enhance. For example, Salah was introduced in for roughly £10m greater than they recouped from the sale of Christian Benteke to Crystal Palace. The latter has three objectives in 29 appearances this season, the previous 43 in 48.

It’s this that has enabled Klopp to develop the Reds into one of the vital devastating attacking sides in England and past, with out breaking the financial institution. This could possibly be emphasised additional on 26 Might after they face Actual Madrid within the last of the Champions League.

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addictionfreedom · 6 years

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Addiction Treatment For Professionals

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megadarkbouquettidalwavethings · 7 years

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Chinese Super League: Has the bubble burst with transfer tax?

Moves for Carlos Tevez and Oscar helped take Chinese Super League spending to a record

The Chinese Super League has gained worldwide attention, with their clubs’ collective display of financial might seemingly enabling them to attract young, overseas superstar players at will.

Oscar arrived from Chelsea for £60m, with the likes of Hulk, Alex Teixeira, Axel Witsel and Jackson Martinez also making the switch to China.

This was no retirement league with ageing players aiming for one last big pay day – these were players in their prime, who opted to leave top-flight European football.

Having lost Oscar to Shanghai SIPG in January 2017, Chelsea manager Antonio Conte claimed the CSL was a “danger for all”.

However, new rules governing overseas players appear to have dented the clubs’ buying power in their current transfer window which, unlike in Europe, closes at the end of February.

The imposition of a 100% transfer tax for overseas players – which the Chinese FA proposes to use to help the nation develop football at youth level – has led to a slowing down of clubs’ transfer activities.

Diego Costa’s mooted £64m move to Tianjin Quanjian was scuppered when the fee effectively doubled to £128m overnight because of the new tax.

So, with this new restriction in place, has the Chinese Super League’s bubble burst?

China’s football authority wants a 100% tax on loss-making clubs that sign foreign players

CSL spending slowing – but has anybody noticed?

Having been able to flex their financial power unhindered in the past, CSL clubs are not happy with the new rule. Some are keen to explore loopholes to enable them to sign top overseas players who buy out their contracts and then arrive for free.

Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger’s view is reflective of a system which appears to be taking a breather.

“They have slowed down in China and people haven’t noticed. Many people still think ‘OK we will pay these prices because if we don’t, China will buy the players for a maximum price’,” he said.

“That is gone. We have to be looking at what has happened in the past 10 months in China, and accept that they have slowed down. They are much more cautious about spending big money for European players.”

Newcastle United manager Rafael Benitez notes that Chinese clubs, hindered by the tax, “have fewer places for foreign players”.

And while he was reluctant to see Brazil international Oscar leave Stamford Bridge, Conte now appears to have softened his stance.

“If an offer arrives for a player who wants to go, who is not in our plan, he can go,” said the Italian.

The new CSL season starts in March, with reigning champions Guangzhou Evergrande Taobao looking to extend their record haul of titles to eight.

But it was perhaps Shanghai Shenhua who made many outside China take note of the CSL for the first time, when Chelsea pair Nicolas Anelka and Didier Drogba ended their time in west London to join the club. Anelka signed in January 2012 for a reported annual salary of 12m euros (£10.6m) and six months later Drogba signed up for an eye-watering £200,000 a week.

One of the reasons the league was set up was to help improve the level of football in China, a nation that has qualified for only one World Cup – in 2002 – but is desperate to return to the global stage.

Failure to qualify for Russia 2018 was not a good start, but with the continued inclusion of superstar overseas players, the hope is that the level will improve and China will be able to qualify for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

There is an even bolder ambition of winning the World Cup in 2050 – and that ambition comes right from the very top.

Chinese President Xi Jinping wants his nation to be ready and able to compete against the likes of Germany, France and Brazil.

To do that, he wants to have at least 20,000 training academies and 70,000 pitches by 2020, with 50 million children and adults playing the game in two years’ time, while also ensuring that pitches are readily available in the country.

‘They were substituting players after 15 minutes’ – problems emerge

The rise of the Chinese Super League

The CSL, with its powerful backers, has the capability to make all that infrastructure a reality.

Ambitious Chinese club owners, whose respective business interests range from real estate, agriculture, investments, motoring and shipping among other sectors, are content to compete with each other both on and off the pitch.

As the CSL clubs enjoy close links to the state, in effect the country’s trade surplus with the world – which in 2017 was at a record $275.81bn with the United States alone – has become a very handy revenue stream for the clubs to try to tap into.

However, initial signs that all was not well with the CSL emerged when Drogba said he was not being paid.

Gambling on football – which is illegal in China – emerged in black markets and tales of bribery and corruption enraged the Chinese FA, forcing it to act.

Less than a year after he arrived in Shanghai, Drobga departed for Galatasaray via the intervention of a Fifa exemption.

Tianjin Quanjian claim they dropped bids for Edinson Cavani and Diego Costa due to rule changes

Often viewed as dithering, and with the increasing number of overseas players in their top league, the Chinese FA acted in an effort to help homegrown players’ opportunities.

“The starting foreign player quota was cut from four to three per club per match,” says senior UK reporter for Xinhua news agency Wang Zijiang.

“Any team who fields foreign players must have the equivalent number of Chinese under-23 players on the pitch at the same time. This is to help improve the standard of Chinese players.

“Previously, the rule was to just have a Chinese under-23 player in the starting XI, but clubs got around that rule by substituting them as early 15 minutes into a game, which did nothing to help the young Chinese players’ fragile confidence levels.”

Still, the allure of the CSL remains strong, especially when you see the salaries on offer. Last season, £615,000 per week was paid to Carlos Tevez, £400,000 a week to Oscar, £290,000 a week to Graziano Pelle and £200,000 per week to Ramires.

Attendances at CSL matches averaged just under 24,000 in 2017 – more than the average of the Championship in England this season. Guangzhou Evergrande Taobao had the highest average club attendance at 45,587.

“The stadiums are full with a passionate fanbase really taking their clubs to heart,” said Wang.

“Orchestrated by a lead fan with a loudspeaker, flag-waving, drum-beating, banner-holding fans make for a fantastic matchday noise and what they’re watching on the pitch is a standard of game which is improving with all the investments and addition of overseas players.

“And they’re not being taken for granted either. When any hint of match-fixing or any football scandal surfaces, the attendances dip, with fans wanting the authorities to clean up the game and ensure that what they’re watching on the pitch has not been tainted.”

From ‘crazy’ to ‘under control’

Former West Ham striker Freddie Kanoute learned Mandarin when he moved to China six years ago

One former Premier League player who has first-hand playing experience in China is Freddie Kanoute. The striker played 38 times for Beijing Guoan in the 2012-13 season, scoring 12 times.

Kanoute recalls it being “a bit crazy” early on when he arrived in Beijing, but says the nation is on the right path to realise its lofty ambitions.

“Now it seems they are trying to get things under control by regulating the transfer system and taking a more sustainable position by investing more in youth development,” said Kanoute, whose sports consultancy firm helped facilitate striker Jonathan Soriano’s move to Beijing Guoan last year for a fee of about £10m.

“Chinese players are definitely not at the level of the top leagues in Europe, but maybe equivalent to third-tier divisions in Europe – with the exception of some players who I think could play in top European leagues.

“In the future, if authorities of Chinese football take the right steps, we will definitely see more and more Chinese players coming to Europe and more international players join the CSL.”

Kanoute immersed himself in the country, learning Mandarin and “connecting” with his new environment.

However, former Manchester United and Manchester City striker Tevez has likened his time at Shanghai Shenhua last year to a “holiday”.

“First of all, one should not think it’s easy to play in China, that you’re going to be successful no matter what,” said Kanoute.

“In fact, it’s quite competitive – and on top of that you have to adapt to a team, a culture, a language. You can’t make a difference all alone. So a player who decides to go there should be motivated and be prepared to adjust, blend in to a certain extent in order to make a difference.”

Javier Mascherano’s 10m euro (£8.86m) January switch from Barcelona to Hebei China Fortune proves the CSL continues to do business at the right price. And given the new transfer tax, the 33-year-old Argentine may fit the new financial narrative from now on.

However, Cedric Bakambu’s $50m (£35.7m) switch from Villarreal to Beijing Guoan last month suggests the appetite remains for a big-money transfer. Bakambu reportedly bought out his contract with the Spanish side, although the tax implications of that deal are being scrutinised by the Chinese FA.

For some players, the allure of the riches from China come second to wanting to continue to compete at the highest level.

In 2016, Yaya Toure twice rejected offers from Shanghai SIPG and Jiangsu Suning, preferring to remain at Manchester City in pursuit of Premier League and Champions League success.

And former Italy international Antonio Cassano this week described a potential move to China as “stupid”.

Could England hold the key to China’s future?

Carson Yeung was the owner of Birmingham City from 2007 until 2014

While the CSL will persevere at home, thousands of miles away, something has been stirring on the West Midlands football scene since July 2007, and the area has become the focal point of Far East football investment.

Carson Yeung took over at Birmingham City. Nearby West Bromwich Albion – the only West Midlands side in the Premier League – later moved into Chinese hands, with Aston Villa and Wolverhampton Wanderers going the same way.

So why are we witnessing a West Midlands footballing shopping spree by billionaires from a nation where most traditional football fan allegiances tend to be towards Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal?

Villa’s owner Dr Tony Xia has grand ambitions for his team and he sees a growing of the fanbase in China leading to an eventual tie-up for Chinese players to come and train at the club.

“When we bought Villa, we made detailed planning for the club’s future commercial development and social influence, and hopefully we can use this platform to help Chinese football,” Xia told the Xinhua news agency.

That growth could benefit the CSL in the long run, while also feeding into Guangzhou Evergrande’s stated aim of not fielding a single overseas player in their team by 2020.

However you view it, the grand footballing designs of the CSL clubs and China in general continue unabated.

The Chinese FA may have stepped in to curtail the massive overseas player spend, but that seems to be a much-needed pause for breath rather than a sign of any bubble bursting.

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