Rutger Hauer goes from android to arts teacher

By Ben Berkowitz
ROTTERDAM (Reuters Life!) - Ask any American who Rutger Hauer is and they'll likely remember his hallmark role as the artificial human Roy Batty in 1982's "Blade Runner."
But for 30 young directors, producers and actors who are gathered here this week, Hauer is their ticket to the next stage of their careers.
It's an unlikely combination in many ways - an actor best known for a role he played a generation ago and a crop of young artists who were still in diapers when the movie came out.
But in his home country of the Netherlands Hauer is a serious and respected filmmaker - a reputation he is leveraging for the third instalment of the Rutger Hauer Filmfactory, a 10-day masterclass with instruction from some of the movie world's leading behind-the-scenes players.
"To me it made sense. I don't think it made sense to a whole lot of people," Hauer told Reuters in an interview on the first day of the Filmfactory program late last week.
As crews hustled to put the last touches on the production space the students will use to make their movies, Hauer buzzed around, his phone ringing incessantly and his schedule overflowing with last-minute details. But he made it clear he preferred that to the alternative.
"I could do nothing. This is the hardest thing," said Hauer, who at 65 still has the sharp blue eyes and flowing blond hair that made him instantly recognizable to a generation.
But his methods are not stuck in the past - he carries around a small camera, not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes, that shoots an hour of digital video in high definition.
Give five people the same cameras and let them record a conversation for 10 minutes, Hauer said, with three hours of editing work they could have a serious and thoughtful short film ready to post on the Internet.
GLOBAL CLASSROOM
The lineup of those potential movie makers is a diverse one - a Danish commercials director, a German-Indian author and producer, an astrophysicist with a passion for editing and a soap opera actress fluent in four languages.
"This is not a class for puppies, this is a class for filmmakers who've already had a few serious jobs," Hauer said.
But he's not after perfection - far from it, actually. Hauer encourages students to make mistakes, many of them if needed, as part of the learning process. The things they do wrong, he believes, are as much a part of the art as what they do right.
"It's an exercise, and all the mistakes they make, we love them," he said.
Helping him shepherd the class through their mistakes is a broad lineup of coaches, including Oscar-winning producer Hans de Weer ("Antonia's Line") and Hollywood directors Robert Rodriguez ("Spy Kids," "Sin City") and Paul Verhoeven ("Basic Instinct," "Starship Troopers"). Continued...
Source: Reuters

Milan designers take men on spring journey

By Marie-Louise Gumuchian
MILAN (Reuters) - Designers at Milan's fashion shows are putting a dash of the exotic in their collections for men's wardrobes next spring and summer, looking to places like Africa or Brazil for inspiration.
Injecting color and showing plenty of sportswear shoes and roomy bags, several top names at Milan's spring/summer 2010 menswear shows, which started Saturday and end on Tuesday, seem to taking on a travel trend.
Gucci's Frida Giannini went to Rio, looking to the works of architect Oscar Niemeyer and his white buildings against Brazil's piercing blue skies.
She presented white slim tailored suits with color ties and printed shirts for a mood described as "resolutely optimistic."
There were featherweight leather jackets and hooded anoraks, paired with leggings or shorts as well as hand-knit sweaters.
For the evening, deep indigo blue was the new black for Gucci with glossy suits that also came out in fiery red.
Quoted by Italian newspapers on Monday, Giannini said the look represented "a desire of escapism, of lightness and freedom with the sporty and super chic attitude of someone who can take long holidays on the Brazilian beaches."
Versace looked to the French Foreign Legion, the Tuareg culture and north Africa for its menswear line that featured unbuttoned tunics, light trousers, leather sandals and silver and leather plaited jewelry.
Design head Donatella Versace used prints that evoked "the hazy light of a mirage in the desert" and a neutral palette -- white, sand, khaki with flashes of violet, orange and green.
To complete the desert look, models wore their sunglasses on a string and had caps with neck protectors in the "kepis" style. They wore belts in woven leather and desert boots.
On Monday, Salvatore Ferragamo also looked to Africa with a "colonial style revisited for the modern eye, evoking the exotic with irresistible contrasts" such as natural fibers like raffia against luxury leathers like crocodile and alligator in bags.
Colors were earthy -- burned browns, ochre sands, coral reds and indigo blues. Jackets were slim fit and light, shirts had contrasting cuffs and collars while trousers had small pleats.
Also showing on Monday, Roberto Cavalli took his male buyers on a journey of rediscovering their bodies.
His silhouette was triangle with strong shoulders -- at times decorated with embroidery, an emphasized torso with revealing vests and tops and tight-fitting trousers -- the intention of revealing and highlighting the "fit body" of the Cavalli man.
"It is man who is beginning to love himself and wants to make himself evident," Cavalli told Reuters.
(Editing by Paul Casciato)

Source: Reuters

British dogs trained to sniff out diabetes

By Georgina Cooper
AYLESBURY, England (Reuters) - Dogs are being trained in Britain as potential life-savers to warn diabetic owners when their blood sugar levels fall to dangerously low levels.
Man's best friend already has been shown capable of sniffing out certain cancer cells, and dogs have long been put to work in the hunt for illegal drugs and explosives.
Their new front-line role in diabetes care follows recent evidence suggesting a dog's hyper-sensitive nose can detect tiny changes that occur when a person is about to have a hypoglycemic attack.
A survey last December by researchers at Queen's University Belfast found 65 percent of 212 people with insulin-dependent diabetes reported that when they had a hypoglycemic episode their pets had reacted by whining, barking, licking or some other display.
At the Cancer and Bio-Detection Dogs research center in Aylesbury, southern England, animal trainers are putting that finding into practice and honing dogs' innate skills.
The charity has 17 rescue dogs at various stages of training that will be paired up with diabetic owners, many of them children.
"Dogs have been trained to detect certain odors down to parts per trillion, so we are talking tiny, tiny amounts. Their world is really very different to ours," Chief Executive Claire Guest told Reuters TV.
The center was started five years ago by orthopedic surgeon Dr John Hunt, who wanted to investigate curious anecdotes about dogs pestering their owners repeatedly on parts of their body that were later found to be cancerous.
At around the same time, the first hard evidence was being gathered by researchers down the road at Amersham Hospital that dogs could identify bladder cancer from chemicals in urine.
The move into diabetes followed the case of Paul Jackson, who told Guest and her team about his dog Tinker who warns him when his sugar levels get too low and he is in danger of collapsing.
"It's generally licking my face, panting beside me. It depends how far I have gone before he realizes," Jackson said.
Tinker has now been trained by the Aylesbury center and is a fully qualified Diabetic Hypo-Alert dog, complete with red jacket to announce himself as a working assistance animal.
The center is continuing work to perfect dogs' ability in spotting signs of cancer. But while dog-lover Guest says it would be nice to have a dog in every doctor's office to screen for disease, ultimately that is not practical.
Instead, she hopes the research will lead to the invention of an electronic nose that will mimic a dog's.
"At the moment electronic noses are not as advanced as the dogs', they are about 15 years behind. But the work that we are doing and what we are finding out will help scientists advance quickly so that they can use electronic noses to do the same thing," she said.
(Additional reporting and writing by Ben Hirschler; editing by Michael Roddy)

Source: Reuters

The Boss set to shine at Glastonbury

By Paul Lauener
GLASTONBURY, England (Reuters Life!) - Bruce Springsteen will play an extra-long set and the sun will shine at the world's biggest green field arts and music festival this year, Glastonbury Festival founder Michael Eavis said.
Old favorites will dominate Glastonbury this year as Neil Young, Tom Jones, Status Quo and Blur join Springsteen on the main stage, marking a return to the festival's guitar-based roots after rap superstar Jay-Z headlined last year.
This year, hip-hop artists like Q-Tip, Roots Manuva and Black Eyed Peas are mostly relegated to smaller areas on the southern English farmland that Eavis has been opening up for Glastonbury since 1970, when the one pound entry fee included free milk from the farm.
Springsteen is so keen to perform this year he has asked for more than his allotted time on the main 'Pyramid' stage.
"He wants to play for three hours actually, so we can give him two and a half by the sound of it or maybe two (hours) forty-five," Eavis told Reuters as his cows were herded indoors and he prepared for the invasion of some 200,000 revelers.
Other artists likely to appeal to a younger crowd include indie pop group The Wombats, Australia's Gabriella Cilmi, electro-pop musician Little Boots, and pop artist Lady Gaga.
Pete Doherty will play on Glastonbury's second-largest stage and The Prodigy, best-known for their violent lyrics and hard beats, will be performing "Invaders Must Die," their first album since 2004.
WEATHER
Eavis, who this year made it into TIME magazine's annual list of "the world's 100 most influential people," is confident that the weather will be good this year, but says there are enough marquees to cover everyone if the rain pours and the entire farm becomes a sludgy mud bath as in previous years.
The official weather forecast showed it could be a scorcher.
"It looks like actually getting quite warm and sunny," George Goodfellow, a forecaster at the Met Office, said on Friday, adding temperatures would be around 25-30 degrees Celsius.
Not just about music, the June 24-28 festival, which has 3,225 toilets and consumes over one million gallons of water, also has performing arts, theater, dance, spiritual-healing and circus events.
Highlights will include the silent disco, where clubbers dance to music on headphones while watching a 3D show through special glasses, "Cult Bingo," "frilly-knickered knife throwers," and "the world's strongest lady."
Those wishing something calmer can enrol in The Free University of Glastonbury and discuss nature, music, non-conformism and even maths. Eternal hippies can head to Stone Circle, where people have been known to dance naked and play drums.
Always trying to find the right balance between security and freedom, an enormous fence surrounds the 1,100 acres of the festival to stop thefts from tents and control numbers. Continued...
Source: Reuters

Economic crisis clouds Moscow film festival

By Catherine de Pury
MOSCOW (Reuters Life!) - Shrugging off a cold drizzle and disappointing box office receipts, Moscow opened its annual film festival to patriotic tales and big screen epics over the weekend.
This year's 10-day festival wilL feature the film "Czar" -- a tale of battles and survival in 16th century Russia whose main character is Ivan the Terrible.
The festival opened in the shadow of comments from one of the country's biggest movie financiers, who said that Russia's film industry needs state support led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to help it cope with the impact of the global economic crisis.
"All production companies and distribution in general have been hit by the financial crisis," Alexander Rodnyansky, boss of entertainment company CTC media, told Reuters earlier this month. "I would call it a cold shower."
Rodnyansky helped finance the Russian 4-1/2 hour sci-fi film "Inhabited Island," one of Russia's highest budget productions, made last year before the main impact of the crisis.
The film cost about $35 million to make and had expected a box office return of about $70 million after its release at the end of last year. It only managed to pull in ticket sales of roughly $25 million.
Now he said a new state committee headed by Putin was prepared to direct funding to large film production and distribution companies to boost the domestic industry.
"This gives an indication to the whole market on how important the film industry is today, we've never had a committee at such a level," Rodnyansky said.
The state has a long history of financing films and Rodnyansky said the new committee was to focus on how better to spend cash and not about adding a layer of censorship.
Russia has been hit hard by the economic crisis and predictions of a boom in cinema viewers have not materialised.
But Rodnyansky said Russia still has huge potential as a market for films. He said it was the sixth biggest cinema market in Europe and that Russian language films had an audience of 300 million -- including the countries of the former Soviet Union.
One problem it had to confront was the limited infrastructure with around a third of Russia's cinemas located in either Moscow or the second city of St Petersburg.
"Cities with a population of less than half-a-million, most of these cities don't have modern cinemas at all," he said.
(Writing by James Kilner, editing by Paul Casciato)

Source: Reuters

Threatened sea turtles have Thai navy for protection

By Papitchaya Boonngok
KHRAM ISLAND, Thailand (Reuters Life!) - Sea turtles have to battle humans hungry for their meat or eggs and fungal infections to survive, but in Thailand, the endangered species have the navy on their side.
Every year, dozens of mature sea turtles come ashore on Khram Island, an isolated island known as the biggest nesting site of sea turtles in the Gulf of Thailand, to lay their eggs.
The turtles born out of these eggs will also eventually return to the same island, some 30 km (19 miles) from the tourist beach town of Pattaya, when it is their time to lay eggs.
But the survival of these eggs, and the hatchlings, is under constant threat, which is why the navy has been protecting them for almost 20 years.
"Sea turtles in Thailand have not reached a critical endangered level," said Captain Aran Jiemyuu, Deputy Director of the Thai Navy's Sea Turtle Conservation Center which was set up in 1992.
"But that's because of our efforts. At Khram Island, we found green turtles, from 15 to 17-years-old laying eggs. It shows that the turtles laying eggs here may be turtles we nurtured and released to the sea or natural-born turtles on the island."
Sea turtles are recognised as an endangered species by International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.
But Aran said the number of sea turtles in Thailand has increased since the project was set up.
Five species of the sea turtles have been found along the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman sea coast, including olive ridley turtle, green turtle, hawksbill turtle, loggerhead turtle and leatherback turtle.
On the island, navy conservationists use a sharp metal stick to find nests. These are then encircled by protective pens.
The conservationists also put tags on each pen to identify the number of eggs, the date of nesting and the expected birth date. It takes between 45 and 60 days for eggs to hatch.
"We observe the sand. If the sand is softer, we will dig it. If we find turtle eggs, we will move all the eggs to the front beach for further nurturing," said Commander Tosporn Osathanond, chief of staff the conservation center.
Once born, the new baby turtles are collected and moved to tanks where they are fed minced fish and scrubbed to prevent fungal infections.
Some 15,000 green and hawksbill baby turtles are housed at the navy's conservation center each year. The newborns are kept in tanks and once they are strong enough, after about six months, they are released into the sea.
Sea turtles in Thailand are often killed for their meat or eggs, which are regarded as a delicacy. Many sea turtles also die when they are caught in fishing nets. Continued...
Source: Reuters

Exercisers picking up good vibrations

By Dorene Internicola
NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - There's a whole lot of shaking going on in gyms these days.
The machines responsible may look like locker room scales on steroids, and the idea of using them to jiggle the flab away may seem a bit wacky. But experts, celebrities and true believers say that squatting and pressing atop these vibrating platforms can perk up tired bodies and ignite weary workouts.
"Vibration training improves muscle tone and increases core body temperature because it allows for stimulation of the neurological system," David Harris, director of personal training for the Equinox Fitness, said in an interview.
Over 100 gyms in the United States and more than 80 countries worldwide feature the vibrating platforms, according to Patty Stapleton, spokesperson for Power Plate, the California-based company which manufactures them.
Model and television presenter Heidi Klum, actors Clint Eastwood and George Clooney, and entertainers P-Diddy and Madonna are among its celebrity users, according to the company.
"Many people are using the machines to improve flexibility and reduce muscle soreness," Fabio Comana, an exercise physiologist and spokesperson for the American Council on Exercise (ACE), said in an interview.
"There is quite a bit of research from Europe and United States to support some of the benefits," said Comana, who teaches at the University of California at San Diego.
The principles of whole-body vibration therapy were originally developed for the Russian space program to combat the degenerating effects of zero gravity on muscle and bone.
Scientists found that vibrating therapy allowed cosmonauts to stay in space for up to three months longer.
Russian Olympic trainers began using it in the 1970's to improve their athletes' competitive edge, and in 1999 Dutch trainer Gus Van de Meer designed a device for the fitness community.
But really the technology reaches back much further -- to 1687 and Sir Isaac Newton's second law of motion.
"It works on Newton's principle where force equals mass times acceleration," Comana explained.
"The vibration activates neurological systems and muscle response. It also places stress on the bones to increase their density and it certainly stimulates blood flow, improves flexibility and reduces muscle soreness," he said.
The company recommends exercising on the platforms for three to four 30-minute sessions per week.
"I favor dumbbell squats and overhead presses," Comana said. "But whatever you chose to do on the platform, you are limited to static movements, given how small it is." Continued...
Source: Reuters

Super cars, premium beers help rich Indians beat blues

By Rina Chandran
MUMBAI (Reuters Life!) - The world economy is struggling and India is growing at its slowest pace in six years, but that hasn't stopped the wealthy from downing premium beers and revving up their super-luxury cars.
The global financial crisis has hit Asia's third-largest economy harder than expected, more than halving the number of billionaires to 24, according to Forbes magazine, but marketers are upbeat about prospects for sporty cars and luxury holidays.
"There's nothing like a spin in one of these beauties to make you feel better," said Hormazd Sorabjee, editor of Autocar magazine, pointing to a flaming red Ferrari and a bright orange Lamborghini rolling to a stop outside a stylish restaurant.
Autocar, along with textile tycoon and car buff Gautam Singhania, launched India's first Supercar Club at the weekend, to bring together the growing number of luxury car owners.
Car sales are struggling in India, but that didn't stop Audi from opening a 10,000-sq. ft. showroom in Mumbai, not far from a showroom for Rolls Royce and a spanking new one for Jaguar and Land Rover, the luxury UK brands owned by India's Tata Motors.
"We have a critical mass of luxury car brands now and owners who are keen to connect," said Sorabjee, who expects the club will have about 200 invited members to begin with.
The club's members, along with the more than 123,000 millionaires in India, are also the target of global luxury apparel and jewelry labels as well as wine and beer brands.
Consumption of beer in India, traditionally a whisky-swigging nation, has been on the rise, helped by a young population and launches by brewers including Budweiser, Carlsberg and Heineken.
But the market, estimated at about 1.4 billion liters last year by Euromonitor, is almost entirely made up of lager.
Which makes it perfect for craft beers, according to Habeeb Kamaal, chief executive of TVB Group in India, which has launched five beers and ales, all branded Little Devils.
"The beer market is growing fast, incomes are rising and there is a young population that is keen for new experiences, so it is the perfect time," he said, demonstrating how to pair the beers with Indian foods such as kebabs and biriyani.
Little Devils is priced at a premium to most other beers in the market, but despite the gloomy economic environment, Kamaal is confident of frothy sales in a country where per capita beer consumption is just over a liter a year.
"We're sure growth in the Indian beer market will be in small, niche beers like these," he said.
Exclusivity is where it's at, Sorabjee agrees, with one complaint: "It's all very well to own a Ferrari, but where would you drive it? There's not one suitable road in the city."
(Editing by Alistair Scrutton and Miral Fahmy)

Source: Reuters