Monday, November 23, 2015

Champions of Change Program - TDG promo - stills - articles

NEWS:
On Monday, November 23, the White House will recognize nine individuals from across the country as “White House LGBT Artists Champions of Change.” These individuals were selected by the White House for their artistry in advocating for the LGBT community. The program will feature remarks by Senior Advisor to the President Valerie Jarrett and Secretary for the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro, and screenings of the show Transparent from Amazon Studios and the Focus Features film THE DANISH GIRL.
The event also marks an important day in the LGBT community, Transgender Day of Remembrance, observed on November 20.
The Champions of Change program was created as an opportunity for the White House to feature individuals
doing extraordinary things to empower and inspire members of their communities. The event will be live streamed
on the White House website.
To watch this event live, visit www.whitehouse.gov/live on Monday, November 23, at 1:00 PM ET.
To learn more about the White House Champions of Change program, visit www.whitehouse.gov/champions.
Follow the conversation at #LGBTChamps. - Read more



THR: How Eddie Redmayne’s Transgender Role in ‘The Danish Girl’ Went From “Commercial Poison” to Oscar Contender (via)
Eddie Redmayne was about to shoot the climactic battle sequence in Les Miserables... when director Tom Hooper calmly strolled across the battlefield and handed the young actor a large unmarked envelope. “I think he said something simple like, ‘Read it,’” recalls Redmayne, 33, recalls of that day in 2011. “Tom has a very gentle manner.”
The pages inside — the screenplay for The Danish Girl — had been circulating among filmmakers and actors in just this fashion for the better part of a decade. At moments over the years, there were even hopes that the film actually might get made — at one point, Nicole Kidman was signed for the lead — but something always went wrong. Financing fell through. Or talent dropped out. Or somebody got cold feet. “It was the subject matter,” says Lucinda Coxon, who wrote the script in the envelope. “It was considered commercial poison.”


Times change. And it’s hard to imagine a more hospitable moment than right now for a commercially viable movie based on the life of Lili Elbe... Far from poison, the subject matter has reunited an award-winning director (before
Les Miserables, Hooper won an Oscar for The King’s Speech) and an award-winning actor (after Les Miserables, Redmayne won one for The Theory of Everything) to finally bring to the screen the story of a transgender icon
predating Caitlyn Jenner by nearly 100 years.
“I knew the script had a long, tortured history,...But it’s a wonderful love story. It reframed my notion of love, that
love is not about gender or bodies. It’s about souls. The minute I read it, I wanted to do it.” - full article here

 More photos in the article - Tom Hooper, Alicia Vikander, Matthias Schoenearts, Amber Heard

The New Yorker: True Selves (by Anthony Lane) via bespokeredmayne
“…The Danish Girl would be unfeasible without Eddie Redmayne. To be honest, he’s so outrageously pretty to begin with that the journey into feminine loveliness is for him little more than a sidestep. (Did I detect a faint testiness in Vikander as she realizes that, for once, she must settle for being the second-most-beautiful creature onscreen?)
I struggled hard to picture Steve Buscemi, say, in the role of Einar, but nothing came, and, likewise, were you to
swap the stately trio of Copenhagen, Paris, and Dresden for downtown Pittsburgh, the film would swiftly collapse. What rescues it, then, from complacency? The answer, I think, is not simply Redmayne’s performance but his acute realization that Einar, too, is a performer of the first rank. Observing women at the fishmonger’s, as their fingers circle briefly and then point at their fish of choice, he slyly copies the motion. Better yet, in the dimly lit highlight of the film, he visits a peepshow, in Paris, where a naked model feigns her pleasure behind a glass screen; rather than leering, however, Einar studies her devoutly, his imagination hungering toward her. To know the desires of another body,
and to learn them by heart: that, Redmayne suggests, is the path to becoming yourself.” - full article

Illustration by Tina Berning

The New York Times:
Eros and Identity Meet Again in Copenhagen, in ‘The Danish Girl’
In one scene in “The Danish Girl,” due in theaters Friday, Nov. 27, the 1920s Danish artist Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander) gazes intensely at her canvas as she paints a portrait of a nude woman stretched out languidly in a classical pose.
The beautiful model is Gerda’s artist husband, Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne), who has just started stepping out in public as a woman, to be known later as Lili Elbe. Erotically charged, the painting is ahead of its time, as were the real-life subjects of the film, Wegener and Elbe, one of the earliest patients to undergo sex reassignment surgery, in 1930.
“In this moment in the movie, through this painting, we can see how Lili and Gerda’s stories are both of a Danish tradition, and also far ahead of that tradition,” said David Ebershoff, author of the 2000 novel “The Danish Girl,” which was adapted for the film. “A women’s rights movement was playing out in Denmark somewhat simultaneously to their lives.” (via)



Decca Records will release a soundtrack album for the period drama The Danish Girl. The album features the film’s original music composed and conducted by Academy Award winner Alexandre Desplat (The Grand Budapest Hotel, The King’s Speech, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Godzilla, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). The soundtrack will be released on December 4, 2015 and is now available for pre-order on Amazon, where you can also listen to audio samples.



New photos from The Danish Girl (XXX) via olly-77 (1)(2)

Another awards campaign ad for The Danish Girl, advancing it as Best Picture 
and for its dazzling cinematography. (via)

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