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UNL Today Archive

Mon, Dec 20, 2004

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JANUARY 3, 2005


Real Nebraska
REAL NEBRASKA WEB SITE
Voting on Fourth Round of Real Nebraska Videos Begins Today

Voting on the fourth round of the Fall 2004 Real Nebraska video contest begins this morning at 9 am on the Real Nebraska website. Using the theme "There is No Place Like Nebraska," entries were taken from full time UNL students and/or teams of full time UNL students.

In addition to three monetary prizes, winners of the contest will be screened at a film festival that will take place in March at the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center. All entries will be shown and the "Viewer's Choice" winners, as well as the Grand Prize winner, will be announced at this event. The festival will be open to the public and the campus.


REAL NEBRASKA
 
 


MARY RIEPMA ROSS MEDIA ARTS CENTER
Concluding this week at the Ross: Since Otar Left, Being Julia

UNL's Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center presents the winner of the prestigious Critics' Week Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Since Otar Left and the film Being Julia, the newest film from director István Szabó.

now showing at the ross  
Since Otar Left is a bittersweet tale of deception and affection. Three Georgian women--strong-willed matriarch Eka (90-year-old former dental assistant and fledgling star Esther Gorintin), her long-suffering daughter Marina (Nino Khomassouridze) and rebellious granddaughter Ada (Freeze, Die, Come to Life's Dinara Droukarova)--all live together in their stately-yet-crumbling apartment in contemporary Tbilisi, the capital of the former Soviet republic. Eka pines for her beloved son Otar, a physician who is now a construction worker in Paris.

Marina is deeply resentful of her mother's obsession with her absent brother, while Ada endures their bickering and yearns for a more adventurous existence. When a friend of Otar's calls with tragic news, Marina and Ada must make a seemingly impossible choice: Do they keep Eka from learning the truth? Former assistant director to Bertrand Tavernier and Krzysztof Kieslowski, Bertuccelli deftly spins the delicate threads of familial conflict and maternal love into a bewitching tangle of intergenerational duplicity.

In Being Julia, London theater actress Julia Lambert (Annette Bening) starts having a nervous breakdown. She still rules the West End, but is growing too old for ingénue parts. Enter Tom Fennell (Shaun Evans), an adoring lad half her age, and a clandestine affair begins. Though she's happy for a while, Julia eventually winds up in a face-off with a Tom's other, much younger lover (Lucy Punch). Luckily, the spirit of Julia's cantankerous old acting coach (London theater legend Michael Gambon) follows Julia around offering some tough-love encouragement.

Set in the late 1930s, this is a fine costume comedy-drama about the sorrows and joys of art. The eternal question of "when am I acting and when am I myself?" has seldom been addressed as intelligently as it is here; Bening seems to be not only tangling with her own status as an aging beauty, but also with the limits of her own acting abilities, and it's a pleasure to see her transcend both with such triumphant exuberance. Bravo, Miss Bening, and kudos to director Szabó (Mephisto) for rendering his obvious love of theater, cinema, and actors with such contagious warmth. Other fine performances include Jeremy Irons as Julia's manager/husband and Juliet Stevens as her jaded maid.

More information is available at the Ross website.


MRRMAC | SINCE OTAR LEFT
 
huskers  
WOMEN'S BASKETBALL | 7:05PM
Nebraska Cornhuskers vs. Louisiana-Lafayette Ragin' Cajuns
DEVANEY CENTER