DECEMBER 23, 2004
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REAL NEBRASKA WEB SITE
Voting on Third Round of Real Nebraska
Videos Continues
Voting on the third round of the Fall
2004 Real Nebraska video contest continues 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 |
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DEVANEY CENTER
UNL Graduates 1,450 During Winter
2004 Commencement
At UNL commencement exercises held on December 18, 1,450 students received their degrees.
Ted Kooser, poet laureate of
the United States and professor of English in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
College of Arts and Sciences, gave the address and received an
honorary doctor of letters degree at the ceremony.
Kooser was named poet laureate (officially the Poet Laureate Consultant
in Poetry to the Library of Congress) Aug. 12 by James H. Billington,
Librarian of Congress, and began his duties on Oct. 7. Previous poets
laureate include Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks and Rita Dove.
The author of 10 collections of poetry and prose including "Local
Wonders, Seasons in the Bohemian Alps," (2002) published by University
of Nebraska Press, Kooser was born in Ames, Iowa, in 1939 and attended
public school there before earning his bachelor's degree at Iowa
State University (1962). He taught school for one year before moving
to Nebraska to pursue graduate school. He received his master's degree
at the University of Nebraska in 1968. He has lived all of his life
in Nebraska and Iowa and worked for 35 years in the life insurance
business, retiring in 1999 as a vice president.
Kooser's most recent work is an upcoming University of Nebraska Press
book, "The Poetry Home Repair Manual," due out soon, following "Delights & Shadows" (2004).
His other collections of poetry include "Sure Signs" (1980), which
received the Society of Midland Authors Prize for the best book of
poetry by a Midwestern writer published in that year; "One World
at a Time" (1985); "Weather Central" (1994); and "Winter Morning
Walks: One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison" (2000), winner of the
2001 Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. "Local Wonders" also won the
Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction in 2003. The book was also chosen
as the Best Book Written by a Midwestern Writer for 2002 by Friends
of American Writers, and it won the Gold Award for Autobiography
in ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Awards.
Kooser is also the author, with his longtime friend Jim Harrison,
of "Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry" (2003), for which the
two poets received the 2003 Award for Poetry from the Society of
Midland Authors. Among Kooser's other awards and honors are two National
Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Pushcart Prize, the Stanley
Kunitz Prize, the James Boatwright Prize and a Merit Award from the
Nebraska Arts Council.
FULL TEXT OF 2004 WINTER COMMENCEMENT
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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.
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 |
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