By Colleen Barry
VENICE, Italy (AP) --Sofia Coppola gives audiences an insider’s look into two worlds she knows intimately in her latest film: hotels and Hollywood.
“Somewhere,” which made its world premiere Friday at the Venice Film Festival, is the story of a movie star, played by Stephen Dorff, who comes to see the emptiness of his existence through the eyes of his 11-year-old daughter, a role performed by Elle Fanning.
Like “Lost in Translation,” which Coppola also premiered in Venice in 2003, “Somewhere” takes place nearly entirely in hotels, mostly the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, one of the places the director remembers staying with her famous father, Frances Ford Coppola.
“We spent a lot of time growing up living in hotels when we were on location with my Dad. I always like when you are living in hotels; it’s like a world unto itself,” Coppola said.
“Also it is an impermanent place. A lot of the characters I am interested in with are in a mo ment transition, so it seems fitting they would be in an impermanent setting.”
Dorff’s Johnny Marco is in transition – though he hardly appears to know it as he indulges in the trappings of stardom. He’s just finished up a movie and is in a sort of netherworld between gigs.
“The one thing I found very realistic … there is an isolation that happens to an actor when a film is finished,” Dorff said. “For film actors, we work together three months, then the movie ends. I don’t go to an office every day. I am kind of left with not knowing what I am going to do, until the next movie arrives.”
Coppola said she wanted to do “a portrait of today’s L.A.” and the idea for the movie took shape while she was living in France after finishing “Marie Antoinette,” her last film, and viewing Los Angeles from a distance through the pages of tabloids brought by visiting friends.
The 39-year-old director gives a fresh and often wry twist to the excesses of showbiz fame. The twins who pole dance at the foot of Johnny Marco’s bed perform with all the sex appeal of cheerleaders, stiff, slightly out of synch and failing to excite much of a response from Marco.
Marco, in fact, fails to grasp how dissatisfying all the fruits of his fame really are until his daughter Chloe shows up.
“I wanted to try to write a story about a guy’s point of view, something about the emotional life of a man, because it was different for me,” Coppola said. “I just sort of tried to picture what it looks like the morning after.”
Coppola wonderfully lampoons star treatment in a way that perhaps only a child of Hollywood can.
On a trip to Milan to promote his new film, Marco is given a television award, a grotesquely smiling gold cat statuette called the Telegatto, an award that existed until recently. After a five word acceptance speech in Italian, Marco is swarmed by scantily clad showgirls gyrating around him, while Chloe watches from the first row.
Coppola said that the scene was not meant as comment on Italian TV, well-known for its constellations of starlets.
“I wanted to show in the film the contrast of the show business world of Johnny Marco and the character of his young daughter,” Coppola said. “With the Telegatti, to me it’s the same all over the world. We have this culture, in America, in Italy, everywhere there is show business, there is sort of glitz about it.”
And what did her dad – the ultimate insider – think of the movie?
“He told me he loved it, and he thought it can only be made by me, and we should only make the movies only we can make,” Coppola said.
“Somewhere” is among 22 films, plus one still unannounced surprise, competing for the Golden Lion, which will be awarded on Sept. 11.
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads โ essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More