By Jenny Barchfield
CANNES, France (AP) --The actresses showed up at their news conference Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival in elbow-high gloves, oversized cubic zirconia hoops, lots of leopard print and even a kitten-eared headband.
The news conference for French actor-director Mathieu Amalric’s new movie “Tournee,” or “On Tour,” about a raucous band of stripteasers, was not your typical news conference. Curtseying and winking at the gathered journalists, the five women — real life burlesque dancers from the U.S. — oozed enthusiasm about being at the world’s premier cinema showcase.
“I feel like Cinderella going to the ball,” gushed Kitten on the Keys, a brunette whose act consists of playing the piano in spangly bra and thong and singing raunchily funny songs rife with double-entendres.
In the movie, Kitten — the one sporting the cat ears — plays one of six members of a New Burlesque troop touring provincial France under the direction of a disaffected former TV producer fallen on hard times, played by Amalric.
The camera follows the troop onstage, as they regale audiences with their bawdy, funny, inventive striptease numbers; backstage as they deck themselves out in fake eyelashes, glitter, pasties and ostrich feathers; and through the camaraderie and loneliness of the tour, as they joke, clash and console one another.
The cast includes curvaceous blondes Mimi le Meaux and Dirty Martini — two of the founding members of the New Burlesque movement, which looked to the glamorous striptease acts of the 1940s and ’50s as a way of expressing female sexuality and of valorizing all sorts of body types.
Dirty Martini, a Woodstown, New Jersey, native, trained as a classical ballet dancer throughout her childhood before turning to striptease.
“There weren’t many spots (in ballet) for a woman of my size and shape,” she told The Associated Press in an interview. “No one was going to pick me up and say ‘hey, you’re a great dancer, let’s see how we can outfit you with your big-ass hips?’ So I had to make a venue for myself.”
Dirty Martini, who like the other dancers goes by her stage name, defended the New Burlesque as a feminist movement.
“We are women who are concerned about how the women in the world are treated and the way that women hate themselves sometimes,” she said. New Burlesque is “a form to educate women in the need for their own sexual expression.”
“On Tour” is one of 19 official selection movies competing for the Palme d’Or, Cannes’ top prize. It’s the fourth film directed by Amalric, a renowned French actor best known abroad for his role as a quadriplegic magazine editor in Julian Schnabel’s 2007 “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”
Asked whether he had ever felt overwhelmed during the shooting by his cast of exuberant, strong ladies, Amalric demurred.
“No! No, really,” he exclaimed and praised his cast’s acting talent.
“There are only 17 minutes of (striptease) show in the movie. The rest of the time, the girls are actresses, that’s it,” he said. “After, I made a film with actors from the Comedie Francaise. I showed them ‘On Tour’ to show them what real actors are all about. And it worked.”
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 — 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