Directors Round Table: Steve McQueen reveals his secret to casting

Regardless of their success level, many actors seem to dread auditions, which sometimes replicate the "pick me!" anxiety of a schoolyard basketball game, only on a much grander scale. But as it turns out, plenty of directors find the process stressful as well.

At the Envelope Directors Round Table, six of the year's top filmmakers talked about the ins and outs of casting: Nicole Holofcener of "Enough Said," Steve McQueen of "12 Years a Slave," J.C. Chandor of "All Is Lost," Spike Jonze of "Her," Paul Greengrass of "Captain Phillips" and John Lee Hancock of "Saving Mr. Banks."

"It's a shame because sometimes somebody will walk in the door and you know already that you're not going to cast that person, and you have to have them read," Holofcener said. "It's painful for me to know that they have to go through that. I don't like auditioning people. As exciting as it can be when you do find the right person, I tend to take on their anxiety and want to take care of them."

VIDEO: See the full Q&A with Spike Jonze, Steve McQueen and more

"It's like [being in] the middle of a bad toast," Chandor added. "I've got to get better at that. Does anyone love that process?"

McQueen then chimed in with his solution. "The secret to auditions is a great casting director. I had an amazing lady called Francine Maisler for '12 Years a Slave.'"

One of Maisler's great finds was newcomer Lupita Nyong'o, whose supporting performance as the tortured plantation slave Patsey has already earned Golden Globe and SAG Award nominations.

"Looking for Lupita was like looking for Scarlett O'Hara," McQueen said. "It was over 1,000 actresses we looked at, models, all kinds of people. She was a diamond in the rough."

Jonze agreed that casting can be difficult but also said he has much to gain from the process. "I definitely feel the pain of when somebody's anxious and you want to make them comfortable, but I also feel like I learn so much about what the character needs by reading with people right and wrong, and you kind of get down to the essence of what the character is, and therefore you start to know what the essence of the person you need to cast is."

For more from the Directors Round Table, watch the full video above and check back for daily highlights.

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Kolkata is fertile ground for Indian ghost stories

KOLKATA, India — Rumors swept Kolkata this year that a runaway boy spent the night beside a 4,000-year-old Egyptian mummy in the Indian Museum, a building with a reputation for being haunted.

The local media wrote it up, and a crowd, including some worried that the youngster had been besieged by ghosts, mobbed India's oldest museum demanding better security.

With passions running high, authorities here in West Bengal state launched an investigation.

"We checked all the closed-circuit TV cameras, gave them to the police," said Tanuja Ghosh, a museum geologist. "Sure, sometimes night guards hear something, some creaking — it's an old building. But this business about a small boy, it was false information."

Everyone loves a good ghost story, but Kolkata, the former capital of British India also known as Calcutta, is particularly fertile ground for the creepy, eerie and supernatural. Magazines publish lists of haunted buildings. Planchettes, also known as seances, have a long history, enjoyed by the likes of beloved native son, poet and 1913 Nobel literature laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

"The ghost belief is stronger here than almost anywhere else in India," said Soumen Kotal, cofounder of the Kolkata-based Paranormal Research Society of India, which investigates ghost claims. "The city is very old, and traditions come with that."

Like the Inuits' many terms for snow, Bengalis have at least 15 words for ghosts based on the spirit's caste, marital status, behavior and the fate suffered in the pre-paranormal past. Some look like forest owls, others enjoy eating fish or stealing from you. Still others lure you to your death by feigning the voice of your lover, have backward-facing feet or drift past without heads.

"I'd want a rich, handsome ghost," said Aditi Basu Roy, a reporter with the Bengali-language Sangbad Pratidin newspaper and an avid believer. "These headless ghosts are no good, although maybe they can use sign language."

Her colleague in the windowless newsroom, reporter Debdutta Gupta, estimates that 70% of Bengalis believe in ghosts. The city's spirits like to stay in one place, he said, such as old buildings or trees. "Most don't travel," Gupta said, "although a few take the train, mostly third-class."

Residents offer various theories on why the city seems so haunted. Some cite the many decrepit buildings of this once-glorious capital of the British Raj. Others chalk it up to a large number of famines, disease and unnatural deaths in the region.

Rationalists say it's a reflection of West Bengal state's rich literary traditions, imagination and love of storytelling.

"Ghost myths are so prevalent because everyone told us as kids that ghosts would come if we didn't eat our food," said Harish Ramchandani, steward at the Royal Calcutta Turf Club.

"The only ghost walking around these parts is Johnnie Walker," quipped general manager Robin Corner over lunch at the club's posh dining room.

For India's majority Hindu community, which believes in reincarnation, ghosts are seen as unfortunate souls caught between lives because of a sin committed by or against them. The Garuda Purana manuscript, believed written between 3000 BC and 1500 BC, lists 17 types of ghosts and how they became so, including the notion that many choose to lurk where "falsehood and ignominy" exist.

Adding to the Indian Museum's infamous reputation are tales of marching-boot sounds at night attributed to the restless spirits of Indian freedom fighters detained in the administration building by the British in the early 20th century.

"People spend a lot of money to get rid of ghosts so they don't come again," said Chaitali Roy Chowdhury, the museum's zoologist. "India is backwards, it's all rubbish. I don't believe in ghosts, although I do believe in unfulfilled spirits."

The 200-year-old museum, with its peeling, discolored Corinthian columns, suffers as much from ghostly neglect as from ghosts. Exhibitions of Indian native cultures cite the nation's 1961 census, six iterations ago. Once vibrantly colored stuffed birds are washed-out and gray after years of sun. A sign in an empty glass case reads: "Removed for international exhibition in China 2010-2011."

The museum lacks the scientific equipment to fully detect those haunting its halls, ghostly or otherwise, said security head Sumonto Roy, adding that the story of the boy trapped overnight has no apparent validity. The boy reportedly left his home at 4:56 p.m. and the museum closes at 5, he said. "He can't fly, how could the boy remain inside?" Roy added. "It's just to sell news. If they don't have the circulation, they have to sell somehow."

Joining the Indian Museum on the city's haunted-house list are several British Empire-era buildings whose distressed former occupants are said to hold eerie classical concerts, ride diaphanous coaches and attend ethereal dinner parties. Some say the 236-year-old Writers' Building, once used by British scribes, is haunted by unhappy writers who died young. Then there's a famous old peepul tree, whose branches Bengali ghosts are said to particularly enjoy lounging in.

Also on the list is Rabindra Sarovar metro station, also known as "Suicide Paradise," where it is claimed that spirits can occasionally be seen riding the last train. About 75% of those who take their own lives in the subway system reportedly do so in this station.

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Baddie role in 'Peter and the Starcatcher' hooked John Sanders

During his working hours, John Sanders sports a Groucho Marx mustache that looks like it has been applied with an extra wide black marker. The actor portrays the dashing, malaprop-dropping, always-hopping villain Black Stache in "Peter and the Starcatcher," now on national tour at the Ahmanson Theatre through Jan. 12.

The Tony Award-winning play presents the back story to the Peter Pan tale, but it also imagines how a foppishly dressed pirate came to trade in his name and his notable facial feature for a hook. And even though it is not Black Stache's story, which makes clear he is inept at plundering, the character nevertheless steals the show. (The play, based on a novel by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson, was written by Rick Elice and is co-directed by Roger Rees and Alex Timbers.)

Below is an edited transcript of a conversation with Sanders, who understudied the role on Broadway.

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What attracted you to the material? How did you come to get this part?

I was sent the script and .... well, I ran a new play development program in Chicago for five years and I've read a lot of new scripts and there have only been two scripts that I had just as good a time reading as I did experiencing it. One was Conor McPherson's "Shining City" and the other one was this one. I fell in love with it.

How do you describe your character to someone who hasn't seen the play?

Oh, man, he's such a bundle of contradictions and weirdness. His humor is so arcane and a little elusive. Because he's alone, and he's surrounded by idiots. He's trying to make the best of it. I guess I usually say he's the villain of the piece and that villains are always a ball of fun, especially in a comedic fantasy like this one.

Your character eventually becomes Captain Hook, and we've seen that character quite a bit. Did that change the way you approached the role?

We're all familiar with the Peter Pan story, and the characters are in our DNA. I've seen "Hook" and a lot of the other Peter Pan iterations over the years — it's really just in me. But I didn't go back and study for this character. It's important to me that, even though it's such a showy, fun time in the play, to present something that has some psychological plausibility.

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Peter Pan gives Hook a goal, but this is before that, of course. What's driving Black Stache?

When we meet him at the beginning, he's this guy who decided a long time ago that he was going to be a pirate and in a time when pirates weren't really a thing. And so there's not a lot of apparatus for him to succeed. And he's surrounded by fools because none of the smart people are going into piracy. He's perpetually disappointed with his lot. And as he goes along, he's really searching for what we're all searching for — money and a reason to exist. He admits early on that what he really wants to be is a hero, but [he'll] take the money. It's really about that.

The staging of the play is very clever but also very simple.

It's a play about playing and imagination and having fun and going a little bit wild and crazy like when you're a kid and you accept that the chair leg is a sword and that the rope is the ocean. "You be a pirate and I'll be the captain." That sort of play is so central to it that Black Stache, he's the funnel for that idea and that style in the show.

Your role seems very demanding physically.

All I can say right now is that I tried to schedule a 90-minute massage for later this week and they weren't available and I'm heartbroken. I have to find someone else. This is definitely the most physically demanding thing that I've ever done.

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Did you train for it specifically?

I've never had this happen before until this play, but there's a half-hour at the beginning of each rehearsal where there's physical training. They run us, make us do sit-ups and push-ups and squats and all the things we need to do to perform this show.

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'The Returned' breathes new life into foreign programming

One suspects the world is out of kilter when a French girl utters cultural sacrilege: "Love is stronger than death? What a load of bull."

The girl in question, Camille, has returned from the dead, unbruised and unbloodied and looking just as she did four years earlier, before her school bus rounded a reservoir and sailed off a mountain. She does not devour flesh or walk in spastic shuffles. She's a zombie in the European style, moving with grace, pouting and posing existential questions in a mountain village where the water is rising and animals are up to strange things.

The critically praised TV series "The Returned" is a French parsing of the afterlife, a chillingly photographed dimension where the living and the departed, try as they may, cannot remake their shattered idyll. The eight-part series, which concluded this month on the Sundance Channel, is an eerie meditation on relationships, resurrection, redemption and where we tuck our fears and escape our sins in a world fixated on the eternal.

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The show's creators wanted to humanize the dead and "make them understandable and likable," producer Jimmy Desmarais said in an email from Paris. "They are not zombies, they don't even know they are dead at first, they just want to start their life again. The human dimension of the return prevails over any supernatural or frightening one. But as time goes, and confronted by the difficulty of returning with the living loved ones, the returned take different paths."

Tout cela est naturel.

"The Returned" became the highest-rated original drama ever on France's prestigious Canal + channel, Desmarais said. It was also a hit in Britain, he added, "where Channel 4 hadn't broadcast a subtitled drama in 20 years." U.S critics have raved — Variety called the show "brainy, bizarre yet strangely hypnotic," and The Times' Robert Lloyd lauded it as "deep, mysterious and remarkable."

As frequently happens with such shows, the A&E network is now developing "The Returned" in English and sans subtitles.

"'The Returned' takes an incredibly unique approach, filled with suspense and twists and turns, to the subject of the living dead," said David McKillop, general manager and executive vice president of A&E. "Part mystery, part thriller; 'The Returned' is a perfect complement to A&E's unique brand of scripted storytelling."

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The American television market has had an odd, culturally imbalanced relationship with foreign programming. U.S. producers borrow foreign narratives and tweak them to fit American sensibilities (and of course vice versa). The 1970s landmark sitcom "All in the Family" was modeled on the British serial "Till Death Do Us Part." Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage" was the loose inspiration for the 1980s yuppie hit "thirtysomething."

Foreign language films for decades have enjoyed a niche art house market, but Americans, even as YouTube videos go viral and national boundaries are blurred by new rhythms and multi-ethnic collaborations, prefer homegrown TV entertainment. Except for those sherry-tippling (English-prattling) Brits of "Downton Abbey."

The U.S. has a tradition of "loving to export its culture to other countries around the world, but it doesn't like to import [in other languages]," said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. "It's not that the American television audience is not smart enough for this stuff. ... But subtitles are hard for a lot of people."

The high quality of American television in recent years has also made it difficult for international programs to compete with the likes of "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad." This may be gradually changing, though. The well-reviewed "Borgen," a Danish political drama showing on some public TV stations, has drawn an intensely loyal audience.

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Viewers and critics have also taken notice of "Top of the Lake," a mystery about the vanishing of a 12-year-old pregnant girl filmed in New Zealand and starring "Mad Men's" Elisabeth Moss, and "Prisoners of War," an Israeli series on Hulu that elucidates the emotional and psychological scars of the Middle East conflict. Showtime's CIA thriller "Homeland" is an adaptation of "Prisoners." Such intriguing foreign fare is also increasingly available on DVD and the Internet.

But what's a back-from-the-grave French girl supposed to do to attract an audience?

The "Returned" unspools slowly. Camille and her dead compatriots — the handsome Simon pining after his fiance and Serge, a woodsman and the town's resident cannibal/serial killer — are determined to re-insinuate themselves in past lives. It's impossible, life edges on, the fallen grow fainter. Or do they? And at times, it's hard to know who's alive and who's dead as a baffled police force wades through unsolved murders amid pewter skies and the brooding music of Mogwai.

"It's important to be at peace with one's ghosts," a priest counsels a troubled parishioner. "Contrary to what people think, they mean us no harm."

They certainly can be annoying, though. Restless souls are unrealized dreams. They scare, but unlike the ravaged flesheaters of "The Walking Dead," they momentarily soothe, suffusing the netherworld with the real world and forcing introspection of who we are and how we love and let go. "The Returned" bristles with modern anxieties in hushed terms, creating a stylish and perplexing landscape between miracles and the apocalypse.

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Female suicide bomber kills 14 at Russian rail station

MOSCOW — At least 14 people were killed and 43 injured in a suicide bombing Sunday afternoon at the railway station in Volgograd, an industrial city in southern Russia, officials said.

Shortly after 1 p.m. local time, a woman approached a metal detector frame at the railway station's entrance, where she stopped and detonated the explosives after a police officer started walking toward her, authorities said.

"When the suicide bomber saw the metal detector frame and saw the policemen on duty as she entered the railway station, she got nervous and her behavior seemed suspicious to the policemen," Interior Ministry spokesman Andrei Pilipchuk told Rossiya-24, a news television network. "[Officer] Dmitry Makovkin started in her direction at a fast pace and at that moment the explosion rang."

Makovkin died on the spot and six other police officers were injured, Pilipchuk said.

The station was crowded with passengers. If the bomber had entered the main hall, the number of casualties would have been much higher.

"I was putting my [computer] notebook in the scanner when I head a loud boom from behind and I fell down on the floor," Dmitry Lobachev, an injured passenger, told Rossiya-24.

The power of the explosion was equal to 10 kilos [about 22 pounds] of TNT, officials said.

Volgograd governor Sergei Bazhenov told Rossiya-24 that of those injured, two were in critical condition.

Sergei Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow, said that clinics in the city were ready to receive the injured  and that an Emergency Ministry plane was on its way to pick them up.

No group has as yet claimed responsibility.

Volgograd suffered a similar attack in October when a female bomber struck on a passenger bus, killing six and injuring 33 people.

The Volgograd region is close both to the troubled North Caucasus region and to the site of the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi, which are set to begin Feb. 7.

Early in July, Chechen Islamist resistance leader Doku Umarov, responsible for a number of terrorist attacks in Russia, said his fighters will use "maximum force" to prevent the Olympics, which he called "satanic games held on the bones of our ancestors."

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sergei.loiko@latimes.com

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Palm Springs festival a showcase for foreign-language films

It makes for an unlikely combination: some of Hollywood's biggest stars rubbing up against relative obscurities from the international festival circuit. Yet that's exactly what happens each year at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, which has become an essential stop for celebs working the awards circuit while also showcasing iforeign language cinema (including Oscar hopefuls).

"To me, that's the beauty of the festival, that combination," said festival director Darryl Macdonald. "We were always into focusing on international cinema and the discovery of new talent. Once you become converted to international cinema, it's pretty unlikely you're going to go back to a diet of only English-language films."

This time, for example, some 150 of the 187 feature films screening in Palm Springs are in a foreign language. Palm Springs is showing 45 of the 76 films submitted for the foreign language Oscar, including all nine of the pictures on the film academy's nominations shortlist. This gives audiences a chance to see for themselves more than just the presumed front-runners — Denmark's "The Hunt," Hong Kong's "The Grandmaster" and Italy's "The Great Beauty."

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This marks the 25th anniversary of the Palm Springs International Film Festival; in the past, the festival would strive to show all the foreign language Oscar submissions. More recently, however, programmers have looked to put together a tighter selection. Speaking to the quality of the films submitted this season, the festival's artistic director, Helen du Toit, said: "I had intended to cut it off at 35 or 40, but there were just more that were good."

Even among those films that did not make the cut to the Oscar shortlist, there are many strong selections, such as Australia's "The Rocket," Mexico's "Heli," the Netherlands' "Borgman," Chile's "Gloria," Singapore's "Ilo Ilo," Georgia's "In Bloom," and Switzerland's documentary "More Than Honey."

"This section has become a big draw to our audience," added Du Toit. "People want to feel like they're insiders, like they can talk the academy talk. Even regarding the shortlist, they want to have opinions, 'Oh, they missed this one,' and that kind of thing."

On the set: movies and TV

Besides the Canadian Oscar submission, "Gabrielle," the festival also has a Spotlight on Canadian Cinema section with a number of French language films, including "Another House," "Sarah Prefers to Run," "The Auction" and "Vic + Flo Saw a Bear." Also screening as part of the Canadian program is the English-language "Enemy" from filmmaker Denis Villeneuve and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, a reteaming of the pair who had recent box office success with "Prisoners."

Palm Springs will also feature a section called "Modern Masters" that includes a number of notable foreign language films, including Agnieszka Holland's "Burning Bush" from the Czech Republic as well as documentarian Claude Lanzmann's "The Last of the Unjust" and Francois Ozon's "Young & Beautiful."

Du Toit noted that the audience in Palm Springs can be unpredictable, responding first and foremost to strong storytelling in whatever the language or genre — "They are beyond the Netflix crowd; they are a Criterion Collection kind of audience," she said — such as when the audience award a few years back went to the original Swedish version of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo."

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At a time when foreign language films often struggle in the broader theatrical marketplace, venues such as Palm Springs also prove that there is an audience unbothered by subtitles.

"I think there has been a lot of hype about the end of the art house that is completely untrue," Du Toit added. "I think there is a hungry audience who is underserviced most of the year, and so they flock to places like Palm Springs and other destination festivals to fill up on as many of these films as they can. And then they go home to provide great word of mouth for when and if these films do get picked up for theatrical distribution."

Some 70% of the festival audience at Palm Springs comes from out of town, with attendance of more than 135,000 in recent years making it among the top festivals for attendance in the U.S. McDonald noted that many who come to Palm Springs for the festival do so as "a cultural vacation."

"Part of our mission is to build an audience for international cinema in the U.S.," McDonald added. "Before long, you're walking them down a path where they will take more chances in their filmgoing."

mark.olsen@latimes.com

    

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Art review: Adam Silverman's 'Clay and Space' is vessel for inquiry

Before he became a potter, setting aside a longtime hobby for full-time engagement, Adam Silverman trained and practiced as an architect. Clay vessels and buildings are significantly different, in myriad obvious ways. But Silverman sometimes collapses the two in surprising and provocative installations.

An exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum titled "Clay and Space" lays out some of those correspondences. It's a significant step forward from "Boolean Valley," an intellectually sound if rather dry and unengaging 2009 collaboration with architect Nader Tehrani for the Museum of Contemporary Art's Pacific Design Center space in West Hollywood. That room-sized installation employed 400 small clay domes dispersed in a complex, undulating pattern across the floor.

Site-specific and alluding to landscape, "Boolean Valley" paved the way for what's more engagingly on view in Laguna Beach. Architecture remains significant. Silverman's work begins with the simple premise that buildings and pots are functional objects that form spatial volumes, then elaborates from there.

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The show's title installation is a pair of free-standing circular walls, each built from stacks of ordinary, buff-colored fire-bricks — similar to the ones used by Carl Andre for 1960s Minimalist sculptures, except scarred by use. The uniform stacked rows are interrupted at various levels by blocks of charred wood.

The two constructions were erected inside a relatively small gallery whose walls are painted dark bronze, and the interior of each is flooded with light from overhead spotlights. These twin silos, each slightly taller than a standing person, suggest kilns being fired, and the staggered bricks allow glimpses inside.

Silverman placed them so that a pathway runs between the two. Walk around them, and an opening allows entrance into each interior space.

There, 16 or 17 ceramic vessels are displayed around the small circular room on shelves protruding from the wall at staggered heights. Vases, bottles, bowls and other basic shapes feature smoky, mottled surfaces, looking somewhat like traditional Korean and Japanese raku but produced from baking in fire pits the artist built on a nearby beach. (Visually, Paul Soldner's ceramics are one precedent.) The space even carries the faint smell of smoke, probably from the charred wood blocks.

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From the painted gallery room to the hand-built walk-in "kiln" to the rough-hewn vessels, Silverman has shaped one space that contains two spaces that contain yet more spaces. One uncanny result is a heightened sense of a viewer's own body — although, given the effect, perhaps "participant" is a more accurate description than "viewer." The savvy installation vivifies pottery's component parts, which have always been identified in bodily terms — lip, neck, body, foot, skin.

Those conventional parts are dramatically elaborated in the first of the show's four rooms, where 18 wheel-thrown vessels are displayed in clear plexiglass boxes mounted at various heights on a deep indigo wall. Vases, chalices, bottles and other familiar, functional forms are interspersed with natural shapes, such as eggs and ornamental gourds. (Gourds are sometimes called "nature's pots," given their ancient uses as vessels.) Glazes tend to be thick and even crusty, somewhat like bark on a tree, metamorphic rock or cooled lava.

A rich, brown 2007 chalice-shape is even so thickly glazed that at first it appears to be made of mysteriously molten mud. The natural history of pottery's firing process bubbles up in these luxurious surfaces, much as it does in Beatrice Wood's densely glazed ceramic work.

Silverman achieves these crusted surfaces in different ways. Often, various chemicals and salts are mixed into the glaze, which is sanded down once it comes out of the kiln, then reglazed and refired. (The artist, who studied in the scientifically rigorous ceramics program at Alfred University in Upstate New York, is director of design at Heath Ceramics in Los Angeles.) Lip, neck, foot, body and skin are joined by an emphasis on the hand. Inside their sleek vitrines, the knobby pots appeal to the sense of touch.

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Across from the display, six large, unframed photographs by Stefano Massei are tacked to the wall. (There is no catalog to the show, but Massei's photographs are featured in a lavish recent monograph on Silverman from Skira Rizzoli.) Each shows a single, spherical vessel against a white or black field, as if it were a fashion model posed in an advertisement art-directed by Irving Penn or Richard Avedon.

The glamorous images are focused on the dark opening at the top of each vessel, emphasizing the inaccessible interior volume. A black hole hums at the center of each photograph, the vessels transformed into chunky alien planets.

A third installation in a small, dark room is composed from eight large, spotlighted egg forms, glazed off-white or blue and positioned on end atop knee-high concrete pedestals. The composition (if not the style) recalls the poised, probing egg sculptures of the late ceramic artist Ken Price. Inexplicably, these symbols for prospective birth coexist with the reverent gravity of funeral markers.

Finally, two works in the last room merge pottery, art's most ancient medium, with video, its newest. (A sound piece in the same gallery meshes ambient noise recorded from both.) Silverman, as he did with Massei, collaborated on these works with Lucas Michael and David B. Kelley.

One video installation is a simple set-up in which the rotating image of a spherical vase with a pitted white surface is projected onto the surface of the actual, stationary vase. A sliver of light curves around the black shadow the vase casts against the wall. A static physical form is held in visual tension with its rotating image, memory of its origins on a potter's wheel. Bathed in projected light, it's like watching the moon go through time-lapse phases.

Across the room, a video diptych charts Le Corbusier's famous chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France. The building's exterior is recorded on one side, its interior on the other.

With its swooping roofline, asymmetrical shape, pierced walls and pair of altars, one indoors and the other outdoors on a sun-drenched patio, the architect built a surging, organic, site-specific form that broke from the rigorous machine aesthetic of his earlier work. Silverman's video of the sacred space, titled "Inside, Outside, In," is something of a key to everything that has come before in his show.

christopher.knight@latimes.com

-------------------------

Adam Silverman

Where: Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach

When: Through Jan. 19. Closed Wednesday.

Info: (949) 494-8971 or http://www.lagunaartmuseum.org

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Palm Springs festival a showcase for foreign-language films

It makes for an unlikely combination: some of Hollywood's biggest stars rubbing up against relative obscurities from the international festival circuit. Yet that's exactly what happens each year at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, which has become an essential stop for celebs working the awards circuit while also showcasing iforeign language cinema (including Oscar hopefuls).

"To me, that's the beauty of the festival, that combination," said festival director Darryl Macdonald. "We were always into focusing on international cinema and the discovery of new talent. Once you become converted to international cinema, it's pretty unlikely you're going to go back to a diet of only English-language films."

This time, for example, some 150 of the 187 feature films screening in Palm Springs are in a foreign language. Palm Springs is showing 45 of the 76 films submitted for the foreign language Oscar, including all nine of the pictures on the film academy's nominations shortlist. This gives audiences a chance to see for themselves more than just the presumed front-runners — Denmark's "The Hunt," Hong Kong's "The Grandmaster" and Italy's "The Great Beauty."

PHOTOS: Palm Springs International Film Festival through the years

This marks the 25th anniversary of the Palm Springs International Film Festival; in the past, the festival would strive to show all the foreign language Oscar submissions. More recently, however, programmers have looked to put together a tighter selection. Speaking to the quality of the films submitted this season, the festival's artistic director, Helen du Toit, said: "I had intended to cut it off at 35 or 40, but there were just more that were good."

Even among those films that did not make the cut to the Oscar shortlist, there are many strong selections, such as Australia's "The Rocket," Mexico's "Heli," the Netherlands' "Borgman," Chile's "Gloria," Singapore's "Ilo Ilo," Georgia's "In Bloom," and Switzerland's documentary "More Than Honey."

"This section has become a big draw to our audience," added Du Toit. "People want to feel like they're insiders, like they can talk the academy talk. Even regarding the shortlist, they want to have opinions, 'Oh, they missed this one,' and that kind of thing."

On the set: movies and TV

Besides the Canadian Oscar submission, "Gabrielle," the festival also has a Spotlight on Canadian Cinema section with a number of French language films, including "Another House," "Sarah Prefers to Run," "The Auction" and "Vic + Flo Saw a Bear." Also screening as part of the Canadian program is the English-language "Enemy" from filmmaker Denis Villeneuve and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, a reteaming of the pair who had recent box office success with "Prisoners."

Palm Springs will also feature a section called "Modern Masters" that includes a number of notable foreign language films, including Agnieszka Holland's "Burning Bush" from the Czech Republic as well as documentarian Claude Lanzmann's "The Last of the Unjust" and Francois Ozon's "Young & Beautiful."

Du Toit noted that the audience in Palm Springs can be unpredictable, responding first and foremost to strong storytelling in whatever the language or genre — "They are beyond the Netflix crowd; they are a Criterion Collection kind of audience," she said — such as when the audience award a few years back went to the original Swedish version of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo."

PHOTOS: Billion-dollar movie club

At a time when foreign language films often struggle in the broader theatrical marketplace, venues such as Palm Springs also prove that there is an audience unbothered by subtitles.

"I think there has been a lot of hype about the end of the art house that is completely untrue," Du Toit added. "I think there is a hungry audience who is underserviced most of the year, and so they flock to places like Palm Springs and other destination festivals to fill up on as many of these films as they can. And then they go home to provide great word of mouth for when and if these films do get picked up for theatrical distribution."

Some 70% of the festival audience at Palm Springs comes from out of town, with attendance of more than 135,000 in recent years making it among the top festivals for attendance in the U.S. McDonald noted that many who come to Palm Springs for the festival do so as "a cultural vacation."

"Part of our mission is to build an audience for international cinema in the U.S.," McDonald added. "Before long, you're walking them down a path where they will take more chances in their filmgoing."

mark.olsen@latimes.com

    

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For 10 days, Palm Springs is the movie capital of the world

A small article in the Jan. 10, 1990, Los Angeles Times heralded the opening of the first Palm Springs International Film Festival, founded by then-mayor and former pop star Sonny Bono.

"The mayor's first event is a modest beginning, with no world premieres, no film market and few stars scheduled to attend," stated the article. "But the event does boast a wide range of international pictures including the opening night feature 'Cinema Paradiso.' "

That Italian drama directed by Giuseppe Tornatore won the festival's first Audience Award and went on to win the foreign-language film Oscar a few months later. But none of the stars invited to the event — Bob Hope, Jimmy Stewart, Kirk Douglas — bothered to show up.

PHOTOS: Best films of 2013 | Betsy Sharkey

From that humble beginning, the Palm Springs event has grown into one of the world's most popular — about 135,000 people attended last year, most from outside the area — and prestigious, especially as a showcase for international cinema. The festival essentially takes over the town for 10 days, with films on 15 screens in Palm Springs and the surrounding Coachella Valley.

As for the "few stars," the 25th festival, which kicks off Jan. 3 and runs through Jan. 12, features some of this award season's brightest lights, including Sandra Bullock, Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Bruce Dern and director Steve McQueen, who are all being feted at the festival's awards gala on Jan. 4.

The original festival was born out of Bono's desire to "jump start the tourist season in Palm Springs. Every year right after New Year's, the town would essentially get quieter," noted Darryl Macdonald, the festival's original director of programming and current director. "So he wanted an event in early January that might keep people over from the holiday season and drive new people here from outside of town. I don't know how many other things he may have considered, but he hit upon the idea of the film festival."

Over the years the festival has grown in stature, one that has something for cineastes, casual filmgoers and those who simply want to flee cold winters (Canadians make up a sizable festival contingent). This year's version features 187 films from 60 countries, including 77 premieres. The 2014 lineup includes 45 of the foreign-language film submissions, including all nine titles that made the academy's shortlist.

PHOTOS: Best films of 2013 | Kenneth Turan

The festival combines elements of Sundance (specialized films, in this case foreign language), Toronto (aimed at filmgoers, not industry types) and Cannes (an international flavor and a resort town). For another, it is a rare chance to showcase foreign-language films in the U.S., where the audience for them has dwindled.

The festival draws loyal fans, such as retirees Nat and Sara Kessler from St. Louis who winter in Palm Springs. They have attended all but one festival.

"The festival is the highlight of the winter trip to Palm Springs," said Sara Kessler, 86. "It is the thing that keeps us going back. We particularly love foreign films."

To celebrate its 25th anniversary, there are special screenings and events, including "Deja View: Past PSIFF Favorites," which features films that have won the Audience Award and gone on to win the foreign-language Oscar. Also showing will be first films at PSIFF whose directors went on to major careers — Roberto Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful" and Baz Luhrmann's "Strictly Ballroom."

PHOTOS: Box office top 10 of 2013

Macdonald has watched the festival grow to the third largest in the country. He was director of programming for the first four years, left and then returned a decade ago. Macdonald had founded and was running the Seattle International Film Festival when he joined the young upstart festival.

Initially, Macdonald said, Bono wanted to showcase major studios' new films. "He was quickly advised that just was not a possibility for a couple of reasons," Macdonald said. One of them being that "major studio festival-quality movies that are released in January are few and far between."

The first years had a homegrown feeling — or at least as homegrown as a festival thought up by Bono could be. Though the galas now take place in the Palm Springs Convention Center, they were more intimate affairs in those salad years.

"Sonny had a party at his house for Sophia Loren," festival chairman Harold Matzner recalled. "Jimmy Stewart came to my house for the third year. We had about 60 people."

A global affair

Because the Sundance Film Festival, which takes place just a few weeks after Palm Springs, was celebrating American indie cinema, it was decided to give the festival a more international flavor.

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For 10 days, Palm Springs is the movie capital of the world

A small article in the Jan. 10, 1990, Los Angeles Times heralded the opening of the first Palm Springs International Film Festival, founded by then-mayor and former pop star Sonny Bono.

"The mayor's first event is a modest beginning, with no world premieres, no film market and few stars scheduled to attend," stated the article. "But the event does boast a wide range of international pictures including the opening night feature 'Cinema Paradiso.' "

That Italian drama directed by Giuseppe Tornatore won the festival's first Audience Award and went on to win the foreign-language film Oscar a few months later. But none of the stars invited to the event — Bob Hope, Jimmy Stewart, Kirk Douglas — bothered to show up.

PHOTOS: Best films of 2013 | Betsy Sharkey

From that humble beginning, the Palm Springs event has grown into one of the world's most popular — about 135,000 people attended last year, most from outside the area — and prestigious, especially as a showcase for international cinema. The festival essentially takes over the town for 10 days, with films on 15 screens in Palm Springs and the surrounding Coachella Valley.

As for the "few stars," the 25th festival, which kicks off Jan. 3 and runs through Jan. 12, features some of this award season's brightest lights, including Sandra Bullock, Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Bruce Dern and director Steve McQueen, who are all being feted at the festival's awards gala on Jan. 4.

The original festival was born out of Bono's desire to "jump start the tourist season in Palm Springs. Every year right after New Year's, the town would essentially get quieter," noted Darryl Macdonald, the festival's original director of programming and current director. "So he wanted an event in early January that might keep people over from the holiday season and drive new people here from outside of town. I don't know how many other things he may have considered, but he hit upon the idea of the film festival."

Over the years the festival has grown in stature, one that has something for cineastes, casual filmgoers and those who simply want to flee cold winters (Canadians make up a sizable festival contingent). This year's version features 187 films from 60 countries, including 77 premieres. The 2014 lineup includes 45 of the foreign-language film submissions, including all nine titles that made the academy's shortlist.

PHOTOS: Best films of 2013 | Kenneth Turan

The festival combines elements of Sundance (specialized films, in this case foreign language), Toronto (aimed at filmgoers, not industry types) and Cannes (an international flavor and a resort town). For another, it is a rare chance to showcase foreign-language films in the U.S., where the audience for them has dwindled.

The festival draws loyal fans, such as retirees Nat and Sara Kessler from St. Louis who winter in Palm Springs. They have attended all but one festival.

"The festival is the highlight of the winter trip to Palm Springs," said Sara Kessler, 86. "It is the thing that keeps us going back. We particularly love foreign films."

To celebrate its 25th anniversary, there are special screenings and events, including "Deja View: Past PSIFF Favorites," which features films that have won the Audience Award and gone on to win the foreign-language Oscar. Also showing will be first films at PSIFF whose directors went on to major careers — Roberto Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful" and Baz Luhrmann's "Strictly Ballroom."

PHOTOS: Box office top 10 of 2013

Macdonald has watched the festival grow to the third largest in the country. He was director of programming for the first four years, left and then returned a decade ago. Macdonald had founded and was running the Seattle International Film Festival when he joined the young upstart festival.

Initially, Macdonald said, Bono wanted to showcase major studios' new films. "He was quickly advised that just was not a possibility for a couple of reasons," Macdonald said. One of them being that "major studio festival-quality movies that are released in January are few and far between."

The first years had a homegrown feeling — or at least as homegrown as a festival thought up by Bono could be. Though the galas now take place in the Palm Springs Convention Center, they were more intimate affairs in those salad years.

"Sonny had a party at his house for Sophia Loren," festival chairman Harold Matzner recalled. "Jimmy Stewart came to my house for the third year. We had about 60 people."

A global affair

Because the Sundance Film Festival, which takes place just a few weeks after Palm Springs, was celebrating American indie cinema, it was decided to give the festival a more international flavor.

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China rejects shipments of genetically modified corn

China rejected two shipments -- almost 546,000 tons -- of U.S. dried distillers' grain, a corn byproduct, because it contained genetically modified material, state media reported Friday. 

China's top food-quality watchdog rejected the two shipments because they contained MIR162, a special insect-resistant variety of maize developed by Syngenta, a Swiss maker of seeds and pesticides. 

The first shipment, 545,000 tons, was rejected last week in Shanghai, state media said. The second shipment, 758 tons, was rejected Monday.

MIR162 is not on the Chinese government's short list of approved grains considered genetically modified organisms, or GMO.

Still, Chinese consumers remain wary of GMO crops and some nationalist-leaning pundits have suggested the Western-dominated technology leaves China's food supply vulnerable.

The U.S. is the world's largest corn exporter and China is its No. 3 customer. The Asian nation is expected to buy a record 7 million tons of corn in the 2013-14 marketing year.

Chinese authorities said the shipments have been returned and are urging American officials to improve their "inspection procedures to ensure they comply with Chinese quality standards."

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Faces to Watch 2014: Dance

The Times asked its reporters and critics to highlight figures in entertainment and the arts who will be making news in 2014. From teen actors to media moguls, rappers to classical cellists, here's who they picked:

Josie Walsh and Melissa Barak | Artistic director-choreographer; artistic director-choreography-dancer

There's an undeniable synchronicity to the career arcs of Los Angeles natives Josie Walsh and Melissa Barak. They are alumnae of Westside Ballet; both became ballerinas with prominent national companies — Walsh with Joffrey Ballet and Barak with New York City Ballet. Then in 2010, Walsh got a commission from Los Angeles Ballet and cast Barak (then a soloist with LAB) in a leading part. Now, these outspoken women are forging against the local head winds and heading up their own contemporary troupes, Walsh's Ballet Red and Barak's Barak Ballet.

Walsh is known for her provocative, sensual, contemporary-mélange style — rather than defy gravity, her dancers often give into it, performing lowered on the floor. She collaborates with other artists and with her husband, rock musician Paul Rivera Jr., a.k.a. Jealous Angel.

GRAPHIC: Faces to watch 2014 | Entertainment 

The award-winning Barak has a sophisticated and complex style that is nonetheless warm and human. She exhibits a keen intuition of how movement affects an audience. Each woman is planning (separate) concerts in June at the Broad Stage. "If I can find that raw, visceral internal dialogue through totally contemporary movement and fuse it through the ballet syllabus, that has been my path," Walsh said. In addition to creating new work for her own company, Barak has commissions from Sacramento Ballet and Richmond Ballet in 2014. And she has found an interim executive director, Christopher Clinton Conway, a onetime Joffrey Ballet administrator. Said Barak: "I want nothing more than to give L.A. its own unique ballet company."

—Laura Bleiberg

Nikolai Tsiskaridze | Dancer

Nikolai Tsiskaridze began the 21st century as arguably the greatest Russian danseur of his generation: a 6-foot-1, perfectly proportioned, brilliantly trained star of the Bolshoi Ballet as well as someone who would quickly become a respected ballet coach and a popular television celebrity. But eclipsing those excellences in the next decade was his role as the Edward Snowden of Russian dance. At great personal risk, Tsiskaridze refused to be silent about the corruption he found at the Bolshoi in the treatment of the dancers and the remodeling of the theater, to name a few. His unrelenting accusations led to his dismissal from the company.

Some of them involved the crime that had everyone in the ballet world talking and texting for almost a year. On Jan. 17, the Bolshoi's artistic director was nearly blinded by an acid-throwing assailant — a scandal that exposed just how venomous the conflicts in the company had become. Tsiskaridze testified for the prosecution at the recently concluded trial of the accused perpetrators. But he stayed in the news for more reasons than his testimony. Suddenly, he was appointed the head ("acting rector") of what is widely regarded as the greatest ballet school in the world: the Vaganova Academy in Saint Petersburg, affiliated with the Mariinsky Ballet (formerly the Kirov).

RELATED: Faces to watch | Theater

Tsiskaridze is much loved as a guest artist with the Mariinsky, and that company has given him roles that were denied him at the Bolshoi. But the bedrock differences in style between the companies has made his new position controversial in the extreme, so you can bet he'll remain in the news — as reliably dramatic in his speech as he always was in his dancing.

—Lewis Segal 

August Bournonville | Choreographer

August Bournonville died in 1879, but memories of this great Danish ballet choreographer are likely to be alive and well in May and June when Los Angeles Ballet presents his two-act masterwork "La Sylphide" in four theaters throughout Southern California.

Bournonville's classical style is not as bold or space-devouring as Russian classicism, but it emphasizes intricacy and effervescence, qualities hard to master by dancers trained in other techniques. In the distant past, Los Angeles audiences saw a stylistically clueless "La Sylphide" by American Ballet Theatre and a hopelessly crude production by the Bolshoi Ballet. But Los Angeles Ballet's performances in 2009 were exemplary, among the finest achievements in this company's history. The late spring staging will again be by Thordal Christensen, Los Angeles Ballet artistic director and a former artistic director (1999-2002) of the Royal Danish Ballet, Bournonville's home company.

RELATED: Faces to watch 2014 | Art

Based on a French original, the work itself is a high-Romantic dance drama from 1836 about a young Scot who has everything he needs, including a girl who loves him. But even on his wedding day, he dreams of something more: an ideal love from a parallel universe. And when that dream girl flies in at his window, demanding that he leave his old life behind, the results are momentous for everyone.

—Lewis Segal 

PHOTOS: Hollywood stars on stage

CHEAT SHEET: Fall Arts Preview

PHOTOS: Arts and culture in pictures

   

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What's the most overrated movie of 2013? [Poll]

Sandra Bullock in a scene from the film, "Gravity." (Warner Bros. Pictures / September 13, 2013)

By Steven Zeitchik

December 27, 2013, 7:40 a.m.

On Thursday we asked which movie released this year deserved a lot more love than it received. On Friday the opposite, tougher version of the question: Which film was absurdly, ridiculously, undeservedly overpraised?

Our fourth-annual most-overrated poll has a wide range of choices, critical and commercial favorites that, according to our informal survey of fellow staffers and contacts, didn't exactly merit all the affection showered on them. (Last year's winner, for guidance purposes, was "The Avengers.")

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Faces to Watch 2014: Pop music & jazz

The Times asked its reporters and critics to highlight figures in entertainment and the arts who will be making news in 2014. From teen actors to media moguls, rappers to classical cellists, here's who they picked:

Kelela | Singer-songwriter

With its spacey textures and shape-shifting grooves, Beyoncé's self-titled album — released this month on iTunes with no warning — felt like the superstar end point to a year rich in adventurous R&B. Among the underground acts that appear to have inspired her is Kelela, an L.A.-based singer-songwriter known for layering smoldering vocals over starkly futuristic beats.

Raised in Maryland by parents who'd emigrated from Ethiopia, the 30-year-old put out a free Internet mixtape in October called "Cut 4 Me." It attracted instant attention from hipsters and tastemakers with tracks like the clanging "Enemy" and "Cherry Coffee," a woozy ballad lined with lonely sounding sonar pings.

GRAPHIC: Faces to watch 2014 | Entertainment 

Beyoncé wasn't the only member of the Knowles family listening. In November, the star's sister Solange included Kelela's song "Go All Night" on an acclaimed avant-soul compilation alongside tunes by other up-and-comers such as Jhené Aiko and BC Kingdom. "I think it's really awesome to hear someone who's doing something so incredibly experimental but that still really, really values the art of the vocal," Solange told Billboard.

Now, Kelela is at work on her first studio disc, reportedly with help from Hudson Mohawke, a Scottish producer with close ties to Kanye West. Expect something that soothes even as it unsettles.

— Mikael Wood

RELATED: Faces to watch 2014 | Classical music

Travi$ Scott | Rapper-producer

Travi$ Scott is a 21-year-old L.A.-via-Houston rapper and producer, one so versatile and provocative that he makes having a dollar sign in his rap alias seem original. His eerily beautiful sonics and fevered delivery have earned him co-signs on two rap-titan major label imprints: Kanye West's G.O.O.D. Music and T.I.'s Grand Hustle.

Behind the mixing boards, he helmed tracks for Ye, Jay Z and John Legend on their respective agenda-setting albums in 2013. Now after his debut EP, "Owl Pharaoh," in May, he's ready to take center stage himself. For the clearest look at his vision, check out the seven-minute surrealist, ghastly video for "Upper Echelon" — you'll wonder whether his next move could be directing an episode of "American Horror Story."

— August Brown

RELATED: Faces to watch 2014 | Opera  

Zara McFarlane

Singer-songwriter

One of the real pleasures of 2013 has been the many fresh faces on the jazz vocal front, including José James, Gregory Porter and young phenom Cécile McLorin Salvant. Deserving of mention amid this rising tide of unique talent is London-born Zara McFarlane, who next month releases her second album, "If You Knew Her," on tastemaker Gilles Peterson's label.

Her standing as a promising star in Europe is only confirmed with recent stints sharing the stage with Porter and Dianne Reeves, and she has already earned airplay on KCRW-FM (89.9) for a lush and arresting recast of the late Junior Murvin's reggae classic "Police and Thieves." Echoes of vintage soul and Britain's so-called acid jazz scene from the '90s echo through various points of McFarlane's album, but some of her greatest promise can be heard on the new record's elastically swung single "Angie La La," a buried treasure from reggae vocalist Nora Dean that features trumpeter-vocalist Leron Thomas with McFarlane's nimble band.

But ultimately, it's about songwriter McFarlane's talent and voice here. Echoes of Nina Simone and Ella Fitzgerald shimmer at the margins, along with the sound of a rising talent claiming new ground of her own.

— Chris Barton

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Afghanistan: Three NATO troops dead in Kabul suicide attack

KABUL, Afghanistan--Three international service members were killed Friday and at least seven civilians were wounded in a suicide car bomb attack in eastern Kabul, authorities said.

In an email sent to journalists, the Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.

According to the International Security Assistance Force, the name given to the U.S.-led NATO forces in Afghanistan, the three died when the vehicle exploded nearby. Their names and nationalities were not immediately available.

Hashmat Stanikzai, a spokesman for Kabul police, confirmed the account and provided some additional details.

"Today at around 1:00 p.m. a suicide car bomber using a Toyota Corolla targeted a foreign military convoy in Kabul's 9th precinct, wounded more than seven civilians and destroyed a foreign military vehicle," Stanikzai said.

The attack took place while the convoy was passing an area about a half mile from Camp Phoenix, a NATO base.

Many armored vehicles and police vehicles stopped nearby, and the area was cordoned off by the joint forces. Remains of the detonated car bomb covered the road where the incident took place.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid emailed the statement claiming responsibility, and claiming far greater casualties. The Taliban commonly exaggerates the effect of its attacks.

"The martyr attack on foreigner's convoy in Kabul's police District 9, near to an invaders guest house [Camp Phoenix] killed 12 Americans and wounded many more," the Taliban statement said.

So far this year 151 coalition troops have been killed in Afghanistan, according to a tally kept by the Associated Press.

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Brian Dennehy to do benefit show for L.A. County Arts High School

Brian Dennehy will be extending his current L.A. run by one performance -- not in Sebastian Barry's "The Steward of Christendom" at the Mark Taper Forum, which closes Jan. 5, but in a Jan. 6 benefit for the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, in which he'll be surrounded by family.

Dennehy's two grandsons attend the public arts high school and their parents, veteran stage actors Elizabeth Dennehy and James Lancaster, will support the star in a series of scenes on the school's stage from plays that Dennehy has starred in or has on his list of coveted roles not yet tackled.

Ellzabeth said she and her father are working up a scene from "King Lear" in which she'll court hisses as one of the turncoat daughters, Goneril, opposite her dad's tragic king.

PHOTOS: Hollywood stars on stage

Lancaster, who met his father-in-law before he met his wife, is appearing at the Taper in "The Steward of Christendom" as the chief tormentor of Dennehy's character, a lonely old Irishman who's been banished by his family to a mental asylum. 

At the benefit they will perform a scene from Ron Hutchinson's "Rat in the Skull," the play that first brought them together nearly 30 years ago. They also will perform a scene from Ronald Harwood's "The Dresser," with Lancaster playing the titular assistant to Dennehy's aging lion of the British stage. 

Two members of the arts high school's drama faculty, Chris Fairbanks and Jeremy Guskin, will join Dennehy for scenes from the star's two Tony Award-winning roles: as Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman" and James Tyrone Sr.  in "Long Day's Journey Into Night."

Elizabeth said there will be some lighter bits as well, possibly including scenes from "The Odd Couple" or "Twelfth Night" (the benefit falls on the 12th night after Christmas, to which the Shakespeare comedy's title refers).

She reports that her older son, Jack Lancaster, 16, is a junior at the arts high school focusing on theater -- including a turn as Fleance and Macduff's son in the Antaeus Company's 2012 production of "Macbeth" -- and William, 14, is in the school's cinematic arts program. Dennehy also has five granddaughters, the children of Elizabeth's two sisters.

Tickets are available through the arts high school's online box office.

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Hollywood is losing the race for ethnic and gender inclusion

If you're among the small number of directors or actors who isn't white, there is finally some cause to be excited about what's happening in Hollywood.

For the first time in Academy Awards history, a black man — British filmmaker Steve McQueen — may win the directing Oscar for his heralded, harrowing film "12 Years a Slave."

Besides McQueen, critics and awards voters are celebrating the work of other people of color, singling out "Gravity's" Mexican-born filmmaker, Alfonso Cuarón, the African American talk show host Oprah Winfrey from "Lee Daniels' The Butler," and a variety of black actors, including Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong'o ("12 Years a Slave"), Barkhad Abdi ("Captain Phillips") and Michael B. Jordan ("Fruitvale Station").

PHOTOS: Best films of 2013 | Kenneth Turan

But all of those achievements mask fundamental, enduring problems within the movie industry.

A few weeks of feel-good inclusion can't alter the more troubling fact that opportunities for people of color remain scarce and that, for all of the Academy Award interest these directors and actors are receiving, Hollywood ultimately will judge their value using the only yardstick it believes matters: box-office performance.

"It's a big issue," said Lee Daniels, who directed "The Butler." "People can say, 'I'm sick of hearing about the race issue.' But it has to be addressed. I just think it's time for us to actually be at the party."

Several other prominent black filmmakers say that change within show business remains glacial. Even if Hollywood likes to present itself as magnanimous and liberal, its hiring decisions — including jobs handed to women — continue to be demographically constricted, with most work still going to white men.

PHOTOS: Best films of 2013 | Betsy Sharkey

It's not just movies that are an issue. The Directors Guild of America recently found that 73% of all primetime TV episodes were made by Caucasian males, and the Screen Actors Guild concluded that 76% of all leading roles in television and film were given to Caucasians. (Separately, the picture for women of all races is similarly depressing, and yet again no female filmmakers are contending for the directing Oscar.)

Following a 2012 Los Angeles Times study that found the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was whiter, older and more male than the organization's toughest critics feared, the academy has tried to diversify its ranks.

The last two classes of people invited to become Oscar voters look far less like members of a country club, even if the invitees hardly mirror the nation itself, where African Americans, Latinos and Asians collectively make up more than 35% of the population. But because the academy has more than 6,000 voters, the more diverse new members haven't been able to change the organization's overall makeup in a meaningful way.

PHOTOS: Celebrity portraits by The Times

Roger Ross Williams, the first black director to win an Oscar for making 2010's documentary short "Music by Prudence," has been shortlisted in the documentary feature race this year for his film "God Loves Uganda." He said that while he was "thrilled" to be invited into the academy earlier this year — "but it was three years after I won," he noted — he still feels like an interloper when he's in a room with fellow Oscar voters.

"I don't see a lot of people who look like me, and that's unfortunate," Williams said. "I do applaud the academy for trying to change things. They really are making an effort. But the real world is still much more diverse than Hollywood. And I think it's because of opportunity — there are not of lot of opportunities for African Americans to enter the field."

If movie studios are so far failing to do their part, some film schools are entering the void.

USC's School of Cinematic Arts actively recruits at historically black colleges and in parts of the country — Miami and East Los Angeles, for example — with high Latino populations. In just 10 years, the number of Latino applicants to USC's graduate program has almost tripled, while African American applicants have almost doubled (Caucasian applications have gone up about 38% in the same time period).

PHOTOS: Behind the scenes of movies and TV

"We think you create a better intellectual and artistic climate when you have diverse people coming together," said Elizabeth Daley, the film school's dean.

Several filmmakers said part of the problem inside Hollywood is that studio executives often assume that minority filmmakers only connect with minority moviegoers: Tyler Perry, an African American director whose audience is almost entirely African American, is the norm, in other words. By that same logic, though, only women would attend the movies of Kathryn Bigelow.

"You can get stuck in a way of thinking that's not accurate," said Ryan Coogler, the African American writer and director of "Fruitvale Station." "And that is that people don't go see movies that come from a certain perspective."

Dede Gardner, a producer of "12 Years a Slave," said the critical acclaim and commercial success of movies made by people of color prove that moviegoers are hungry for the full spectrum of storytelling. "It really suggests that people are curious about what's outside the shrinking parameters of their lives," Gardner said.

As Daniels proved with "The Butler," a fictional account of a black White House servant, audiences of all kinds will come see an entertaining and engaging movie regardless of the skin color of its director or lead actor. "The Butler" has grossed more than $116 million in domestic release, making it one of the Top 25 releases of the year. Playing in about half as many theaters as "The Butler," "12 Years a Slave" could soon surpass $40 million as largely white audiences have flooded art houses to see McQueen's slave drama.

Ultimately it will be those financial returns — rather than the movie business actually becoming as progressive and open-minded as it supposes it is — that will govern Hollywood's future hiring decisions. As Daniels noted: "You can't ignore that these movies made a lot of money."

john.horn@latimes.com

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Stocks open higher on good jobs, consumer confidence news

Stocks opened higher on Wall Street as traders return from the Christmas holiday.

Good news about the U.S. job market encouraged investors to bid up stock prices.

The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits dropped last week by the most in more than a year. That's a sign that layoffs are easing.

T-Mobile rose 1% on talk that Japan's Softbank was considering buying the company.

The Dow Jones industrial average was up 55 points, or 0.3 percent, to 16,412 in the first few minutes of trading Thursday.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index rose four points, or 0.3%, to 1,838. The Nasdaq composite rose 11 points, or 0.3%, to 4,166.

Bond prices fell. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note edged up to 2.99%.

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With 'Duck Dynasty' flap, reality TV gets a little too real

The A&E cable channel has a huge hit show in "Duck Dynasty" and a huge PR problem with the star of the show, Phil Robertson, who will not back down from comments he has made disparaging homosexuals and questioning whether blacks really had it so bad in the days of segregation and Jim Crow.

And A&E's even bigger problem is that their leverage over Robertson and his clan is slight. Yes, the network has suspended Papa Robertson from participation in the show, but the family is not inclined to tell their patriarch to shut up. With offers from other channels already coming in, they know their TV franchise is portable. A&E needs them more than they need A&E.

PHOTOS: Horsey on Hollywood

Far from being cowed, Robertson reasserted his beliefs Sunday at a Bible study group in West Monroe, La., declaring, "I will not give or back off from my path." All he has done is cite the teachings of scripture, Robertson insisted.

"Jesus will take sins away," he said. "If you're a homosexual, he'll take it away. If you're an adulterer, if you're a liar, what's the difference? If you break one sin you may as well break them all."

Robertson has made a string of such comments over several years equating homosexuality with every kind of wickedness, including murder. When gay rights groups expressed outrage last week, A&E executives felt they had no choice but to distance themselves from Robertson, fearing the controversy would damage their brand.

ON LOCATION: Where the cameras roll

Cracker Barrel, the restaurant and country store chain, also decided its business would suffer if it continued its association with the show and so stopped offering "Duck Dynasty" merchandise on Friday. Two days later, though, the same paraphernalia was back on the shelf. The company issued a statement that said, "When we made the decision to remove and evaluate certain 'Duck Dynasty' items, we offended many of our loyal customers. Our intent was to avoid offending, but that's just what we've done."

Reacting to rage from the left, Cracker Barrel got hit by a firestorm from the right. Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, evangelical pastors and many other conservative voices stated loudly and clearly that Robertson's views are shared by plenty of Americans. Robertson may be mocked by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but he has champions at Fox News. Cracker Barrel capitulated as soon as it realized it has many more customers watching Sean Hannity than Comedy Central.

PHOTOS: Hollywood Backlot moments

Will the A&E crew stick to its guns and risk losing "Duck Dynasty" to a competitor? Initially, they probably hoped the controversy would die down and Robertson could be brought back to the show quietly, but now that their star has become a champion to Christian conservatives, the outcry may only grow louder.

Somebody smart should have known that turning a Deep South duck call millionaire into a celebrity might come with a some risk. In a country that seems as culturally polarized as it has ever been, it is no surprise that a reality show has gotten a little too real.

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‘Doctor Who’ fans talk Matt Smith, Peter Capaldi on Twitter

"Times change, and so must I."

Thus spoke the 11th Doctor, as played by Matt Smith, moments before the time-traveling extraterrestrial shed his appearance and regenerated in a new form — this time played by Peter Capaldi. (Fans who missed the Christmas episode, beware — there are spoilers ahead.)

The passing of the Doctor mantle came during the final moments of "The Time of the Doctor," the show's ninth Christmas special since its 2005 revival and the 800th episode in its 50-year history. Smith's 11th Doctor spent most of the episode protecting the town of Christmas on the planet Trenzalore, and aging significantly in the process. After delivering his swan song aboard the Tardis, the 11th Doctor quickly morphed into the 12th.

Viewers didn't have much time to see Capaldi in action, as his arrival was brief and hectic: Upon regenerating, the wild-eyed 12th Doctor exclaimed, "Kidneys — I've got new kidneys!" and proceeded to complain about their color. He then asked an equally bewildered Clara (Jenna Coleman), "Do you happen to know how to fly this thing?"

Reaction to the new Doctor on Twitter was largely positive. Though many fans were sad to see Smith go, most were also cautiously optimistic about Capaldi or outright excited. Here's a sampling:

It was a reallllyyyy good episode. I only wish we got to see another few mins of Peter Capaldi, like we did Matt Smith.—
Frank Jones (@AH_Frank) December 26, 2013

That is ALL WE GET of Peter Capaldi? I know that's how it goes, but I feel cheated. Matt Smith got a nice send off speech, though.—
Deke The Halls (@WereGeek) December 26, 2013

PETER CAPALDI. YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSS.—
Jordan Milam (@Jordan_Milam) December 26, 2013

I think it goes without saying that Peter Capaldi is going to be a fantastic Doctor. We've only known him for a few seconds. @DoctorWho_BBCA—
Joey | Team Cosmic (@funfxtimes2) December 26, 2013

Welcome Peter Capaldi.
Its a bit worrying that you don't know how to fly the TARDIS though.
#HelloNumber12 #DoctorWho @SpaceChannel—
ThatEnglishKid (@buddyOo) December 26, 2013

peter capaldi appeared on the screen and my mom just sat there and said ew for 5 minutes i'm—
soda punk (@drevvingle) December 26, 2013

That regeneration was awful. It was too quick. One second it's matt smith next second oh look it's peter capaldi.—
Roseyyyyyyy (@rororoxmysox) December 26, 2013

So, everyone loves Peter Capaldi as much as I do now? Yes? I mean, even in five seconds I have to imagine…—
Cristina (@_cristina_) December 26, 2013

Huh. The Doctor Who regeneration was… abrupt… and odd. I was expecting more… or different. And there was so little Peter Capaldi.—
MadMadameMim (@artista_gooner) December 26, 2013

Matt Smith was too young…at first, but this Peter Capaldi face is going to take some getting used to #DoctorWho—
Lisa Cheney (@MadeinMI) December 26, 2013

dearest peter capaldi, eleven was my doctor but when it comes to you guys i'm not that hard to impress, i'm sure you'll do great—
❁ (@eIevnthdoctor) December 26, 2013

Welcome, Peter Capaldi! I'm so excited to see what you do with The Doctor!! #WelcomePeterCapaldi—
Katie Queener (@KatieQueener) December 26, 2013

The introduction of Peter Capaldi was brutal and unexpected.The scene was weird and way too fast! #TimeOfTheDoctor #DoctorWho—
Irina Biamby-Jacques (@Irina2606) December 26, 2013

Mom's reaction to seeing Peter Capaldi as the Doctor. "Ew he's old."
#DoctorWho—
Charles Dulaney (@cdulaney85) December 26, 2013

Peter Capaldi. I have faith in you. Sad to see 11 go, loved to watch it happen. #whovian—
Drew Katsock (@ReverseDrew) December 26, 2013

What did you think of the new Doctor? Let us know in the comments.

– Oliver Gettell

Follow us on Twitter: @LATherocomplex

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Troubled '47 Ronin' may be headed for a box office reckoning

In "47 Ronin," Keanu Reeves portrays the leader of a band of ronin — masterless samurai in 18th-century Japan who must suffer the indignity of having no one to lead them in battle. Turns out that plot line provides an apt metaphor for the period 3-D sci-fi epic's problem-plagued odyssey to the screen.

"47 Ronin" arrived in theaters Christmas Day as one of the most troubled movie productions in recent memory, as well as one of 2013's most spectacular flops-in-the-making.

According to pre-release awareness surveys, the revenge thriller, which cost at least $175 million to produce, is on track to earn around $20 million in its opening five days. Such a weak box-office haul would put "47 Ronin" in the top tier of big-budget Hollywood failures, ranking alongside "John Carter," "R.I.P.D." and "The Lone Ranger" in the "when tentpole films go horribly wrong" category.

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Moreover, the film's distributor, Universal Pictures, has taken a rare pre-emptive write-down on the cost of "47 Ronin" — a charge on the studio's income tax statement to offset substantial losses. Even on the heels of hugely profitable films for Universal this year (including "Fast and Furious 6," "The Conjuring" and "Despicable Me 2"), it's a move that signifies the white flag of defeat to industry observers.

"Universal Pictures regularly evaluates its film slate for potential adjustment," the studio said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times. "In the case of '47 Ronin,' we adjusted film costs in previous quarters and as a result of our financial performance will not be negatively impacted by its theatrical performance."

Earlier this month, "Ronin" got off to a disappointing start in the country in which the movie is set, grossing just $1.3 million over the film's opening weekend in Japan. But its difficulties date back to 2011, when shooting began in Budapest, Hungary, and a widely reported difference of vision between Universal and "Ronin" director Carl Rinsch.

PHOTOS: Best films of 2013 | Kenneth Turan

An acclaimed TV commercial director whose short sci-fi film "The Gift" sparked a bidding war between Hollywood studios interested in expanding it into a feature in 2010, Rinsch was filmdom's hot new thing. He was originally tapped to direct the "Alien" prequel "Prometheus" (before being replaced by Ridley Scott, his mentor and father of his then-girlfriend), but had no experience directing feature films before reaching the "47 Ronin" set.

Loosely based on a legendary 18th-century saga ("Ch¿shingura" in Japanese), the film follows some four dozen samurai who set out to avenge their feudal master after he is forced to commit seppuku (ritual suicide) for assaulting a power-hungry feudal chieftain. Reeves was cast as a character nowhere to be found in the original text — the "half-blood" outcast Kai — despite not having carried an effects-driven action movie across the $100-million threshold in domestic box office since 2003's "The Matrix Revolutions."

Universal expected Rinsch to deliver an effects-driven thriller, but according to a January 2012 Hollywood Reporter story, the director envisioned "Ronin" as more of a drama. Even as its $175-million budget reportedly soared ever closer to $200 million (a posting on the entertainment news website the Wrap said "Ronin's" production budget grew to $225 million; Universal executives dispute that figure), producers and the studio remained unhappy with crucial battle sequences and ordered Rinsch to film scenes beefing up Reeves' heroism and a romantic sub-plot. (Neither Universal executives nor Rinsch would agree to be interviewed for this story.)

PHOTOS: Best films of 2013 | Betsy Sharkey

In the end, Universal brought in seasoned second-unit director Phil Neilson ("Iron Man," "Tears of the Sun") to help film five days of pick-up shots in London last year to get the scenes the studio originally wanted from Rinsch.

But contrary to previous reports, Rinsch was never removed from "Ronin," according to a person close to the production who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. Nor was the director prevented from editing the film, although he did not retain final cut.

"47 Ronin's" problems didn't end there, however. Universal pushed the film's release date back twice — first from pre-Thanksgiving 2012 to last February and then again to this Christmas — in what Hollywood watchers interpreted as yet another sign of impending disaster.

The completed film is visually dazzling and fetishistically — if not authentically — shot through with Japanese cultural touchstones, featuring more ceremonial bowing than perhaps any studio movie in the last half-decade. Amid a cast of A-list Japanese actors, Oscar nominee Rinko Kikuchi ("Pacific Rim," 2006's "Babel") steals scenes as "Ronin's" shape-shifting witch character. And the movie's action set pieces are handsomely staged.

Which is to say that "47 Ronin" betrays few signs of the inefficiencies that characterized its production. Still, the reviews have not been kind. The Times' Mark Olsen described it as "overlong, underwhelming." And the film will have to gross around $500 million just to break even.

Entering a crowded holiday movie marketplace, "Ronin" will need more than shape-shifting magic and samurai spirit to achieve redemption.

chris.lee@latimes.com

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Piñata district in L.A. produces hit after hit

With her papier-mache cowhide pants and bright red hat, the piñata replica of cowgirl Jessie from "Toy Story" was nearly perfect. Except it was too small.

The next store didn't have Jessie's companion, Woody, so Jovanny Beltran walked out. Despite having only two hours to shop, Beltran wasn't worried. If there was a place to be picky about piñatas, this was it.

The downtown Los Angeles piñata district, with its menagerie of papier-mached princesses and superheroes, is easy to miss if you don't know what you're looking for. Still, hundreds flock every day to the area around East Olympic Boulevard and South Central Avenue in search of the perfect creation to pummel.

Countless versions of Snow White, Spider-Man and Power Rangers line the ceilings of nearly two dozen shops in the kaleidoscopic district, sometimes called Piñata Alley. Christmas piñatas are everywhere lately, particularly the multipoint stars that are an essential part of any Las Posadas celebration. The name means "lodgings" and is celebrated by Latinos in the U.S. for the nine days that precede Christmas.

"I know I'll find what I want here, and you can't beat the prices," said Beltran, 29, who made the trek from North Hills.

Unlike Historic Filipinotown in Echo Park or the Toy District in downtown, whose borders are plastered with signs, the piñata district isn't officially recognized by the city. But that hasn't stopped it from developing into a thriving wholesale and retail hub as the Southland becomes increasingly Latino and people from other cultures adopt the piñata as a party staple.

"In one week all of us could easily sell 3,000 piñatas," said Lorena Robletto owner of Amazing Piñatas. "Everyone has a birthday and every day is a birthday."

Piñatas are the main draw, but on weekends the half-mile area turns into an informal open-air market attracting food vendors, men renting out ponies for birthdays and panhandlers. Latinos make up the majority, but Asian, black and white families also wander the gritty sidewalks.

In front of swaying piñatas, women with hair in tightly wound buns toss sizzling meat as customers bite into pupusas and huaraches.

"Pásele, pásele" ("Come in, come in") one woman beckons potential buyers.

They might be looking for traditional shapes, like the multipronged star that resembles a colorful retro satellite. Or popular cartoon characters, perhaps made without permission from the copyright owners.

Shoppers can find piñatas for pretty much any party theme or holiday. Most of the piñatas sell for $12 to $20 at Amazing Piñatas. At Party City, a 20-inch Elmo goes for $20; it's half the size of what a customer can get in the district for the same price.

Some store owners specialize in custom piñatas, which can cost hundreds of dollars. They build phallic piñatas for bachelorette parties, cardboard replicas of former spouses for divorce parties, and props for film sets. Three full-time employees build custom orders at Robletto's shop, while she and her nephew oversee requests from corporate clients.

Amazing Piñatas and other shops depend on a cottage industry of piñateros who assemble the cardboard creations in warehouses and homes throughout Southern California. The stores also import piñatas from Mexico.

Robletto said she relies on about 18 piñateros — each with a different style — and pays $10 to $15 per piece.

Francisco Padilla is one of the district's piñateros, delivering his handiwork out of his Ford Aerostar. Nearly his entire Los Angeles home is devoted to the family business.

Seven days a week, he works alongside his wife and extended family folding, stapling and "giving the figures life."

On one end of his driveway, Padilla quickly staples together the body of a soon-to-be superhero. The figure takes shape so fast that it's obvious Padilla has done this thousands of times in his four years as a piñata maker.

"The staples can't stick out," Padilla said, stapling a cardboard arm with several rapid snaps, "because kids throw themselves on top of it."

From there, his wife covers the figure with newspaper dipped in flour and water, smoothing out any wrinkles. Next comes the tissue paper.

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Egypt's Coptic Christians feel vulnerable amid nation's upheaval

KERDASA, Egypt — Three times a week without fail, the sound of ancient chants reverberates from the blackened walls of the Church of the Archangel Michael. Once aglow with precious icons and flickering candlelight, the Coptic church outside Cairo now stands nearly bare, looted and burned by an angry mob more than four months ago.

In this holiday season, many Copts, adherents of one of the oldest Christian sects, see Egypt's turbulent times as a test of their faith. Although the country as a whole has been roiled by violent political upheaval, its Coptic minority feels particularly imperiled, as do many fellow Christians elsewhere in the Middle East.

In the region that gave rise to their religion, Christians are a dwindling minority. A long-standing Christian exodus has accelerated amid the war in Syria, an increase in sectarian violence in Iraq and gnawing hardship in the Palestinian territories. In some countries, the uprisings of the "Arab Spring" also strengthened the hand of Islamists, adding to Christians' anxiety.

Copts, who make up about 10% of Egypt's population, have long suffered discrimination and oppression, not only at the hands of fellow Egyptians, but under successive governments as well. Since Egypt's 2011 uprising against Hosni Mubarak, they have been buffeted by the rise — and spectacular fall — of the Muslim Brotherhood, the region's largest and oldest Islamist movement.

For the most part, Copts rejoiced when Egypt's army deposed Islamist President Mohamed Morsi nearly six months ago. The Coptic pope, Tawadros II, appeared on national television alongside army chief Gen. Abdel Fattah Sisi when he announced that Morsi had been removed from office.

A scant six weeks later, when Egyptian security forces cracked down hard on protesting Morsi supporters, killing more than of 1,000 of them, the Copts bore the brunt of Islamists' vengeance. Across the country, furious supporters of Morsi set fire to churches and looted and burned Coptic-owned homes and businesses. Police did little to intervene.

In Kerdasa, a ramshackle market town that lies a few miles from the Great Pyramids, the church had long coexisted with its Muslim neighbors. But on Aug. 14, a crowd of about 2,000 descended on the Archangel Michael compound, setting fires, toppling rooftop crosses, tearing out electrical wiring and daubing Islamist slogans on the church walls.

Nearly everything of value was stolen, down to the plumbing fixtures. Four people were injured, but none killed.

"We were lucky to escape with our lives," said Reda Gaballah Girgis, the church's caretaker for more than two decades. "We felt that anything at all could happen."

It is a source of considerable bitterness to Copts that the interim government has done nothing to help rebuild their vandalized houses of worship. At Archangel Michael, like most of the targeted churches, the only cleanup has been done by parishioners. They have swept up broken glass, hauled out debris, covered doorways with plastic sheeting and painted over scrawled obscenities.

At this time of year, in preparation for Coptic Christmas celebrations on Jan. 7, the church compound normally would be bustling with activity, filled with traditional decorations and strung with twinkling lights. But the church's burnished candlesticks, holy vessels and incense burners vanished in the crowd's rampage. The ornate chandelier was smashed. Even light bulbs were looted.

As a mark of solidarity and defiance, about 200 people still attend thrice-weekly services in the church, where raw-wood planks have replaced many of the old carved pews. But on Fridays, the main day of Muslim prayers, the Copts gather early in the morning so congregants can be safely away before pro-Morsi protests erupt after noon prayers, as they do almost every week.

And although services resumed within weeks of the August attack, the Coptic community in Kerdasa must go elsewhere to mark crucial rites of passage, such as funerals or weddings.

"Who could ever begin their married life here?" said Girgis, gesturing at a reception hall whose walls still gave off the acrid smell of smoke. Birds fluttered among the sooty eaves.

Copts tend to feel somewhat safer in big cities such as the Egyptian capital, but even there they are scarcely immune. In October, a drive-by shooting in front of a large Coptic cathedral in an outlying Cairo neighborhood killed four wedding celebrants, young children among them. And this time of year brings memories of Jan. 1, 2011, when about two dozen worshipers in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria were killed and scores injured in a bombing as they left a church service.

At Sunday services this week in a church along the Nile in the capital, some congregants said they hoped for a better year ahead.

"Maybe we have reached the low point," said Raafat Saliba, a churchgoer in his 60s who was seated on an outdoor wooden bench amid the scent of incense wafting from the church. "It's important to have hope that things will improve."

But a thin, sad-eyed fellow worshiper, Reda Sameeh, shook his head. His barbershop in the town of Delga, south of Cairo, was destroyed in the August attacks. He and most of his extended family fled to the capital, where they are barely eking out a living and relying on the help of relatives.

"Whenever things go wrong, we are blamed," he said. "And no one knows when that will happen again."

laura.king@latimes.com

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Al Qaeda-linked group says it bombed Egypt police headquarters

An Egyptian policeman guards the scene of an explosion at a police headquarters in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura. At least 15 people were killed. (Ahmed Ashraf / Associated Press / December 24, 2013)

By Laura King and Amro Hassan

December 25, 2013, 7:34 a.m.

CAIRO -- An Al Qaeda-inspired group that until now had concentrated its attacks in the restive Sinai peninsula claimed responsibility on Wednesday for the bombing of a security headquarters in northern Egypt a day earlier that killed at least 15 people.

The claim by a group known as Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, or Partisans of Jerusalem, posted on a jihadist forum, raised the specter of more attacks by the organization in areas other than the Sinai, where Egyptian security forces are battling Islamist militants.

In its statement, the group appeared to warn that it considers police and soldiers anywhere in Egypt a target -- together with those associated with the "apostate" military-backed interim government.

Calling the bombed security building in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura  "a venue for tyranny ... against Islam and Muslims," the group repeated a call to members of the security forces to desert the ranks "if they want to hold fast to their lives and their religion."

The statement also identified by name the attacker who carried out the vehicle bombing, saying he "rode his steed to defend his religion." The Interior Ministry confirmed that the massive vehicle bomb had in fact been a suicide attack.

The organization has staged at least one major strike in Cairo -- a suicide bombing in September that targeted Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim, but failed to kill him. Other than that, its activities have been largely in the Sinai battleground.

The army tried unsuccessfully last week to capture at least two important figures in the group, but a raid by Egyptian troops in northern Sinai instead turned into a firefight that left two soldiers dead and forced the military to send in attack helicopters to back up its ground forces. Three militants were reported killed as well.

King is a staff writer and Hassan is a special correspondent.

laura.king@latimes.com

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