http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czw-dtTP6oU

This article titled “Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: from Harvard hijinks to hoody billionaire” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 18th May 2012 16.42 UTC

Thursday night was just like any other for Mark Zuckerberg. On the eve of his company’s dizzying stock market debut, the 28-year-old gave his weekly address to Facebook engineers and opened its “hackathon” jamboree of computer code, caffeine and Chinese food.

Zuckerberg did not stay long into the night, but left his company’s campus-style headquarters in Menlo Park, San Francisco, to be with his girlfriend Cilla and their fluffy Hungarian sheepdog, Beast.

His modest way of life has been described as monastic by some commentators, who contrast it with lavish extravagances enjoyed by other self-made billionaires. On Friday he became the 23rd wealthiest person on earth, according to Forbes magazine.

But Zuckerberg does not own a super-yacht or a mansion. He is rarely seen out of his trademark navy hoody, and last year the Harvard dropout drove around San Francisco in a discreet $30,000 (£18,995) Acura TSX.

Those who have worked with Zuckerberg over the past four years describe an earnest and unassuming young developer whose social network has grown to connect an eighth of humanity.

“He’s not off on himself about how this whole thing has happened,” one of these people said. “He’s just earnest about developers and the product; he’s definitely not some kind of evil genius. It’s easy to make a caricature of him but he’s not a caricature – he’s a good guy and it could have been so easy for him to be a dick.”

Much has been made of Zuckerberg’s apparently awkward social manner. Technology news sites are awash with videos of early interviews showing an unblinking, dry-mouthed twentysomething struggling to explain his quasi-religious belief in engineering and openness.

But those who worked with Zuckerberg say he has gone “way out of his comfort zone” to improve on his press relations, guided by his widely admired No 2, Sheryl Sandberg. “Mark is clearly gifted, but he doesn’t make others feel small or flaunt his success. There is no ‘I’m the boy genius wonder, where’s my Gatorade?’,” said one person.

Even his own Facebook profile is unpretentious. His history timeline mentions the mammoth social network only once – when he founded it in 2004 – and otherwise charts his own personal milestones: in 2010 he started learning Mandarin Chinese (Cilla, his partner, is half-Chinese and a fully qualified doctor); in 2011 he became vegetarian; in April this year he became an organ donor.

The 5ft 8in New York Yankees fan lists “minimalism” and “openness” among his interests, he enjoys reading Plato while tennis and fencing are among his favourite sports. Like your typical young American male, Jay Z and Nirvana feature heavily on his iPod. Less known is much about Zuckerberg’s wildly ambitious formative years.

The son of a dentist father and psychiatrist mother, Zuckerberg enjoyed a comfortable upbringing with his three sisters Randi, Donna and Arielle. He was a voracious computer programmer, building a network for the family home dubbed “Zucknet” aged 12. Later he reportedly created a computer game version of Monopoly based at his middle school in Dobbs Ferry, New York.

A rare insight into the teenage mind of Zuckerberg came to light in 2010, when the Business Insider website published a series of instant messaging conversations between the fledgling internet grandee and his Harvard college friends in 2004. The correspondence is notable both because it exposed a steely ambition but also because Zuckerberg’s machine gun fire missives were remarkably close to his unusually flat way of speaking.

Zuckerberg appears to confirm in one message that he secretly hacked into the website of the Harvard University newspaper, the Crimson, by guessing the emails and passwords of two people in the college database.

“So I want to read what they said about me before the article came out and after I complained,” he told one friend. “So I’m just like trying the email/passwords of everyone who put that they’re in the Crimson. I wonder if the school tracks stuff like that.”

In another message, Zuckerberg jokes that 4,000 people have submitted emails, pictures and addresses to his budding Harvard social network. “People just submitted it … I don’t know why … They ‘trust me’ … dumb fucks.”

Zuckerberg later told the New Yorker that he regretted the exchanges and that had since grown up and learned from his mistakes. “If you’re going to go on to build a service that is influential and that a lot of people rely on, then you need to be mature, right?,” he told the magazine.

The signs are that Zuckerberg, guided by his close-knit group of experienced internet executives, has grown up markedly since those Harvard hijinks. Hidden in the corner of his Facebook profile are three favourite quotations, including this from Pablo Picasso: “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once you grow up.” That will no doubt resonate more strongly than ever as Zuckerberg enters a bold new chapter with his $100bn-valued social network.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lW0F1sccqk

This article titled “Blade Runner sequel will reunite Ridley Scott with original screenplay writer” was written by Ben Child, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 18th May 2012 11.06 UTC

Ridley Scott‘s return to Blade Runner will be a sequel featuring a female protagonist, the veteran British director has confirmed. Alcon Entertainment, which owns the follow-up rights to the 1982 science fiction classic, announced in August that it had pulled off a coup by engaging the veteran British director to revisit one of his greatest triumphs, but it was unclear at the time what form the new film would take.

That uncertainty has now been dispelled, however, after Scott enlarged on an Alcon statement revealing that “the new story will take place some years after the first film concluded”. “I started my first meetings on the Blade Runner sequel last week,” the director told aceshowbiz.com. “We have a very good take on it. And we’ll definitely be featuring a female protagonist.”

As if securing Scott’s services weren’t coup enough, Alcon has also revealed it is in talks with original Blade Runner writer Hampton Fancher to write the screenplay.

“The three-time Oscar-nominated Scott and his Blade Runner collaborator Fancher originally conceived of their 1982 classic as the first in a series of films incorporating the themes and characters featured in Philip K Dick’s groundbreaking novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, from which Blade Runner was adapted,” said Alcon in a statement. “Circumstances, however, took Scott into other directions and the project never advanced.”

Based on Dick’s 1968 novel, Blade Runner was not a box office or critical hit in 1982, but has gathered plaudits over the years and been cited as the greatest science fiction film of all time by a number of publications. Negative initial critical opinion of the movie was largely reversed with the arrival in 1992 of a director’s cut, in which Scott excised the original’s studio-commissioned Harrison Ford voiceover as well as a pegged-on “happy ending”, which the film-maker is said to have hated.

Set in an overpopulated future Los Angeles that never sees the sunlight, the film is about a “blade runner”, Rick Deckard (Ford), who is tasked with taking out a gang of “replicants” (android outlaws) who have escaped to Earth from an off-world colony. The film-maker left the audience to decide whether Deckard himself is in fact also a replicant.

“It is a perfect opportunity to reunite Ridley with Hampton on this new project,” added Alcon. “One in fact inspired by their own personal collaboration, a classic of cinema if there ever was one.”

Fancher, 73, has not been a prolific screenwriter since Blade Runner, producing screenplays for only two films, 1989′s The Mighty Quinn and thriller The Minus Man a decade later, the latter of which he also directed. The appointment is all the more intriguing because Scott fell out with Fancher on the first film over his initial draft, which is said to have taken more of an environmentally-themed approach to the story. Fancher was replaced by David Peoples, though he later returned for rewrites.

No release date has been set for the new project, but it is likely to be some time before it arrives in cinemas. Scott is currently promoting his first science fiction film in more than three decades, Prometheus, which revisits the universe he created for 1979′s Alien. He is also due to shoot Cormac McCarthy’s screenplay for The Counselor, and has said he is open to the possibility of Prometheus sequels. An adaptation of the board game Monopoly is also on the cards.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UEv03g51kU

This article titled “Prometheus: are you ready to take Ridley Scott’s leap of faith?” was written by Ben Child, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 18th May 2012 10.11 UTC

Reading this on mobile? Click here to view video.

Just a fortnight until Prometheus lands in cinemas, and Ridley Scott’s team at 20th Century Fox clearly don’t believe we’ve been hammered with anywhere near enough advance hype. The veteran British director’s first venture into science fiction film-making in more than three decades has delivered two more featurettes in the past week alone, along with a fresh viral video of Noomi Rapace’s Elizabeth Shaw soliciting The Weyland Corporation for funding (what’s up with the warping faces on the left?) and a clip of the good ship itself landing on the mysterious planet Zeta 2 Reticuli. A reminder: those of you who have already watched the torrent of clips and trailers for the film will know this is the home of something nasty that has apparently been drawing alien graffiti on terrestrial cave walls for millennia in order to mess with our puny human noggins.

Film-makers always seem to be at pains in promo material for science-fiction films to convince us that their stories benefit from a degree of verisimilitude. Scott, for his part, wants us to know that Planet Scary is a real place somewhere far off in a distant galaxy, and not just a fanciful heavenly body dreamed up by screenwriters Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof. He’s also keen to point out that the Catholic church, Nasa and “various scientists” are convinced of the existence of extra-terrestrial life, though he neglects to mention that other belief system which specifically references humanity’s alien origins: Scientology. “This story kind of walks around the truth of what there may be out there,” says Scott (rather sheepishly and not really looking into the camera).

Reading this on mobile? Click here to view

Why is all this necessary? Could it be that the director and his team are fully aware that Prometheus’s entire premise is slightly more preposterous, scientifically speaking, than the giant mechanical spider in Wild Wild West, and are therefore doing their damnedest to lull us into willing suspension of disbelief? If so, here’s a message for them: three years ago hundreds of millions of people went to see a film about giant blue thundercats who ride dragons and communicate with omniscient trees via little organic USB cables attached to their necks. Filmgoers will believe anything can happen in space, as long as it delivers the required thrill factor – and in the case of an Alien film, chills one’s very marrow to its core.

Reading this on mobile? Click here to view video

Fortunately Prometheus (which will have a 15 certificate in the UK despite threats of a 12A) looks like it will more than deliver the latter, though the landing clip doesn’t particularly add much to the sense of impending doom that has saturated previous hype. Perhaps, after all those shots of screaming crew members and snatches of slimy organic nastiness, the marketing team simply ran out of fresh material that isn’t likely to act as a massive spoiler.

Reading this on mobile? Click here to view video

I do hope the film doesn’t get too bogged down in its own grand thematic gravy. Scott should remember that 1979′s Alien was really just a staggeringly well-shot slasher movie in space: few of us cared about how the xenomorph got on board the doomed planetoid, and in fact the complete lack of information surrounding the first film’s relentlessly bloodthirsty antagonist was part of its menacing “charm”.

Nevertheless, if Scott is determined to deliver a portentous, overblown and pseudo-philosophical event movie set in the “same universe” as its claustrophobic, sinewy predecessor, Prometheus looks like a pretty decent attempt. Are you ready to take a leap of faith with the director? Or will you be checking carefully over your shoulder in the multiplex come 1 June (one week later in north America) to make sure John Travolta and Tom Cruise haven’t block-booked the VIP seats right behind you?

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

This article titled “The Maccabees: last of the great indie guitar bands?” was written by Dave Simpson, for The Guardian on Thursday 17th May 2012 19.30 UTC

Six years ago, the Maccabees appeared at the Brighton Concorde, a prestigious venue for any fast-rising band. There, singer Orlando Weeks had once witnessed one of the best gigs he had ever seen – Franz Ferdinand in April 2004 – and his bandmates knew the stakes were high. Unfortunately, everything erupted in mayhem.

“Brighton had just taken us as their own and this kid was hanging from the top bar,” remembers guitarist Felix White. “It was crazy. The most passive people were the band. The bouncers were overwhelmed by the amount of people coming onstage. It ended up with fights, and they were dragging people off by their necks.”

Briefly threatened with becoming the first band since the Sex Pistols to be banned from playing live, their next Brighton gig took place surrounded by police officers and as a result was “awful”. The band couldn’t even get into gigs as punters. “I went to see Ben Kweller and they wouldn’t let me past the door,” chuckles White, shaking his long locks. “I did a Laurel and Hardy routine with my mate – swapped hats and jackets and managed to get in.”

Today, it’s all very different: the quintet are about to play London’s Alexandra Palace, port of call of every indie guitar phenomenon from the Stone Roses to the Black Keys. This on the back of critical acclaim for their third album, the sweepingly melancholic Given to the Wild, reviewers who once called them “landfill indie” showering them in comparisons with the Blue Nile and Talk Talk.

“I didn’t think we deserved the ‘landfill’ tag,” chuckles Weeks, more bemused than bitter, inside the band’s cluttered Elephant & Castle enclave that was once the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Drugstore rehearsal rooms. “But in a way it hasn’t done us any harm. It was a nice thing to prove wrong.”

Weeks firmly downplays any suggestion their success means his group are the last of the great indie guitar bands (“Anything like that must be taken with a huge pinch of salt”), but with big-selling guitar bands now almost as rare as the dodo, they have followed a method dating back to the Rolling Stones and the Who: forming like a gang in childhood, making gradually better records (initially on tiny labels Haircut and Promise Records) and then touring the world as mates.

“It’s been a very nice way to learn who we are,” considers the singer, who seems to be keeping level-headed in the face of what must be bewildering experiences such as following Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav’s outsize clock.

More debatable is whether the Maccabees have ever been a straightforward “indie guitar band” at all. Even when their primary influence was jerky guitar band the Futureheads and not David Bowie’s Low and Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love, they incorporated brass into their sound, at one point even recording with the Dodworth Colliery Band. “Lovely people, great banter,” sniggers White. “There was a wonderful episode when they realised the timpani was too big to get in, and we had to take the door off.”

They recorded with British hip hop pioneer Roots Manuva, who rode in on his bicycle, parked it against the drum kit and toasted over their track No Kind Words, turning it into Empty Vessels in one take. “We wanted him to play with us at Brixton Academy,” chortles White, but it didn’t happen. “He said, ‘Brixton? Last time I was there I saw the Police’. I said ‘That must have been a while back?’ He said, ‘No, the Metropolitan Police.”The band – mostly well-educated, well-spoken chaps with posh first names – aren’t typical of an indie-rock phenomenon. Bassist Rupert Jarvis was a wannabe racing driver who studied automotive engineering. The first album Fulham fan White bought was Oasis’s (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? – “Noel [Gallager] talked about how anyone can achieve anything they want and you don’t have to be super-intelligent. As a 16-year-old, that’s incredibly powerful” – but these days prefers 80s atmospherics.

The quivering, engagingly fretful-voiced Weeks is the biggest curveball, a public-school-educated art student who grew up more interested in David Attenborough’s naturalist broadcasts than music. Thoughtful and artistic – it was his idea to ask artist Boo Ritson and sculptor Andy Goldsworthy to do the band’s artwork – he insists he doesn’t feel like a frontman, and just happens to write most of the words and sing. At school, he was more drawn to images than language and he is surely the only indie rock singer to be massively influenced by Saul Steinbergan early 20th-century Romanian-born artist who served for American military intelligence, conveying messages in China. “Because his illustrative skills were up there in terms of being able to have a conversation with someone in a foreign language. I remember thinking how cool that was.”

Equally, their fantastic voyage has rather hapless origins. When Londoner White – who Weeks played football with on the common – was forming a band, the future singer asked if he knew any other guitarists. “I said, ‘”‘Well, there’s my brother, but he’s not as good as me.” Hugo White was 16 and couldn’t play a bar chord. Meanwhile, Rupert Jarvis was recruited on bass because he could play Purple Haze – but on guitar, not four-string. Naming themselves after a 2nd-century Judean army – a name a mate had spotted in a book – their first gig, at the tiny Pleasure Unit bar in Bethnal Green, was “awful.” Things started to take off when they decamped to Brighton, using courses as an “excuse”, and they still remember the thrill of playing to 20 people at the Free Butt.

Hugo White remembers their early days as running on “gut and instinct” – but they were nothing if not resourceful. When Mel Gibson was cast in the ill-fated film The Maccabees, the band used the newspaper headlines – “Mel wants to be a Maccabee” – on flyers for their gigs. “We took it seriously,” insists Hugo White. “It was always, ‘It’s gonna be amazing when we play Brixton Academy’.”

Still, he admits that back then they were nowhere near.Early releases consisted of EPs such as You Make Noise, I Make Sandwiches and songs littered with references to childhood: Scalextric and the Green Cross Code. Their 2006 single Latchmere[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faMEnZQT2f8] addresses the complex subject of the wave machine at Latchmere swimming pool, while Lego hinges on Weeks’s dramatic declaration: “And Mum said ‘no’ to Disneyland.”

“It wasn’t an anti-corporation sentiment,” he admits, drily. “She just didn’t fancy queueing.” He admits he wrote about his childhood because, still finding his feet with words, he didn’t feel “expert” enough to address more complicated issues. However, Precious Time[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0629SPfofVI] – the standout on 2007′s debut Colour Me In – convinced Elbow’s label Fiction to sign them and, in Weeks’s unusually mature musing on mortality, hinted at things to come.

The charismatic Weeks gives the impression of hidden depths but will admit only that he’s a “worrier”. He insists that nobody has died around the Maccabees but they did have a shock as to the transient nature of life when original drummer and childhood friend Robert Dylan Thomas entered rehab, and left the band.

“He wasn’t very well, and what we were doing wasn’t conducive to him staying well,” considers Weeks, more quietly than ever. “It was very amicable and very sad.” White remembers feeling emotionally shattered: “We were 22 and drained.” But where Thomas was “skinny, nimble and played at a million miles an hour”, actor-turned-replacement Sam Doyle is “muscular and groove-based”. Through slowing down and becoming more reflective, the unlikely lads had found their sound.

To celebrate how far they’ve come, we end the interview trekking up to Ally Pally, to get a taste of where they’ll play. On the way up the hill, Weeks admits that 2009′s Wall of Arms and Given to the Wild mark a growing maturity and confidence. “We all think, ‘We are the Maccabees,’” he explains, and the band clearly mean everything to him. “We don’t want anything to bear our name that isn’t right.”

White, however, has more practical concerns. Gazing around the palace’s stunning stained-glass windows and enormous spaces, the usually chatty guitarist suddenly looks overwhelmed: “Playing here is going to be really terrifying.”

Went Away, the third single from Given to the Wild, is released on 28 May. The Maccabees play Alexandra Palace on 8 June.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

This article titled “Kristen Stewart: ‘Twilight was so intense. I’m still a very intense person’” was written by Kira Cochrane, for The Guardian on Thursday 17th May 2012 19.00 UTC

After a year of unsuccessful auditions, the nine-year-old Kristen Stewart told her mother she wanted to pack it all in. It hadn’t been her ambition to act; she had wanted to be an archaeologist. But she lived in Los Angeles, where an agent saw her sing in a school play aged eight, and so inevitably the notion was put to her. She was interested initially. Her parents were crew members, and she had spent time on film sets where there was a feeling that: “we were all in this together, and we were making something worthwhile”. She takes one of many deep, meaningful breaths. “And then I would see a kid walk around and people would be like: ‘Shhh, that’s the actor, don’t talk to him.’ And I was like, I want a job, I want you guys to talk to me like I matter!”

It’s not surprising Stewart wasn’t tying down all those roles. I can’t imagine her having made a convincing child star in the twinkling insincerity and too many teeth mould. She’s just so socially awkward. She bounds into the hotel room, in her Led Zeppelin T-shirt and black jeans, clasping a glass of milk, and rather than sitting opposite me, she perches on the next chair, so close I have to check our knees aren’t touching.

She’s renowned for being moody. I’ve read whole interviews about her dislike of being interviewed, and she certainly has nervous tics. Her leg sometimes twitches like a piston, and she says “do you know what I mean” 18 times in the course of the interview. But she seems to be putting her all into being understood as genuine, and that, in itself, is completely endearing.

Anyway, her essential traits were not going over very well in the child actor market. She would go to auditions for commercials where she had to dance with the product. She pulls a face. “And in those situations I became really like a pompous nine-year-old. I was like: ‘I don’t want to do those auditions any more. I feel silly.’” She asked if she could ditch the final one, and her mother said: “Kristen! You have fucking integrity! If you make an appointment, you go. I’ll fire your agent tomorrow.”

If she hadn’t landed her role as a troubled, tomboyish kid in The Safety of Objects, followed by a role as a troubled, tomboyish kid in Panic Room, she might be off on an archaeological dig right now. Instead she’s at the heart of a juggernaut.

When she first signed up, in her late teens, to play Bella Swan in Twilight, there was, she says, no talk of sequels or merchandise or monsterish profit margins. It was a small film. Stewart has been in lots of smallish films, before and since. She has played Joan Jett in The Runaways, an 80s teenager working at an amusement park in Adventureland and a girl suffering from a serious illness in The Cake Eaters. The word that is often applied to her performances is “watchful”.

She started off on a distinctive route, then, an indie-inflected career, and Twilight seemed apt. The first film is all rain storms and inchoate emotion. Then the series took on a life of its own. The first film took almost $70m in its opening weekend in the US; the second, New Moon, had the biggest midnight opening in US box office history; the four films in the franchise have made more than $2bn at the worldwide box office in total. Last year, a Forbes magazine survey found that for every dollar Stewart is paid, her films bring in an average of $55.83, making her the best-value actor around – a value which reflects both the staggering speed of her rise, and how many young women adore her. Bella Swan might be devoid of any obvious interests beyond her lust for vampire Edward Cullen and werewolf Jacob Black, but her very blankness has allowed a generation of young women who are in love or would like to be to live out their longings for dangerous, unattainable men. Stewart is startlingly beautiful, of course, but her slightly clumsy gait, her palpable self-consciousness, have made her a perfect proxy.

She realised how big Twilight was going to be before it even came out, when she and Robert Pattinson, her co-star and rumoured boyfriend, were mobbed by 6,500 people at a comics convention. Did that make her nervous? “Oh my gosh. It blew my head off.” She’s talked since then of feeling trapped, unable to go for walks, stuck in hotel rooms. She says it’s not always like that though. “I mean, if I walked out of this hotel” – Claridge’s – “obviously I’d be screwed. But in London, I am perfectly fine, unless I have a trail of parasites behind me. “. The paparazzi are at the hotel entrance when I leave. “But I’m good at evading those little twits. Once I lose them, once no one’s trying to make a buck off you, you know, I’m fine – I know at this point that there’s a buck to be made, which is weird considering I’m just walking down the street with dirty hair.”

Stewart has a silent film star face that can project all manner of wordless emotion. It’s a quality that has been used to great effect in the Twilight series – all that endless staring, wanting, needing – and now in her new film, Snow White and the Huntsman, in which she stars as the titular heroine, and which threatens to become another franchise. The film is uneven. It’s hard to get excited about the romantic hero, played by Chris Hemsworth, a character who spends a surprising amount of the film as a sloppy drunk. But it’s visually interesting, with its blinking mushrooms, melting mirrors and dark, dark forests. Stewart and her co-star Charlize Theron, as the evil queen, are terrific.

The film is a reworking of the classic fairytale, with Stewart as a more powerful heroine, who is locked up by the evil queen for a decade, before escaping and becoming a warrior. Stewart was never a great fan of the Disney movie. “In the original she totally represents what a woman wanted to be back then: the ultimate maternal figure. She cleans house really well. It’s just that [women] do more than that now.” Instead they created a “bad-ass, girl power movie”, she says, in which the character’s strength is represented in a realistic way. “We’re not built to take out big guys in armour. So it was really more about being faster and smarter.”

In some ways, Snow White is, of course, the ultimate Hollywood story; the older woman terrified that a young girl might surpass her in beauty. (There’s a hilarious scene in which Theron sucks the life force out of Lily Cole.) I ask if Stewart finds the Hollywood focus on looks difficult, and she answers an entirely different question. She starts talking about how beauty is ruined “if you’re not cool as well. If you don’t have the heart to back up your looks, you are ugly. I’ve met so many people that I thought were so gorgeous and talented and amazing. And then you meet them for one second and you’re like,” she heaves another breath, and spits out emphatically, “‘you are wearing a costume, you are a fake, you are so unattractive’. And it doesn’t always come across in a picture, but you can be really beautiful in a still frame, and then, in life, moving around, you’re ugly. And that’s kind of what the movie’s about.”

There’s a big similarity between Snow White and Twilight, she says, in that, “there’s a stage of life represented in both movies that is so impassioned, and it doesn’t know why yet. Do you know what I mean? That was what I really liked about Bella. The fact that she trusted that at some point these feelings are going to make sense, and that she’s not going to let everyone tell her she’s fucking crazy. Also, it was just so,” she takes a big breath, “it was so intense,” she laughs.

Was she an intense teenager? “Yeah, I’m still a very intense person.” She’s 22 now. “I’m chilled out about some things. I’m cool. But definitely, I take things far too seriously … I am just a serious person. I love joking around, and it’s obviously about mood, because sometimes I can definitely be a silly idiot. But most of the time I am like this.” She makes a sound as if her mouth has been suctioned shut. Quite private? “Yeah,” she says. “And I’m overtly aware of fucking everything. I’m always like,” she mimes picking things out of the air, “details, little things. Just obsessive, analytical.”

Many thought Twilight pushed an abstinence message, presenting sex as a danger to be avoided – in this case, of course, specifically because it would involve coupling with a vampire and a werewolf. Was it worrying to have that outlook pinned to her? “I always just very honestly said that that’s not why I did the movie, and it’s not why the book was written,” she says, adding that she finds it frustrating when people read the characters differently to her. “Mostly in this idea that Bella is a weak girl who is just obsessed with these two boys, and doesn’t really think beyond her own needs, and is selfish. And she is, completely, but that’s like the way to live, man! You’ve got to follow your heart. That is actually a really bold way to live, not making concessions, or giving things up … I don’t know why people ignore the sacrifices that Edward makes. I don’t know why the power thing has been viewed the way it’s been viewed, because I just view it so differently.”

Isn’t it because the men are physically threatening, and Bella willingly becomes their potential victim? In the first film, Edward tells Bella he’s “the world’s most dangerous predator”, and has wanted to kill her. Her response? “I trust you.” “I think girls think that they’re stronger than the next one, and so they can take it,” says Stewart. “I think that she’s not hurting herself. I mean, it’s extreme, it’s really romantic, it’s really ideal. I think that the reason it’s effective is because if she was a vampire, he would do the same. He would be like ‘fuck me up!’”

Stewart grew up with an older brother, Cameron, and adopted brother, Taylor, who’s five days her senior, and says it was a very tomboyish childhood. “I don’t think I had a picture taken of me without a backwards baseball cap before the age of 14.” They all played hard. “You’d just connect skateboards to bikes and see how fast you can go down a hill without dying … I would go for it. But I would hurt myself. I’m always, always, always the one that is incredibly gung-ho, really excited, and then just before, you doubt yourself, and take a tumble.”The first time she realised a film could be really important was when she made Speak, aged 13, about a girl who had been raped. She did a public service announcement after it was shown on TV, with details of a helpline for people who had been sexually assaulted to call. An enormous number did so that night. The other film that stands out for her, in those terms, is Welcome to the Rileys, in which she played a troubled teenager, working in a strip club. She met women in those jobs while researching it, which gave her an idea she is still working on, of putting her earnings into a network of homes for women who want to leave the sex trade, or need support.

She has just made another film that means a lot to her, On the Road, with the director Walter Salles. She plays the wild, instinctive Marylou, partner of Dean Moriarty, and she loved the chance to improvise, to try to bring the feel of the book to the screen. “I think in order to do that book right, in order to make everyone happy – because there’s a lot of people sitting around going: ‘OK, let’s have it’ – it had to be spontaneous, it had to have that feeling of never quite knowing where someone’s going to jump or scream,” she says. “So sometimes it was a truer reading of the line to just forget it, and say it your own way.”

Stewart reminds me, at times, of an earlier era of actors. The sullen teenagers of James Dean’s generation (she is keen to adapt the one-time Dean vehicle, East of Eden); or the grungy young actors of the 90s – Winona Ryder, River Phoenix, Johnny Depp – with their gorgeous, unwashed earnestness. She plays a character who is a terrible role model in Twilight, but in person is a blessed relief, with her trainers on the red carpet, crumpled clothes and intensity. While many of her toothierchild-star contemporaries implode, she seems grounded. “When you make moving pictures, it’s so easy to become disingenuous,” she says. “It’s so easy to just become a commodity, and I think that’s so embarrassing.” And with that, she finishes her milk.

Snow White and the Huntsman is released on 30 May.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

This article titled “2 Days in New York – review” was written by Steve Rose, for The Guardian on Thursday 17th May 2012 21.37 UTC

Julie Delpy’s alter ego Marion deserves her own sitcom. She’s a lovable mess of neurotic babble, intellectual uncertainty and unmanageable lies, and after 2007′s 2 Days in Paris, it’s great to see her again. She’s now shacked up in Manhattan with her new partner, played by Chris Rock; each have a child from a previous relationship. But Rock is in for a shock: crashing in like an anarchic French circus come Marion’s childish father (Delpy’s real-life father, Albert), her bickering sister and her casually racist ex-boyfriend (who’s now dating her sister), all of whom we met in the first movie. Family relations and cross-cultural mishaps might be the stuff of Hollywood cliche, but Delpy whisks it all into a delightfully eccentric comedy, here, big on laughs, low on pretense, exaggerated but emotionally sincere – not least in Delpy’s dealing with the death of her mother (in real life as well as in the movie). We’ve rarely seen comedy this smart since Woody Allen and Seinfeld left New York.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

This article titled “Pinterest valued at more than bn after raising m funding” was written by Charles Arthur, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 17th May 2012 11.37 UTC

Move over, Facebook. Pinterest, the social site that lets people “pin” pictures and content to create collections of interest, has become the latest company to be valued at more than bn (m), following a m round of funding.

While estimates of the effective valuation implied by the investment vary between bn and bn, they highlight the fact that Pinterest has already discovered a business model in which it collects an “affiliate” payment on purchases people make via the site.

The new valuation is at least a fivefold leap in value since October 2011, when a previous financing round put it at m.

The company has shot to stardom in the past few months to become the 16th most-visited site in the US, according to measurement company Alexa. In April it had more than 20 million users, up from 1 million in July 2011, according to ComScore, another ranking company.

Its traffic soared after August 2011 when it was named one of the 50 best websites of 2011 by Time magazine, and by December it was getting 11m visitors worldwide a week, according to Hitwise.

Now it has received a fresh round of funding led by the Japanese online retailing giant Rakuten, and with particiapnts including its existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital, and a number of angel investors.

In October 2011 it received a m funding round that valued it at m. The site only opened for business in March 2010.

Although the company has not disclosed its revenues, they are probably less than m according to modelling carried out in March by Rags Srinivasan, a strategic marketing expert. But with user numbers still growing fast, that could be advancing rapidly.

A growing number of brands are using Pinterest to advertise their wares effectively for free, with the aim of driving sales via the displays. That could offer a future means for Pinterest to charge, either for position or visibility.

However, legal experts have queried the site’s liability for copyright lawsuits because it effectively allows the copying of images that are often copyrighted. While some brands may not mind if it drives sales, photographers and commercial organisations could be less pleased.

Rakuten has invested in a number of online retailing companies around the world, including the British retailer Play.com.

“While some may see e-commerce as a straightforward vending machine-like experience, we believe it is a living process where both retailers and consumers can communicate, discover, and curate to make the experience more entertaining,” said Rakuten chief executive Hiroshi Mikitani.

“We see tremendous synergies between Pinterest’s vision and Rakuten’s model for e-commerce.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

This article titled “Android over 50% of smartphone sales as Nokia and RIM feel strain” was written by Charles Arthur, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 16th May 2012 19.20 UTC

Android continued its relentless march on the mobile market in the first quarter of 2012, making up 56% of world smartphone shipments as that sector grew by 44.7% to 144.4m, even while the overall world market for mobile phones shrank by 2% year-on-year to 419m, according to new data from research company Gartner.

A year ago Android phones were 36.4% of the smartphone market, at 36.4m units. But a year later they more than doubled to 81m, leaping nearly 20 points in share in the past year. Of other mobile phone platforms, only Apple managed any significant growth in sales and share, rising to 33.1m units and 22.9%, compared to 16.9% and 16.9m units a year ago when the total smartphone market was just short of 100m.

But for Nokia and RIM, which formerly dominated the sector, the figures brought more unsettling news.

RIM struggles

RIM in particular saw handset shipments fall from 13m a year ago for a 13% share to 9.9m, and 6.9%, from January to March. Separate figures released on Tuesday by Kantar WorldPanel ComTech said that RIM’s share of consumer sales in the US in the 12 weeks to mid-April dropped to just 3%, from 9% for the same period a year ago – suggesting that one of its former strongholds has become a significant weakness.

RIM’s strongest markets now are in the UK, Spain, Middle East and India – but the Kantar figures (which do not include sales to business) show RIM’s share of sales falling compared a year before in the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy and Australia.

The company’s stock has fallen to a 52-week low, and its new BB10 OS may not appear on devices until late in the year. “RIM desperately needs to deliver winning BB10 products to retain users and stay competitive,” said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. “This will be very challenging, because BB10 lacks strong developer support, and a new BB10 device will only be available in the fourth quarter of 2012.”

Nokia shifts

Nokia too faces a torrid time, with a collapse in sales of its older Symbian smartphone OS not being replaced yet by sales of newer devices running Windows Phone. The first quarter of 2012 marked the first three months in which Nokia’s Lumia was available in the UK, but it did not go on sale in the US until after the first quarter.

Symbian sales have dived around the world, according to both Gartner and ComTech: Gartner said total sales fell from 27.6m in the year-ago quarter to 12.4m this year, while ComTech saw its share fall to single digits everywhere but Italy – where it more than halved, from 47.1% to 16.9%. But Windows Phone shipments have barely budged. Though Gartner does not distinguish between the now-deprecated Windows Mobile and Windows Phone, the latter is reckoned to be the overwhelming majority of Microsoft licences – but Gartner puts its figure at just 2.7m this first quarter, compared to 2.6m in the same period in 2011. As the smartphone market is expanding, that amounts to a fall in share.

Nokia has not yet however begun to offer its Lumia portfolio in a significant number of countries compared to the number in which it sells Symbian. But Gupta noted that the Finnish company, which once dominated the mobile market, is hobbled by its comparatively small smartphone share: for Samsung they make 44% of total shipments, for Apple 100%, but for Nokia just 16%.

Dominic Sunnebo, global consumer insight director for ComTech, warned that the coming months could see seismic changes in the UK phone market. “We are likely to see some big changes in manufacturer shares over the coming months, as we expect to see almost 22 million consumers aged 13+ changing their mobile device in the next year, with almost 80% of these consumers buying a smartphone.”

The best news for Nokia is that in the UK, Germany, Italy and France, where the Lumia 800 went on sale last November, Windows Phone is showing fast growth compared to a year ago – though its share is still in the low single digits.

UK smartphones: change in store?

Presently around 53% of the UK mobile-using population of 60m has a smartphone, but it is unclear whether the remainder presently using featurephones will shift to smartphones more quickly than those who already have – who did so over the course of about five years. Some featurephone users might prove reluctant to change.

“The pool of featurephone users left to trade up is beginning to diminish,” said Sunnebo. “This means that smartphone manufacturers need to step up their game and find ways of stealing consumers from their competitors – something that usually proves harder than convincing existing customers to trade up from featurephone to smartphone.”

Gartner’s figures also confirmed the world dominance of Samsung, which is reckoned to have shipped more mobiles than any other company, and Apple: together, the two companies took 49.3% of the smartphone business, which itself made up a record 34% of the entire mobile sector, surpassing more than one in three sales for the first time.

But within Android, despite its rapid growth and dominant share, there are tensions, said Gupta, due to the rapid commoditisation of the sector. There, he said, “a strong commoditization trend is at work and most players are finding it hard to break the mould. At the high end, hardware features coupled with applications and services are helping differentiation, but this is restricted to major players with intellectual property assets. However, in the mid to low-end segment, price is increasingly becoming the sole differentiator. This will only worsen with the entry of new players and the dominance of Chinese manufacturers, leading to increased competition, low profitability and scattered market share.”

Sunnebo, for ComTech, pointed to HTC’s success with the One X, which became one of the ten best-selling phones for the 12 weeks to the end of April, despite only being on sale for one week. But Sony and LG saw their share of Android sales in the UK dwindle, to 10.4% and 1% – and so to only half that of the overall smartphone market, where Android has 50.1% of sales. Both companies have struggled to convert their featurephone users, said ComTech: in the past year only 11% of Sony featurephone users upgraded to one of its smartphones, while for LG the figure was just 4%.

Future challenges

Android’s share of the UK market grew from 44.6% in the 12 weeks to mid-April 2011 to 50.1%. Apple’s grew faster, from 18.6% to 30%, and Sunnebo suggested that it could be well-positioned for future challenges: “Rich new content and features are a big driver for consumers looking to trade up. However, convincing users to switch brands requires an emphasis on the user experience – an area in which Apple excels. Consumers have come to expect top-end hardware, and manufacturers are responding with innovative software, good services and exclusive content partnerships.”

Some of the ComTech data hints at increased price sensitivity in parts of the Eurozone such as Spain, where Android has hit a 72% share. But its dominance is emphasised by the fact that it is approaching or above 50% share in every country surveyed by the company.

China meanwhile is becoming increasingly important: the rollout there of smartphones by a brace of local and regional makers including Huawei, ZTE, Lenovo, Yulong and TCL Communication is expected to drive sales there. For Apple, it became its second-largest market, after the US, with more than 5m units shipped from a combination of official and unofficial distributors.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.