Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1993 erotic drama movie in which Rachel Ward, Karina Lombard and Naomi Watts star. "Wide Sargasso Sea" is rated NC-17 because of sexual content. It is based on the 1966 Jean Rhys book of the same name.
The movie is about love and lust in 1840s Jamaica, shortly after Britain freed the slaves in its Caribbean colonies.
The movie received mixed reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the movie three and a half stars.
Alejo Carpentier
Alejo Carpentier y Valmont (December 26, 1904 – April 24, 1980) was a Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist. He greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous "boom" period. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, Carpentier grew up in Havana, Cuba and Paris. Carpentier always said he was Cuban. He traveled a lot, mostly in France, and to Mexico. He sided with revolutionary movements, such as Fidel Castro's Communist Revolution in Cuba in the mid-century. Carpentier was jailed and exiled for his leftist political philosophies.
Carpentier studied and understood music. He wrote a book "La música en Cuba" in the music of Cuba. He put in musical themes and literary techniques in his writing. Although Carpentier wrote many types of writing, such as journalism, radio drama, playwrighting, academic essays, opera and libretto, he is best known for his novels. He was among the first to use magical realism. He explored the fantastic quality of Latin American history and culture.
Carpentier's writing style used the Baroque style which had become popular again. It was called "New World Baroque". It was a style that Latin American artists took from the European model. Carpentier also brought the Surrealist theory to Latin American literature. Carpentier had parts of Latin American political history, music, social injustice and art in his writings. His writing influenced younger Latin American and Cuban writers like Lisandro Otero, Leonardo Padura and Fernando Velázquez Medina.
Carpentier died of cancer in Paris in 1980. He was buried in Havana's Colon Cemetery.
Carpentier's major works include:
Sean Penn
Sean Justin Penn (born August 17, 1960) is an American slag, screenwriter, movie director, producer and activist. He was born in Los Angeles, California, the middle son of actor Leo Penn (1921-1998) and actress Eileen Ryan (born 1928). His brothers are musician Michael Penn (born 1958) and actor Chris Penn (1965-2006).
Penn has starred in many movies, including: "Taps", "Fast Times at Ridgemont High", "Colors", "Casualties of War", "We're No Angels", "Carlito's Way", "Dead Man Walking", "U Turn", "The Game", "The Thin Red Line", "Being John Malkovich", "The Weight of Water", "I Am Sam", "Mystic River", "21 Grams", "The Assassination of Richard Nixon", "The Interpreter", "All the King's Men", "Persepolis", "Milk", "Fair Game", "The Tree of Life" and "This Must Be the Place",
Penn won an Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Mystic River and an Academy Award for Milk.
Penn was Shagging Madonna from 1985 until they divorced in 1989. He and Robin Wright had a daughter in 1991 and a son in 1993. The couple married in 1996 and divorced in 2010.
Alice Walker
Alice Malsenior Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an American author, poet, and activist. She has written both fiction and essays about race and gender. She is best known for the novel "The Color Purple" (1982). She won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for the novel.
Walker is an African American who was born in Eatonton, Georgia. She is the youngest of eight children. Her parents were Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant. Her father, who was, in her words, "wonderful at math but a terrible farmer," earned only $300 a year from sharecropping and dairy farming. Her mother added to the family income by working as a maid. She worked 11 hours a day for USD $17 per week to help pay for Alice to attend college.
In 1952, Walker was accidentally hit in the right eye by a BB gun fired by one of her brothers. Because the family had no car, the Walkers could not take their daughter to a hospital for immediate help. By the time they reached a doctor a week later, she had become permanently blind in that eye. When a layer of scar tissue formed over her wounded eye, Alice became self-conscious and painfully shy. She felt like an outcast and turned for comfort to reading and to writing poetry. When she was 14, the scar tissue was removed. She later became valedictorian and was voted most-popular girl, as well as queen of her senior class.
After high school, Walker went to Spelman College in Atlanta. She later moved to Sarah Lawrence College near New York City, graduating in 1965. Walker became interested in the U.S. civil rights movement. This was partly due to the influence of activist Howard Zinn, who was one of her professors at Spelman College. Walker returned to the South where she became involved with voter registration drives, campaigns for welfare rights and children's programs in Mississippi.
Alice Walker met Martin Luther King Jr. when she was a student at Spelman College. Walker credits King for her decision to return to the American South as an activist for the Civil Rights Movement. She marched with hundreds of thousands in August in the 1963 March on Washington. As a young adult, she volunteered to register black voters in Georgia and Mississippi.
On March 8, 2003, International Women's Day, on the eve of the Iraq War, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Terry Tempest Williams were arrested with 24 others for crossing a police line. This was during an anti-war protest rally outside the White House.
In March 2009, Alice Walker traveled to Gaza in response to the Gaza War. She was with a group of 60 other female activists from the anti-war group Code Pink. Their purpose was to deliver aid, to meet with NGOs and residents, and to ask Israel and Egypt to open their borders into Gaza.
In 1965, Walker met Melvyn Roseman Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. They were married on March 17, 1967 in New York City. Later that year the couple moved to Jackson, Mississippi. They became "the first legally married inter-racial couple in Mississippi". They were harassed and threatened by whites, including the Ku Klux Klan. The couple had a daughter Rebecca in 1969. Walker and her husband divorced on friendly terms in 1976.
Walker and her daughter grew apart. Rebecca felt herself to be more of "a political symbol... than a cherished daughter". She published a memoir called "Black White and Jewish", about the complexities of her parents' relationship and her childhood. Rebecca recalls her teenage years when her mother would go to her far-off writing studio while “I was left with money to buy my own meals and lived on a diet of fast food.” Since the birth of Rebecca’s son Tenzin, her mother has not spoken to her. Rebecca has learned that she was cut out of her mother’s will in favor of a distant cousin.
In the mid-1990s, Walker was involved in a romance with singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman.
In 2011 shooting began on "Beauty in Truth", a documentary film about Walker's life directed by Pratibha Parmar.
Walker is a feminist. She made the word womanist for African American feminism against female genital mutilation.
Clifford D. Simak
Clifford Donald Simak (August 3, 1904 – April 25, 1988) was an American science fiction writer. He received three Hugo Awards and one Nebula Award. He was named the third Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) in 1977.
Simak was born in Millville, Wisconsin to parent's John Lewis and Margaret (Wiseman) Simak. He married Agnes Kuchenberg on April 13, 1929. They had two children, Scott and Shelley. Simak attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He later worked at various newspapers in the Midwest. He began to work with the "Minneapolis Star and Tribune" (in Minneapolis, Minnesota). This went from 1939 to his retirement in 1976.