Names and faces
Asked about Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton during her onstage interview at last year’s Miss America pageant, Savvy Shields turned heads on the judge’s panel and across the country by offering some advice to both political parties: Stop arguing and start compromising. Now, with her reign to end in about a week, the former Miss Arkansas says the nation is not as divided as it may seem. “We’re a lot more similar than we think we are,” she said in one of her final interviews before her successor is crowned Sept. 10. Shields said she’s been in a different state every 48 hours for the past 12 months, logging thousands of airline miles and living out of suitcases as she crisscrosses the country, meeting people from all walks of life. “I’ve seen world-changers and philanthropists and charities and ordinary people who are all seeking the same goal,” she said, which is making a difference in whatever way they can. “It’s been very encouraging to me to see that.”
George Clooney was all charm at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday, but don’ t be fooled. The actor said his latest directorial effort, Suburbicon, is an angry movie for an angry country — his own. “A lot of us are angry — angry at ourselves, angry at the way the country is going, angry at the way the world is going,” Clooney told reporters Saturday in Venice, Italy, where Suburbicon is competing for the festival’s Golden Lion prize. The satirical film noir stars Matt Damon and Julianne Moore as residents of a seemingly idyllic — and all-white — 1950s suburban community that is angered when a black family moves in. It fuses a script by the Coen brothers with a narrative about racial divisions inspired — in a negative way — by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. “I was watching a lot of speeches on the campaign trail about building fences and scapegoating minorities,” Clooney said. That set Clooney and writing-producing partner Grant Heslov to thinking about other points in United States history when forces of division were in the ascendant. They remembered 1957 events in Levittown, Pa., a model suburban community where white residents rioted at the arrival of a black family. They fused that idea to an unproduced script by Joel and Ethan Coen about a similar white-picket-fence community where a crime goes horribly wrong in farcically bloody ways.