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Thursday April 26, 2018 16 x ENTERTAINMENT

“THE Handmaid’s Tale” returns to televi-sion this week with its chilling portrait of a near future where women are turned into second-class citizens, seeming even darker and more prescient than ever.

That’s not by chance. As the Emmy-winning series moves away from Mar-garet Atwood’s dystopian 1985 novel, it delves further into how the United States moved from democracy into a fi ctional totalitarian state called Gilead.

Here, pollution has caused widespread infertility, women are forbidden to read, cannot control money, and people spy on each other.

“We began Season 1 feeling we cannot let Margaret Atwood down,” said Warren

Littlefi eld, one of the show’s executive producers.

“Then right after the (2016 presiden-tial) election, as this pre-Gilead Trump administration unfolded, we felt a responsibility that we can’t let down the United States. We are storytellers, but the world that we depict is relevant and the themes are more relevant than ever before,” Littlefi eld added.

Season 2 starts Wednesday on stream-ing platform Hulu, resuming immedi-ately where Season 1 ended last June, with the pregnant Offred (Elisabeth Moss) taken away to face punishment for an act of mass rebellion by a group of handmaids in Gilead.

Pre-Gilead fl ashbacks show the under-mining of human and civil rights, where women need their partner’s consent to get birth control, are pressured to be stay-at-home mothers, and gay people lose legal protections and face persecution.

It also gives viewers a fi rst, terrifying glimpse of the book’s polluted colonies, where infertile or dissident women are sent to live in concentration camp-like conditions.

Season 1 premiered in April 2017 but production started long before Hillary Clinton lost her bid to become the fi rst woman in the White House and Donald Trump was elected U.S. president.

(SD-Agencies)

'Handmaid's Tale' returns to television

BRUCE CAMPBELL’S Ash Williams is no more.

The news comes following Friday’s announcement that Sunday’s fi nal episode of “Ash vs. Evil Dead” Season 3 would also be the series fi nale.

Campbell, who has played anti-hero Ash Williams in the horror/comedy on and off since 1981, said it had been “the role of a lifetime.”

Fans campaigned for another network to take on the Starz show but Campbell tweeted: “I’m retired as Ash.”

In an earlier tweet, posted after news of the cancellation of the series was announced, Campbell thanked Starz, creator Sam Raimi and executive producer Rob Tapert and “our tireless fans.”

Old school friends, Campbell and Raimi began working on the horror fi lm “Evil Dead” after graduating from university.

Considered one of the most violent

Bruce Campbell says he’s retiring ‘Evil Dead’ Ash role

fi lms of its time, it caused controversy when it was released in 1981. It was given an X-rating and was included in a group of “video nasties” — a term used to describe extremely violent and disturb-ing, low-budget horror fi lms from the United States and Italy.

The success of the fi lm spawned two

sequels: “Evil Dead II” and “Army of Darkness.”

A remake of “Evil Dead” was released in 2013.

Campbell reprised the role of Ash in the recent Starz TV reboot, with the fi rst series airing in 2015.

(SD-Agencies)

Bruce Campbell

THE fantasy world of Oscar-win-ning animator Hayao Miyazaki will come to life as a theme park is set to open in central Japan in 2022, the regional government said yesterday.

Miyazaki is the co-founder of Studio Ghibli, Japan’s premier animation studio, and renowned internationally for works including “Princess Mononoke” and “Spirited Away.”

Studio Ghibli has released a basic concept for the vast park to be built by 2022 near Nagoya in Japan’s Aichi region.

It will feature rides and forest trails based on the master anima-tor’s popular fantasy fi lms, includ-ing “My Neighbor Totoro,” “Kiki’s Delivery Service” and “Howl’s Moving Castle,” according to the Aichi government.

The park will also be dotted with the European-themed brick towers that appear frequently in Miyazaki’s work, as well as giant installations of spider- and boar-shaped spirits in imaginary landscapes that evoke Japan’s mythical and idyllic past.

The park will be built at the Expo 2005 Aichi Commemorative Park in Nagakute city, the local govern-ment said.

Its construction cost and other details were yet to be decided, an Aichi offi cial told AFP.

Miyazaki is among the world’s most acclaimed animators, with huge followings in Japan and abroad.

“Spirited Away” won the Oscar for best animated feature in 2003, the fi rst Japanese fi lm to do so, and also scooped the Golden Bear prize at the Berlin International Film Festival, among other major gongs.

Studio Ghibli already operates the hugely-popular Ghibli Museum on the outskirts of Tokyo.

Tickets for the museum only go on sale at the beginning of each month and regularly sell out within hours. (SD-Agencies)

Japan plans Studio Ghibli theme park

MADONNA has lost a court bid to stop a former friend auctioning off intimate items including love letters and a hair-brush with strands of her hair.

A New York judge threw out the pop star’s lawsuit against Darlene Lutz, saying the statute of limitation to recover

her items had passed.One of the items is a break up letter

from the rapper Tupac, who died in 1996 and who Madonna had dated secretly.

The auction will now go ahead in July, entertainment website TMZ reports.

Madonna had claimed she never knew

that Lutz was in possession of Tupac Shakur’s 1995 letter until she heard about the online auction last year.

The singer and Lutz fell out in 2003, and after settling a legal dispute over art-work the following year, Madonna signed a release from “any and all” future claims

against her former friend, Judge Gerald Lebovits said in his ruling made public Monday.

As such, he explained, the pop star could no longer sue over the items sub-ject to auction.

(SD-Agencies)

Madonna loses bid to stop sale of Tupac breakup letter

A sceme from “The Handmaid’s Tale” Season 1. File photoHayao Miyazaki’s extremely popular Studio Ghibli creations will be showcased in a new theme park in central Japan. File photo