Senators Watch ‘Lincoln’ with Steven Spielberg and Daniel Day-Lewis

Grab the popcorn: Its movie night tonight in the Senate.

The Senate has taken an official recess from floor debate for a few hours to screen the movie “Lincoln” in the Capitol Visitors Center within the Capitol complex.

Appearing with director Steven Spielberg and actor Daniel Day-Lewis on Capitol Hill this evening, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said that he hopes the message of the movie with resonate with senators and the American people.

“I hope everybody who shared his anti-political mood will go out there and see Lincoln. The movie portrays a nobility of politics in exactly the right way,” Reid said.

All senators and their spouses were invited to tonight’s special screening. Without mentioning the fight over the fiscal cliff going on within the halls of Congress as the clock clicks closer to a deadline, Reid said tonight’s screening is an opportunity for “bipartisanship,” among the members.

“For me, it’s what I work with every day but it’s good the American people have seen or will see what the great Abraham Lincoln did to get things done,” Reid said. “It’s remarkable.”

Spielberg said he was honored to show his movie in the Senate and to be able to see ‘”both sides sitting in the same room watching a president put the people out in front of the abyss.”

Because even senators need snacks, a special waiver was granted by the Senate Rules Committee to allow popcorn in for the screening.

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Videogames under fire, Hollywood lays low after school shooting

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The multi-billion-dollar videogame industry came under scrutiny on Wednesday after Hollywood canceled, postponed or played down a slew of movies and TV shows with violent content in the wake of last week's shooting at a Connecticut elementary school.

In Washington, Senator John Rockefeller called for a national study of the impact of violent videogames on children and a review of the rating system.

Although investigators in Newtown, Connecticut, have given no motive for Friday's shooting rampage, some U.S. media have reported that the 20-year-old gunman played popular videogame "Call of Duty" - in which players conduct simulated warfare missions - in the basement of his home.

The gunman, Adam Lanza, killed himself at the scene after gunning down 20 young children, six school employees and his mother.

Rockefeller said he had long been concerned about the impact of violent games and videos on children.

"Major corporations, including the video game industry, make billions on marketing and selling violent content to children. They have a responsibility to protect our children," Rockefeller said in a statement.

The Entertainment Software Association, which represents the $78 billion U.S. videogame industry, on Wednesday offered its "heartfelt prayers and condolences" to the Newtown families.

But it said in a statement that "the search for meaningful solutions must consider the broad range of actual factors that may have contributed to this tragedy.

"Any such study needs to include the years of extensive research that has shown no connection between entertainment and real-life violence," the association said.

NEW 'CALL OF DUTY,' 'HALO' GAMES RAKE IN BILLIONS

Activision Blizzard's latest title in its "Call of Duty" franchise - "Call of Duty: Black Ops II" - hit $1 billion in sales two weeks after its launch last month.

Other popular videogames include Microsoft's "Halo 4," in which players kill evil aliens. The game racked up $220 million in global sales on its launch day in November.

Mike Hickey, an analyst at National Alliance Capital Markets, said backlashes against videogames were not rare, but he was unaware of an instance of games being pulled off store shelves in the past.

When the Columbine school shooting happened in 1999, there was a similar outcry because the two perpetrators were students who played the shooter game "Doom," Hickey told Reuters.

Executives at Hollywood movie studios and TV networks have mostly laid low this week as Americans seek answers to the Newtown slaughter, and discuss how to prevent similar gun violence.

However, content seen as sensitive has been pulled from the airwaves, including an episode of the SyFy TV series "Haven" that contained violent scenes in a high school setting, and the premiere next week of a TLC show called "Best Funeral Ever."

Discovery Channel canceled a third season of its reality series "American Guns" about a family of gun makers. Some radio stations stopped playing pop star Ke$ha's bubbly new single "Die Young" to avoid any potential offense.

Glitzy red carpet premieres for violent upcoming new movies "Jack Reacher," starring Tom Cruise, and "Django Unchained" starring Jamie Foxx, were canceled out of respect for the Newtown victims, but both movies will open in theaters as planned in the next seven days.

INSENSITIVE TODAY, OK TOMORROW?

The Parents TV Council praised the response of the entertainment industry this week, but said it shouldn't be confined to the immediate aftermath of such tragedies.

"If a television network changes its programming because of content that could be insensitive today, why would that same content be appropriate at a later time?," council president Tim Winter said in a statement.

"If producers and performers rightly question whether their industry is complicit in creating a violent media culture that feeds real-life tragedies, why would there be a later time to produce and distribute more of it?," Winter added.

Most major Hollywood stars have remained silent about the potential influence of violent movies on U.S. society. But "Django Unchained" star Foxx was quoted as saying the movie industry should not shirk its responsibility.

"We cannot turn our back and say that violence in films or anything that we do doesn't have a sort of influence," Foxx was quoted as saying while promoting the film in New York.

Director Quentin Tarantino called the Newtown shootings "a horrible tragedy," but in an interview with CNN on Monday he declined to link screen violence with real life events.

"This has gone back all the way down to Shakespeare's days ... when there's violence in the street, the cry becomes 'blame the playmaker.' And you know, I actually think that's a very facile argument to pin on something that's a real life tragedy," Tarantino said.

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'Homeland' star Claire Danes gives birth to first child

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Emmy-winning actress Claire Danes has given birth to her first child, a boy, the publicist for the "Homeland" star said on Wednesday.

Cyrus Michael Christopher Dancy was born on Monday to Danes, 33, and her husband, British actor Hugh Dancy.

Danes' performance as CIA operative Carrie Matheson on Showtime's "Homeland" series scored her an Emmy win in September, while the psychological thriller won the TV industry's highest honor of best drama series.

Danes is nominated for her second Golden Globe award in the role at the Hollywood awards show in January. She also has won multiple awards for her past work on 2010 TV film "Temple Grandin," and as a 15-year-old on the 1990s coming-of-age television drama "My So-Called Life."

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'Lincoln' at the Capitol draws director and star

WASHINGTON (AP) — Today's lawmakers might be excused for thinking they've seen this movie: A recently re-elected president spars with a quarrelsome Congress over an issue that roils the nation.

The so-called fiscal cliff wasn't at the core of the film screened Wednesday in the Capitol for lawmakers. The movie "Lincoln" explores the political machinations involving President Abraham Lincoln and Congress in 1865 as they considered the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery.

On hand before the evening screening at the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center were the movie's director, Steven Spielberg, and its star, Daniel Day-Lewis, who portrays Lincoln. Both also met privately with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Earlier Wednesday, reporters and congressional staff members filled a Senate corridor to get a view of Day-Lewis, considered a top contender for an Oscar.

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Book Talk: The sin of envy on a small Greek island

TOKYO (Reuters) - After a Greek bride is abandoned at the altar and her prospective bridegroom is found blinded from an acid attack, local villagers are baffled until Hermes Diaktoras, a portly man in white tennis shoes, arrives to help.

So begins "The Doctor of Thessaly," the third in a series of detective stories by British-born author Anne Zouroudi that feature Hermes, who even as he works to unravel the crime has more than a hint of mystery about himself.

Zouroudi, who married a Greek fisherman and lived for a while in the remote Greek islands, spoke with Reuters about the origins of her sleuth and the themes that underpin her series.

Q: What started the series?

A: "When I came back to England with my tail between my legs and a failed marriage and a small child in tow, I wrote the first book in the series, 'The Messenger of Athens' kind of to get the issues out for myself, to understand for myself what had gone wrong and why it hadn't been this idyll. I was expecting to live the rest of my life there. So I think 'The Messenger of Athens' is quite a bleak book, really, sort of explaining to myself and to the world what I found in a very isolated and very tiny Greek community.

"But the lead character in that book is obviously slightly worldly and I based him on my interest in Jungian archetypes, actually. The idea of this figure of justice had immense appeal to me and I think he really appealed to readers as well. So when the first book was published, Bloomsbury really liked that character and said, come on, we can do more with him.

"So because the first book was based around lust and love, and there were very blurred lines between lust and love, I thought, you know, lust is supposed to be a sin so we could go through the seven deadly sins. That's how the series was born."

Q: You said you were working through issues, why choose the detective story form?

A: "Because I wanted to write something that I would like to read, and I love to read crime ... When I travel, I like to read books that are about the place that I'm visiting, and yet I could find very few novels of any description based in Greece.

"It seemed to be a market where there was a bit of a dearth, actually. So I really wrote originally a book that I would like to read, and happily other readers seemed to like them too."

Q: You said Hermes was kind of a Jungian archetype - how else did you come up with him?

A: "The story of his appearance is actually quite an interesting one. In the Greek islands in winter, there isn't very much to do. One Sunday afternoon, my ex-husband and I took a walk to the local cemetery because where else are you going to go? When we got there, there was another couple there, and one of them was a man I didn't know. I hadn't seen him before, which once again is very unusual in small Greek islands in winter.

"He was a very elegant man. He was wearing a suit and a raincoat, and he had owlish glasses and a quite distinctive hairstyle, distinctive longish gray curls. He was standing on the cemetery wall and looking down onto the sea. He was such a striking character that when I came to think of a description of Hermes he immediately came to mind. But rather unglamorously, he turned to out to be the new manager of the bank of the island where I was living ... I should say, though, that the bank manager was not wearing the white tennis shoes, they were another quirky detail that came from childhood."

Q: So then he gradually developed?

A: "The fact is, through the books Hermes never changes because it's the nature of who he is and what he is, not to change. Readers can make of him what they will, but to me, he is an incarnation of the god Hermes. My theory on the gods is this: as we have slowly forgotten about them, the immortals have begun to age, very slowly. So over millennia Hermes has begun to age and become quite portly, he is going a bit gray. My theory is that if we started to remember the old gods -- and I think to an extent that's happening (and) the Greek myths are becoming quite voguish at the moment -- perhaps he might reverse and revert to his original golden youth and become young and dashingly handsome again."

Q: Are you doing books on all the seven deadly sins?

A: "Yes, I've just finished the seventh. It's out next June in the U.K. So we're at a bit of a crossroads with Hermes right now, where should we go next?"

Q: So you're not finished with him?

A: "No, I don't think so, because I have a quite big fan base here in the U.K and abroad. People are just loving the character. They love the idea of this character who just turns up from nowhere, fixes everything and then quietly melts away ... It's at the heart of all crime fiction, really, but I think because Hermes is not a policeman and it's based more on natural justice rather than legal justice, people find that really appealing. But now having done the seven deadly sins, where should he go next? I'm thinking the Ten Commandments, maybe. We're still thinking about it."

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