Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 138 Shares189 Views

    in Theater

    Marshall Brickman, Woody Allen’s Co-Writer on Hit Films, Dies at 85

    The duo won an Oscar for “Annie Hall.” Mr. Brickman went on to write Broadway shows, including “Jersey Boys,” and make movies of his own.Marshall Brickman, a low-key writer whose show business career ranged across movies, late-night television comedy and Broadway, with the hit musical “Jersey Boys,” but who may be best remembered for collaborating on three of Woody Allen’s most enthusiastically praised films, including the Oscar-winning “Annie Hall,” died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 85.His daughter Sophie Brickman confirmed the death. She did not cite a cause.Mr. Brickman and Mr. Allen first teamed up on the script for “Sleeper” (1973), a science fiction comedy set in a totalitarian 22nd-century America whose protagonist, a cryogenically unfrozen 20th-century man, poses as a robot servant to save his life and then sets out to overthrow the government.“Annie Hall” (1977), the Oscar-winning romance about urban neurotics, was their second project. Two smart, insecure, witty singles meet at a Manhattan tennis club, consciously couple, measure their lives in psychotherapy sessions, find lobster humor in the Hamptons and disagree about whether Los Angeles is beyond redemption. It won four Academy Awards: for best picture, best actress (Diane Keaton), best director (Mr. Allen) and best screenplay.The two men then wrote the screenplay of “Manhattan” (1979), a contemporary black-and-white romantic comedy hailed at the time as a love letter to New York. It is now most often remembered because of its central relationship: a middle-aged man’s affair with a high school girl (Mariel Hemingway), mirroring Mr. Allen’s own scandal-tarnished later years.“Manhattan” won BAFTAs, the British film and television awards, for best film and best screenplay. At the Césars, France’s equivalent of the Oscars, it was named best foreign film.In a Writers Guild Foundation interview in 2011, Mr. Brickman described his collaboration with Mr. Allen as “a pleasure and a life changer.” And if Mr. Allen, who directed and starred in all three films, dominated the process, he said, that was for the best.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 63 Shares189 Views

    in Television

    Best TV Shows of 2024

    “English Teacher,” “My Brilliant Friend,” “Shogun,” “Babylon Berlin” and “Somebody Somewhere” were among the series that stood out in a year when television felt more mid than ever.As you browse, keep track of how many shows you’ve seen or want to see. Find and share your personalized watch list at the bottom of the page.Best Shows of 2024 | Best International | Best Shows That EndedJames PoniewozikBest Shows of 2024We live in the Age of Like. You can click stars and hearts from one end of the internet to the other to express your contentment. Like is fine. Like is good. But like isn’t the same as love. Love is more challenging. It asks more of you and it risks more. Like can’t break your heart.The good news is, there was a ton of TV to like in 2024. But it was harder this year than most to find those special, challenging, distinctive shows to l-o-v-e, which is what I think year-end lists like this are all about.All this is an outgrowth of a phenomenon I wrote about earlier this year: “Mid TV,” the burgeoning category of well-cast, professionally produced shows that look like the groundbreaking TV of the past but don’t actually break ground of their own. This TV has its place — I watch a lot of it, happily — but that place is not on this list. (The shows that did make it are arranged alphabetically.)Farewell, 2024; here’s to a more-than-mid 2025!‘English Teacher’ (FX)There’s a popular “Simpsons” meme in which the school principal, Seymour Skinner, wonders to himself, “Am I so out of touch?,” and concludes, “No, it’s the children who are wrong.” What the rookie-of-the-year sitcom “English Teacher” posits is: Maybe the children are wrong, and so are the adults, but we’re all also sort of right, and all this is part of life. Less apocalyptic than “Euphoria,” more acerbic than “Abbott Elementary,” the series surveys the post-Covid educational culture wars with more curiosity than judgment. That, it turns out, is one of the best ways to learn. (Streaming on Hulu.) More

  • 125 Shares149 Views

    in Theater

    Auli’i Cravalho on ‘Moana 2’ and Making Her Broadway Debut

    On a chilly November evening, wearing a light leather jacket and a scarf, Auli’i Cravalho was freezing as she plunged through a pair of gleaming doors into a candlelit bar in Midtown Manhattan.“I do not know how people layer here — I’m in total awe,” said Cravalho, who had just come from a photo shoot at a park on the Lower East Side. Like the plucky young heroine she voices in Disney’s “Moana” films — the sequel, “Moana 2,” hits theaters on Wednesday — Cravalho grew up in a tropical climate, in Kohala, Hawaii.But recently she had been living in an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, with her partner and her best friend, while starring in the Broadway revival of “Cabaret.” Cravalho plays the singer Sally Bowles in the John Kander and Fred Ebb musical about a Berlin nightclub during the rise of fascism.That night would be her first back in the show after sitting out a few performances after she “had come this close to vocal hemorrhaging.”“I have a newfound respect for the leads of these musicals, because my gosh, it is tough,” said Cravalho, 24, whose name is pronounced owl-LEE-ee cruh-VAL-yo. It had been a whirlwind few weeks, but she was gregarious as she sipped tea poured from a miniature teapot.In addition to performing an emotionally demanding role seven times a week, there were promotional appearances for “Moana 2,” the follow-up to the 2016 Polynesian animated adventure — a global phenomenon that was the most-streamed movie on any U.S. platform last year, according to Nielsen.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 125 Shares149 Views

    in Theater

    How the Visual Effects of ‘Death Becomes Her’ Changed Movies

    The loony 1992 comedy’s visual effects broke new ground (along with Meryl Streep’s neck). With the film’s Broadway musical adaptation, a look at its enduring legacy.A tagline for the 1992 release of “Death Becomes Her” billed the film as “Your basic black comedy.” In truth, it was anything but: A screwball mélange of satire, slapstick and gonzo body horror, the movie would have been notable enough for starring two Oscar-winning actresses, Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn, as lifelong frenemies who find immortality — and all the curses that come with it — via a magic elixir. (And for the fact that Bruce Willis, a die-hard paragon of broody masculinity, played the hapless, bumbling cuckold caught between them.)Reviews were mixed; The New York Times called it “wildly uneven.” But a series of groundbreaking visual effects — particularly unexpected in a mid-budget comedy — both shocked and awed audiences, and earned the film its sole Academy Award, along with an enduring cult following and now, a Broadway musical adaptation.“We actually didn’t think we had a chance,” Doug Chiang, the film’s visual effects art director, said on a video call, of the Oscar win he shared with three collaborators. “Because we were going up against two stellar projects, ‘Batman Returns’ and ‘Alien 3,’ and ours by comparison was rather small in scale.”“Small-scale” was hardly a byword for the director Robert Zemeckis, who at the time was fresh off a blockbuster run of three “Back to the Future” films and the pioneering live action-animation hybrid “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” So David Koepp, then a little-known 28-year-old screenwriter, didn’t expect the spec script that he and his fellow writer, Martin Donovan, had submitted under contract at Universal Pictures to land in Zemeckis’s hands.“We envisioned it as, if we were lucky, a $5 million independent movie, so we wanted some grotesquerie,” Koepp said by phone. “But our inspirations were like, ‘The Evil Dead’ and ‘The Vikings.’” “The Vikings,” a gleefully hammy 1958 swashbuckler starring Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas, featured a fight sequence between its two leads that Koepp said inspired one of the most indelible setups in “Death Becomes Her.” In it, Streep’s character, a fading but indomitable Hollywood actress named Madeline Ashton, is reunited with her old friend, Hawn’s wallflower novelist Helen Sharp.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 113 Shares99 Views

    in Theater

    Juliette Binoche Is Taking Christian Louboutin to the Theater

    “I’ve seen this play three times, and it’s five and a half hours long,” said the actress, who stars in the new movie “The Return.”In Homer’s “Odyssey,” Penelope waits 20 years for her husband, Odysseus, to come home after winning the Trojan War.Juliette Binoche waited even longer to reunite with Ralph Fiennes after “The English Patient,” the 1996 film in which they co-starred.Their collaboration this time: “The Return,” Uberto Pasolini’s reimagining of Homer’s epic, and a project the filmmaker worked on for 30 years.Binoche was excited by Pasolini’s vision for the movie — a kind of stripped-down landscape with actors wrapped in cloth instead of costumes.“There was something bare about it. He tried to really go to the core of the dialogue,” she said in a video call from Paris. “He made those characters very human.”Binoche was also at a point in her life where “I was in touch with the feeling of abandonment, the feeling of the patience that you need to have for this male side of anger, of going into the world and conquering,” she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 125 Shares149 Views

    in Television

    Earl Holliman, Rugged, and Familiar, Screen Presence, Dies at 96

    Earl Holliman, an iron-jawed actor who earned a star on Hollywood Boulevard for a prolific career that included a corral full of Westerns, an appearance on the first episode of “The Twilight Zone” and a turn as Angie Dickinson’s boss on the 1970s television drama “Police Woman,” died on Monday at his home in Studio City, Calif. He was 96.His death was confirmed by his husband, Craig Curtis, who is his only survivor.While never a household name, Mr. Holliman was a seemingly ubiquitous presence on both the big and small screen, collecting nearly 100 credits over a career that spanned almost five decades.Ruggedly handsome, he was a natural choice for Westerns, war movies and police procedurals. Among his many notable films were “The Bridges at Toko-Ri” (1954), starring William Holden and Grace Kelly; “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” (1957), starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas; “The Sons of Katie Elder” (1965), with John Wayne and Dean Martin; and “Sharky’s Machine,” the 1981 Burt Reynolds detective thriller.Over the years, he also popped up in many television series, including “Gunsmoke,” “CHiPs” and “Murder, She Wrote.”Mr. Holliman’s career started with promise. He broke through in the Depression-era romance “The Rainmaker” (1956), winning a Golden Globe for best supporting actor for playing the impulsive teenage brother of a lovelorn woman (Katharine Hepburn) who encounters a grifter (Mr. Lancaster) promising rain in drought-ravaged Kansas.A relative unknown, Mr. Holliman managed to win the role over Elvis Presley, who was then rocketing to fame as a rock ’n’ roll trailblazer, but who took time out to read for the role. (Mr. Holliman apparently had little to worry about: “Elvis played the rebellious younger brother with amateurish conviction — like the lead in a high school play,” Allan Weiss, a screenwriter who saw the audition, recalled.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 125 Shares139 Views

    in Theater

    Review: This ‘Importance of Being Earnest’ Is a Fabulous Romp

    A new production in London, starring Ncuti Gatwa, releases Oscar Wilde’s 1895 comedy from period convention and brings it stunningly into the 21st century.Purists may reach for their smelling salts at the National Theater’s wild revival of “The Importance of Being Earnest,” the Oscar Wilde comedy concerned with self-identity, veiled sexuality and forming “an alliance,” as one character drolly puts it, “with a parcel.”More adventuresome audience members, however, are likely to have a blast with this (often literally) unbuttoned take on a familiar text from the director Max Webster, who was a 2023 Tony nominee for “Life of Pi.”Keeping one foot in the here and now, this “Earnest” — which runs through Jan. 25 and will be in movie theaters worldwide via National Theater Live from Feb. 20 — lands the verbal invention and wit of Wilde’s 1895 classic while incorporating contemporary music, the occasional swear word and a decidedly queer sensibility. At times, it may indulge in one wink at the audience too many — but even then, Webster’s intention is clearly to release a time-honored comedy from the confines of period convention.Does this sound too much? I doubt Wilde would have thought so. The Irish writer’s renegade spirit is felt here from the outset, with the introduction of a high-camp prologue that finds a gown-wearing, pink-gloved Algernon Moncrieff (Ncuti Gatwa, TV’s latest Doctor Who,) tearing into Grieg’s Piano Concerto as if he were the star attraction at Dalston Superstore, a queer East London nightlife venue that gets a passing mention.Minutes later, the play proper begins, and Algernon reappears in an extravagantly patterned suit worthy of the Met Gala.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 113 Shares179 Views

    in Theater

    Artists, Then (as in the 17th Century) and Now

    “The Light and the Dark” dramatizes the life of Artemisia Gentileschi, while “300 Paintings” was born during the fever dreams of Covid.Quick! Which 17th-century female artist fought her way into the male-dominated art world, prevailed in a rape trial and alchemized her struggles into revolutionary art? If the name Artemisia Gentileschi doesn’t leap to one’s lips, Kate Hamill’s play “The Light and the Dark” at 59E59 Theaters offers a generous introduction.Heavy emphasis on “introduction.” Much of the information in the play’s 145 minutes will be familiar to anyone who has spent time reading Gentileschi’s Wikipedia page or has seen other recent plays inspired by her life.There are two Artemisias in the show: the historical Baroque painter and a docent-like narrator. Both are played by Hamill, who has unwisely asked the narrator to ride shotgun to the artist. Under the slack direction of Jade King Carroll, “The Light and the Dark” often feels more like an art history lecture than a play. The first act, especially, hews much too closely to biographical exposition. Standing next to a blank canvas on a set that evokes of an artist’s studio, Artemisia talks to us about the art of composition before taking us back in time to her youth.As a child, she idolizes first the work of her father, Orazio (Wynn Harmon, posed like an off-duty Greek statue), then Caravaggio, whose works of fleshy realism crack the world open for her. The entrance of Agostino Tassi (Matthew Saldivar), a papal painter who frequents Orazio’s studio, spells trouble. He contrives to spend more time alone with Artemisia; during one of his visits, after he has bribed the Gentileschi’s serving woman (a versatile Joey Parsons) to vacate the room, he rapes Artemisia.Strangely, no mention is made of her three younger brothers, who also trained as apprentices to Orazio and who might have served as dramatic counterpoints for the young female artist.More consequentially, Hamill, who is one of the most produced playwrights in the country, departs from the historical record in a trial scene. Court records of the rape trial preserved at the Archivio di Stato in Rome show that Artemisia averred that she threw a knife at Tassi after he raped her the first time; in the play, she simply lets it drop by her side. “I am not a heroine of some old story. I cannot hold the knife,” she says meekly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More