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    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

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    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

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    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

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    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

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    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

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    Margo Martindale Pours It On in ‘The Sticky’

    The esteemed character actress has spent decades enlivening films and series in just a few scenes or episodes. In this new Amazon heist comedy, she is first on the call sheet.Let’s say you need a woman who can slit someone’s throat, who can poison someone’s whiskey, who can smash her son’s fingers with a hammer, who can commit armed robbery with precision and glee. Perhaps you are responsible for “The Sticky,” a new Amazon heist comedy, premiering on Dec. 6, and you require an actress who can reliably crash most of a maple tree through the glass doors of a provincial office building.Then you should absolutely call the three-time Emmy winner Margo Martindale.So it was a mild shock, one morning in mid November, to find Martindale — just back from Toronto, where she is shooting a Richard LaGravenese series — tucked away at a tasteful Manhattan brunch spot. A further surprise: Martindale, 73, has lived nearby since 1978. She arrived for breakfast looking elegant in a black-and-white caftan, the picture of an Upper West Side matron, a matron without a sizable body count.“I am a wimp,” Martindale confessed as she pushed some eggs around her plate. “I’m scared of my own shadow. I’m afraid of the dark.” Those dangerous women? That’s acting.An esteemed character actress — in the Netflix animated comedy “Bojack Horseman,” in which she voiced a felonious version of herself, she was typically introduced as “Esteemed Character Actress Margo Martindale” — she has spent the last two decades playing a deluxe assortment of baddies, women with steel wool and spite where their hearts should be. She’ll often show up for only a few scenes in a movie or a handful of episodes on a show, just long enough to make the extremes of human behavior seem wholly plausible.In “The Sticky,” Martindale plays a farmer seeking revenge on the bureaucrats trying to take her farm.Jan Thijs/Amazon StudiosBut in “The Sticky,” she is the star of the series, first on the call sheet. Martindale plays Ruth Landry, a reluctant maple syrup farmer who plots to steal millions of dollars of syrup from the bureaucrats who are trying to seize her farm. (Landry is an invented character, but the series is based — very loosely — on actual events.) To hear her tell it, Martindale approached this lead the same as she would any of her character parts — all acting should be character work, 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

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    ‘The Agency’ Is a Slick and Pleasing Spy Drama

    Based on the French show “The Bureau,” the new Showtime series stars Michael Fassbender as a spy who must readjust to life after living undercover.Pity the C.I.A. agents deploying their enhanced interrogation techniques, beating hostages and meddling; truly it is they who suffer. It’s hard work being a spy — but the hardest work of all is loving yourself.“The Agency,” beginning Friday on Paramount+ (and debuting on Showtime at 9 p.m. Sunday), is set mostly within the London office of the C.I.A., where one of the primo dudes (Michael Fassbender), code name “Martian,” has been abruptly yanked back from a mission in Ethiopia. He was undercover there for six years, living as Paul and falling in love with Sami (Jodie Turner-Smith), a Sudanese historian and political activist. He wasn’t ready for the mission to end, and he is definitely not ready for their relationship to end — but c’mon, what are a few bent rules in the interest of hot-people diplomacy?“This isn’t national security; this is personal,” Martian insists to his boss (Jeffrey Wright). “It’s the agency,” the boss bellows back. “Nothing is personal!” Ooooh!The series is based on the terrific French show “The Bureau,” and in the four episodes (of 10) made available for review, it deploys a lot of spy-show standards: the rookie to whom everything must be explained, the ambitious but naïve flunkies, the secretly cooperative foreign attaches, the higher-ups who seem institutional and out of touch until they drop some monologue wisdom on our heroes.Fassbender’s mesmerizing performance is the biggest draw here, giving viewers a real taste of what it’s like to love a liar. We’re never quite sure what his angle is, how much of his seemingly vulnerable moments are all part of the game. He finds an intriguing sparring partner in the agency’s therapist (Harriet Sansom Harris), with whom he is required to meet on account of how hard it is to reintegrate into real life after living undercover for so long. Other story lines for secondary and tertiary characters feel comparatively unmoored.But on the whole, it’s all very slick and overtly, pleasingly fancy-schmancy. The show’s reflective-surfaces budget alone puts some national G.D.P.s to shame. The London of “The Agency” is a pallid grayscape where even the mall is dreary, where real life is the same color as CCTV footage. Every move here is surveilled, and the show revels in that constant unease. As the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. More

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    Seth Meyers Wishes You a Happy Frozen-Pizza Thanksgiving

    Meyers tried out a few catchphrases for DiGiorno’s seasonal offering, while Jimmy Fallon suggested some last-minute Turkey Day substitutions.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.It’s Not Delivery, It’s …Seth Meyers tried out several catchphrases for DiGiorno’s frozen Thanksgiving pizza, which features roasted turkey, green beans, cranberries and gravy.“Because some years, Dad gets the kids on Thanksgiving,” Meyers offered.“But don’t worry: I’m sure next year you’ll have something to be thankful for.” — SETH MEYERSFor those going the more traditional route, Jimmy Fallon had a few suggestions for last-minute Turkey Day substitutions on “The Tonight Show.”“For instance, if you can’t find a turkey, you can slap two booties on a Costco rotisserie chicken,” Fallon said.“If you can’t find wine, you can bust out the expired Robitussin — it works!” — JIMMY FALLON“If you can’t find a gravy boat, get this, you can run your neti pot through the dishwasher and call it a day.” — JIMMY FALLON“Next up, if you can’t find mashed potatoes, corn, and mac and cheese, you can DoorDash Boston Market, then put a finger to the delivery guy’s lips and whisper, ‘Our little secret.’” — JIMMY FALLON“And, finally, if you can’t find salad, you can forget about it, ’cause nobody really wants salad.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Black Friday Eve Edition)“Yep, Thanksgiving is just hours away. Right now, people are looking at the turkeys left in the grocery store, like, ‘What’s wrong with you?’” — JIMMY FALLON“I read that Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving an official holiday in 1863. During the Civil War, Lincoln saw all the fighting and was like, ‘This, but with cranberry sauce.’” — JIMMY FALLON“A record number of Americans are traveling for Thanksgiving, and today was expected to be the busiest travel day of the year. But here’s the good news: If you’re currently at the airport, you will make it home for Christmas.” — JIMMY FALLON“Bargain hunters are gearing up for Black Friday. In fact, right now at Walmart, there’s already a half-hour wait to get trampled to death.” — TOM SHILLUE, guest host of “Gutfeld”“Organizers have announced that Amazon workers in more than 20 countries are planning to go on strike between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which could affect Amazon’s ability to get your Christmas gifts to you two weeks late.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingBen Stiller and Katie Holmes played a game of “Catchphrase” on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightThe Meyers family will appear on Seth Meyers’s Thanksgiving episode of “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutDaniel Craig, left, and Drew Starkey in “Queer.” Yannis Drakoulidis/A24Daniel Craig is sensitive and seductive in “Queer,” Luca Guadagnino’s feature film adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novella. More