Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 88 Shares99 Views

    in Television

    South African Filmmakers Move Beyond Apartheid Stories

    Films about South Africa once focused on apartheid, but a new generation of directors and producers is making hits about modern life and love for global audiences.JOHANNESBURG — One of South Africa’s top film producers squinted at a monitor as a hush settled over the crew. Cameras zoomed in on an actress playing a dealer of fine art — chicly dressed in a pencil skirt made from bold African textiles — who offered a coy smile as an old flame stepped into her gallery.It’s the opening scene of a new Netflix movie about high-powered Black women, wealth and modern city life in Johannesburg — one in a flood of productions from a new generation of South African filmmakers. They are bent on telling their own stories on their own terms, eager to widen the aperture on a country after a generation of films defined by apartheid, poverty and struggle.“We call it the legacy exhaustion, the apartheid cinema, people are exhausted with it,” Bongiwe Selane, the producer, said a few days later in the editing studio. “The generation now didn’t live it, they don’t really relate to it. They want to see stories about their experiences now.”Those stories have been buoyed by recent investment from streaming services like Netflix and its South Africa-based rival, Showmax, which are racing to attract audiences across the African continent and beyond, and pouring millions into productions by African filmmakers.Bongiwe Selane, at the Usual Suspects Studios in Johannesburg. She said people want to see stories about their current experiences, not just from the apartheid era. Joao Silva/The New York TimesIn South Africa, where for decades the local film industry has been financed by and catered to the country’s white minority, the new funding has boosted Black filmmakers — a cultural moment that parallels the one playing out in Hollywood.Netflix’s first script-to-screen South African productions — the spy thriller “Queen Sono” and “Blood and Water,” a teen drama about an elite private high school — have won fans locally and topped the streaming giant’s international charts.“I know especially in the States, a lot of people were excited to see a Black, dark-skinned girl play a lead character in Netflix,” Ama Qamata, 22, a star of “Blood and Water,” said one recent afternoon in Johannesburg on set for a local soap opera.As a makeup artist touched up her merlot-red lipstick, showrunners shouted into walkie-talkies to set up the day’s scene: A woman at a funeral accidentally falls into the grave of the man she is accused of killing. “Over the top, but the audience loves it,” one line producer, Janine Wessels, quipped.Soap operas like this have been a favorite on local television for years, but many were imported from the United States. “Blood and Water” takes another familiar American genre — the teen drama — and turns the tables: It’s a story set in Cape Town, featuring mansion parties with bouncers, bartenders and infinity pools soaked in neon lights — and has been eaten up by American audiences.Often likened to “Gossip Girl,” the show was the first original African series to be ranked in Netflix’s Top Ten chart in several countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France and South Africa.“One of my proudest moments was people from the continent just saying ‘Wow, you really represented us in good light, you really showed the world the filmmaking we’re capable of,’” Ms. Qamata said.Ama Qamata on set of the series “Gomora” in April.Joao Silva/The New York TimesIn the three decades since apartheid, much of South African cinema has been shaped by its legacy.Hollywood studios have flocked to the country to film blockbusters about Nelson Mandela and the struggle’s other heroes. The South African government has promoted apartheid-focused entertainment on local television as part of the country’s own efforts to reckon with its history.Other local fare catered largely to the country’s white Afrikaans minority, who could afford cable and outings to movie theaters mostly in malls and wealthy suburbs — a long, expensive trek for many Black South Africans living in the country’s old townships.“We’ve always had the local industry and funders sort of dictating how our stories should be told,” Ms. Selane, the producer, said. “Our financiers say, you can’t say that or if you say it that way you will offend our white subscribers.”Productions about apartheid were important in documenting the country’s history and exposing the roots of an economy that remains one of the most unequal in the world, where wealth is still concentrated mostly in the hands of whites and a small Black elite.But in recent years, the country has also undergone major demographic and economic shifts. The first South Africans who grew up after apartheid are now adults, asserting their voices on social media and in professional workplaces. And a growing Black middle class has been eager to see itself reflected onscreen — and showing it with their wallets.Actors Ntobeko Sishi, Thembi Seete and Zoliza Xavula during filming of the soap opera “Gomora” in Johannesburg in April.Joao Silva/The New York TimesIn 2015, the film “Tell Me Sweet Something,” about an aspiring young writer who finds unlikely love in Johannesburg’s hipster hangout Maboeng, hit number five in South Africa, blowing the lid off box office expectations for locally made romantic comedies.A year later, “Happiness is a Four Letter Word” — the prequel to Ms. Selane’s latest film that opens with the art gallery scene — outperformed several Hollywood releases in South African movie theaters on its opening weekend.The movie revolves around three bold women navigating a new South Africa. There is Princess, a serial dater and owner of a trendy art gallery; Zaza, a glamorous housewife having an illicit love affair; and Nandi, a high-powered lawyer who gets cold feet on the cusp of her wedding.“Audiences would come up to me to tell me how they also had a guy who broke their heart and they want to see that, to watch something where apartheid is not in the foreground,” said Renate Stuurman, who plays Princess. “It can be in the background, surely, it’s what brought us here, but people were happy to be distracted.”Netflix and Showmax pounced on such stories to capture audiences in Africa, where streaming is projected to reach nearly 13 million subscriptions by 2025 — up fivefold from the end of 2019, according to Digital TV Research, an industry forecaster. For Netflix, the investment is part of a larger push to acquire a generation of Black content.Musicians rehearsing on the set of “Gomora” in Johannesburg in April. The changing demographics of South Africa have led to a shift in the cinematic offerings.Joao Silva/The New York Times“We’re aiming to become a strong part of the local ecosystem in terms of growing the capacity and talent in the market,” said Ben Amadasun, director of Africa Originals and Acquisitions at Netflix. “The basis is that we believe that stories can come from anywhere and travel everywhere.”Since 2016, the company has snapped up content from filmmakers in South Africa and Nigeria, home to the industry popularly known as Nollywood. Nigerian filmmakers have churned out thousands of movies — many produced with just a few thousand dollars and one digital camera — since the late 1990s.Nollywood films won fans across English-speaking Africa, but South Africa is chipping away at its dominance, industry leaders say.For the past two decades, South Africa has hosted major Hollywood studios drawn to its highly skilled workers and government-issued rebate on all production costs spent in the country.Cape Town’s streets were transformed into Islamabad for the fourth season of Homeland; studios constructed models of Robben Island for “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom;” and crews flew helicopters, crashed cars and set off massive explosions in downtown Johannesburg for “Avengers: Age of Ultron.” Of the roughly 400 films made in South Africa between 2008 and 2014, nearly 40 percent were foreign productions, according to the National Film and Video Foundation, a government agency.For filmmakers here, the shoots were often a source of frustration. The studios brought in their own directors and leading actors — who sometimes played South African characters — while sidelining South Africans to jobs as assistants and line producers.The productions “weren’t looking for our intellect or perspectives, they were looking for Sherpas,” said Jahmil X.T. Qubeka, a filmmaker.Jahmil X.T. Qubeka at The Bioscope cinema in Johannesburg.Joao Silva/The New York TimesBut increased investment in South Africa’s already thriving film industry means that local creatives like Mr. Qubeka have come closer to realizing their ambitions. His new production, “Blood Psalms,” a series for Showmax, employs massive sets reminiscent of “Game of Thrones,” green screens to concoct magical powers, and elaborate costumes of armor and golden crowns.Inside an editing suite in Johannesburg one recent morning, Mr. Qubeka chatted with an editor slicing together shots for the show, about a queen battling a world-ending prophecy — a plot drawn from African mythology.“The true revolution,” Mr. Qubeka said, “is that we as South Africans are being sought out for our perspective and our ideas.” More

  • 113 Shares109 Views

    in Television

    In ‘Gangs of London,’ the Method Behind the Madness

    Gareth Evans, a creator of the hyperviolent AMC crime series, breaks down a battle from Sunday’s episode. “Every death should be a tragedy,” he said.The kinetic crime series “Gangs of London,” currently airing on AMC, is a pulpy video game adaptation that follows a chaotic gang war that begins after the mysterious killing of the mob boss Finn Wallace (Colm Meaney). The major players include Finn’s vindictive son Sean (Joe Cole), the macho Welsh gangster Kinney Edwards (Mark Lewis Jones) and Kinney’s petulant son Darren (Aled ap Steffan). In the first episode, Darren kills Finn at the request of an unidentified rival. (Not even Darren knows who it is.) More

  • 150 Shares169 Views

    in Theater

    ‘Scott and Andy and All the Boys’ Review: Ripped From the Headlines

    Mike Daisey takes sluggish aim at juicy targets: the disgraced Broadway producer Scott Rudin and the New York governor, Andrew M. Cuomo.A lot of us have gotten rusty at talking face to face — at stringing our thoughts together in a coherent and entertaining way. Desperate to commune as we slowly emerge from our pandemic hibernation, we’re a little woozy still from all the isolation.It could be that the monologuist Mike Daisey is, too. That would go some way toward explaining why his enticingly titled new solo show, “Scott and Andy and All the Boys,” often feels more like barroom blather than sharp-minded storytelling, and why it takes such sluggish aim at its juicy targets: the disgraced Broadway producer Scott Rudin and the scandal-tarnished governor of New York, Andrew M. Cuomo.Daisey means to spin the recent allegations of workplace bullying by Rudin and allegations of sexual harassment by Cuomo into a wider critique of the patriarchy, indicting us collectively for rewarding both men’s behavior through the years, enabling their success. Ripped from the headlines, and involving two of Daisey’s areas of consuming interest — theater and politics — the material seems ripe for his comically lacerating provocations.Yet watching this directorless show’s single live performance on Friday night at the Kraine Theater, with a fully vaccinated, mask-muffled, socially distanced audience in attendance and a virtual crowd tuning in to the livestream, I kept wishing that Daisey actually was holding forth in a bar — as a regular person, not a monologuist on a stage. Then his listeners might have been able to interject, pushing back on the weak spots in his argument, querying the bits that were puzzling.For instance, the distractingly opaque story of a quarrel with his girlfriend over the sheets on their guest bed. Daisey sees this interaction as gendered and uses it to frame the show, but I still have no idea what was so wrong with the sheets, how it turned into a giant fight between them and what was so gendered about it. He deploys this anecdote to implicate himself as a member of the patriarchy, but surely he could find a less baffling example.It made a rickety opening, the first stretch of tedium in a not quite 90-minute evening that never did alchemize — partly, perhaps, because Daisey underestimated his audience. Presented by Daisey and Frigid New York, “Scott and Andy” isn’t a niche-knowledge monologue like “The Last Cargo Cult,” his show about money and financial systems; it doesn’t rely on extensive research like “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” It’s based on news that’s fresh in our memories, and if we race to watch a performance about Rudin and Cuomo, chances are high that we don’t need much of a recap.Daisey was on the Kraine stage just last month with a different show, which was also performed for both live and streaming audiences — a bifurcation that is still an awkward experiment. The setup demands that he talk straight to the crowd in the theater and simultaneously connect with people online.The pulsating humans in the theater were essentially put on hold for minutes at a time while Daisey provided back story on Cuomo for the remote-viewing out-of-staters. Speaking past the people right in front of you is not a great way to tend to the energy in the room.More problematically, while Daisey spent a lot of the show repeating reported details of Rudin and Cuomo’s alleged transgressions, he never wove them into something more textured and insightful, which is what we come to him for.He was eager to say that everyone in theater knew about Rudin, but he didn’t mention having experienced or passively witnessed any other bad behavior by men in his industry, the silence about which is ingrained in its culture. That kind of acknowledgment would have helped to make his case both more rooted in insider knowledge and reflective of male behavior that goes beyond the pair of titans in his show’s title.And when Daisey suggested, twice, that Cuomo has been lately “gelded” by legislators, there was no sign that he thought the term might smack of machismo.There were moments in “Scott and Andy” when the performance went taut and Daisey found his rhythm, as with his funny-serious point about workaholic men needing to cultivate hobbies. But those were rare.In the program — an actual paper program! — Daisey prints a quote, attributed to the canonical second-wave feminist Andrea Dworkin, on the necessary death of manhood.Daisey himself, though, seems rather new at thinking about the patriarchy. This inchoate show is a baby step taken by one of the boys.Scott and Andy and All the BoysOn May 7 at the Kraine Theater, Manhattan. More

  • 125 Shares149 Views

    in Theater

    ‘Mary Stuart’ Review: A Battle Royal in a Brooklyn Apartment

    With four actors and a contemporary setting, Bedlam offers an audacious, if half-baked, take on the Schiller play about the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots.Two queens, a gaggle of self-serving politicians, a murder plot, a rivalry for regal dominance: George R.R. Martin has nothing on the annals of English history. That’s why the stories appeal to so many, from the writer and historian Philippa Gregory to the 18th-century German poet-playwright Friedrich Schiller, whose verse play “Mary Stuart,” about the imprisonment and final days of the famous Queen of Scots, has proved a steady stage draw, especially for zealous actresses.Sixteenth century England comes to 21st-century America in Bedlam’s new adaptation of Schiller’s play, a fleet though unkempt production performed by a trim cast of four and filmed inside a Brooklyn fourth-floor walk-up.Perhaps you already know the story from European history class, or one of the many fictionalized accounts of the tale. (I have Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie to thank for my most recent refresher, in 2018’s “Mary Queen of Scots.”)Mary Stuart (Violeta Picayo), who is accused of murdering her husband, is imprisoned in England for also claiming a right to the throne. Her cousin, Queen Elizabeth (Shirine Babb), is conflicted about how to handle Mary, who poses a threat to her power while she’s alive, but whose execution would weigh on her conscience.Then there’s the sway of public opinion and the perspectives of her various advisers to take into account — as they say, “uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”This “Mary Stuart,” adapted by Rachel Vail from the translation by Joseph Mellish, works a bold contrast between the aureate language and the home-cooked D.I.Y. vibe of the production, which has the same playful quality the scrappy and always inventive Bedlam is known for — albeit with a touch less polish.Mary is held captive beneath a kitchen island; a suicide happens behind a shower curtain in a bathtub; a queenly meeting takes place not in a forest, as we’re told, but on a rooftop overlooking the city.Such jarring contradictions occasionally feel compelling, but often read as kitschy, even amateurish. A French ambassador, for example, appears in the form of a blue sock puppet: Adorable, but — Mon Dieu! — dangerously close to something you’d find in a high school homework assignment.That also goes for the camerawork, which is as shaky and abrupt as a scene from “Cloverfield.” The sound, too, cuts in and out, leaving some of the dialogue behind.The four actors give generous performances, directed by Zachary Elkind with a snappiness that allows for each to contain multitudes: speedy, minute costume changes (a scarf, a pair of glasses, a blazer, a baseball cap) create the illusion of a whole English court without even the briefest interruption of a scene.However, Elkind’s direction also sits unsteadily between cartoony humor and stately drama. So Simon Schaitkin’s Lord Burleigh, a sniveling, slouching schemer with glasses perched at the tip of his nose, is too arch, and Shaun Taylor-Corbett’s Wilhelm Davison, the queen’s secretary, too dopey. And yet Taylor-Corbett’s selfish Earl of Leicester, caught between his love for each queen and his desire to save his own neck, lands with more punch.Picayo, left, taking the role of one of Elizabeth’s trusted advisers in this scene, consults with Shirine Babb’s queen.Zachary ElkindThe same for Picayo and Babb, whose contrasting stances — both headstrong and self-righteous in separate ways — bring fire. Babb makes a believable Elizabeth, firm and royally composed yet vulnerable beneath the surface, while Picayo embodies defiance, as when she hurls a throaty “I am your queen!” at her rival.“Before these strangers’ eyes, dishonor not yourself and me. Profane not, disgrace not the royal blood of Tudor. In my veins it flows as sure a stream as in your own,” Stuart declares to Elizabeth when they meet — a meeting that, in reality, never happened, by the way. And yet historical fiction loves to imagine it, understandably, because what could be juicier than a showdown between two powerful women?Still most versions of this story struggle to figure out how to handle these women. Often their personalities, strengths and fears become occluded by the machinations of the men around them, as happens occasionally here.Ultimately, despite the audacious contrasts that define this production, “Mary Stuart” also suffers from a case of “So what?” And by that I mean, “Why now?”One impulse seems to be the chance to talk about female power, or power in general. I could imagine a critique of our election fracas and all the recent chatter about the expectations placed on the royals of Buckingham Palace today.But for all the ways “Mary Stuart” asks us to see Elizabethan England in a Brooklyn apartment, it fails to show us what Elizabethan England can tell us about Brooklyn — and America, and contemporary England — now.Mary StuartThrough May 9; available on-demand at bedlam.org starting May 10. More

  • 75 Shares149 Views

    in Television

    ‘SNL’ Gets Ready for Elon Musk

    The choice to have the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire host “S.N.L.” has drawn praise, criticism and some veiled pushback from the show’s own cast members.When “Saturday Night Live” announced last month that this weekend’s broadcast would be hosted by Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of Tesla and founder of SpaceX, the decision was widely discussed, dissected and lamented. More

  • 125 Shares189 Views

    in Theater

    Review: ‘Waiting for Godot’ in the Bleakest Zoom Room Ever

    Ethan Hawke and John Leguizamo star as Beckett’s tragicomic tramps — minus the comic part.Early audiences were baffled by “Waiting for Godot.” Even Peter Hall, who in 1955 directed the first English language production, claimed not to understand it. When actors with access to its author, Samuel Beckett, demanded explanations from him, he usually professed himself helpless to answer.Now, though some of the references have become more obscure with time, it’s hard to imagine anyone not fathoming the play’s gist. Decades of high school lit seminars, let alone the gradual opening of the playgoing class’s eyes to the world’s inequities and terrors, have transformed it from an enigmatic museum piece into an existential tchotchke.But there is more to “Waiting for Godot,” which the New Group has just released as a lugubrious film starring Ethan Hawke and John Leguizamo, than its status as a modern classic suggests. Its portrait of life as a charnel house may be half the story but in this case, it’s the only half.After all, Beckett called “Godot” a tragicomedy, presumably with emphasis on the second part of the word because the first part speaks for itself. The thumbprints of Buster Keaton, and especially Laurel and Hardy, are all over its main characters, the broken-down migrant workers Vladimir and Estragon. (Estragon was first played on Broadway by the great vaudevillian and erstwhile Cowardly Lion Bert Lahr.) The undercard, Pozzo and Lucky, are no comic slouches either; together, the four wanderers, with their long-honed routines and jags of passive-aggressive mayhem, outnumber and upstage the Three Stooges.But of the New Group’s cast, which also includes Tarik Trotter as Pozzo and Wallace Shawn as Lucky, only Leguizamo, as Estragon, could really be considered a clown — and not just because he called himself one in his 2011 one-man show “Ghetto Klown.”A theatrical being to his core, he has the quick-twitch reflexes and papered-over wounds that can make injury funny. The best parts of this “Waiting for Godot” mine that duality, and also Leguizamo’s heritage; when Hawke, as Vladimir, discredits Estragon’s account of being beaten for no cause, we get a new, white-privilege angle on their recurrent miscommunication.Hawke, left, and Leguizamo mask up when approaching the other two tramps in the play.via The New Group Off StageBut even Leguizamo is done in by a production, directed by Scott Elliott, that is almost entirely — and, it would seem, deliberately — humorless. The actors are shot in separate gloomy interiors, and from stationary positions, so as to appear in Stygian Zoom-like frames as if at a virtual meeting of hobbits.And though Beckett did say, in response to a proposed in-the-round production, that “Godot” needed “a very closed box,” I doubt this is what he meant. In any case, a play that famously takes place outdoors, with its sole scenic element a barren tree that for Act II sprouts five leaves, is now mercilessly interiorized, and a relationship that is meant to test the limits of intimacy is unhelpfully kept at arm’s length from the start.To the extent this comments on our pandemic moment, it’s at least intriguing; a lot of thought seems to have gone into Vladimir and Estragon’s decisions to mask up, mostly when they approach Pozzo and Lucky. But this and other contemporary intrusions, including the use of cellphones for texting and black screens when the characters apparently disable their feed, don’t actually illuminate anything, let alone emphasize the play’s humor as they seem to intend. It’s hard to laugh when you can hardly see.That problem encourages a certain degree of overacting, especially from Hawke, as if he were trying to make himself visible from a distance. (He has lovely moments, though.) Trotter, who under the name Black Thought was a co-founder of the hip-hop group the Roots, uses his terrific stage voice to capture Pozzo’s first-act bluster without resorting to flailing, but has a harder time with the humbled version of the character who returns in Act II.At least Drake Bradshaw, in the small role of Godot’s young herald, is sweetly effective in both his appearances. And though Shawn, delivering Lucky’s impossible speech — nine minutes of gibberish — is able to make convincing emotional sense of the moment, the production as a whole doesn’t support his efforts. Vladimir and Estragon check out of the Zoom call for much of the harangue, encouraging us to think we might do so as well.It’s not that you need to be literal with “Waiting for Godot”; it’s anything but a naturalistic drama. I liked the designer Qween Jean’s past-midnight cowboy look for Hawke and Mets cap and tank top pandemic ensemble for Leguizamo. But if Elliott, working with the Academy Award winner John Ridley’s Nō Studios and the Hollywood producer Frank Marshall, has avoided excessive fealty to Beckett’s instructions — the estate approved the socially distanced production — he has not provided anything as coherent to take their place.For one thing, the action is awkwardly staged, even beyond the necessity of executing comedy bits when the actors, if not the characters, are calling in from different locations. (The passing of Lucky’s hat, a clear lift from Laurel and Hardy, is totally botched.) At three hours, the show is also long, even bloated. Most problematically, Vladimir’s and Estragon’s embraces, so necessary to the play’s emotional equilibrium, are about as warm here as octopi suckering up to opposite sides of a glass wall.Far from seeming too modern, though, this “Godot,” especially coming more than a year into the pandemic, seems too passé. Other companies, even no-budget ones like Theater in Quarantine, have long since figured out ways to make an aesthetic out of the limitations of lockdown. Why only now, just as those lockdowns are lifting, is this first-gen take on pandemic play production emerging? About the only expressive use of the medium is in the processing that gives the film the appearance of a dodgy video feed, with freezes and glitches that imitate a poor signal.You could argue that a dodgy feed is exactly the way “Godot” depicts life: as a poor approximation of what it should be. But in Vladimir and Estragon, Beckett also finds poignancy, humor and the last dregs of physical love, where Elliott and company find only horror. If they are right, what kind of pass have we come to, in which even Beckett’s vision is not bleak enough?Waiting for GodotThrough June 30; thenewgroup.org More

  • 125 Shares119 Views

    in Television

    Seth Meyers Doesn’t Want to Have to Support Liz Cheney

    Meyers made a “M*A*S*H” reference about the Republican who denounces Donald Trump: “I feel like B.J. Hunnicutt speaking up in support of Charles Winchester.” 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. We’re all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now. More