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      He Made ‘Seven Brides’ Less Sexist. But Can He Stage It?

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      David Landay, an author of the 1982 stage musical, reworked a kidnapping scene for a 2021 production. Now he’s suing the estates of his coauthors for the right to keep going.“Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” features a central plot twist that makes the story problematic for contemporary audiences: A group of ill-mannered brothers kidnaps the women they have been eyeing.The plot device goes back all the way to ancient times, when it was the theme of a Roman legend called “The Rape of the Sabine Women.” That story inspired paintings (Rubens, et al.), a short story (“The Sobbin’ Women”) and a 1954 musical film later adapted into a 1982 stage musical, which closed on Broadway three days after it opened.Now, an effort to modernize the story to make it palatable for today’s theatergoers has landed in court.The dispute centers on a version of the show that was staged in 2021 in St. Louis at the Muny, one of the nation’s biggest musical theater venues. For that staging, David Landay, the only one of the 1982 show’s four writers who is alive, added a prologue and revised the plot so that the women foil the kidnapping attempt but, bored with life in their small town, opt to flee voluntarily with their would-be abductors.Landay hoped there would be more productions to breathe new life into a tired title.A modernized version of the “Seven Brides” musical was staged at the Muny in St. Louis in 2021.via MunyBut according to a lawsuit filed this week in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, the heirs of his deceased collaborators, Al Kasha, Lawrence Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn, would not agree to productions beyond the one at the Muny. Landay, represented by Lita Beth Wright, argues in the lawsuit that the heirs are breaching their contract with him by unreasonably withholding their consent.Although it was a flop on Broadway, the original musical is admired by some for a few songs and its exuberant dance numbers. An outdoor production in London in 2015 received mostly positive reviews, although with qualifiers, like the one in The Standard: “some of the most dubious gender politics — and there’s a lot to choose from — in musical theater.”So when Mike Isaacson, the Muny’s artistic director and executive producer, thought about staging the show during a pandemic summer (the Muny’s shows are outdoors), he was clear about the conditions. The story would have to be revised.“The criteria I have is that if there’s a woman sitting there with her daughter, what is it that they’re receiving,” he said in an interview, adding that the female characters in the original version were “guileless and passive.”He added: “It’s one of those shows that audiences love and have great affection for, but when you look at it, it’s really challenging to do now — in the original version, there are not a lot of good choices being made. The music is gorgeous, and the barn dancing is epic, and there’s a decent love story for the two leading characters, but it’s one of those shows that belongs to another era.”In the lawsuit, Landay, who wrote the original book with Lawrence Kasha, is seeking at least $250,000 in damages as well as the right to pursue future productions of the revised version.“Because of #MeToo it had become outdated,” he said in an interview. “Before that, it was done all over the world.” He added, “The version I came up with, now I want to get it out there so people can enjoy it.”The defendants could not be reached for comment. More

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      ‘Alphaville’: A Film That Feels Brand-New

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      Jean-Luc Godard’s hard-boiled sci-fi movie from 1965 returns in a restored version at IFC Center.Cinephiles of a certain age have a Jean-Luc Godard film that when first seen, blew their minds. Mine was Godard’s low-budget foray into dystopian science fiction, “Alphaville.”Having opened the 1965 New York Film Festival, which called it the “first successful incursion of pop art into the cinema,” “Alphaville” returns in a restored, re-subtitled print at the IFC Center, starting Dec. 15.Call it pop art, meta-noir, sci-fi neorealism or the underground precursor to the overblown, effects-driven superhero movies of the 21st century. “Alphaville” inserted itself into popular cinema by appropriating an existing movie icon, the hard-boiled detective Lemmy Caution, played in seven French thrillers by the frog-faced American actor Eddie Constantine.Thanks to Constantine, “Alphaville” is remarkably close to a “normal” movie (by Godardian standards). And thanks to Godard, Lemmy — one icon among many — lives in a self-aware movie universe. My own eureka moment came when, dispatched to find the German pulp character Harry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff), Lemmy asks him if their colleagues Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon are dead.“Alphaville” is pure pop in the form of gritty vérité — shot on high-speed, black-and-white film almost entirely at night and largely in the then-new Paris business district La Défense. As outrageously callous and bluntly stylized as a comic strip, mayhem is accentuated by Paul Misraki’s start-stop, hyper-melodramatic score, while tough-guy Lemmy quotes Paul Éluard.Inventive and pragmatic, Godard transformed ordinary objects into futuristic gizmos: That a jukebox stands for a spy console, a cigarette lighter receives radio transmissions, an electric fan denotes the supercomputer Alpha 60 and the computer’s flat, guttural croak is that of a man with a prosthetic voice box, is a form of surrealism.Godard was pragmatic in other ways, too. Richard Brody’s biography, “Everything Is Cinema,” suggests that “Alphaville” was designed to get Anna Karina, who divorced the director just before filming began, to say the words “I love you.” She does at the end of the film. Audiences did not. Present at the movie’s premiere, the Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris “felt waves of hatred washing up on the screen.”The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, also there, noted that Godard’s “excessively cinematic prank,” provoked annoyance when, shifting gears midway through, it became “a tedious tussle with intellectual banalities.” Perhaps, but to paraphrase Umberto Eco’s essay on cult films and “Casablanca,” where two clichés make us laugh, a hundred clichés make a myth — in this case Orpheus and Eurydice. (In “Alphaville,” Cocteau’s version is referred to throughout.)Like “1984” and any number of recent opinion pieces, “Alphaville” equates totalitarianism with the debasement of language and allegiance to the algorithm. That it makes its points audio-visually may be why many artists prized the film. The conceptualist Mel Bochner celebrated “Alphaville” with a photo-text grid published in 1968 in Arts Magazine. Decades later, MoMA PS1 hosted a show of contemporary art inspired by Godard called “Postcards From Alphaville.”Those artworks have dated but the film hasn’t. Digitally restored, “Alphaville” not only looks but feels brand-new. The “intellectual banalities” that bored Crowther are so insistently contemporary that “Alphaville” could have been made in 2023. If by some time-traveling Borgesian twist of fate it were, Godard’s film would have been my candidate for the year’s best.AlphavilleOpens on Friday at the IFC Center in Manhattan; ifccenter.com. More

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      ‘Immediate Family’ Review: Unpacking a Musical Kinship

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      The session musicians who helped create the soundtrack of 1970s pop step into the spotlight in the director Denny Tedesco’s documentary.“Immediate Family,” Denny Tedesco’s amiable documentary, could use a subtitle, as it’s not an intimate domestic portrait. It focuses on the currently touring rock band that comprises session players who defined the sound of American pop and rock in the 1970s, while for decades playing with the likes of James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Carole King, Stevie Nicks, Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon and more.Tedesco is the son of the West Coast guitar great Tommy Tedesco, and he clearly has a knack for getting musicians to open up. The band members — the guitarists Danny Kortchmar, Waddy Wachtel, Steve Postell; the bassist Leland Sklar; and the drummer Russ Kunkel — all relate their individual bios in relaxed, candid fashion. “Immediate Family” takes its time limning their skills and showing how they survived the 1980s, when session gigs became scarce. (Kortchmar’s remedy was to embrace new music technology and use it to boost Don Henley’s solo career after the Eagles disbanded.)Kortchmar’s playing is always in the service of the song and whatever depths that song is trying to plumb. Kunkel’s drumming is metronomically perfect, with powerful fills. Sklar’s sinuous bass playing reminds one of the influential jazz legend Steve Swallow, with a more pop sensibility. And Wachtel is a rhythm master with a bottomless bag of licks and leads. The chord structure of Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” is elemental, but Wachtel’s practically nonstop nasty embellishments make lines like “He’ll rip your lungs out, Jim” really sing. Postell, a decade younger than Sklar, the most-senior bandmate, has a varied background that includes time with David Crosby, who appears here singing the praises of all of these musicians.Their stories are often funny, like one in which Wachtel recounts hammering out “Werewolves” all night with guest rhythm players Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, only to conclude that they had nailed the song on Take 2.Immediate FamilyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Godard Cinema’ Review: A Convention-Defying Auteur

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      This documentary looks at the work of Jean-Luc Godard, who sought with each new work to confound assumptions about how movies could look and sound.Making sense of the career of Jean-Luc Godard is both impossible and contrary to the spirit of his art. More than any other filmmaker, Godard, over six decades of features, sought with each new work to confound assumptions about how movies could look and sound. He long ago left behind intelligibility, at least in the conventional sense.But if an overview were your goal, Cyril Leuthy’s documentary “Godard Cinema” — which had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September 2022, just eight days before Godard’s death at 91 — acquits itself reasonably well. It refuses to reduce Godard’s output to the relatively accessible French New Wave period and tries to deal with him in all his thorniness.There is Godard the film lover turned film director, who had made a decisive break with his childhood and who, beginning with “Breathless” in 1960, rewrote the rules of cinematic storytelling. His work continued to defy precepts of commercialism, language and politics. Interviewed in the documentary, Marina Vlady, the star of Godard’s “2 or 3 Things I Know About Her” (1967), recalls the difficulty of acting the complicated texts that the director would read into her earpiece.Leuthy’s survey doesn’t ignore Godard’s bizarre flirtation with Maoism or the abrasive, often-neglected films he made with the politicized Dziga Vertov Group, in a period that forced him to acknowledge the contradiction of making art collectively in an auteurist medium. (The filmmaker Romain Goupil recalls that holding majority votes during the editing process wasn’t really suited to Godard the poet.)Rebirth came, oddly, in part because of Godard’s interest in video. The 1975 unveiling of “Numéro Deux,” which harnessed and interrogated the technology, was “really a moment when Godard allows himself for the first time in a long time to say ‘I,’” the film historian Antoine de Baecque says. And from there, Godard never stopped.For many, the attraction at Film Forum, where “Godard Cinema” opens this week, is not the documentary but the short that precedes it, a final work from Godard screening under the title “Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars.” It is essentially storyboards in motion: The cinematographer Fabrice Aragno has described it as an offshoot of Godard’s preparations to adapt a 1937 novel, “False Passports,” that won its author, Charles Plisnier, the Goncourt Prize.The short is filled with cryptic witticisms (“It’s hard to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if it’s not there”), abstract artwork, photographs, film clips (from Godard’s own “Notre Musique”) and even Godard himself in voice-over explaining his ideas about Plisnier (“He was more like a painter than a writer”). That’s after the sound kicks in, which takes a while.Godard CinemaNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Greta Gerwig, ‘Barbie’ Director, to Head Cannes Film Festival Jury

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      The director and writer behind “Barbie,” “Little Women” and “Lady Bird” will help pick the winner of next year’s Palme d’Or, the festival’s main prize.This year’s Cannes Film Festival didn’t host the biggest movie of the year — “Barbie” — but the film’s director and co-writer, Greta Gerwig, will have a significant role at next year’s event.Cannes’s organizers announced on Thursday that Gerwig will lead the jury at the 77th edition of the glitzy festival, scheduled to run from May 14-25, a role in which she will help decide the winner of the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize.Gerwig will be the first-ever female American director to take the role. And at 40, she will be the second youngest person to be jury president, following Sophia Loren, the Italian actress, who was 31 when she chaired the jury in 1966.Thierry Frémaux, the festival’s artistic director, and Iris Knobloch, its president, called Gerwig the “obvious choice” for the role. The director, writer and actress, they added in a joint statement, “audaciously embodies the renewal of world cinema” and “is also the representative of an era that is breaking down barriers and mixing genres, and thereby elevating the values of intelligence and humanism.”Gerwig, who is also known for movies including “Frances Ha” (which she co-wrote and starred in), “Lady Bird” and “Little Women” (which she both wrote and directed) said in the news release announcing her appointment that she was “stunned and thrilled and humbled” to have been named the jury president.“As a cinephile, Cannes has always been the pinnacle of what the universal language of movies can be,” Gerwig added: “I cannot wait to see what journeys are in store for all of us.”The lineup for next year’s festival is scheduled to be announced in April. More

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      A ‘Polar Express’ Character Comes to Life

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      Nia Wilkerson has spent years hearing that she looks like the girl from “The Polar Express.” On TikTok, she’s leaning into it.“Oh my God! You’re the girl from ‘The Polar Express,’” a tourist yelled at Nia Wilkerson.Dressed in a pink nightgown, Ms. Wilkerson was dancing in front of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center in Midtown Manhattan for a TikTok video.Over the course of the next two hours on Monday afternoon, dozens more people stopped and stared. Many of them filmed her from afar or asked to take selfies with her.“Wait, are you really the girl from the movie?” a passer-by asked.The answer to that question is no. Ms. Wilkerson, a senior at St. John’s University in Queens, was 3 years old in 2004, when “The Polar Express” was released.The movie, a box office hit directed by Robert Zemeckis that was based on a children’s book by Chris Van Allsburg, has long drawn criticism because of its brand of motion-capture animation, which gives its characters an eerie, zombified look.Hero Girl in a scene from “The Polar Express,” a 2004 movie made with motion-capture animation that has been criticized for the odd look of its characters.Ms. Wilkerson, 22, said that ever since she was an elementary school student in Woodbridge, Va., people had been telling her she looks like Hero Girl, a character in the film who is also known as Holly. Later, a high school crush pointed out the resemblance.“That was heartbreaking,” she joked.Since then, Ms. Wilkerson, who stands five foot tall, has come to embrace her digital doppelgänger. This is the fourth holiday season she has spent making TikTok videos in the guise of Hero Girl. Each year, her popularity has grown. She now has nearly a 250,000 followers.

      @niasporin ♬ original sound – $ Ms. Wilkerson said she got the idea after seeing another woman on TikTok cosplaying as the character. “But she didn’t really look like her,” she said.In “The Polar Express,” Holly wears pigtails and a patterned pink nightgown. Ms. Wilkerson goes with a variation on the look for her TikToks.“It’s a seasonal gig,” she said, adding that she was recently swarmed by people in Elmo costumes while making a video in Times Square.Ms. Wilkerson posed with her fans in Rockefeller Center.Scott Rossi for The New York TimesAccompanying her on Monday were several of her St. John’s classmates, who acted as her unpaid film crew. “My friendship is my payment,” Ms. Wilkerson joked, adding she had bought the group food at the campus dining hall during the weeks of filming.She used to suffer from social anxiety, she said, but her TikTok alter ego has helped her overcome it. “No one in New York cares,” she said. “I would never do this anywhere else.”Ms. Wilkerson, who is studying television and film at St. John’s, has found ways to profit from her 15 minutes of seasonal fame. She participates in TikTok’s creator fund, a program that the company uses to pays certain people who make videos for the platform, she said. Musicians have reached out to her about making videos, she added. Her rate is about $250 per video, she said. Outside of the holiday season, she makes videos on other topics, but her views drop off precipitously.While most of the feedback has been positive, Ms. Wilkerson said she no longer read the replies to her videos, after having seen too many racist comments. Still, there have been upsides to her social media fame, like a recent collaboration with @jerseyyjoe, a popular TikTok creator known for his dance moves who sometimes makes videos dressed as Hero Boy from “The Polar Express.”

      @jerseyyjoe The duo you never expected 🤣🚊🔥 ( DC: ME ) #jerseyclub #jerseyyjoe #jersey #trend #viral #fyp ♬ the polar express jersey club – Ali Beats After an afternoon of shooting, Ms. Wilkerson and her friends discussed their upcoming final exams while waiting for an F train on a subway station platform. Ms. Wilkerson mentioned an earlier subway video, during which she had accidentally kicked a passenger.After boarding a rush-hour train car, they wriggled into formation to film another TikTok. One of Ms. Wilkerson’s friends, Amanda Gopie, 20, pointed at a sign that read: “Don’t be someone’s subway story. Courtesy counts.”“That’s you,” Ms. Gopie said, to laughs from the others in the group.As the F train rolled toward Queens, Ms. Wilkerson and her friends recorded themselves singing “When Christmas Comes to Town,” a song from “The Polar Express.”“The best time of the year, when everyone comes home,” Ms. Wilkerson began.As her friends joined in to form a shaky chorus, a few riders perked their heads up in recognition. One told the singers to work on their pitch. The group decided they’d try another take. More

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      Teo Yoo and John Magaro on ‘Past Lives’ and Inyeon

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      It’s fitting, maybe, that the male leads of the continent-spanning “Past Lives” had to do their joint interview from different countries. John Magaro hopped on the video call from Budapest, where he was filming a new project, while Teo Yoo joined from Los Angeles, where he had traveled to attend November’s starry Art+Film Gala at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.“It was quite overwhelming for me,” Yoo told us, still reeling from the party. “You try to look nice and be present, and not freak out when you shake hands with Keanu Reeves and Pedro Pascal.”Both men, who are in their 40s, felt fortunate to still be celebrating “Past Lives.” The movie has come on strong at the start of awards season, earning the top prize at November’s Gotham Awards and a strong haul of five Golden Globe nominations this week, including a key one for best drama. Directed by Celine Song, the film stars Greta Lee as Nora, a Korean immigrant living in New York whose marriage to good-natured Arthur (Magaro) is tested by a visit from her childhood sweetheart, Hae Sung (Yoo).It’s the most delicate of love triangles, because Nora can’t simply choose one or the other: Hae Sung is her Korean past and Arthur is her American present, and she must hold space for both in order to feel complete. Still, the carefully calibrated performances from Yoo and Magaro have had audiences swooning. (The Times critic Alissa Wilkinson called the men “magnificent.”) As each gazes at Nora, wondering if she will return his love, the accumulation of all their loaded glances is almost certain to break your heart.Greta Lee with Magaro and Yoo in the film. “Each and every one of us were, at one moment in time, working in that neighborhood as struggling actors,” Yoo said. A24“I don’t think I’ve ever been a part of something quite like this,” Magaro said. “To continue to be in the conversation of films, especially at this time of the year when such enormous things are coming out with a lot more power behind them, it’s been really nice. It’s one of those little films that could.”Much is made in “Past Lives” about inyeon, the Korean concept of destiny, and Yoo referred to it frequently when describing the film’s long tail. For the actor, who grew up in Cologne, Germany, and now works primarily in South Korea, “Past Lives” has been a major breakthrough since its Sundance Film Festival debut in January.“Oh my God, I was a mess,” Yoo said, recalling how he felt after the premiere there. “But I want to put John on the spot. John, have you seen it with an audience yet?”Not yet, Magaro admitted: The movie is simply too special to him. “If it’s a film that I don’t have so much invested in, I’m more inclined to watch it with an audience,” he said. “But because we all left a big piece of ourselves on the screen for this one, it’s just been hard for me to have the courage.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.“I knew people would make it, like, ‘me vs. Teo,’ but that’s not what the film is about,” Magaro said.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesWhat sort of reactions did you get when the film came out this summer?JOHN MAGARO I knew people would make it, like, “me vs. Teo,” but that’s not what the film is about. This is not “Twilight,” this is not Edward and Jacob. If I’m being honest about it, it bothered me that some audience members have turned it into that kind of movie, but it’s been really nice to see the people who are really seeing the deeper message of what Celine was trying to do. This is much more than just a story of unrequited love — it’s about something that’s deep and cosmic.YOO I think it also depends on the amount of life experience an audience member has had and what they can perceive. Maybe they will come back to the film at some point and they will say, “Oh my God, I hadn’t seen that other layer.”MAGARO The heart of the story is her coming to terms with who she is and choosing herself instead of being defined by either of the two men. It’s the idea of standing on your own two legs and being able to have one foot in the past and one foot in the present, and still being OK with that. I think that’s a lovely notion.What did your wives think of the movie?MAGARO My wife is Korean American, too, so she saw a lot of parallels between her own life and her own family story. She isn’t an immigrant herself, but her folks came here in their university days and she was first-generation. There is a piece of her that is still back in Korea and there’s a piece of her that is part of whatever this American experience is, so she felt very connected to the story and pretty emotional about it.YOO My wife already thinks of it as a modern classic. She thinks it’s going to be one of those movies that people are going to talk about throughout the future.What was going on in your lives when the script for “Past Lives” came to you?YOO I was in the middle of shooting a reality TV show in South Korea.MAGARO What?YOO Yeah. It was during Covid, and I was on a small island with a few celebrities on a cooking show. It was for newlyweds who didn’t have a chance during the pandemic to go on their honeymoon, so we were providing this extra special experience for them, and I was cooking my butt off every day for two weeks.MAGARO I got the script right before the pandemic. My wife was pregnant at the time, and we had just moved into our new place in Brooklyn. I remember loving the script and wanting to be a part of it, but then Covid hit and it was gone. That summer, there were some rumblings that it was coming back but they were going much younger. I think they had cast Teo’s role, and it was a younger guy. Then that all broke down and they needed old people to do it, so they called the nursing home and we came out.YOO I remember Celine saying the initial idea for the film was conceived when she was 29, so she thought she needed to write it for 20-year-olds. And as the film progressed, she turned 30, and then became early 30s, so then she needed to revise it — she matured, and the characters needed to mature. So in this way, we met, and this is how inyeon comes into play.“To be an East Asian actor and not have to lean against tropes like martial arts and comedy, but to be a romantic lead and be accepted as that with the power of my talent?” Yoo said. “That’s really something to me.”It’s funny that the film was conceived prepandemic because so much of it feels even more relatable now, like the frequent video calls between Nora and Hae Sung.MAGARO That’s one of those inyeon things Teo was talking about. If this movie came out before Covid, would it have resonated as much? I mean, look at what we’re doing right now on Zoom. The whole idea of me being in this part of the world and you being in the other part of the world is so much more universal.How did the two of you get to know each other?MAGARO We were kept apart until the scene where the two characters actually meet. We were really lucky to have a crew of people who were able to facilitate Celine’s wish, so that night when we finally did meet, we got to share this real experience that made it into the movie. But after that, we went back and hung out in our trailers for a while. We had a drink, we had a toast and we got to break the ice a little bit.YOO It was a relief, after all the pent-up stress.MAGARO Yeah, because Celine wanted Greta to talk about him to me, and about me to him. That night, we got to hang out and let our hair down.YOO On my end, I feel like there was an unspoken bond of trust. I’d never met you, but just seeing your body of work and the person you are, I knew that the moment that we would meet and work together, there will be something of a shared brotherhood.And all that lent an electric charge to the bar scene you have together.MAGARO That’s one of my favorite scenes that I’ve ever done, actually. First of all, it was our chance to finally share a moment. All this mythology had been built up around each other, and we got to sit there in the bar and talk man to man and play a scene that was written so beautifully, showing these men who were not combative men. Although they’re both jealous, they could temper that.YOO Yeah, I always talk about it in terms of vulnerability. I’ve watched a few of those YouTube reactions to the movie, and I see those faces that they make: “Ooh, awkward.” And I’m like, yeah, that’s exactly the sweet spot, that vulnerability, because it gives way to human beings who are able to get hurt a little more, but that also gives human beings kind of a passage to get loved a little more. That vulnerability is a space that is a bit more needed nowadays, and I feel people are seeking that out and thirsting for that.How did you feel when you wrapped the film?YOO First of all, there was a tremendous sigh of relief. I felt this heavy burden was lifted off my shoulders because I’m not at all a person like Hae Sung: I don’t live with a lot of repressed emotions, so it was really, really hard to live in that bubble for those seven, eight weeks. But there was a scene we shot in St. Mark’s Place and one moment in between takes where we didn’t go back into our trailers. We were cherishing the moment because each and every one of us were, at one moment in time, working in that neighborhood as struggling actors and bartending somewhere around the corner. And now we were all leading actors with our names tagged to the back of our chairs in an A24 film in the middle of New York City.Teo, you came to New York as a young man to study acting but didn’t see opportunities there to play characters you could relate to. How does it feel to come back and star in a film like this?YOO It feels like a dream come true, who am I kidding? To be an East Asian actor and not have to lean against tropes like martial arts and comedy, but to be a romantic lead and be accepted as that with the power of my talent? That’s really something to me. I’m really, really lucky, and I don’t take it lightly.How close is your current path to the one you imagined you’d be walking?MAGARO Not this at all. I think a similarity between me and Teo is that you’re from Cologne, I’m from Ohio — we’re from places where this didn’t really exist. I went to school, I stumbled ass-backwards into agents in New York, and I thought maybe I’ll work in regional theater or something like that because the idea of film was so alien to me. I try to keep a level head because it’s weird to work with people who you had posters on your wall of, you know?YOO Totally.MAGARO And when you get to work on films like this, it’s surreal. You are part of this magic that you grew up loving and not knowing how to reach. And even for a moment, you get to peek in and touch it and taste it. I’m getting emotional, actually, saying this. It’s beyond words, but no, I never expected this.YOO Me neither. I mean, in a faint way, in the distance maybe you dream about it and you hope for it. But initially, after my studies in New York, I thought I would be a street performer in Europe, to be honest with you. I really thought I would be performing in parks for children, doing juggling acts. My wife helped me to set my mind into a different trajectory to go to Korea and then get cast in film and television, but I had my mind set on something like a nomad lifestyle.I guess that’s where we all are coming from: If the industrialized world wouldn’t have had invented the magic of light and cinema, we would still be on the back of a carriage going from town to town, from village to village, gathering people around and telling stories. Now, we just do it in a more heightened and luxurious way. More

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      ‘Home Alone,’ ‘Fame,’ and Apollo 13’ Join National Film Registry

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      These movies, along with “Bamboozled” and “Home Alone,” are among 25 selected by the Librarian of Congress.It was a year for the underdogs.Two films that initially received mixed receptions but that later came to be considered groundbreaking in their own way — Spike Lee’s satire of blackface in cinema, “Bamboozled” (2000), and Tim Burton’s stop-motion animated Disney musical “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993) — are among the motion pictures that have been selected for preservation this year in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry.Also being added are “Apollo 13” (1995), the Ron Howard space drama about the quest to save American astronauts after the failed 1970 lunar landing, and “Twelve Years a Slave” (2013), the Steve McQueen-helmed narrative that won three Academy Awards, including best picture.The library on Wednesday announced all 25 films, dating from 1921 to 2013, that are being honored this year for their historical, cultural or aesthetic significance. Movies are chosen by the Librarian of Congress, in consultation with other experts.The library also allows the public to make nominations at its website, and this year people nominated more than 6,800 films. Titles that were among the most submitted, and that have now been added to the list, include Chris Columbus’s holiday comedy “Home Alone” (1990), which vaulted Macaulay Culkin to stardom as a plucky youngster who uses his creativity to foil two bungling burglars; and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991), the James Cameron sci-fi sequel that became a landmark study in the use of CGI special effects.Two documentaries selected concern battles for representation. The Oscar-winning “Helen Keller in Her Story” (1954), by Nancy Hamilton, follows its subject, who was deaf and blind, from her childhood frustration to global success as an author, lecturer and activist for the rights of women and disabled people. “We’re Alive” (1974) chronicles six months of roundtables at the California Institution for Women that drew attention to inhumane prison conditions. The conversations were led by three U.C.L.A. graduate students, Michie Gleason, Christine Lesiak and Kathy Levitt.The experiences of Asian Americans are also centered in several new selections: “Cruisin’ J-Town” (1975), Duane Kubo’s documentary about jazz musicians in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo; the Bohulano Family home movies about a Filipino American community in Stockton, Calif. from the 1950s through the 1970s; and “Maya Lin: A Strong, Clear Vision” (1994), Freida Lee Mock’s Oscar-winning documentary about the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall.Three films that experimented with new forms and techniques were also selected: “The Lighted Field” (1987), Andrew Noren’s silent avant-garde masterwork that traffics in sensual shadow-play; “Queen of Diamonds” (1991), a drama by Nina Menkes, filmed in Las Vegas, that contrasts the noise and neon of the city with the quiet, lonely lives of its residents; and “The Lady and the Tramp” (1955), the Disney animated romance between a spoiled cocker spaniel and a mutt, which was praised for its fuller character development and distinguished by its use of a wide-screen CinemaScope format.The lineup also recognizes the debut features of several award-winning filmmakers: Martin Ritt’s noir drama “Edge of the City” (1957), which stars Sidney Poitier as a dockworker whose friendship with a white co-worker (John Cassavetes) aggravates a racist union leader; Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “Love & Basketball” (2000), a romantic sports drama that follows a boy and girl as they pursue basketball careers from childhood; and “¡Alambrista!” (1977), a small-budget film by Robert Young — often shot with a shaky, hand-held camera — that follows a farmer who enters the United States from Mexico undocumented, seeking work to support his family, which incorporates elements of guerrilla and activist filmmaking.Finally, New Yorkers — or those who love New York — will find a lot to like on the list this year: Choices for a Manhattan-set adventure include “Fame” (1980), Alan Parker’s teen musical drama about the High School of Performing Arts; “Desperately Seeking Susan” (1985), Susan Seidelman’s wackball of a film that follows an unhappy New Jersey housewife (Rosanna Arquette) down a rabbit hole of personal ads and mistaken identity; and “The Wedding Banquet” (1993), Ang Lee’s comedy about a gay Taiwanese man in New York who marries a Chinese woman to appease his parents back home (high jinks ensue when they decide to pay the “couple” a visit).The Library of Congress said in a statement that these additions bring to 875 the number of titles on the registry created to preserve the nation’s film heritage.” Eligible movies must be at least 10 years old. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, made the choices after consulting with members of the National Film Preservation Board and others. Some registry films are also available online in the National Screening Room.A television special, featuring several of these titles and a conversation between Hayden and Jacqueline Stewart, the film historian who directs the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, will be shown Dec. 14 on TCM.Below are the 25 new additions to the National Film Registry:1. “A Movie Trip Through Filmland” (1921)2. “Dinner at Eight” (1933)3. Bohulano Family film collection (1950s-70s)4. “Helen Keller in Her Story” (1954)5. “Lady and the Tramp” (1955)6. “Edge of the City” (1957)7. “We’re Alive” (1974)8. “Cruisin’ J-Town” (1975)9. “¡Alambrista!” (1977)10. “Passing Through” (1977)11. “Fame” (1980)12. “Desperately Seeking Susan” (1985)13. “The Lighted Field” (1987)14. “Matewan” (1987)15. “Home Alone” (1990)16. “Queen of Diamonds” (1991)17. “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991)18. “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993)19. “The Wedding Banquet” (1993)20. “Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision” (1994)21. “Apollo 13” (1995)22. “Bamboozled” (2000)23. “Love & Basketball” (2000)24. “Twelve Years a Slave” (2013)25. “20 Feet From Stardom” (2013) More