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      How “Bottoms” Reinvents the Coming-of-Age Fight Scene

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      The hero vs. bully template made famous in the ’80s gets subverted in this indie comedy, as well as in Hulu’s “Miguel Wants to Fight.”The director Emma Seligman narrates a sequence from “Bottoms,” featuring Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri.Orion Pictures Inc.You know the setup: one boy, the underdog, is forced to face off with a boy with more social clout — and, likely, more muscles. They’re in the gym, the hallway, or the schoolyard, and by the time the last punch is thrown, the underdog, our hero, has taken his first steps into manhood.For decades the school scrap was a prevailing coming-of-age trope in movies and TV. The ’80s produced some of the most memorable scenes, whether it was Clifford versus Moody in “My Bodyguard” or Ralphie versus Scut in “A Christmas Story.” Then in 1993, Richard Linklater gave us the memorable freshmen versus the paddle-swinging Fred O’Bannion and his cohort of sadistic seniors in “Dazed and Confused”; and in 2002, Sam Raimi offered Peter Parker decking Flash Thomspon in high school. Even SpongeBob has found himself caught in a boating school scuffle with a classmate.But teen brawling onscreen has since evolved to becoming more than just a metaphor for boys at the cusp of adulthood learning to assert their masculinity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the queer sex comedy “Bottoms,” which de-genders and subverts the boorish maleness of the school tussle as a male developmental milestone, ultimately making it about young women asserting their identities and pushing back against convention.PJ and Josie are best friends who start a female fight club at their high school, with the goal of losing their virginity to two popular cheerleaders. The entire premise of this delightfully absurd offbeat comedy is predicated on two young women using a narrative often tied to masculinity to their advantage. PJ specifically models the concept of the extracurricular on “Fight Club,” which also works as a meta-commentary: The girls in “Bottoms” are flipping gender in the same way “Bottoms” itself is reworking the testosterone-pumped, fist-bumping, male-targeted genre of fight movies like that much-worshipped film. (“I love David Fincher,” one of the girls gushes about the “Fight Club” director in passing as she walks into the first club meeting.)Rachel Sennott, Havana Rose Liu and Ayo Edebiri in “Bottoms.”Orion PicturesWhereas that Brad Pitt vehicle rewards the savagery of its virile men with sex, violence and destruction, their aggression brimming with homoerotic undertones, “Bottoms” offers its girls the same gratification, but with more comedy and explicit queerness.PJ and Josie take male posturing to the extreme, capitalizing on a rumor about their being hardened juvenile delinquents. Even when it seems they’ll be called on their bluff, they double down, as when, early in their charade, PJ goads Josie into punching her in front of the group of their peers and Josie ends up on the floor smiling, blood streaking down her chin. The girls’ popularity soars. So does their self-confidence. Somehow, these girls aimlessly bruise and bloody one another into a sense of camaraderie, even newfound strength.The movie’s wry gender subversions extend to its ridiculous depiction of PJ and Josie’s male peers, specifically the jocks, who spend the entire movie in their football uniforms. Despite these guys wearing the armor of masculine dude-bros — literally, protective shoulder pads included — “Bottoms” often makes them effeminate. They fit more squarely into a misogynist’s stereotype of women: They’re petty, sensitive, underhanded and, ultimately, the ones who need saving by the end of the movie. (The one notable exception is an example of the opposite extreme, masculinity gone wild in the form of a feral male student who spends his school days locked in a cage.)Tyler Dean Flores in “Miguel Wants to Fight.”Brett Roedel/HuluAnother recent film, “Miguel Wants to Fight,” on Hulu, also pokes holes in displays of violent masculinity, albeit with less of a payoff. Miguel is a teenage boy who also doesn’t really meet the criteria for the uber-masculine Tyler Durden type. He lives in a neighborhood where fighting is everything: Kids get into brawls on the regular, and guys who dominate in the boxing ring are revered as local heroes. Despite all this, and the fact that his father is a boxing coach, Miguel is the only one of his friends who hasn’t been in a fight. When Miguel learns his family’s moving in a week, he decides he must get into a fight before he leaves.But Miguel hesitates on the sidelines as his three buddies come to blows with another group of peers. The one scuffle he gets into involves more awkward embraces than punches. Miguel is more apt to make friends with an opponent than fight them. Even his fantasy fight sequences, in which he imagines himself as the star of his own anime or martial arts movie, sometimes end with him emasculated. In one, he wears a yellow tracksuit like Bruce Lee’s in “Game of Death” as he faces off against a bully; even after Miguel lands a strike the bully simply laughs and asks why he’s “dressed like the chick from ‘Kill Bill.’”Instead of framing the fight as Miguel’s great hurdle to self-assurance and maturity, the movie shows how Miguel’s obsession with fighting is misguided, just a distraction from the anxiety and sorrow he feels about moving away from his friends. The pressure Miguel puts on himself is all internal; he thinks his father wants a fighter son when his father just wants him to be happy and safe. Every fight scenario either causes Miguel embarrassment or ends with him selfishly alienating his friends. And when Miguel does finally get into a fight, it’s not the heroic, cinematic experience he imagined. In fact, he says to his buddy, “It sucked,” throwing in an expletive for good measure.This is the ultimate subversion that the two films pull off: While “Bottoms” ends with its female protagonists getting into a massive, bloody gladiator-esque battle and reigning victorious, the coming-of-age movie that’s actually about a boy getting into a fight ends with a 36-second tussle and a sweet reconciliation between bros.So perhaps that old saying is wrong: Fighting is sometimes the answer. It just depends on who’s throwing the punches — and what’s at stake. More

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      Streaming Horror: ‘Marry My Dead Body,’ ‘Good Boy’ and More

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      This month’s picks will take you on a global tour of terror, with tales of a Taiwanese gay ghost and a Norwegian canine whose owner is a dog’s worst friend.‘Marry My Dead Body’Stream it on Netflix.There’s nothing remotely terrifying in this charming opposites-attract ghost comedy, a box office hit in Taiwan. Give it a shot if your taste in scary movies is the flavor of Horror Lite with a side of screwball romantic (ish) comedy.When Wu Ming-han (Greg Hsu), a homophobic police officer, picks up a red envelope on the street, he gets roped into the folk ritual of a ghost marriage, a wedding to a dead person. His betrothed is Mao Mao (Austin Lin), a gay man who was killed in a hit-and-run and who still carries a torch for his ex-boyfriend. Despite their differences, the husbands agree to stay married to complete the ritual and solve Mao’s death, and in the process they forge a sweet “Odd Couple”-like companionship.Cheng Wei-hao’s film is a comedy of many kinds — horror, queer, romantic, supernatural — that evolves from a gay panic farce into a slapsticky but heartfelt bromance about forgiveness and the singular power of coming out. Hsu and Lin are winsome leading men with a natural rapport that fuels the film’s goofy gay spirit, which lives somewhere between the endearing British comedy “Kinky Boots” and the cringey cop comedy “Partners.”‘Subject’Stream it on Screambox.On his way to prison, Willem (a terrific Stephen Phillips) gets intercepted by a government agent who offers him the chance to be part of a secret mind-monitoring experiment instead of doing time. Willem agrees, and gets placed in cramped quarters lined with cameras.As the film jumps between Willem’s suffocating present and his harrowing past as a drug-addicted father, it also moves between perspectives and camera styles, including surveillance, digital and even early-era video art. When a monstrous, mummy-like entity appears in an adjacent room and menacingly watches Willem through their shared window, this formally audacious film kicks into high gear as it careers toward a despairing finale.The director Tristan Barr and the writer Vincent Befi seamlessly blend science fiction, horror and psychological thriller as they explore the horrors of addiction and the dangers of a dystopian state. As shot through a low-fi and intensely claustrophobic lens, Befi’s script is both a disorienting cautionary tale and a fever dream. Are Willem’s living nightmares real, or are we watching his life as imagined in his increasingly besieged head? I still don’t know despite a post-credit coda that tries to explain it all — and that’s what makes this one of my favorite under-the-radar horror films of the year.‘Good Boy’Rent or buy on most major platforms.Christian (Gard Lokke) leads a privileged life. He’s loaded, lives on his dead parents’ estate and is blessed with model good looks. And he’s got a cute and devoted dog named Frank. I take that back: He doesn’t have a dog, because Frank is a guy in a dog costume who Christian treats as his full-time canine companion — a hardcore manifestation of puppy play, a dom-sub scenario popular in the kink community.Sigrid (Katrine Lovise Opstad Fredriksen), who Christian meets on Tinder, at first is weirded out by Frank. But eventually she comes around to the situation, and agrees to go with the two on a weekend getaway, where Christian convinces Sigrid to put away her phone. That’s when this Norwegian film takes a sinister twist I didn’t see coming.The writer-director Viljar Boe doesn’t go overboard during most of his entertaining and exploitation-like parable about power, privilege and punishment. But that reserve goes out the window as the film’s enthusiastically sordid final stretch reaches its climax with a symphony of spanking, heavy metal and primal screams. It’s a hoot.‘Insidious Inferno’Rent or buy on major platforms.I lost count of how many conventions — haunted house, demonic possession, supernaturalism, giallo — the writer-director Calvin McCarthy packs into his low-budget meditation on grief and loss. The result is both under and over baked. But it’s also unabatingly odd and enthusiastically macabre, with a soft uncanniness akin to what made the recent weirdo thrillers “Superior” and “Outpost” so darkly entertaining.Monica (Stephanie Leet), reeling from her father’s mysterious death, heads to his secluded cottage with her husband, Andre (Neil Green). There, she hears her father’s deathly screams, has nightmares in red and vomits up chunky blood. To get away from it all, Andre spends time jogging through the forest, where he keeps encountering a strange white-eyed woman (Chynna Rae Shurts, wonderful), whose dire warnings for Andre and Monica to leave the house he ignores with deadly consequences.Stylistically, McCarthy’s giallo touches — frenzied zoom-ins, gasps, saturated red and purple cinematography — are delicious. Bonus: McCarthy gives a loving shout out to Lucio Fulci’s “The Beyond,” one of my favorite giallo films.‘Tell Me a Creepy Story’Stream it on Freevee.Two great scares front load this anthology of four international horror shorts you can stream for free.The best comes first and from the U.K.: Paul Holbrook and Samuel Dawe’s “Hungry Joe.” The title character, played by several actors as he ages, won’t stop eating, and his appetite tests the patience of his increasingly resentful mother (an excellent Laura Bayston). As Joe grows into a feral man-child, his hunger, and the film, take a gruesome turn that asks a difficult question: What responsibilities does a mother have to her not-so-little monster? (All this in just 22 minutes.) ASMR makes my skin crawl, so I was extra creeped out by Joe’s incessant sucking, chomping and slurping.The second film is Félix Dobaire’s gorgeously shot evil vegetable movie “Myosotis.” In French but nearly wordless, it reiterated one of horror’s most important housekeeping life lessons: Never leave a knife in the dishwasher blade side up. More

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      Actors Seeking Stability Turn to Directing at the Toronto Festival

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      Movies directed by actors were prominent at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Could the reasons they’re striking also underlie the career move?By my count, there are 10 movies by actor-turned-directors at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Ten. The majority, including Chris Pine’s “Poolman” and Anna Kendrick’s “Woman of the Hour,” are debuts.I don’t know how many actors choose to be filmmakers at any given moment; “what I really want to do is direct” is a cliché for a reason. But that still seems like a lot. And it is particularly noteworthy right now in Hollywood, when the strikes by the actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, and the Writers Guild of America have revealed how much disparity there can be in pay and in the ownership of one’s work. Not to mention the willingness of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers to make a deal with the Directors Guild of America but not the other creatives.“Actors directing films isn’t unusual,” said Cameron Bailey, the chief executive of the Toronto festival, “but we saw a larger number this year and invited several, before we got news of the strike.” Besides the Kendrick and Pine movies, actors making directorial debuts included Patricia Arquette (“Gonzo Girl”), Kristin Scott Thomas (“North Star”), Kasia Smutniak (“Walls”) and Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk (“Hell of a Summer”).Directing confers control, which confers power, which confers stability, right? At the very least, if you’re directing, you’re not left hanging around.“Everyone is hanging around,” Stacey Sher, one of the “Poolman” producers, told me. “You’re hanging around to get financing. You’re hanging around to get distribution. You’re hanging around to hope that you get a date that connects. You’re hanging around to hope that you get lucky and your campaign clicks and that you’re in the zeitgeist. You’re hanging around hoping that the press likes your movie.” Sher has been producing films for more than 30 years, among them actor-director feature debuts like “Reality Bites” (Ben Stiller) and “Garden State” (Zach Braff).In “Poolman,” for which he also served as a producer and co-screenwriter, Pine plays a Lebowski-style free spirit who ministers a decrepit apartment-complex pool by day and disrupts local council meetings by night. As a director, Pine, who has been acting for two decades, suddenly found himself answering questions about everything around the clock. Sher recalled him telling her, “‘I understand how easy I had it before, just being able to go back and study my lines and prepare and stay in character.’”Though Pine had planned to publicize “Poolman” at Toronto, his support of the strike precluded his attendance because SAG-AFTRA forbids promotions during the labor action. On opening night, Sher presented the film solo, stating: “It is a different premiere and Q. and A. then we had hoped for, but there was never a second where Chris was going to do anything but stand with SAG and the W.G.A.”Pine was returning the favor. He “knew what he wanted and what he wanted was to build a team that could support him in achieving what his goals were cinematically,” Sher said. Patty Jenkins, who had directed the actor in the “Wonder Woman” franchise, was a “Poolman” producer from the start (Ian Gotler was also a producer). Jenkins acted as “directing doula,” available for technical checks and gut checks, Sher said. Pine also worked with the “Wonder Woman” films’ cinematographer, Matthew Jensen. Directing granted him the power to surround himself with people — the kind who are currently striking — who could make his new job easier.“Poolman” was a low-budget film in which almost half of the 22 days was spent shooting in a motel where beds were removed to make way for makeshift offices and dressing rooms, adding to the camaraderie. “I think if you just want the job for control, you’re not going to do a very good job,” Sher said of directing. “The best filmmakers I’ve ever worked with are the most collaborative.”Chris Pine starred in as well as directed “Poolman,” featuring Annette Bening, left, and Danny DeVito.Darren Michaels/ABC Studios“Woman of the Hour” was an exercise in combining the right people in what Miri Yoon — one of several producers on the project along with Kendrick — likened to a kind of “math” problem. Kendrick, who was initially attached only to star, “really drove us over the line,” said Yoon, who recently worked on another major actor-director feature, “Don’t Worry Darling” from Olivia Wilde. It was the way Kendrick interpreted the Black List script by Ian McDonald — a quasi-biopic about the 1970s serial killer Rodney Alcala told through the eyes of women who crossed his path, including a “Dating Game” contestant (Kendrick) — that convinced everyone she should helm.“We’re like, well, what are we doing?” Yoon said. “Why do we even bother going through this whole dog-and-pony show trying to figure out who else can do this movie? Let’s just go.” From that moment, it went fast — about six weeks after Kendrick was tapped to direct, the crew was in prep for a 24-day shoot — and it went hard, with a Vancouver winter standing in for a Los Angeles summer. Despite all of this, the first-time filmmaker was very deliberate, Yoon said: “There’s nothing arbitrary about Anna Kendrick.”I suggested that Kendrick’s preparation might be due to the fact that she’s a woman in the director’s chair, with all the prejudices that entails. Yoon gestured that I had hit it on the nose. While almost half the actor-director films at Toronto are by women, everyone knows by now the challenges female filmmakers face behind the camera. As actress Eva Longoria recently told Variety upon the release of “Flamin’ Hot,” her feature directing debut, “I get one at-bat, one chance, work twice as hard, twice as fast, twice as cheap.”No doubt aware of this calculus, Kendrick herself announced she was “heartbroken” at not being able to attend the Toronto festival for the premiere because of SAG-AFTRA rules. While some independent films have secured interim agreements if they agree to union demands, this year’s festival has seen few American filmmakers and actors doing promotion. Despite that, “Woman of the Hour” still landed the first major sale of the festival in a reported $11 million deal with Netflix.Considering that the stability of Hollywood itself is in question, it is hard to determine whether directing confers more security than having to hang around waiting for an acting job. Neither of the producers I spoke to were able to give a definitive answer, with Yoon saying the industry was still finding its footing in “a landscape that is going through a seismic change.”Bailey, the Toronto festival chief, surmised that the lack of work around the Covid lockdowns led to an abundance of actors directing, an attempt to claim agency over their careers. “I suspect some of these actors used the opportunity of the pandemic disruption to get more personal projects made.” Indeed both Pine and Kendrick have said separately that the pandemic led them to change the way they thought about their work.Yoon did, however, agree that while producing seems to be more about business ownership, directing seems to be more about artistic ownership. She elaborated, “The film’s end result is the sum of many, many, many parts, and the fact that you get to participate in all of those parts, which, as an actor, you don’t necessarily do.”Still, Sher said she thought the reason anyone, including an actor, directs is incredibly personal. “I remember a filmmaker friend of mine said every filmmaker directs for a different value,” Sher explained. “For some people, it’s reality; for some people, it’s about precision, some people performance, some people it’s technical, some aesthetic pleasure. And the more people that are doing it, the more people also realize that it’s an option that they may never have thought that they had.” More

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      C.I.A. Discloses Identity of Second Spy Involved in ‘Argo’ Operation

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      The movie about the daring mission to rescue American diplomats from Tehran portrayed a single C.I.A. officer sneaking into the Iranian capital. In reality, the agency sent two officers.In the midst of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, the C.I.A. began what came to be noted as one of the spy agency’s most successful publicly known operations: the rescue of six American diplomats who had escaped the overrun U.S. Embassy — using a fake movie as the cover story.“Argo,” the real-life 2012 movie about the C.I.A.’s fake movie, portrayed a single C.I.A. officer, Tony Mendez, played by Ben Affleck, sneaking into Tehran to rescue the American diplomats in a daring operation.But in reality, the agency sent two officers into Tehran. For the first time on Thursday, the C.I.A. is releasing the identity of that second officer, Ed Johnson, in the season finale of its new podcast, “The Langley Files.”Mr. Johnson, a linguist, accompanied Mr. Mendez, a master of disguise and forgery, on the flight to Tehran to cajole the diplomats into adopting the cover story, that they were Canadians who were part of a crew scouting locations for a science fiction movie called “Argo.” The two then helped the diplomats with forged documents and escorted them through Iranian airport security to fly them home.Although Mr. Johnson’s name was classified, the C.I.A. had acknowledged a second officer had been involved. Mr. Mendez, who died in 2019, wrote about being accompanied by a second officer in his first book, but used a pseudonym, Julio. A painting that depicts a scene from the operation and hangs in the C.I.A.’s Langley, Va., headquarters, shows a second officer sitting across from Mr. Mendez in Tehran as they forge stamps in Canadian passports. But the second officer’s identity is obscured, his back turned to the viewer.Ed Johnson, right, receiving the C.I.A.’s Intelligence Star from John N. McMahon, the agency’s deputy director for operations at the time, in a photo provided by Mr. Johnson’s family. Mr. Johnson was the long-unidentified second C.I.A. officer in the rescue of six American diplomats from Tehran.The agency began publicly talking about its role in rescuing the diplomats 26 years ago. On the agency’s 50th anniversary, in 1997, the C.I.A. declassified the operation, and allowed Mr. Mendez to tell his story, hoping to balance accounts of some of the agency’s ill-fated operations around the world with one that was a clear success.But until recently, Mr. Johnson preferred that his identity remain secret.“He was someone who spent his whole life doing things quietly and in the shadows, without any expectation of praise or public recognition,” said Walter Trosin, a C.I.A. spokesman and co-host of the agency’s podcast. “And he was very much happy to keep it that way. But it was his family that encouraged him, later in life, to tell his side of the story because they felt there would be value to the world in hearing it.”After Mr. Trosin heard Mr. Johnson and his family were visiting C.I.A. headquarters early this summer, he arranged to meet them. At the meeting, Mr. Trosin and his podcast co-host saw how much the C.I.A.’s recognition of Mr. Johnson’s work meant to his family and started looking for a way to tell the story on the podcast.Mr. Johnson, 80, was unavailable to discuss his career on the podcast or with The New York Times because of health issues. Undeterred, Mr. Trosin dived into the agency’s classified archives.Soon after dangerous operations, the C.I.A. often records secret interviews with the participants, to capture so-called lessons learned for its own, classified histories. In addition, for many storied officers, the C.I.A. records classified oral histories at the end of their careers. C.I.A. historians had done one such oral history with Mr. Johnson.“We found out there was this prior interview,” Mr. Trosin said. “And at least portions of which could be made public.”Thanks to the “Argo” movie, the C.I.A.’s role in the rescue of the diplomats, who were being sheltered by the Canadians, has become one of the agency’s best-known operations.The C.I.A. museum, which has a tendency to dwell on the agency’s failures, features a display on the operation. Among the artifacts is a copy of the script — or at least treatment — of the fake movie complete with the Hollywood-esque tagline “A Cosmic Conflagration.” Also displayed are the business cards of the fake production company used as part of the cover story and the concept art for the movie, which featured drawings from Jack Kirby, the celebrated comic book artist who helped create the Marvel universe.Like the painting, the museum display did not identify Mr. Johnson.A painting depicting a scene from the operation hanging in the C.I.A.’s headquarters shows a second officer sitting across from Tony Mendez as they forge stamps in Canadian passports while in Tehran but does not show his face.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesBut C.I.A. officials said Mr. Johnson, an expert in languages and extracting people from tricky places, was invaluable to the operation.At the time of the hostage crisis, Mr. Johnson was based in Europe, focusing his Cold War work on learning how to get in and out of countries that were not always hospitable to Americans.When Iranian revolutionaries overran the American Embassy and took 52 diplomats hostage, six Americans working in the consular office escaped. They eventually ended up under the protection of Kenneth D. Taylor, Canada’s ambassador to Iran, and the C.I.A. began working on a plan to sneak them out of the country.Mr. Mendez, who had worked with Hollywood experts to hone his tradecraft, came up with the plan to use a fake movie, which he named “Argo” after the story of Jason and the Argonauts, the ancient Greek heroes who had undertaken the arduous mission to retrieve the Golden Fleece.While some C.I.A. extraction operations at the time used single officers, the agency decided that for the rescue of the six diplomats, two officers would be needed, said Brent Geary, a C.I.A. historian who has studied the agency’s history in Iran.Mr. Johnson was fluent in French, German, Spanish and Arabic. He did not, however, speak Persian, the predominant language in Iran.Dr. Geary said the agency had Persian speakers, but could not risk sending in someone who might be known to current or former Iranian officials. The belief was also that someone fluent in the local language could draw questions, and what was critical to the mission was having people with Mr. Mendez’s and Mr. Johnson’s skill sets.“They had trained to get in and out of tight spots,” Dr. Geary said.Even without Persian, Mr. Johnson’s languages came into use. Soon after arriving, Mr. Mendez and Mr. Johnson mistakenly ended up at the Swedish Embassy, across the street from the U.S. Embassy, which was occupied by the Iranian revolutionaries.Tony Mendez, a master of disguise and forgery, was played by Ben Affleck in “Argo.”Mark Makela/Corbis, via Getty ImagesOutside the embassy, Mr. Johnson discovered that both he and the Iranian guard spoke German, and the two began talking. The guard then hailed a taxi and wrote the address of the Canadian Embassy on a piece of paper and sent the two fake movie producers off.“I have to thank the Iranians for being the beacon who got us to the right place,” Mr. Johnson said in his oral history.In the “Argo” movie, Mr. Affleck, portraying Mr. Mendez, is shown swiping Iranian forms that were needed to enter and exit the country. But in reality, it was Mr. Johnson who performed the sleight of hand to steal the documents. (Mr. Affleck did not respond to a request to comment.)In his oral history, Mr. Johnson said the “biggest thing” was to persuade the diplomats that they could pull off the movie team cover story.“These are rookies,” Mr. Johnson recalled in the recorded session. “They were people who were not trained to lie to authorities. They weren’t trained to be clandestine, elusive.”But Mr. Johnson recounted that the six diplomats pulled it off, putting aside their nervousness and adopting the persona of a happy-go-lucky film crew.The climax of the real movie — spoiler alert for a film that has been out for more than a decade — involves Iranian government officials reacting skeptically to the cover story, then realizing the “film crew” were American diplomats and chasing the plane down the runway. None of which happened.In reality, there was simply one last security check as the group left the departure lounge.“A couple of young Iranians, they’re patting people down as they went through,” Mr. Johnson recalled, noting that the diplomats were leaning into their parts, cracking jokes as they approached the checkpoint.With that, the diplomats, Mr. Mendez and Mr. Johnson were through the last checks. In the oral history, Mr. Johnson recalled boarding and seeing the plane’s name painted on the side. It was named Aargau, and Mr. Johnson thought to himself, “What the hell?”“After a bit, I forget when, I picked up The Herald Tribune and did the crossword puzzle,” Mr. Johnson said. “And one of the one of the clues was Jason’s companions … Jason and the Argonauts.”In the C.I.A. podcast, Mr. Trosin said the name of the plane and the crossword were simply coincidences.“To be clear,” Mr. Trosin said, “this is not C.I.A. officers with excess free time just planting clues.” More

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      ‘Rebel’ Review: A Family Caught in the Islamic State’s Snare

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      This musical drama about Islamic extremism (yes, you read that right) crowds out its finer points with spectacle.Directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, “Rebel” is the rare film about Islamic extremism that features musical numbers. These interludes — with actors rapping and singing à la “Hamilton” — are shot like slick dream sequences, indicative of the sprawling drama’s epic ambitions. Instead “Rebel” is cringe-y and off-putting; a sexual assault is envisioned as a highly choreographed dance.The film’s examinations of the horrors perpetrated by the Islamic State, or ISIS, begin in Brussels, where Kamal (Aboubakr Bensaihi), a Moroccan immigrant and amateur rapper, lives with his mother, Leila (Lubna Azabal), and a doting little brother, Nassim (Amir El Arbi). Disgruntled and directionless, Kamal heads to Syria as part of a slipshod humanitarian effort to assist war victims, but almost immediately he’s kidnapped by ISIS and forced to serve as the group’s videographer. Later, with a gun to his head, he’s pushed into becoming an executioner, his crimes captured on camera and disseminated by news networks back home.Nassim, refusing to believe that his brother has gone rogue, is played like putty by an extremist henchman in Brussels who brainwashes the boy into joining the cause. Only 13, Nassim, too, ships out to Syria where he joins a group of child soldiers. In the final section of the film, Leila ventures abroad to find her little boy.At best, this drama picks apart the Islamic State’s nefarious recruitment tactics, taking on the fresh perspective of a Muslim family in Europe. These dynamics are rich, and the consequences agonizing — so it’s too bad the filmmakers seem to think that the bigger the spectacle, the more powerfully communicated this whirlwind of politics and emotions. The opposite is the case.RebelNot rated. In Arabic, French, English and Dutch, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Radical Wolfe’ Review: The Substance of Style

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      This by-the-book documentary about Tom Wolfe, a pioneer of the New Journalism movement, can hardly match the stylistic flair that made the writer famous.For journalism students, it’s lore: The tale of how the famed writer Tom Wolfe sold a story about car customizers to Esquire, was hit by writers’ block and handed in a harried 49-page memo on deadline, which the editor published as is — minting a star and helping to usher in a new trend of literary reportage.Wolfe was a mythmaker who gained a mythical stature, with his white suit, contrarian takes and irreverently vivid way with words. For him, style was a kind of substance. This makes the new film about his life and career, “Radical Wolfe,” something of a letdown: Richard Dewey’s staid, by-the-book documentary can hardly match the flair with which Wolfe lived and wrote.The film adapts a 2015 Vanity Fair article by the writer Michael Lewis, who appears as a talking head alongside Wolfe’s peers, like Gay Talese, and loved ones, including his daughter. Their interviews are rather cursory, mostly touching upon Wolfe’s Southern upbringing and incongruously gracious off-page persona, while the archival footage in the film draws heavily on his television interviews.These offer a dazzling view of a time when long-form journalism held top cultural billing, yet there’s little here that interrogates the man behind the words, his process or his politics. Jamal Joseph, the writer and former Black Panther, is made the sole, thankless critical voice in a rushed section about Wolfe’s notorious New York Magazine piece, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” a mordant account of Leonard Bernstein’s 1970 fund-raiser soiree for the Panther 21.Wolfe’s knack was for translating sights and sounds exuberantly into words. Jon Hamm’s actorly voice-overs of Wolfe’s writing, woven throughout the film, feel impoverished by contrast — a grasp at a master by lesser artists.Radical WolfeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 16 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘A Million Miles Away’ Review: From the Fields to Outer Space

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      In this biopic, a boy from a family of migrant farm workers watches the moon landing in 1969, which ignites his desire to be an astronaut.The dream of being an astronaut was planted in José Hernández (Michael Peña) early, when he and his family were migrant workers in 1960s California. Back when the U.S. immigration policy resembled a revolving door more than a steel wall, tens of thousands of families would travel north to harvest seasonal crops. For his parents, the work was in service of a long-held dream: to build a house in their native Michoacán. The children were frequently uprooted and placed in new schools as the family zigzagged across the state, following the work. It wasn’t until a teacher, Ms. Young (Michelle Krusiec), intervened that the Hernández parents settled in Stockton, Calif., forsaking their dream for their children’s education. That’s where young José saw the 1969 moon landing on T.V., a moment that ignited a lasting passion for flight.Sacrifice, grit, perseverance, tenacity: These are the themes that drive “A Million Miles Away,” directed by Alejandra Márquez Abella and based on José Hernández’s memoir, “Reaching for the Stars: The Inspiring Story of a Migrant Farmworker Turned Astronaut,” a true up-by-the-bootstraps tale. The film spans decades, from childhood to, eventually, the NASA space program. He married Adela (Rosa Salazar), a car saleswoman and aspiring chef, with whom he had five children; along the way he also worked as an engineer at a federal research facility. He is propelled by the support of his wife and family as well as a “recipe” for success from his father, Salvador (Julio César Cedillo), around which the film is framed.Beautifully shot and interspersed with historical footage of migrant workers and spacecraft launches, the film’s most effective and touching scenes revolve around the family relationships, particularly José’s with his cousin Beto (Bobby Soto), who became a farmworker like his parents. In one scene, Beto says: “I just think it’s great that I get to be so freaking proud and have no idea what you’re talking about, cousin.” It’s a line that aptly distills what many upwardly mobile immigrants face. There are moments that show the clashes of the two worlds, and those that show their melding: José’s driving to work blasting a ranchera on the radio; using a corncob as a spaceship; or washing dishes in his astronaut uniform. These are heartwarming scenes, and it’s hard not to be moved by the enormity of the challenge he undertook and conquered.But the grit narrative at times becomes a bit heavy-handed, with quotes such as “Hard work or nada,” from his father, and “Tenacity is a superpower” from his NASA trainer, Kalpana Chawla (Sarayu Blue). José Hernández applied to the space program 11 times before succeeding, and the film centers almost exclusively on this plight. There are meaningful glances at his hands, an echo of the calloused hands that supported him, and montages of his persevering through training.In peddling the mythical American dream narrative, the film misses an opportunity for conflict or character development and falls short of delving into bigger, more interesting themes: assimilation, immigration, gender roles, family conflict. Doing so would have made for a more meaningful watch and felt more in line with our present understanding of the reality of migrants’ lives.A Million Miles AwayRated PG. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters, and streaming on Prime Video Sept. 15. More

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      ‘Outlaw Johnny Black’ Review: A Gravel-Toned Gunslinger

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      This misguided Western parody, starring and directed by Michael Jai White, struggles to establish a comedic rhythm.A gravel-toned gunslinger rolls into town. He’s got a bullet with his nemesis’s name on it and vengeance on his mind. It’s a familiar image that “Outlaw Johnny Black,” directed by Michael Jai White, intends to spoof, but the punchlines don’t quite land properly in this misguided Western parody.This is the second movie that White has written with Byron Minns; the first was “Black Dynamite,” the 2009 Blaxploitation spoof that White also starred in. But whereas the latter understood the specific visual language and tricky tone of its genre satire, “Outlaw Johnny Black” struggles to establish a consistent comedic rhythm.Much of the flaws come from its bagginess and lack of expositional focus (plus several needlessly cringe-worthy scenes involving Native American characters). The first third of the film — which concerns the relationship between the titular Johnny Black (White) and Brett Clayton (Chris Browning), the man who killed his father — becomes practically irrelevant after Johnny winds up in a small town impersonating a preacher and enmeshed in political schemes over oil-rich land.There are some funny moments in this stretch, particularly when the actors are allowed to run with some of the purely inane gags. But the laughs are lost within an overly long, meandering plot and scenes that miss visual polish or comedic concision. The gunslinger can land a punch, but the film doesn’t pack any.Outlaw Johnny BlackRated PG-13 for violence, strong language and some sexual material. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. In theaters. More