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      Marvel Superhero and Indigenous Actress Holds Fast to Maya Roots

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      After filming her part in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” María Mercedes Coroy returned to her “normal” life of farming and trading in a Guatemalan town at the base of a volcano.SANTA MARÍA DE JESÚS, Guatemala — For her big underwater scene in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” the Guatemalan actress María Mercedes Coroy had to hold her breath as her character, Princess Fen, gives birth in a hazy ocean world to a winged serpent son.She emerges from the watery depths as a rarity even in Marvel’s fantastical universe: a female Maya superhero.The day after filming her final scene in Los Angeles, Ms. Coroy, rather than hanging out in Hollywood, headed home to Santa María de Jesús, a Kaqchikel Maya town of about 22,000 at the base of a volcano in Guatemala. By nightfall, she was curled up in bed in her family’s bright pink cinder block house with vegetables growing in the backyard.“I felt like my bed was hugging me,” said Ms. Coroy, 28, one of nine siblings in a family of farmers and vendors.The next morning she resumed her usual life. She and her mother put on their hand-woven huipiles, or blouses, and cortes, or skirts, to catch the 5:30 bus to the small city of Escuintla to sell produce in the bustling market, a job she started after fifth grade when she had to drop out of school to help her parents.The main square of Santa María de Jesús, Guatemala, Ms. Coroy’s hometown.Daniele Volpe for The New York TimesSome days she walks two hours with a mule to the family farm to cultivate cabbage and pumpkins. In her spare time, she weaves colorful huipiles with motifs of birds and flowers on a backstrap loom.“People ask me what I do after filming,” said Ms. Coroy, who is working on her third Guatemalan movie after appearing in two in the United States. “I go back to normal.”Ms. Coroy represents a new generation of Maya actors determined to hone their craft while holding onto their customs and helping expose a legacy of discrimination against Guatemala’s Indigenous population.While she said she enjoys acting in the United States — and posing in a pink and blue huipil at the 2021 Golden Globe Awards — she is more interested in her own country’s burgeoning film industry.But whether she’s working in her homeland or Hollywood, acting can be draining, and she relies on Santa María de Jesús to recharge her.“I love my life, but filming is physically demanding,” Ms. Coroy said, relaxing on a bench in Santa María’s central park. “This is my community.”Ms. Coroy’s first role was the lead in a school play production of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”A mural depicting the actress on a wall of her hometown.Daniele Volpe for The New York TimesSanta María de Jesus has long been locally famous for its street theater, and a decade ago, the Guatemalan director Jayro Bustamante came to the town to prepare for his first feature film, “Ixcanul” (“Volcano”). He wanted to tell a story of Maya women that addressed issues like endemic poverty and inequities in education and health care, and he was determined to cast Maya actors speaking the Indigenous language of Kaqchikel.Mr. Bustamante initially put up a sign in the town’s central park: Casting Here. No one showed up. A few days later he posted: Work Here. He was overwhelmed with prospective actors.Ms. Coroy missed the audition. But a friend put her in touch with the director the next day.“He told me I was the only person who looked him in the eye,” she said. When he offered her the lead, she balked. “I had no experience. I was afraid I would ruin the movie.”But he convinced her to join the cast. For the next several months, they trained at the country’s first film academy, founded by Mr. Bustamente.“When we began filming, they were no longer amateur actors,” Mr. Bustamente said.“Ixcanul,” which won the Alfred Bauer Prize at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival, focuses on a poor family in the mountains that arranges for the daughter to marry a plantation overseer. The daughter secretly gets involved with a young man, a drunk and a dreamer, who promises to take her with him to the United States. But he leaves without her and she finds herself pregnant while still engaged to the other man.After she gives birth in a hospital, a staff member tells her that her baby has died. When the young woman finds out later that her child had lived and had possibly been sold for adoption, grief consumes her.Ms. Coroy, center, with her neighbors. Daniele Volpe for The New York Times“Quiet and fearless,” the Los Angeles-based film critic Manuel Betancourt wrote of Ms. Coroy’s understated performance, which revealed anguish behind a still face.“I mouthed the words I was feeling in my head,” Ms. Coroy said, explaining her acting method. “It was easier then because I was naturally timid. I’m much more animated now.”Her second film with Mr. Bustamante, “La Llorona,” transformed a traditional Latin American ghost story into an indictment of a fictional dictator, but one clearly reminiscent of the Guatemalan leader, Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt. Five years before his death in 2018, General Ríos Montt was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity for the systematic slaughter of Maya men, women and children in the 1980s after he took control of the country in a coup.Ms. Coroy plays Alma, a Maya housemaid whose son and daughter were among those murdered. A spectral figure in white, she haunts the dictator in his home.A casting director saw her in the two Bustamante films and picked her for the part of an Indigenous guerrilla in “Bel Canto,” an American film starring Julianne Moore. For two-and-a-half months, Ms. Coroy filmed in Mexico and the United States, the longest she had ever been away from her family. She froze in New York, she said, and didn’t like the food.The actress prefers not to discuss politics. But Mr. Bustamante said artists in Guatemala worked in an increasingly hostile climate.“You realize you’re in a country where there is a dictatorship without that name,” Mr. Bustamante wrote in an email interview. “There is a murky sort of oppression and no rights or freedom.”In “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” Ms. Coroy’s character gives birth underwater. When “Ixcanul” was released, he wrote, “there was a general rejection by the Guatemalan people of this sort of subject matter. With La Llorona, it was much more dangerous. We received anonymous threats.”“Wakanda Forever,” a global blockbuster distributed by Disney, also addresses the oppression of the Maya.Ms. Coroy’s character, Princess Fen, catches smallpox brought by the Spaniards to the Yucatán Peninsula in the 16th century. A shaman gives her a drink that allows her to live and give birth underwater. When her winged son Namor, played by the Mexican actor Tenoch Huerta, returns to the Yucatán, he sees Spaniards beating the Maya they have enslaved.In Guatemala, some Maya families encourage their children to speak only Spanish and wear Western clothing to escape ongoing rampant discrimination. But that’s not how Ms. Coroy was raised.“My parents tell me I should be proud,” said Ms. Coroy, who eventually returned to night school and finished college. “There is no way that you can hide that you’re Indigenous.”She has recently begun delving into Maya spirituality. Her grandmother was a natural healer who taught her about the curative properties or herbal teas and flowers. While she worships in a Catholic church, she also studies with an Indigenous spiritual teacher and reads the Maya creation story, the Popol Vuh.Central to Maya religion is Maximón, a trickster deity both benevolent and hedonistic. In ceremonies, adherents smoke and drink in front of his wooden figure in the hopes he will hear their entreaties. Ms. Coroy attends ceremonies without imbibing, she said.“People ask me what I do after filming,” Ms. Coroy said. “I go back to normal.”Daniele Volpe for The New York Times“I respect Maximón,” she said. “I have connected with him in dreams. He said, ‘You neither speak well of me nor poorly, so I will protect you.’”While she’s famous enough in Guatemala that people in the colonial tourist city of Antigua, a UNESCO World heritage site, approach her politely for autographs, her neighbors in Santa María avoid singling her out. Walking in the town’s park, she might as well be any other vendor.“There’s no movie star culture here,” Ms. Coroy said. “There are no paparazzi.” More

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      ‘Joyland’ Review: A Target of Gossip

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      Saim Sadiq’s melodrama, about a husband’s affair with a transgender dancer, was briefly banned in Pakistan.In November, the director Saim Sadiq’s provocative melodrama “Joyland” was briefly banned in his home country, Pakistan, for depicting a romance between a married man, Haider, and a dancer, Biba. Western audiences might refer to Biba as a transgender woman, but the film avoids those words. “She is that,” Haider tells his jilted wife.A more common local term is khawaja sira, a gender identity that dates to the 16th century and connotes neither male nor female. This community, whose members often served as advisers in the Mughal Empire, was criminalized under British colonial rule. Long shunned, they scored an important victory in 2018 when Pakistan passed anti-discrimination laws that define gender identity as a “a person’s innermost and individual sense of self as male, female or a blend of both, or neither.”Nevertheless, “Joyland” spurred an outcry in Pakistan, with the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting deeming the Cannes prize winner “highly objectionable.” The activist and Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai, one of the film producers, defended it in Variety. The ban was rescinded after three days, then later reinstated in one province.Outrage works in the movie’s favor; this polite weepie needs the added spice. While about an unconventional affair, the movie is more interested in suppression and restraint. Sadiq, a sensitive director who occasionally muddles a scene when he gets bashful, focuses on the patriarchy’s impact on men. Here, every man we meet is terrified to become the target of gossip — a paranoia that sometimes seems to be only in their heads.“Joyland” takes its title from a theme park in Lahore. The city’s stone walls barely allow the park’s neon lights to peek out — Sadiq’s subtle metaphor for how society constrains the colorful shades of human desire. Two brothers live ‌in a crowded, dimly lit house they share with their father (Salmaan Peerzada), a white-haired bully who believes that men should work and women should bear children. This is fine with the macho eldest son, Saleem (Sohail Sameer), and tolerable to his wife, Nucchi (Sarwat Gilani). But our attention is pulled to the younger, gentler son, Haider (Ali Junejo), and his happily employed wife, Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq, a quiet powerhouse). When Haider acquiesces to his dad’s expectations — he finds a job, and his wife is forced out of hers — the entire home’s stability comes tumbling down.Haider’s new (secret) job is as a backup dancer to Biba, a ferocious presence played by Alina Khan. Haider is a klutz — “by the grace of Allah, you’re really terrible,” a director groans — and the theater’s finances make zero sense. (How can Biba pay six dancers while scrounging for stage time?) Yet, the script, by Sadiq and Maggie Briggs, doesn’t spend enough time backstage to satisfy our curiosity. With Joe Saade’s swirling camerawork, the film’s burlesque scenes are themselves a tease, making us yearn for one more sweaty dance number or another “All About Eve”-esque zinger that Biba delivers to her rival (Priya Usman Khan).We’re meant to be miserable when the movie slinks back to the grim family manor. As those inside increasingly realize that they, too, want to make their own choices, our loyalty turns away from Haider to the women, particularly the daughters-in-law, who are more articulate about and exhausted by the pressures on their behavior. When Farooq and Gilani each get a scene to speak up about their characters’ frustrations, their righteous anger burns a hole through the screen.JoylandNot rated. In Punjabi and Urdu, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More

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      A New Kelly Reichardt Movie? These Actors Keep Showing Up

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      The director Kelly Reichardt has developed something of a troupe of performers who are eager to work with her time and time again. A few of them appear in her latest film, “Showing Up.”In her new film “Showing Up,” the director Kelly Reichardt reunites for the fourth time with the actress Michelle Williams, who plays Lizzy, a stressed-out sculptor, in the Portland-set art world comedy. In previous Reichardt films Williams has portrayed a drifter looking for her lost dog (“Wendy and Lucy”), a beleaguered and dehydrated pioneer (“Meek’s Cutoff”) and a Montana woman trying to acquire sandstone for her new house (“Certain Women”). At this point, Reichardt and Williams’s collaboration is one of the most fruitful in the realm of indie cinema.“She has extreme depth perception,” Williams said of Reichardt in a phone interview. “She can see where my sight stops, so I do what I can and I add what I can, but I really am trusting her to take me to the new place, to the next frontier.”But Williams is not alone in being drawn to Reichardt. “Showing Up,” now in theaters, also marks the second time Reichardt has enlisted John Magaro, last of her acclaimed 2020 feature “First Cow,” and the third time she’s brought on James Le Gros, who has shown up in her 2013 eco-thriller “Night Moves” and also in the 2016 omnibus “Certain Women.” In “Showing Up,” Magaro plays the mentally ill brother of Williams’s character, while Le Gros plays a teacher at the art school where she works.Williams and James Le Gros in “Certain Women.”Sony PicturesIn the nearly three decades since her first feature “River of Grass,” Reichardt has developed something of a troupe of actors who are eager to work with her time and time again. In addition to the repeat performers from “Showing Up,” others have made multiple Reichardt films, among them Larry Fessenden, Will Oldham and Will Patton.“There’s no requirement to come back,” Magaro said. “A lot of these people go on and make a lot more money doing other jobs.” But the actor said that there was a reason people return. “At the heart of it is Kelly and that team and that camaraderie and that family atmosphere she creates.”Reichardt works with small budgets and often in and around Portland, Ore., telling intimate stories that often focus on outsiders and the minutiae of life, whether she’s making a movie set in a fur trapping community in the 19th century or at an art school in the present. “Showing Up” is arguably her lightest film yet, a funny exploration of the quotidian struggles of being an artist.The director’s resources have grown since she made “Wendy and Lucy” (2008) — her first collaboration with Williams — but not by much. Reichardt remembered the actress, who had recently received her first Oscar nomination, sitting on an apple box on the side of the road during the filming of “Wendy.” “We had nothing,” Reichardt said. She also explained that, on “Night Moves,” Eisenberg and Dakota Fanning helped push a car out of a ditch and lugged equipment around with the rest of the crew.“You really need to be the kind of person who wants to pitch in and who doesn’t mind that there aren’t walls between people and that you might be asked to drive yourself to work,” Williams said. Over the years Reichardt has recruited big name stars including Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern, but she has said that “plenty of people” still say no to her. Acting in a Reichardt movie is not for everyone, she herself admitted.“I have a great rejection letter from Chris Cooper,” she said. “He just wrote, ‘I don’t want to live through this.’” (A representative for Chris Cooper did not have a comment.)Reichardt does not begrudge that response. “People are smart, like Michelle is down for it and is really game and you have to have people that are up for this kind of filmmaking,” she said, adding, “otherwise they’ll be very unhappy.”Dakota Fanning and Jesse Eisenberg in “Night Moves.”CinedigmThe lack of hierarchy on Reichardt’s sets also manifests onscreen, in some of Reichardt’s artistic choices. Patton recalled throwing away his ego on “Meek’s Cutoff,” about a group of pioneers in the arid Oregon desert under the guidance of a bloviating leader (Bruce Greenwood). “At a certain point you say, ‘OK, maybe you see me in a distance walking up a hill for this whole movie,” he said. “That’s kind of wonderful in a way.”That said, it was a wide shot in “Meek’s” that first made Magaro take notice of Reichardt as a filmmaker. The “brave” choice made him want to seek out more of her work.In addition to “brave,” Reichardt was described in interviews for this piece as a “genius” (by Williams), a “rascal” (by Hong Chau, who makes her Reichardt debut in “Showing Up”), and scary, of all adjectives, by Le Gros. “She scares me a little bit,” he said. “I don’t want to get her on my bad side.” When asked to explain why the small-in-stature Reichardt scares him, Le Gros said, “Any room that she’s in, she’s the toughest one there.”André Benjamin with Chau in “Showing Up.”Allyson Riggs/A24Reichardt knows what she wants and she is relentless in her pursuit of that. “She’s very decisive and uncompromising and she has a vision in her head and nothing is going to stop her from getting that on the screen whether that’s hail storms or oxen or 120-degree heat,” Williams said. But rather than Reichardt’s vision being restrictive, it’s actually liberating, according to Williams. “You can trust her to the ends of the Earth because of the filmmaker that she is,” the actress added.Reichardt, for her part, doesn’t think about actors when writing her films, which she often pens alongside Jon Raymond, who co-wrote “Showing Up.” When it came to Lizzy, an exhausted artist preparing for a show, what first made Reichardt consider Williams for the role was a photo of the sculptor Lee Bontecou.There’s no rehearsal on a Reichardt film, but Reichardt does provide her actors with reference materials before they arrive on set. Chau recalled the casting director Gayle Keller arriving at her house with a box of books and art supplies Reichardt wanted her to have before portraying Lizzy’s landlord Jo, a fellow artist with a slightly haughty demeanor.Beyond reading, there is also often an experiential element to preparing for a Reichardt film. The cast of “Meek’s Cutoff” went to a “pioneer camp,” while Magaro ventured into the wilderness with his “First Cow” co-star, Orion Lee, and a survivalist who gave them roadkill-skinning lessons. In the case of “Showing Up,” Chau shadowed the artist Michelle Segre, while Williams observed Cynthia Lahti, who provided the delicate statues of women that Lizzy makes.“I feel like that’s what it is with getting to work on films like ‘Showing Up’ or getting to work with Kelly Reichardt is what you do offset is just as important or if not more important than what you are doing on set,” Chau said.Williams has now been traveling to Portland to make films with Reichardt for 15 years and considers it a “homecoming.” She has even considered moving there full time. Williams remembered that way back when she was joining “Wendy and Lucy,” Reichardt told her, “I can’t promise you much but on set we’ll have good coffee and good sandwiches.” To Williams, that sounded great.Now they have some more amenities but the spirit of their work remains the same. “As these movies have gotten a little bit bigger and have gotten more attention, we still carry this incredible intimacy,” Williams said.And others want to come along. “I hope I get to join her little troupe of actors,” Chau said. “I will always show up to whatever Kelly does if she invites me.” More

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      Hoping to Draw Moviegoers and Filmmakers, Amazon Heads to Theaters

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      The streaming company released Ben Affleck’s “Air” on 3,500 movie screens this week, and it plans to open 10 to 12 films theatrically every year.It was a full house at the AMC Town Center in Las Vegas in September when Ben Affleck slipped into the darkened theater. He wanted to see how his new film, “Air,” would play with a test audience, some members of which might have shown up just to escape the scorching heat outside.To his amazement, the crowd went nuts for the movie, about Nike’s efforts in the 1980s to lure a young Michael Jordan to its struggling basketball brand. The viewers clapped when Chris Tucker appeared onscreen, and they hooted for Viola Davis.“People were cheering before they said a line,” Mr. Affleck said in an interview.And that left him feeling rather deflated. He exited the theater and called Matt Damon, his longtime collaborator and new business partner.“God, man, this is tragic,” Mr. Affleck recalled telling Mr. Damon. “I haven’t had a movie play in a theater like this in years. And it’s going on a streamer.”He added, “I felt like Charlie Brown with the football.”But a funny thing happened on the way to Amazon’s Prime Video service, which bankrolled the $130 million film. After similar raucous screenings in Los Angeles, Amazon decided the film would go to theaters first — opening on 3,500 screens in the United States this week, and more than 70 other markets worldwide. It will play for at least a month and is the company’s largest theatrical release since it began making movies in 2015.“Originally we thought, well, our customers are on Prime, so that’s where we need to deliver our movies, but we’re now thinking of the bigger audience and assuming that most of the United States are Prime members anyway,” Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon and MGM Studios, said in an interview. “So why wouldn’t you offer these movies theatrically and allow people to come back to that experience and then move directly to Prime afterwards?”She added, “It’s only the beginning for us.”Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon Studios, is a veteran TV executive and was initially wary of releasing films theatrically.Danny Moloshok/ReutersAmazon now says its ultimate goal is to release 10 to 12 movies a year in theaters. Not all will be on as many screens as “Air” or play as long. Rather, each theatrical strategy will be based on the perceived box office potential. And other films will still debut on Prime Video.The news is a huge victory for the beleaguered theatrical exhibition business, with year-to-date ticket sales down 25 percent from before the pandemic.“It’s not really about just playing ‘Air,’” said Greg Marcus, chief executive of the Marcus Corporation, a movie entertainment and lodging business in Milwaukee. “The bigger, more important story is its commitment to doing a theatrical slate so that some of it’s going to work and some of it won’t. Success should be judged over an entire slate and include all revenue generated throughout the life of the slate.”Between the advent of streaming and consumer habit changes brought on by the pandemic, Hollywood has been constantly re-evaluating how it thinks about movie theaters. The common wisdom over the past year is that superhero movies still draw crowds (even if the numbers are waning), as do films with wild spectacle (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) or established characters (“Creed III”).Less certain are the films that Mr. Affleck prefers to traffic in, especially when he’s behind the camera: adult dramas with touches of comedy and an earnest feel-good bent, like his Oscar-winning “Argo.” Recent Oscar contenders, like Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans,” disappointed at the box office.But a strong performance for “Air” could indicate to the industry that movies for adults are still viable in theaters. Apple, which previously eschewed theaters, already has plans to release both Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” and Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” theatrically this year.That could encourage other distributors to release more films in theaters, and filmmakers eager for streaming money but still yearning for their work to be seen on the big screen may look to Amazon. (“Air” brought in $3.2 million at the box office on Wednesday, and Amazon is expecting it to gross a modest $16 million through the weekend.)“I think there is a legitimate case to be made that some movies are better experienced in the theater with a group of people,” Mr. Affleck said. “If they can provide robust theatrical releases where the movies are well supported, then it will move Amazon to the front of the pack.”When Ms. Salke, a veteran television executive, took over Amazon’s studio in 2018, her knowledge of the movie business was cursory at best. She had spent years overseeing television at NBC, shepherding hits like “This Is Us.” At the beginning of her tenure, she plunked down close to $50 million for five movies at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. The films, including “Late Night,” and “Brittany Runs a Marathon,” underperformed.Suddenly, Amazon, which had been a friend to the theater business with its films “Manchester by the Sea” and “The Big Sick,” was no longer interested in the cutthroat world of box office receipts, where the entire industry knows if a movie is a success or a failure by Saturday morning of opening weekend.“It was like, why would we put ourselves through that step if it’s going to tear down the film and require us to double our investment in marketing to get to Prime to kind of turn that story around?” she said.When Amazon bought Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 2021, there was trepidation that the historic label would be reduced to a tile on the Prime website. MGM had recently been resurrected by Michael DeLuca and Pamela Abdy and had made theatrical commitments to filmmakers like Mr. Scott, Paul Thomas Anderson and Sarah Polley.Instead, Ms. Salke seems to have been influenced by the executives at MGM. She also saw how films Amazon acquired during the pandemic — like “Coming 2 America” and “The Tomorrow War” — did as streaming-first movies.“The performance of those films on the service already made us feel like we want to go bigger on the movie side,” she said. “Then we’re buying MGM and closing that deal. We have more movies.”While Mr. DeLuca and Ms. Abdy decamped for a job running Warner Bros., the MGM executives who remained had shown Amazon what a successful theatrical strategy could look like. It culminated in the early-March release of “Creed III,” which has grossed close to $150 million in North America, outperforming its predecessors.In the meantime, Ms. Salke has consolidated her power. The company’s new head of film, Courtenay Valenti, who will oversee both Amazon and MGM after a long career at Warner Bros., will report to her instead of to Mike Hopkins, Ms. Salke’s boss and the senior vice president of Prime Video, Amazon Studios and MGM. And Ms. Salke said she would not waver from her theatrical strategy no matter how “Air” performed.“We are committed,” she said.Matt Damon and Viola Davis star in “Air,” which tells the story of Nike’s pursuit of Michael Jordan.Amazon StudiosThere is no guarantee that Amazon’s strategy for “Air” will succeed. With many moviegoers requiring a spectacle before buying a ticket, a film that is shot primarily in office buildings and never actually shows the face of the actor playing Michael Jordan could be a difficult sell.Sue Kroll, the studio’s new head of marketing, argues that despite the setting and the talky nature of the film, “Air” has the makings of a crowd pleaser.“It really does take you to another place,” she said of the movie, which stars Mr. Damon as Sonny Vaccaro, a sad-sack basketball scout asked to find up-and-coming basketball stars to endorse Nike shoes.“It’s emotional. It’s funny. And it has a lot of heart,” Ms. Kroll added. “I think it can pave the way for a lot of other great movies out there that should be seen theatrically.”The company hopes so. At the end of April, it will release Guy Ritchie’s “The Covenant,” an MGM film that stars Jake Gyllenhaal as an Army sergeant ambushed in Afghanistan. On Sept. 15, it will release “Challengers,” an MGM movie that stars Zendaya as a tennis player turned coach. “Saltburn,” a film from the “Promising Young Woman” director Emerald Fennell, which Amazon acquired out of Cannes last year, will open sometime in the fall.Ms. Valenti, who started last month, is still putting her full schedule together. “There is fantastic development here, but movies don’t grow on trees,” she said, before adding that she thinks her job will be made easier because of Amazon’s commitment to marketing its films, wherever they land.“The only way you attract the best talent, the best filmmakers, the best storytellers to make their larger-than-life films here,” Ms. Valenti continued, “is because they have to know that their movies aren’t going to die in the quicksands of the service.” More

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      Michaela Watkins Shares A Few Photos from Her Phone

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      Seven PhotosThe Dog Days of Michaela WatkinsThe star of “Paint” contemplates work, canines, a coyote attack and mortality while bouncing between the coasts.April 7, 2023Michaela Watkins describes herself as an actress who doesn’t know where she’s going to be next week. That’s only a small exaggeration.“Paint,” the comedy loosely based on the painter Bob Ross and co-starring Owen Wilson and Wendi McLendon-Covey, will be her fourth film to open this year. It premieres the same day as “Tiny Beautiful Things,” a Hulu mini-series in which Ms. Watkins appears with Kathryn Hahn.“There’s nobody better,” Ms. Watkins, 51, said of Ms. Hahn. “The only person better is Julia Louis-Dreyfus.” Ms. Louis-Dreyfus and Ms. Watkins shared the screen this year in the film “You Hurt My Feelings.” (And in case you’re curious, Ms. Watkins’s other two films this year are “The Young Wife” and “History of the World: Part II.”)With her work taking her away from her home in Ojai, Calif., where she lives with her husband, Fred Kramer, and their two dogs, to New York, London and beyond, Ms. Watkins makes good use of her time off. When we caught up, she was thoroughly enjoying a mini-vacation in California’s wine country. “I probably could drink my own urine and be drunk,” she said. “I’ve just had so much wine in the last 48 hours.”Be that as it may, she was fresh-faced, sober and ready to talk through seven photos she had taken during her recent travels across the East and West Coasts.These are edited excerpts from the interview.This is one of my dogs, Wuzzabear. I call her “fatty bum bum,” thanks to one of my dear British friends. She’s our puppy we got during the pandemic, and she’s not perfectly socialized because of that, but she loves attention from other dogs. She’s so thirsty on the playground, and it’s really embarrassing.I’m suspicious of people who don’t let their dogs on their beds. That’s like 80 percent of why dogs are the best: just the “schnoogles,” the cuddling, the hot breath on your face, the weight of their body on you. If, God forbid, I have a terminal disease, just put me in a bed with 1,000 dogs and just let me waste away.When I was in New York, I did what I called the “aging parents tour.” We saw my mother-in-law and we saw my father and his wife. When I was visiting my father, he gave me these Depression-era glasses. They’ve been in his cabinet as long as I can remember. This idea that he says “I’m not going to need this” is very sad.My dad is really fit. He’s 86 and he’s active. He rides his bike, he kayaks, he hikes, he plays trombone in a band, he’s learning Italian, he’s teaching literacy. He’s phenomenal. But we went for a hike in the snow and he was having trouble. It really gets to him.I stopped by my friend Ari Graynor’s. She’s a fellow actress and she bought a farmhouse in upstate New York. Her partner, Michael, is an incredible chef. He does these incredible things called “Death Over Dinner,” where they have a nice dinner and talk about death.What better place to talk about dying than while we’re with people and experiencing really incredible joy with life? And to feel sated with food and drink, while you talk about the thing that you don’t want to talk about, which is our inevitable death. I do not like small talk, I just want to roll up my sleeves and get into it.This is my friend Aya Cash — she’s a phenomenal actress. I worked with her on a movie recently called “The Young Wife,” which just debuted at South By Southwest. She’s a peer, but in this movie she played my stepdaughter, which is weird. Whatever.This is her right after she performed in “The Best We Could.” It’s a beautiful play, and what I really loved about it is that Aya really fell in love with acting again. I’m a little afraid to do theater again. It’s been so long that I’m scared, which makes me think even more I should do it. For five years after I graduated from college, I did regional theater and I always had impostor syndrome. Even though I was getting parts, I felt like I didn’t truly deserve them.My dad’s wife said to me one-time, “You were so great in this play, and boy, you used to be terrible. We were really scared.” At least she was honest.This is at the premiere of “Tiny Beautiful Things,” which is Kathryn Hahn’s new show. In the middle is Cheryl Strayed, who is my hero. Cheryl saved my life. She used to have an advice column called “Dear Sugar,” and my friend Joey Soloway turned me on to her. I was going through a breakup, the death of a friend — a really awful time. I was super depressed and worried that I’d ruined my own life. Her letters breathed life into me and got me through a really hard time. I kept saying, “I feel like I know her.” I didn’t know her, but it turns out we both lived in Portland in the ’90s around the corner from each other. I don’t really fangirl, but when I meet her, my whole personality goes out the window. I just kind of sit there and smile and laugh too hard at everything she says.Tess Morris is a writer friend of mine. She’s in New York now writing on “Only Murders in the Building.” She and I became really good friends when she came out to Ojai and there was a coyote attack on my dog. All the dogs survived, but barely. And I survived, but barely. I was in the hospital for a few days with a bone infection. Anyway, it bonded us.When we were in New York, we went to the “Succession” premiere, which is my all-time favorite show. I think it’s the greatest comedy that’s ever been. We thought we both looked pretty spiffy, so she’s taking a picture of me and I’m taking a picture of her.This just pretty much sums up L.A. It’s a city that makes no sense. Somebody just randomly thought, I’ll put this beautiful flower pot here! And somebody just smashed their garbage bins up against it. And then this fence, which is like, Keep out! You don’t belong here! And, Smile! You’re on Camera. It’s a little snapshot of Los Angeles. More

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      ‘Joyland,’ an L.G.B.T. Pakistani Film, Is Celebrated Abroad

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      Saim Sadiq’s feature “Joyland,” which includes a transgender woman’s love affair, cannot be shown in Pakistan’s Punjab Province.Over the past year, the writer-director Saim Sadiq has garnered a series of unprecedented accolades for Pakistani cinema.Last May, his debut film, “Joyland,” out Friday, became the first production from Pakistan to compete in the official selection at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the jury prize in the Un Certain Regard sidebar. It was also the first entry from the country to be shortlisted for the best international feature film Oscar. And just last month, it emerged as the first Pakistani title to win at the Film Independent Spirit Awards in the same category.The project also counts among its executive producers the Nobel Peace Prize recipient Malala Yousafzai, the Oscar-winning British Pakistani actor Riz Ahmed and the Iranian American director Ramin Bahrani.But despite this international recognition and notable support, “Joyland,” which features characters defying traditional binary gender norms, remains banned in Sadiq’s hometown of Lahore, and in the entire Punjab Province, which houses the majority of Pakistan’s cinemas and about half of the Islamic nation’s entire population.“I wanted the film to play in Pakistani theaters more than anything else,” said an impassioned Sadiq, 32, during a recent interview at the Los Angeles home of the movie’s Indian-born producer, Apoorva Charan.Sadiq and Charan met while both were studying at Columbia University. It was during their time there that Sadiq began writing “Joyland,” a coming-of-age story told as an intricate ensemble piece, as a screenwriting class assignment.When Haider starts working as a backup dancer, he must keep his new source of income, and outlet for self-expression, a secret.Oscilloscope LaboratoriesWhen Haider (Ali Junejo), a mild-mannered young man in an arranged marriage, lands a job as a backup dancer for Biba (Alina Khan), a strong-willed transgender performer, his wife, Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq), quits her job against her will to help out with the domestic tasks Haider was doing before, including caring for his brother’s children.But Haider must keep his new source of income, and outlet for self-expression, a secret, as the couple live in an extended family household under the rule of Haider’s traditional elderly father. That Haider explores his sexuality with Biba further complicates his situation.To challenge the Hollywood notion of the sole protagonist, Sadiq said he wanted to understand “the collective human experience. It was very important to make this a very collectivist film, a film which was truly an ensemble film where the effect of one person’s actions on other people were also taken into account from their perspective.”That “Joyland,” among its many themes, includes a burgeoning romance between a trans woman and a straight-identifying man caused public outcry from Pakistan’s conservative factions on social media just a few days before the film’s scheduled November local release date.The seismic controversy led to the film’s ban, even after Sadiq had diligently obtained the required permits from each of the three separate censor boards in the country: those pertinent to the provinces of Punjab and Sindh, plus the federal board that covers the rest of the territory.In order to appease them, Sadiq had already compromised the artistic integrity of his work.Clockwise from upper left, Farooq, Junejo, Sadiq and Khan in Los Angeles in March.Elizabeth WeinbergFirst, the director was asked to remove two intimate scenes that the censors unsurprisingly deemed too risqué. Sadiq had anticipated these moments would not meet their parameters, so he had shot alternate versions so that the narrative could still run coherently in the eventual Pakistani version. However, more changes were demanded.“What I wasn’t prepared for was a bunch of laughably random cuts and dialogue omissions that were asked for by the federal and Punjab censor boards, which included blurring the shot of a platonic hug between a husband and wife on a rooftop,” Sadiq said.Censorship is unfortunately a cornerstone of Pakistan’s relationship with cinema, said Ali Khan, co-author of the book “Cinema and Society: Film and Social Change in Pakistan,” in a recent video interview.In 1954, “Roohi,” directed by W.Z. Ahmed, became the first film banned in an independent Pakistan for its perceived socialist agenda. Since then, and across the multiple political transitions the nation has undergone, creative freedom has often been hindered. Only about a dozen feature films, mostly commercial fare, are produced in Pakistan each year.“There are so many stories to tell from Pakistan, but how do you do that if everything is controversial?” Ali Kahn said. “It’s really unfortunate that we are not able to support our own films because of this paranoia over how the country is being depicted.”While some Pakistani productions may have had instances of subtle, implied queerness in the past, Sadiq believes there hadn’t been a film that overtly engaged with gender and sexual diversity in Pakistan before “Joyland.”Fortunately, the international attention “Joyland” had already received abroad, as well as a flood of vocal tweets from the filmmaker and his allies denouncing the decision, exerted enough pressure that the edited iteration was allowed to be screened in the Sindh province and the territory under the federal censor board (which includes the capital city of Islamabad).But the authorities in Punjab opted to uphold the ban.Junejo and Khan in a scene from the film. The plotline around their characters’ love affair caused public outcry from Pakistan’s conservative factions on social media.Oscilloscope LaboratoriesFor Khan, a dancer turned actress who first collaborated with Sadiq on the short film “Darling,” the news that her work wouldn’t be seen in Lahore was devastating.“I needed the film to play in my city so that the people who have wronged me there for being trans could see me in a more human light,” she said, speaking in Urdu with Sadiq acting as her interpreter. “And I wanted to show my community that it is possible for a trans person to make something out of their life.”Although Pakistan passed a bill protecting the rights of transgender citizens in 2018, violence, including murder, against trans people in the country remains an alarming issue. Since the law came into existence, homicides of transgender people have increased, with 14 people killed last year, according to the Trans Murder Monitoring project.The rest of Sadiq’s cast were also aware of the significance of the story they were sharing. Junejo, for example, came on board after other actors rejected the part because of its subject matter. Even the sensitive way Haider uses his body when dancing is cause for concern in an environment where masculinity is harshly policed.“It was important that we were making it in Pakistan because its patriarchal society demands certain roles from every one of its members, men included,” Junejo said.In turn, Farooq believes that one of the most remarkable outcomes of the film’s toilsome journey in Pakistan are the conversations that both detractors as well as defenders are having about the purpose of art in general and of filmmaking in particular.“Pakistani viewers who had for long been turned into passive consumers of TV or film were all of a sudden actively talking about the role of art in their lives,” Farooq said. “It’s not the job of films to placate you. Films can talk about things that are uncomfortable.”Months after the film’s partial theatrical release, heated online discussions over “Joyland” continue, especially when anyone of note in Pakistan publicly comments on it.For his part, Sadiq holds on to the film’s hard-fought victories in the face of the restrictions.Embattled as his work might be in the place of his birth, the director finds invigorating encouragement in learning that other people, in Pakistan and elsewhere, have embraced it.“Once the film was finished, I understood I had initially done it out of selfish reasons,” he said. “But now it means something to others, and it means something to the world even if in a small way, so I need to do right by it and push for it to be seen.” More

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      In 1993 ‘Super Mario Bros.’ Bombed; in 2023, It’s a Hit With a New Generation

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      A critical and commercial disaster in its day, the video-game adaptation was trashed even by its star, Bob Hoskins. But a reappraisal is underway.The new animated film “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” recreates the sunny spirit, effervescent action and confectionary aesthetic of the namesake video games, with the voices of Chris Pratt as Mario, Charlie Day as Luigi, Jack Black as Bowser, and Anya Taylor-Joy as Princess Peach. Expect periwinkle skies, green warp pipes and squeaky-voiced, mushroom-headed characters.The mustachioed Nintendo mascot has been on the big screen before — even though some of the people involved would prefer to forget about it.Way back in 1993, the popularity of Super Mario led to Hollywood’s first big-budget video game adaptation. The live-action “Super Mario Bros.” starred Bob Hoskins as Mario and John Leguizamo as Luigi, two down-on-their-luck plumber brothers picking up odd jobs in Brooklyn. Largely shot in an abandoned cement factory in North Carolina, the movie was mostly set not in the hyper-colored Mushroom Kingdom, but in a grody, dystopian alternate version of New York called Dinohattan, ruled over by the maniacal dictator King Koopa (Dennis Hopper). Sticky, elastic fungus plays a key role in the plot. It looked and felt nothing like the video games.To Rocky Morton, who directed the movie with Annabel Jankel, that was the point. Morton and Jankel were British music video filmmakers who also had been behind the creation of the pseudo-computer-generated TV show host Max Headroom. Morton and Jankel’s agent had sent them a Mario Bros. movie script by the “Rain Man” co-writer Barry Morrow. Dismissing that screenplay as too cute, Morton pitched another idea: a darker, grittier Mario Bros. origin story.“It felt like such a great opportunity,” Morton said in a recent phone interview, of turning the video game phenomenon into a movie. “It seemed like the obvious thing to do. And it would have a built-in audience. It was made in heaven.”The result was a critical and commercial disaster. Roger Ebert declared it “a complete waste of time and money.” (Though Gene Siskel allowed, “I like the Goombas,” referring to Koopa’s oversized henchmen.) Several of the actors spoke disparagingly about the production, with Hoskins calling the shoot a “nightmare.” It was game over for any sequel, and for the Hollywood careers of its directors too.In more recent years, millennial Nintendophiles who were put off by the movie in 1993 — or, like me, simply avoided it — have given it another chance.Today, “Super Mario Bros.” has been the subject of something of a reappraisal, achieving a surprising cult status in the process. Its listing on the cinephile movie rating site Letterboxd is accompanied by a host of passionate, discerning reviews. “Super Mario Bros.” is “film-literate, daring, political, and unapologetically insane,” wrote the user Zeke Knott. While awaiting the coming fan-made documentary, “Trust the Fungus: Bob-Omb to Cult Classic,” fans can listen to a podcast dedicated to a minute-by-minute dissection of the movie, or visit the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Texas, which is holding an exhibition on it. This month, Nitehawk Cinemas in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, will screen “Super Mario Bros.” as part of Re-Consider This!, a series showcasing misunderstood masterpieces.The excessive artistic license taken with the adaptation is part of the fun of it, said Desmond Thorne, a film programmer at Nitehawk. “In an age when we’re inundated with video game and comic book adaptations that take a more literal approach, it’s refreshing to look back at ‘Super Mario Bros.’ 30 years later,” he said. “You have to admire the huge swings that it took.” For “huge swings,” see, for example, the scene in which Dennis Hopper takes a mud bath with Fiona Shaw.But even the most ardent fans will admit that “Super Mario Bros.” is kind of a mess. Morton said the problems began after Disney purchased the distribution rights, demanding an extensive rewrite of the screenplay — less effects-heavy, more family-friendly — that arrived 10 days before principal photography began. (Disney was unable to locate anyone involved in the production for comment.)But it’s a fantastic and inspired mess with densely artificial sets concocted by the “Blade Runner” production designer David L. Snyder; cartoonish costumes by Joseph Porro (who most recently worked on “The Mandalorian”); and a lunatic score by the composer Alan Silvestri. Elsewhere, Patrick Tatopoulos’s creature designs anticipate his work on “Independence Day.”“The film is such a kitchen sink in terms of inspiration and execution,” the superfan Ryan Hoss said. “Practical sets, makeup, costumes, pyrotechnics, prosthetics, animatronics and puppets. It has tone issues, and too many cooks in the kitchen, but you can point to any part of the story of ‘Super Mario Bros.’ and it’s fascinating to someone on some level.”In 2007, when Hoss was in college, he created the website Super Mario Bros. The Movie Archive. “I felt that the conversation around the film just wasn’t what it deserved,” he said. The site was “a place to get as much of the background and history of the film out in the open.”Since then, Hoss, along with the site’s editor in chief, Steven Applebaum, has tracked down alternate versions of the script, set photos, and props, and published numerous interviews with crew members. Most recently, they uncovered and restored an early work print of the film, creating an extended edition available to watch online.They’ve also held screenings and other events for like-minded fans. “It’s one of the most enthusiastic and positive fandoms I’ve ever seen,” Hoss said.He added, “The biggest surprise has been getting to know so many of the talented cast and crew that worked on the film. They’ve all said that ‘Super Mario Bros.’ was one of the most memorable films of their career.”Leguizamo has said he’s proud to have been involved in the film. “I’m O.G.,” he told IndieWire recently, also praising Jankel and Morton for their commitment to diverse casting. They “fought really hard for me to be the lead because I was a Latin man,” he said. “It was such a breakthrough.”Today, Morton looks back at the whole experience as one of utter humiliation. “It was horrible, just a really horrible experience.” (Jankel did not respond to an interview request and apparently has not participated in any stories about the making of the movie. “It really did affect her,” said Morton.)The re-evaluation of “Super Mario Bros.” is “heartening,” said Morton. And yet, the fact that the once-reviled movie is being celebrated and enjoyed — without irony — doesn’t seem to have sunk in for its director. The day after our interview, he agreed to attend a Hollywood screening of the movie, his first time seeing it in about 20 years. “They wanted me to introduce it but I can’t think of anything positive to say.”As for the new film, if all goes well, it might signal the launch of yet another movie franchise, the Nintendo Cinematic Universe. Which, Morton admitted, is probably what audiences expected 30 years ago. “That’s the film that everybody wanted,” he said. “And they’ve got it now.” More

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      ‘Showing Up’ Review: Making Art in All Its Everyday Glory

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      In their latest movie together, Michelle Williams and Kelly Reichardt paint a portrait of an artist who’s a real and wonderful piece of work.The stubbornly independent filmmaker Kelly Reichardt makes small-scale movies rooted in specific worlds, both inner and outer; nearly all take place in Oregon, where she’s long lived and worked. She traveled back in time for her last movie, “First Cow,” a moving chronicle of love, land and capitalism set in the Oregon Territory in the 19th century. Reichardt is back on more familiar ground in her latest, “Showing Up,” a wonderful slice of life that’s set in present-day Portland and is about something that she knows intimately: making art.The movies love tortured artists, inflamed geniuses who thunder against the establishment, aesthetic conventions, their historical epochs, God or just the nearest warm body. No one rages or slashes a canvas in “Showing Up,” though a few characters do raise their voices. At one point, its stubbornly independent hero, Lizzy — a sculptor played by a revelatory, notably de-glammed Michelle Williams — leaves an angry message on a colleague’s voice mail, an expletive-laced tirade that she ends with a comical bleat: “Have a great night.”It’s a gently funny and true moment in a gently funny and true movie that perfectly captures Lizzy’s complicated interiority. By the time she makes that call, you know a great deal about her. You know that she makes sculptures in her home studio and works at an art school, though what she does there remains unclear. What’s more crucial is that over the course of this delicate, detailed movie you become familiar with the petulantly downward slope of Lizzy’s mouth, the welcoming disorder of her apartment, the tender care that she takes with her art. You also know that she rarely smiles and scarcely ever says please or thank you.Written by Reichardt and Jon Raymond, “Showing Up” is a portrait of an individual but the film is universal in the sense that it’s about a woman living in the concrete here and now. Reichardt is interested in abstract ideas and everyday intangibles, but her filmmaking is precisely grounded in the material world, and so is Lizzy. If she has aesthetic principles, for instance, she doesn’t voice them. Reichardt, though, speaks volumes about art and the artistic process in this movie, which focuses on Lizzy as she prepares for a fast-approaching exhibit — a quietly fraught few days filled with painstaking creative labor as well as testy and comic interactions.When “Showing Up” opens, Lizzy is putting the finishing touches on the textured, small-scaled figurative sculptures that she molds from clay and then paints before having them fired in a kiln at the school. (The kiln operator is played by André Benjamin, making the charming most out of a modest role.) The figures are of women captured in well-defined poses, with some mounted with rods on wood bases. Several of these little women are erect, and others are recumbent; one stands on her head while a few look like they’ve been captured in mid-leap. A figurine with downcast eyes and a tiny, private smile looks a bit like Reichardt.As Lizzy works on her sculptures, their shape, details and distinct personalities emerge as do she and this wispy story. Things happen in Reichardt’s movies — minor, fleeting and profound things, just like in life. Story can seem both too grand and too impoverished a word to describe the personal, richly inhabited and realistic worlds she creates from faces and bodies, poses and gestures, rituals and habits, and her very specific grasp on time and place. But of course there’s always a story in how human beings navigate one another and sometimes try to bridge — and hide out in — that bristling, ineffable space between us.That space swells and contracts, by turns narrowing and expanding until it seems as vast and impassable as the Grand Canyon. Lizzy doesn’t make it easy to bridge; it’s instructive that she’s more openly affectionate with her cat than with her mother (Maryann Plunkett), who’s her boss at the school, or with her gruff father (a lovely Judd Hirsch). Yet while Lizzy works on her art in solitude (the cat comes and goes), she’s rarely alone for long, and the movie is filled with people, a vivid, eccentric and amusing collection that includes Jo (an essential Hong Chau), a vivacious artist who’s Lizzy’s landlord and the recipient of her angry phone call.Lizzy has reason to be irritated at Jo, who’s taking her time with fixing her broken water heater. But Jo is more than carelessly inattentive. A jolt of energy with a pickup truck and long, sweeping hair, Jo is sexy and popular, the very picture of the hip, hot artist and the apparent polar opposite of Lizzy, with her bob and frumpy look. Jo too is readying a new exhibit, but her gallery is bigger than Lizzy’s and her show more prestigious: It will have a catalog! The women get under each other’s skin, but like everyone else in Lizzy’s life — her family, her colleagues, the art students, her cat and a pigeon who swoops in and stays awhile — Jo sustains her.For Lizzy, making art is an act of self-creation, but it is also and always an act of communion, a way of being in the world and with other people. That makes “Showing Up” a somewhat reflexive self-portrait, one that owes much to Reichardt and Williams’s beautifully synced collaboration. This is the fourth movie that they’ve done together (their first was “Wendy and Lucy”), and it’s a joy to witness how perfectly aligned their work has become. Together, Reichardt and Williams — with little dialogue and boundless generosity — lucidly articulate everything that Lizzy will never say and need not say, opening a window on the world and turning this wondrous, determined, gloriously grumpy woman into a sublime work of art.Showing UpRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More