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      The Artist Who Photoshops Paddington Into Everything

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      For nearly 1,000 straight days, Jason Chou has inserted Paddington, the anthropomorphized bear, into absurd situations. He has no plans to stop.Paddington is the busiest bear in Hollywood.While fans wait another year for the third installment of his film franchise, Paddington has found time for roles opposite Anthony Hopkins, Tom Hanks and Robert De Niro. He celebrated a goal with Ted Lasso, slipped on a spacesuit for “Interstellar” and appeared onstage with David Byrne. He devoured spicy wings on “Hot Ones,” cracked open a children’s book with LeVar Burton on “Reading Rainbow” and recently joined Thanksgiving feasts with characters from “Peanuts,” “The Sopranos” and “The Simpsons.”It is a daunting schedule made possible by the hard work and creativity of Jason Chou, a self-described Paddington enthusiast, who has spent nearly three years harnessing the magic of Photoshop to teleport the marmalade-loving, escapade-seeking, hard-staring bear into scenes from popular films and television shows.“At this point, I feel like some people anticipate it every day,” said Mr. Chou, 27, a student at Gnomon, a visual effects school in Los Angeles, “and it’s hard to let them down.”Mr. Chou, who has created a Paddington-related post every day since March 2021, is nearing a milestone: his 1,000th post, which, barring a Paddington-esque misadventure, will go live on Sunday. (The posts often appear after midnight on the East Coast.) Mr. Chou’s work lives on X, formerly known as Twitter, where he has more than 340,000 followers under his handle, @jaythechou, and where he has pledged to “Photoshop Paddington into a movie, game, or TV show until I forget.”Thanks to the work of Mr. Chou, Paddington has appeared in “Scream,” “28 Days Later,” “Halloween” and “Home Alone.”Jason ChouThe milestone is, if nothing else, one of the internet’s more unusual feats of endurance. (He has yet to forget.) In a telephone interview, Mr. Chou described his creative process.“I basically just try to fit him into a scene,” he said.Few people have Mr. Chou’s persistence, but Geoffrey Palmer, another internet artist, is one of them. Inspired by Mr. Chou’s work, Mr. Palmer has, for the past couple of years, spent a few minutes each weekday morning photoshopping Paddington into various tableaus from Magic: The Gathering, the fantasy card game.Yes, Mr. Chou has spawned a Paddington Photoshop coaching tree.“Anyone who loves Paddington is probably a good person,” Mr. Chou said.Mr. Palmer, 38, who makes television commercials for a mattress company, described Paddington as “a purely good thing that exists,” which helps explain why any of this works.As a beloved character from children’s books, animated television shows and now a film franchise — “Paddington in Peru,” the third film of the series, will be released in the United States in January 2025 — Paddington is known for his innate curiosity, which often lands him in sticky situations.Paddington hasn’t been seen on the big screen since 2017, but Mr. Chou, a visual effects student in Los Angeles, has kept the beloved character on the move.Elizabeth Lippman for The New York Times“He sort of steps through all these different scenes in wonderment,” said Mr. Palmer, who lives in Prior Lake, Minn. “So it feels natural that Paddington would suddenly be in ‘The Godfather’ or in the Magic: The Gathering multiverse. I think it’s the whimsy of it that people appreciate and connect with so much.”Mr. Chou has always sought to stay true to Paddington’s principles.“Even in some of the action scenes, I kind of find myself saying: ‘Oh, Paddington! Don’t do this!’” he said. “I’m scared that one of these days I’m going to accidentally turn Paddington into a bad guy or something.”Mr. Chou’s winding path to Paddington traces back to a childhood love of the original “Star Wars” trilogy. His mother fed his obsession by presenting him with a boxed set of the movies, which included a DVD devoted to special effects.“I watched that all day,” Mr. Chou said.Soon enough, Mr. Chou was making his own animations with clay, and he continued to pursue his artistic interests in high school and at the University of California, Irvine, where he studied film and video production. It was while Mr. Chou was a student there that the seeds of his Paddington opus were sown.Inspired by Mr. Chou, Geoffrey Palmer began inserting Paddington into images from the Magic: The Gathering universe. His version of Progenitus came after a request from Mr. Chou.Geoffrey PalmerHe recalled being stuck on a freeway in Southern California one winter afternoon in 2018. He was feeling anxious about school and about finding a job, and the traffic — well, the traffic was brutal.“I thought: You know what? I’ll just go watch a movie,” he said.Mr. Chou pulled off the freeway and found a cinema, which happened to be showing “Paddington 2.” The woman at the concessions stand told him that he would love it. Mr. Chou had no idea that Paddington’s escapades would affect him so profoundly.The consistency of Paddington’s character resonated with him. Throughout the film, Paddington remains his bighearted, accident-prone self even as those around him change — and change for the better, often because of their interactions with him. Consider the unlikely friendships he makes in a prison full of hardened criminals. (Spoiler: Paddington goes to prison.)“But he just keeps doing his thing,” Mr. Chou said. “And no matter how many obstacles you throw at him, the power of being polite and being kind gets him through everything. I just felt so happy at the end.”A few years later, with free time during the pandemic, Mr. Chou was a regular visitor to Reddit. Social media challenges were in vogue, and Mr. Chou acknowledged that he “needed something to do.” So he photoshopped a giant Paddington into a scene from “Godzilla vs. Kong” and posted it to a film-related subreddit, pledging to do something similar every day.“Paddington 2” was critically acclaimed and grossed more than $200 million worldwide. The third installment of the film franchise, “Paddington in Peru,” will be released in the United States in January 2025.Getty Images“It was sort of light and fun content, to cheer people up,” Mr. Chou said. “And it kept growing.”The subreddit quickly turned into a forum for “film nerds to just kind of geek out about a photoshopped bear in their favorite movies,” said Jarick Simbol, one of Mr. Chou’s avid followers.Mr. Simbol, 28, used the platform Letterboxd to catalog the films and television shows that Mr. Chou used in his ever-expanding Paddington portfolio, which gained an even broader audience once Mr. Chou made the move to Twitter about six months into the experiment.Mr. Simbol tracked Mr. Chou’s posts for 665 straight days, before life got in the way.“I got a new job, ended up having to work long hours and just couldn’t keep up,” said Mr. Simbol, who lives in Long Beach, Calif., where he works in the video game and e-sports industry. “I mean, I was just writing things down. He’s actually doing the work. I think it’s genuinely impressive.”Since the start, Mr. Chou has prioritized consistency.“I do one a day,” said Mr. Chou, who hopes to work in the film industry. “And it doesn’t bother me if it doesn’t get a lot of views, because that might affect the way I do things.”Mr. Chou has had to get creative to come up with new images every day for nearly three years. His dedication has attracted a large following on social media.Elizabeth Lippman for The New York TimesAnd while he dabbled in Patreon, the monetization service for artists, he quickly abandoned that effort. He didn’t get into the Paddington Photoshop business for the money — or for fame, though he did sound bummed that Paddington doesn’t follow him on X.“There must be a reason,” Mr. Chou said.Neither Paddington nor his representatives at StudioCanal, the French production house that oversees the “Paddington” franchise, responded to requests for comment.At this august stage of the series, Mr. Chou is facing challenges. Atop the list: He initially wanted to avoid using the same television show or film more than once, but that pool becomes shallower by the day.“I kind of boxed myself in,” Mr. Chou said.So he has made exceptions, while expanding his oeuvre to include video games and the occasional album cover. For example, there was a recent homage to Taylor Swift: “1989 (Paddington’s Version).”“In terms of an end goal, I don’t think there is one,” Mr. Chou said. “I would just feel bad if I stopped.” More

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      Suleika Jaouad Revisits Bone Marrow Transplant in “American Symphony”

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      This month, writer Suleika Jaouad revisits her second bone marrow transplant in the documentary “American Symphony.”In the months following her second bone marrow transplant, Suleika Jaouad’s TikTok algorithm started serving her videos of bearded dragons shedding their skin. For a writer whose work deals in ambiguities, that metaphor was tidier than she’d have preferred.Ms. Jaouad quotes Joan Didion and Emily Dickinson in casual conversation. She is the author of “Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of Life Interrupted,” a best seller which documents her first bone marrow transplant and its aftermath. Diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in 2011, Ms. Jaouad recorded the experience in real time for a column in this paper.“Why am I drawn to these?” Ms. Jaouad, now 35, wondered of the reptilian videos. She posed the question while settling into the crook of her couch at her home in Brooklyn, with a lunch spread laid out over a low table in front of her. Her dog River ogled some baba ganoush from his perch near her feet.More than time-tested sonnets and snippets of Buddhist wisdom, it was molting bearded dragons that seemed to tell the truth about what Ms. Jaouad called, “the experience of forced renewal.” She too had molted — twice now. And like the lizards, she had no choice but to be vulnerable. “I was so stripped bare, I felt larval,” said Ms. Jaouad.Diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in 2011, Ms. Jaouad recorded the experience in real time for a column in The New York Times.via Penguin Random HouseThis month, Ms. Jaouad will revisit the raw period of her cancer recurrence and second transplant when the feature documentary “American Symphony” premieres on Netflix in collaboration with Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground. The work follows Ms. Jaouad and her husband, the musician Jon Batiste, as the couple faces what Ms. Jaouad has called their “life of contrasts.” Both Ms. Jaouad and Mr. Batiste serve as executive producers.Just how stark are the contrasts? In November 2021, Ms. Jaouad learned her cancer had returned. That same week, Mr. Batiste earned 11 Grammy nominations — the most of any artist. The night before Ms. Jaouad checked into the hospital for her transplant, the two — who met as middle schoolers at band camp and later reconnected — married at home and swapped twist-tie rings.Meanwhile, Mr. Batiste continued both to serve as bandleader on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and to compose a one-time performance at Carnegie Hall in New York (also called “American Symphony”) that would distill the whole of American history into sound. In her sterile room, Ms. Jaouad started to paint and papered her walls in vibrant, sometimes gruesome watercolor.None of this was supposed to happen.As in the lead-up to her initial diagnosis, Ms. Jaouad had been negotiating persistent fatigue for months when she went to see her doctors for tests.It had been over a decade since Ms. Jaouad’s first bone marrow transplant. Her own medical team was so convinced of her durable health that the biopsy she insisted on was deemed a kind of indulgence. Minutes before the procedure, a nurse told her she didn’t have to do it. “I felt embarrassed,” Ms. Jaouad said. “I felt like I was being a hysterical, melodramatic hypochondriac.” She almost backed out, but the writer Elizabeth Gilbert — a friend and mentor — had driven her to the appointment. She didn’t want Ms. Gilbert to feel she had wasted her time.“I was right to push for the biopsy,” said Ms. Jaouad. “I wish I hadn’t been.”Netflix“She’s able to transform darkness, alchemize darkness, and transmutate darkness into light,” Mr. Batiste said of his wife.NetflixDoctors ground into Ms. Jaouad’s spine to extract a sample of her marrow. Ms. Gilbert stood watch, calling the ordeal “grisly as hell.” The relapse “simply wasn’t supposed to happen,” she wrote in an email. “There was no template for it, which was why nobody was looking for it.”“I was right to push for the biopsy,” said Ms. Jaouad. “I wish I hadn’t been.”The filmmaker Matthew Heineman had already started production on what would become “American Symphony” when Ms. Jaouad’s results came in. Mr. Heineman, who directed “Cartel Land” and “A Private War,” had been interested in shadowing Mr. Batiste as he devised the Carnegie Hall piece. Ms. Jaouad’s recurrence necessitated — as Mr. Heineman put it — a “pivot.”Ms. Jaouad was not sure she wanted to function as a plot twist.“I never want to be flattened into ‘the sick girl,’” Ms. Jaouad said of her deliberations. “I said to Matt outright, ‘I don’t want to be the dramatic counterpoint to Jon’s meteoric success.’” Mr. Heineman insisted he too was uninterested in the tropes of the illness plot. In “American Symphony” no one feels an errant lump. Ms. Jaouad doesn’t have a dramatic phone call with her oncologist. Viewers discover she has cancer in the middle of a fierce snowball fight in which Ms. Jaouad — struck and faux-outraged — protests: No hitting the girl with leukemia.Ms. Jaouad came around on the project as she did on “Between Two Kingdoms.” Then too, she had been hesitant. Ms. Jaouad recalled an encounter with the writer Cheryl Strayed not long after her first transplant. She told Ms. Strayed she wanted to write a book, but not one about illness. Ms. Strayed told her she had once been determined to avoid writing about the death of her mother. Then she turned in the manuscript for “Wild: Lost and Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.”“It’s about the hike, but it’s all about her dead mother,” Ms. Jaouad said with a smile.Ms. Jaouad’s book, and to some extent, “The Isolation Journals,” a popular newsletter she launched at the outset of the pandemic, explores how to re-enter the world after devastation. “American Symphony” follows up: How to keep going when there’s no straightforward “after.”So when it came time to watch an initial cut of the film (drawn from 1,500 hours of footage), Ms. Jaouad queued it up alone. “I feel a bit desensitized to it now,” she said. “That specific time is not representative of how I live or who I am.” But she has “no qualms” about her depiction or the decision to let Mr. Heineman film the crucial appointment three months post-transplant in which she would learn if her transplant worked. Mr. Heineman thus found out at the same time she and Mr. Batiste did that the procedure had been a success — and that Ms. Jaouad would have to be in treatment to outwit her cancer for the rest of her life.Lately, Ms. Jaouad is forcing herself to make plans. She sees it as an act of, “necessary optimism,” that she has committed to write two more books. Dana Golan for The New York Times“To describe it as a roller coaster would be an insult to roller coasters,” Ms. Jaouad said of her emotional whiplash. “The idea of indefinite treatment thrust me into a whole different kind of in-between place, and it’s one that I’m still learning to swim in.”“She’s able to transform darkness, alchemize darkness, and transmutate darkness into light,” Mr. Batiste said in a phone interview. (He called hours after still more Grammy nominations. This year, he earned six, including one for “Butterfly” — the song that plays in the “American Symphony” trailer and which he wrote for Ms. Jaouad.) “She’s able to look into what she’s facing and see not only how she can find God and find healing through it, but also provide that insight to hundreds of thousands and millions of other people out there whom she’s never met.”Necessary OptimismAfter the film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, Ms. Jaouad recalled that someone in the crowd approached her and said how relieved she was: “You’re still here.”“When it comes to illness stories, we tell them from the vantage point of having survived,” Ms. Jaouad said. In that sense, “American Symphony,” which stops short of a white-text-black-screen epilogue and offers no update on Ms. Jaouad’s health, is a corrective. “It wasn’t clear that I was going to survive the shooting period of this,” she said. The credits roll, but there is no neat ending for Ms. Jaouad and Mr. Batiste.“None of us know if we’re going to exist in the future, but I have a heightened fear of not existing in the future,” Ms. Jaouad said.In “Between Two Kingdoms” Ms. Jaouad writes about her exchanges with a man named Quintin Jones. Mr. Jones, who introduces himself to her as “Lil GQ,” read her columns while on death row. He’d written from a place of recognition — one trapped person to another. After her transplant, she visited him in prison. But the week her book was released, he was given an execution date. Ms. Jaouad was devastated. She threw herself into the movement to get his death sentence converted into a life sentence. It didn’t work.On the morning of his execution, Mr. Jones was granted four hours of phone calls. He spent them with Mr. Batiste and Ms. Jaouad. “It was unbelievable because we were talking in the future tense, knowing that the future wasn’t going to come to pass,” Ms. Jaouad said. “He talked about coming to visit us, hanging out in our garden. We were all just choosing to live in that space.” She tried to explain the suspension. Their conscious decision to be outside of time.Lately, Ms. Jaouad is forcing herself to make plans. She sees it as an act of, “necessary optimism,” that she has committed to write two more books. One will be a work of painting and prose that Ms. Jaouad has titled “Drowning Practice.” The second will be a book about journaling, incorporating writing prompts. She will show her work at the art center ArtYard next summer.A few weeks ago, Ms. Jaouad traveled to Seattle and was walking outside, suddenly under a torrential rain. Someone rushed to offer her an umbrella. “I was like, ‘No, I’m good,’” Ms. Jaouad remembered. She wanted to feel the rain on her face. Back in New York, she let herself fantasize. Not about prizes or red carpets, but about some unspecial rainstorm a decade from now. How incredible it would be not to feel new, she said. “If I’m around, I’ll want the umbrella.” More

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      Gotham Awards 2023: ‘Past Lives’ and Lily Gladstone Win Big

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      The movie prize season kicks off with honors for the A24 drama and for the star of “The Unknown Country” (who’s better known for “Killers of the Flower Moon”).“Past Lives,” the elegiac drama about a young Korean immigrant and the romantic path not taken, won best feature at the 33rd annual Gotham Awards, which were handed out Monday night at Cipriani Wall Street in New York.The A24 film from the writer-director Celine Song stars Greta Lee as a married writer in New York who reconnects with her childhood sweetheart from South Korea, a meeting that has her contemplating the Korean concept of inyeon, about fated connections between different people.“Thank you for believing in me when all I had was a script written in two languages,” Song said to the cast and crew members lined up behind her during her acceptance speech. “Everybody on this stage is my inyeon.”Considered the first notable awards ceremony of Oscar season, the Gotham Awards have the advantage of corralling contenders while they’re still fresh, before the thank-you lists in their acceptance speeches become rote and the golden dreams of some nominees have been ground into dust.This year’s show was particularly well-positioned since the actors’ strike had, until recently, thwarted many contenders from full-scale campaigning. At the Gothams, A-list attendees like Margot Robbie, Leonardo DiCaprio and Adam Driver were finally permitted to partake in an unabashed, shoulder-rubbing schmoozefest.As a harbinger of future Oscar success, the Gothams can be a mixed bag. Two of their last three best-feature winners, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Nomadland,” went on to win top honors at the Academy Awards, but the Gothams are chosen by small juries that consist of a handful of film insiders, while the Oscars are voted on by around 10,000 people.The Gothams also tend to lean indie: Though the $35 million budget cap for eligibility was waived this year, jurors only found blockbuster representation for “Barbie” star Ryan Gosling, nominated for outstanding supporting performance. The Gothams’ adoption of gender-neutral categories have reduced the acting races from four to two — here, there are only categories for lead and supporting performance — while also expanding the list of nominees in each acting category from five to a somewhat unruly 10.Still, it never hurts to be seen winning, and the Gothams offer contenders a high-profile place to break out of the pack and deliver a memorable speech.One unique example of that was the Gothams win for Lily Gladstone, who triumphed in the lead-performance category not for Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” her big-budget breakthrough, but for her role in the indie “The Unknown Country,” about a woman who embarks on a road trip after the grandmother she was caring for passes away.“At the heart of it, we have Native voices, because Morrisa shot reality,” said Gladstone, praising writer-director Morrisa Maltz. “You listened, like Marty did.”The supporting-performance award went to an overcome Charles Melton, the former “Riverdale” star at the burning heart of the Todd Haynes drama “May December.” The Korean American actor was one of many Asian winners at the Gothams, which also handed out TV awards to the Netflix limited series “Beef” and one of its lead performers, Ali Wong.“Anatomy of a Fall,” the Justine Triet courtroom drama that won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, took home best international feature and best screenplay for its examination of a marriage after a man dies in a family’s remote home in the French Alps. The award for breakthrough director went to A.V. Rockwell, the filmmaker behind the mother-son drama “A Thousand and One.”“I really did not see this coming,” Rockwell said, tearing up as she talked about the fight to make her first film as a Black woman. “Just to be frank, it is very hard to tell a culturally specific story when you look like this.”Though most of the show ran smoothly, presenter Robert De Niro was visibly irritated when a portion of his speech during a tribute to “Killers of the Flower Moon” was “cut out, and I didn’t know about it,” the actor said. Peeved not to find it in full on the Telepromptr, he doubled back and read it on his own.“In Florida, young students are taught that slaves developed skills that could be applied for their personal benefit,” De Niro said. “The entertainment industry isn’t immune to this festering disease: The Duke, John Wayne, famously said of Native Americans, ‘I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.’”De Niro also used his speech to criticize Donald Trump, a frequent bête noire of the actor: “Lying has become just another tool in the charlatan’s arsenal,” he said. “But with all his lies, he can’t hide his soul. He attacks the weak, destroys the gifts of nature and shows disrespect, for example, by using ‘Pocahontas’ as a slur.”De Niro noted that he had planned to wrap his speech by thanking the Gothams and Apple, the studio behind “Killers of the Flower Moon,” but had now changed his mind: “I don’t feel like thanking them at all for what they did. How dare they do that, actually.”In addition to the competitive honors, the Gothams paid tribute to Ben Affleck, Bradley Cooper, Greta Gerwig, Michael Mann and George C. Wolfe.Here is a complete list of winners:Best feature: “Past Lives”Outstanding lead performance: Lily Gladstone, “The Unknown Country”Outstanding supporting performance: Charles Melton, “May December”Best documentary feature: “Four Daughters”Best international feature: “Anatomy of a Fall”Best screenplay: “Anatomy of a Fall”Breakthrough director: A.V. RockwellBreakthrough series (over 40 minutes): “A Small Light”Breakthrough series (under 40 minutes): “Beef”Outstanding performance in a new series: Ali Wong, “Beef” More

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      Rob Reiner Teases Details of ‘Spinal Tap’ Sequel

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      Speaking on a podcast this week, the director said Paul McCartney and Elton John will appear in the film, among other real musical stars.The director Rob Reiner has said that an upcoming sequel to his 1984 documentary parody “This Is Spinal Tap” is scheduled to begin shooting in late February and will feature Paul McCartney, Elton John and Garth Brooks, among other stars.“Spinal Tap” satirized a bungled tour by a fictitious British heavy-metal band of that name, as well as the process of documenting it. The film, which was mostly improvised, was inspired by “The Last Waltz,” a Martin Scorsese documentary about the rock group the Band.Plans for “Spinal Tap II” were first announced last year. The entertainment news outlet Deadline reported at the time that the members of the fictitious band — the actors Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer — would all return for the sequel. Over the years, the three have played real-life concerts as their Spinal Tap characters.Reiner announced new details about the “Spinal Tap” sequel during an episode of a podcast hosted by the comedian Richard Herring that was released on Monday. The film had initially been scheduled for release in 2024, but that was before strikes that disrupted filming schedules in Hollywood. No updated release date has been announced, according to Variety.Without elaborating, Reiner said that there would also be a few other surprise appearances in the film.For most of the podcast episode on Monday, Herring and Reiner mostly talked about Reiner’s new podcast, “Who Killed JFK?” But they also discussed the original “Spinal Tap” movie, his directorial debut, which Herring said was his favorite film of all time.Asked if he regretted anything about what was and wasn’t in the 1984 film, Reiner said no. And did he anticipate how influential it would prove to be? Also no.“When we first previewed it, we previewed it in a theater in Dallas, Texas, and people … they didn’t know what the heck they were looking at,” Reiner said.“They came up to me afterward and said, ‘I don’t understand. Why would you make a movie about a band that nobody’s ever heard of? And they’re so bad! Why would you do that?’” Reiner recalled. “They said, ‘You should make a movie about the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.’”“I said, ‘Well, it’s a satire,’” Reiner said on the podcast. “I tried to explain, you know. But over the years, people got it, and they started to like it.”Reiner’s comments on Herring’s podcast were reported earlier by the music magazine NME and other outlets. More

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      ‘Past Lives’ and Lily Gladstone Win Big at the Gotham Awards

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      The movie prize season kicks off with honors for the A24 drama and for the star of “The Unknown Country” (who’s better known for “Killers of the Flower Moon”).“Past Lives,” the elegiac drama about a young Korean immigrant and the path not taken, won best feature as the 33rd annual Gotham Awards were handed out Monday night in New York.The ceremony was not without controversy. As Robert De Niro was paying tribute to “Killers of the Flower Moon,” in which he co-starred, the actor said his anti-Trump comments had been removed from his speech without his knowledge when it was added to the Telepromptr. “The beginning of my speech was edited, cut out, I didn’t know about it,” he told the audience at Cipriani Wall Street. “And I want to read it.” He went on to note that “history isn’t history anymore, truth is not truth, even facts are being replaced by alternative facts.”But the evening largely stayed focused on the films themselves, like “Past Lives,” from Celine Song. It stars Greta Lee as a married writer in New York who reconnects with her childhood sweetheart from South Korea.Outstanding lead performance went to Lily Gladstone but not for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” her big-budget breakthrough. She was honored for her turn in “The Unknown Country,” about a woman who embarks on a road trip after the grandmother she was caring for passes away.Other winners included Charles Melton, the former “Riverdale” star at the burning heart of the Todd Haynes drama “May December.”“Anatomy of a Fall,” the Justine Triet courtroom drama that won the top prize at Cannes, took home best international feature and best screenplay for its examination of a marriage after a man dies in a family’s remote home in the French Alps.The prizes, sponsored by the Gotham Film & Media Institute, serve as the kickoff to the film awards season, which culminates in the Oscars next year. In addition to the competitive honors, the Gothams paid tribute to Ben Affleck, Bradley Cooper, Greta Gerwig, Michael Mann and George C. Wolfe.Here is a complete list of winners:Best feature: “Past Lives”Outstanding lead performance: Lily Gladstone, “The Unknown Country”Outstanding supporting performance: Charles Melton, “May December”Best documentary feature: “Four Daughters”Best international feature: “Anatomy of a Fall”Best screenplay: “Anatomy of a Fall”Breakthrough director: A.V. RockwellBreakthrough series (over 40 minutes): “A Small Light”Breakthrough series (under 40 minutes): “Beef”Outstanding performance in a new series: Ali Wong, “Beef” More

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      Charles Melton, ‘May December’ Breakout Star, Is Transformed

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      I’ll admit it took me a while to notice the blood, which was wet and daubed onto his right cheekbone like a birthmark. In my defense, Charles Melton hadn’t noticed it either, even though the blood happened to be his.It was an unseasonably rainy November day in Los Angeles — a place where any evidence of the seasons is considered unseasonable — and I had gone to Melton’s house with a dual mission. The first was to discuss the new drama “May December,” in which the 32-year-old actor does more than just hold his own opposite Oscar-winning co-stars Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore: He gives the movie its bruised, beating heart.And the second mission? Well, that was to make some truly excellent kimchi.“These, you have to cut really thin,” Melton said, handing me a bulbous radish. We were in the kitchen of his cozy home in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, preparing to slice and flavor vegetables under the watchful eye of his mother, Sukyong, who was visiting from Kansas. The 32-year-old Melton keeps his fridge so well-stocked with kimchi that he often sends friends home with extra jars of it. “Just remember, kimchi is a probiotic,” he said, feeding me a piece of seasoned cabbage.Six-foot-one, shaggy-haired and easygoing, Melton has the warm glow of a Himalayan salt lamp. (He also has a Himalayan salt lamp.) Though he spent six years playing a conceited jock on the CW teen soap “Riverdale,” Melton wears his beauty and brawn as lightly as a nice jacket, and while we cut vegetables and discussed “May December,” he tried to encourage me by pointing out his own errors.With Julianne Moore in “May December.” Melton played the part as if “you were watching somebody learning how to see and how to speak and how to walk,” the director Todd Haynes said.Netflix“I’ve already messed up,” he said after one particularly inelegant radish slice. Across the kitchen, his mother turned to us, somehow able to sense the misaligned cut. “If you hear my mom saying things in Korean,” he told me, “just assume that it’s all good things.”In “May December,” Melton plays Joe, a diffident 36-year-old father married to the much older Gracie (Moore). The two have seemingly managed to fashion a picture-perfect life — three children, two dogs and a beautiful home by the water — though the original sin of their union provides an awfully shaky foundation: They met when Gracie was a married housewife and Joe was just a seventh grader. Tabloid infamy followed as Gracie was convicted of raping Joe, bore his baby in prison and, after serving a yearslong sentence, married him and had two more children.Enter Elizabeth (Portman), an ambitious actress poised to play Gracie in a movie that will exhume the scandal this couple has worked so hard to move past. In a bid to have the story told their way, Gracie and Joe agree to let Elizabeth shadow them, but as the actress peppers the couple with invasive questions, poor Joe is finally forced to confront the enormity of what he’s locked away for so long. Robbed of a normal childhood by Gracie, Joe can’t quite articulate his feelings — sentences often get lodged in his throat — but in Melton’s hands, Joe’s wounded attempt to make sense of his situation is shattering.In May, after the film premiered to raves at the Cannes Film Festival, Haynes told me that Melton was its linchpin. “It’s a consummate performance by somebody who doesn’t even realize how thorough an actor he is yet,” Haynes said. And as with “Elvis” star Austin Butler, another hunk from the CW turned serious thespian, Melton’s breakthrough role has been drawing plenty of Oscar chatter: He recently earned a nomination for outstanding supporting performance from the Gothams, heady stuff for a man whose most significant laurel until now was a nomination for best kiss at the MTV Movie & TV Awards.As we spoke, Melton met every question with enthusiastic openness; aside from the way he covers his mouth when he giggles, he’s appealingly unguarded for an actor. At 32, he’s been pondering big questions about self and purpose, and our conversation offered such a welcome opportunity to go deep that he often dropped into dreamy reveries.“I can talk to you for hours,” he said as we took a break from grating radishes to nibble on apple slices and Korean pears in his living room. “I’m looking into your eyes and I’m like, ‘Oh my God.’”As he met my gaze, I looked at his cheek and noticed the blood. When did that get there? It wasn’t until he absently brushed his hand against his face that I put two and two together and looked down.“I think you might have cut yourself,” I told him.“Maybe,” he said, grinning. Then he glanced at his right hand, where a cut halfway up his middle finger had been gushing for who knows how long.“Oh my gosh,” he said, surprised. “There’s blood everywhere.”From the kitchen, his mother whipped her head around. “Blood?” she said. “I’m coming!”When he landed the role, “I definitely felt a pressure within myself: ‘Can I go there? Can I do this?’” Melton recalled. Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesSURE, SOME INTERVIEWS benefit from a little spilled blood, but that’s usually meant in the metaphoric sense; Melton was already so willing to be vulnerable that he hardly needed a grating accident to hasten things. He told me that last summer, when he received the audition pages for “May December,” he was similarly ready to go deep.It was not long after Melton had wrapped the sixth season of “Riverdale,” which found his mind-controlled character stabbing comic-book hero Archie Andrews with one of the ancient Daggers of Megiddo. (This is just what happens on “Riverdale.”)As he read the lines and character description for Joe, “There was this sense of repression and loneliness that I related to,” he said. Those wouldn’t necessarily be the first two qualities you’d associate with Melton, an outgoing athlete who loves to hold a game night, but Joe’s predicament reminded him of a pep talk he’d gotten when he was 11: His father, on the verge of a yearlong deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan, pressed Melton to step up and take care of his mother and younger sisters in the interim, effectively becoming the man of the house.“As an 11-year-old kid, you’re like, ‘I’ll do it!’” Melton recalled. “I would never change anything I experienced — no one did anything wrong — but in looking at that part of my own experience and then looking at Joe, it’s that similarity of the feeling of stepping into something whether you’re ready for it or not.”He kept rerecording his “May December” self-tape for six hours until he was satisfied, then sent it over. Though Haynes was unfamiliar with Melton’s work and nearly discounted him because of his model-handsome headshot — “I just didn’t see how he would fit into this world,” the filmmaker told me — once he pressed play, Haynes was intrigued by Melton’s unique take on the character.“Charles just brought this sense of somebody who was almost preverbal, who was almost prenatal, like you were watching somebody learning how to see and how to speak and how to walk,” Haynes said. “He was extremely restrained and subtle in what he did.”After another taped audition, Melton was asked to fly to New York for a chemistry read with Moore, with whom he found an unexpected connection: They were both Army brats who had spent formative chunks of their childhood living on a military base in Juneau, Alaska, a link that lent them an easy rapport and helped him secure the role.“I definitely felt a pressure within myself: ‘Can I go there? Can I do this?’” Melton recalled. “‘I believe I can, but I don’t know what it looks like, so let me do everything underneath the sun to try to figure out what that is.’”To prepare, Melton threw himself into the role in any way he could think of. He spent hours every day consulting with his acting coach and therapist, trying to figure out Joe’s tricky, tangled internal wiring. He rewatched “Brokeback Mountain,” studying the ways Heath Ledger expressed repression in his physical bearing, and “In the Mood for Love,” observing how Tony Leung conveyed so much inner turmoil without saying a thing. And after conferring with Haynes, Melton decided to gain 40 pounds for the role, smoothing out his sharp jawline and adding a suburban-dad paunch.“The reward was me discovering my process,” he said. At his dining-room table, Melton demonstrated by conjuring up Joe for me: He curled his lips inward, setting them in a tense horizontal line, then slumped forward, defeated and deflated. “His reality is so distorted by the projections of society, the last thing he wants to do is to show himself,” Melton said, letting the bright light behind his eyes go dim. “He protects himself, even in his body.”Melton in “Riverdale.” Haynes wasn’t familiar with his work when he auditioned for “May December.”CWThe only thing that threatened to undo him was a determination not to disappoint. It all came to a head in one of the film’s most affecting scenes, where Joe and his teenage son, Charlie, share a joint on their roof. Charlie and his twin sister are about to graduate from high school and after their parents become empty-nesters, Joe will have to confront the ugly reality of his marriage to Gracie in a way he has assiduously avoided. Alarmed, Charlie tells him not to worry. “That’s all I do,” Joe replies, teary and close to retching.After a few takes, Haynes felt they had what they needed, but Melton was unsure: Shouldn’t he take this moment to go bigger, to give more, to prove himself somehow? He kept asking for additional takes, but each iteration felt strained, bringing him further and further from Joe and closer to the pernicious fear that he was a terrible actor. Eventually, he came down from the roof to confer with Haynes and burst into tears.“I think those came from selfish ideas of wanting to be at a certain place, where I forgot at the moment, ‘Hey, your job is to tell the character’s story, not yours,’” he said. What had gotten in the way of that connection? “Maybe wanting to be seen,” he said, trying to parse what exactly he meant by that. “I want to be seen, but I don’t want to be seen, right? But being seen for what you do is still a part of you being seen.”Melton paused. “I don’t even know what I’m saying right now,” he admitted, laughing. “I’m just making kimchi.”LATER, WITH THE task at hand finished and his mother retired to the couch to watch Korean dramas on her phone, Melton gave me a tour of his house. Downstairs, in a low-lit room he nicknamed the “Pavilion of Dreams,” Melton put Radiohead’s “Kid A” on the record player, slid open the glass door to his rain-lashed backyard deck, and lit a cigarette. He wanted to talk more about the idea that had tripped him up earlier, the tension between wanting to be seen and, at other times, striving to disappear.“Sometimes I feel this push and pull of, am I white enough, am I American enough, am I Asian enough?” Melton said. Growing up in military bases all over the world with a white father and Korean mother, he felt a constant need to assimilate that often left him feeling unmoored: “I remember having a dream around that time, like if you cut two cars in half and put the front ends together and one is Korean and the other one is American. Which driver’s seat do you want to sit in?”After five years stationed in Korea when he was a young boy, Melton’s family moved to Texas, where his dyed-blond K-pop bangs and affinity for taekwondo went over less well. He soon adopted the uniform there — Vans, cargo shorts and oversized Hawaiian shirts — and even when his family packed up again and moved to a military base in Ansbach, Germany, Melton couldn’t quite let go of the American boy he’d worked so hard to become, continuing to wear a puka-shell necklace and Hollister shirts shipped overseas.“I want to be seen, but I don’t want to be seen, right?,” Melton said.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesFor his last three years of high school, Melton’s family moved to Manhattan, Kan. “Being an Asian American kid and that not being a commonality, especially in Kansas, what was my bridge to assimilate?” he said. He found it in football: Though he began disastrously, finishing dead-last in every practice sprint and vomiting in front of teammates, he applied himself and worked his way up, eventually becoming an all-star and earning a slot as a defensive back at Kansas State University, where he was nicknamed “Kamikaze” for hitting harder than anyone else on the team.“I’m checking all the boxes, right? ‘American,’” he said. “But a big thing to process for me was, what is my identity outside of this?”Around that time, on the way to football practice, he heard a radio advertisement for a talent showcase that asked, “Do you want to be a star?” Melton had always dreamed of becoming an actor, but when he was a child, his father warned him that the only Asians who succeeded in Hollywood were martial artists like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. Still, he drove 45 minutes to the open call in Salina, Kan., where he was asked to read ad copy for Twizzlers, model for talent scouts and perform Ben Stiller’s airplane freakout scene from “Meet the Parents” onstage.He came out of the showcase with 20 callbacks and a brand-new lease on life. “It was so exhilarating to be seen in a way that wasn’t me being seen, but what I was choosing to do,” he said. “It seemed like there were no boundaries.” Though he was used to toggling between different identities, acting offered something way beyond assimilation — it felt, if anything, more like expansion.The entirety of what he wanted out of life shifted very suddenly, and Melton dropped out of college, moved to Los Angeles, and spent the next few years modeling, walking dogs, delivering Chinese takeout and auditioning for anything he could. Eventually, he secured “Riverdale,” which led to roles in films like “The Sun Is Also a Star” and “Bad Boys for Life,” as well as a featured spot in Ariana Grande’s presciently titled music video, “Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored.”But after leveling up as an actor with “May December,” Melton could be at a career crossroads: Will Marvel come calling, ready to poach a hot new name with superhero looks, or will Melton throw in with the likes of Butler and Jacob Elordi, who are using their heat to help finance auteur-driven projects? “All one hopes for with an actor like Charles is that he gets roles offered to him and projects coming to him that excite and continue to stretch him,” Haynes said.The monthslong awards gantlet will surely raise his profile even more, and Melton is excited to embark on all it has to offer, though he’s lately tried to ground himself in simpler pleasures, like family visits, camping trips and accepting licks to the face from his Siberian husky, Neya. “I have good people in my life, Kyle, really good people who know me and love me,” he said. “I don’t need any more love, but if I get it, it’s awesome.”At the very least, Melton is about be seen in a whole new way, and he’ll have to wrestle with all that entails. But as we parted ways — me, with several jars of take-home kimchi and him, with a bandaged middle finger — he promised that no matter what happens over the next few months, he’ll be ready for it.“I’ll still be me,” he said. “Maybe I’ll just have nicer shoes.” More

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      Can a Rom-Com Make Sense in Dark Times? Yes, When It’s From This Master.

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      Aki Kaurismaki’s “Fallen Leaves” is both magical and despairing, born of what the Finnish auteur’s stars say is an unusual shooting approach.There’s a detail in Aki Kaurismaki’s brilliant new gem of a comedy, “Fallen Leaves,” that I didn’t notice — even after two viewings — until one of its stars pointed it out to me. When the heroine goes to work as a dishwasher at a dingy Helsinki bar, there’s a shot of an oversize calendar. The year is 2024. “This is actually, you know, like a sci-fi film,” the actor Jussi Vatanen told me in a video call.As absurd as it sounds, there’s truth in that statement. The carefully constructed, dry-as-a-bone romantic comedy (in theaters now) technically takes place in the future. However, if you didn’t notice the calendar, you might assume it’s a period piece — one from the 1980s perhaps, given the clothing and décor — except for the fact that the radio is broadcasting reports from the ongoing war in Ukraine.It’s all a bit disorienting, but it’s also part of the magic of the latest from the Finnish master. Alma Poysti, the other star of the new film, described “Fallen Leaves” as something out of a “fairy tale,” adding, “He probably suggests to throw logic out of the window.”Perhaps one reason I’m so taken with “Fallen Leaves” is that it does feel like an uplifting fairy tale despite the despair that initially surrounds the characters. It’s a love story with a happy ending — and a cute dog to boot — that nonetheless throws together two people whose loneliness is palpable, who exist in an unforgiving world, where work and joy is often scarce. To love “Fallen Leaves” is to submit to the often hilarious deadpan rhythms that are characteristic of Kaurismaki’s work but also to its unrepentant optimism.One of Poysti’s co-stars in “Fallen Leaves” is a four-legged actor who happens to be the director’s dog, Alma. Malla Hukkanen/SputnikAt a moment in the release calendar when seeing a quote-unquote serious film often requires wrestling with humanity’s ills, “Fallen Leaves” is a rom-com from a great auteur that, in its brief run time, offers a balm for dark times. It’s not frivolous, but at the same time it’s genuinely heartwarming.Kaurismaki has called “Fallen Leaves” a lost installment of what is known as his “Proletariat” trilogy: three films released in Finland between 1986 and 1990. Like “Fallen Leaves,” these relatively short works are all stories about people on the margins.This latest finds its two solitary protagonists in Ansa (Poysti), who stocks the aisles of a coldly lit grocery store, and Holappa (Vatanen), who works on a construction site and dulls his pain with alcohol. Their eyes first meet, briefly but intensely, at a karaoke bar. He’s been dragged there by a bombastic friend, even though he would prefer to be reading comics alone. “I remember in the script it said that the gaze is upsetting Holappa so much that he needs to go out for a smoke because he can’t handle it,” Poysti said, adding, “It’s this kind of electric moment.”Their paths continue to collide across Helsinki — she finds him passed out at a bus station one night — before they finally make tentative moves toward a true introduction. A coffee date turns into an evening-long excursion to see a film. (Cheekily, it’s Jim Jarmusch’s zombie flick “The Dead Don’t Die,” a nod from one art-house hero to another.)And yet the path to romance is not easy. Some of the obstacles seem to emerge from the most conventional rom-com tropes. Holappa immediately loses Ansa’s phone number, for instance, when he reaches into his pocket for a cigarette and the slip of paper blows away. Other impediments are deeper and more painful. Though she is infatuated with him, Ansa is wary of Holappa’s dependence on alcohol, and refuses to allow herself to come second to his addiction — she’s been through that before with her father and her brother.Still, without spoiling too much, this is not a dour exploration of love lost. In fact, by the end it’s downright life-affirming. And, yes, at some point during the saga, Ansa takes in an adorable stray dog, played by Kaurismaki’s real life pup, Alma. Even if it doesn’t work out between her and Holappa, at least she’ll have a companion. The dog is an immediate comfort, settling in next to Ansa on her twin bed.In interviews, Poysti and Vatanen explained how unusual a Kaurismaki set is. He doesn’t want his actors to rehearse by themselves, and he usually does only one take. If they mess up, they get a second go. Only a disaster would prompt a third. Even the pooch would typically hit her mark, Poysti explained: “She’s got intuition.”The film offers glimmers of hope amid a bleak setting.Malla Hukkanen/SputnikIt would be tempting to view the frames Kaurismaki creates as almost too exacting, since he does construct this world with a painterly quality. At the karaoke establishment, there are beats when it seems as if the bartender and the other patrons are frozen while the singers perform. An absent-minded swig of beer breaks the spell. But there’s also an energy to this precision, especially when Ansa and Holappa are interacting. You feel the expectant tension between them, this flicker of hope for two souls resigned to the idea of being forever lonely.It’s reflective of the anxiousness felt by the performers — both Kaurismaki newcomers, children of the digital age being captured on 35-millimeter film.“There is this sort of sense of nervousness, and you can’t be very prepared,” Vatanen said. “So you have to be very present in that moment.”Poysti agreed that there was something terrifying about the experience initially, but that subsided when she realized what Kaurismaki was making. “It’s so precious and fragile and honest, and as soon as you repeat it, you have to start faking it a little bit,” she said. “So if you can avoid it then you will find something very, very honest and rare and beautiful, so you start to get kicks from it and you start to love it.”And it’s not as if Kaurismaki isn’t playful. For one musical sequence, he recruited the impossibly cool modern Finnish duo Maustetytot, whose name translates to “spice girls” and who perform a song with the lyric “I like you but can’t stand myself.” The jokes elicit chuckles even if the characters barely crack a smile; Poysti said there were some moments when she had trouble not breaking. After a rough patch for Ansa and Holappa, Ansa’s friend declares that “all men are swine.” Ansa shoots back: “They’re not. Swines are intelligent and sympathetic.”That humor in the face of desperation, which ultimately leads to an ending that is as tender as any Hollywood rom-com, is why “Fallen Leaves” feels like such a gift. Poysti said she believed that Ansa and Holappa were going to be all right as they walk off into the future, a little battered but together.“I think,” she said, “throughout the film, there is a sense that caring for each other is a counter force for cynicism, and as long as you care for each other, then you have strengths and you have some power in life.”And that is timeless — no matter the year on the calendar. More

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      Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’ Film: 4 Takeaways From the Premiere

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      The star skipped the red carpet and slipped into the celebrity-filled screening on Saturday night. But the movie pulls back the curtain — a little.Near the end of her new concert documentary, “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,” Beyoncé states that she’s tired of being a “serial people-pleaser.” Since she was a child, she says, she has been striving for stardom, but now that she’s on top of the world and two years into her revelatory 40s, it’s time to recalibrate.“I have nothing to prove to anyone at this point,” she says.Maybe that’s why Beyoncé decided to skip the red carpet entirely at the Los Angeles premiere of her movie on Saturday night, leaving that task to a starry list of invitees that included Tyler Perry, Ava DuVernay, Lizzo and Issa Rae. Though Beyoncé made a posed appearance at the Oct. 11 premiere of “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” — like that concert documentary, “Renaissance” will be distributed by AMC Theaters — she entered her own premiere only after the lights had been turned off and the movie was seconds away from beginning.Unlike Swift, who shares plenty about her life and is currently in a high-profile, well-documented romance with the N.F.L. player Travis Kelce, Beyoncé is one of our most private superstars. She has given virtually no interviews over the last decade, and any insight into her life or work mostly has to be inferred from brief statements released on social media or her website. “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,” which chronicles the most recent world tour in support of her seventh studio album, offers fans something new to interpret, pulling back Beyoncé’s curtain ever so slightly.Here are four the takeaways from the premiere of the movie, which is out in theaters Dec. 1.This is more than just a filmed concertSwift’s AMC film was a straightforward concert documentary that never left the stage: It was meant to feel as if you had the best seat on her tour stop, but it included no behind-the-scenes frills.“Renaissance” does things a little differently. Like Beyoncé’s film “Homecoming,” which chronicled the assemblage of her 2018 Coachella performance, the new movie often takes us behind the steel girders to see just how the mammoth tour was put together. “I’m excited for people to see the show,” Beyoncé says in the film, “but I’m really excited for everyone to see the process.”That process comes in bits and pieces as we watch Beyoncé call the shots on everything from lighting to set decoration to orchestration, sometimes getting frustrated that her notes aren’t heard. “Communicating as a Black woman,” she says, “everything is a fight.”Still, people come around to Beyoncé’s will sooner or later, she says: “Eventually, they realize this bitch will not give up.”Beyoncé also devotes behind-the-scenes segments to her recovery from a knee injury, a hometown visit in Houston, and her late, treasured Uncle Johnny, whose love of house music helped inspire the dance bangers on “Renaissance.” And there’s plenty of fan footage, too: The film often cuts away to shots of audience members in various states of ecstatic crying or frozen, religious awe.Only a little bit got left outThough the ballad-heavy prelude that opened Beyoncé’s Renaissance set list is trimmed, nearly every other song from the tour is included in the film. She even found room for “Thique” and “All Up in Your Mind,” a Renaissance double-header excised from many of her tour stops.The only egregious omission in this two-hour-48-minute movie is a behind-the-scenes bit that goes by way too quickly: Beyoncé convenes a Destiny’s Child reunion in Houston that includes not just Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams but also two of the girl group’s first members, LeToya Luckett and LaTavia Roberson, who were contentiously pushed out. “It was like a new birth for us, and a lot of healing,” Beyoncé says in her narration, though we only see the five of them together for a second and don’t hear a single thing they discussed. I would have watched three more hours of that summit alone!The missing ‘visuals’ remain a mysteryThe “Renaissance” album was released in July 2022 without any sort of music-video accompaniment, a surprise given Beyoncé’s recent run of game-changing visual albums for “Lemonade” and her self-titled 2013 record. A subsequent teaser video for the first “Renaissance” album track “I’m That Girl” seemed to promise more to come, but none did.At a Louisville, Ky., stop on the Renaissance tour, a fan held up a sign asking where the visuals were, prompting Beyoncé to grandly tell the crowd, “You are the visuals.” (The crowd didn’t love that.) The “Renaissance” movie is cheeky enough to include that moment, but otherwise, there’s no mention of the missing visuals, nor an explanation of why they’ve seemingly been scuttled.Blue Ivy fought for her tour spotBy and large, the Renaissance tour eschewed celebrity cameos and surprise drop-ins, preferring to keep the focus on the queen bee herself. Big names joined Beyoncé onstage at only two tour stops: Houston, where Megan Thee Stallion performed “Savage,” and Los Angeles, where Diana Ross and Kendrick Lamar came out for the concert held on Beyoncé’s 42nd birthday.Those appearances all made it into the movie, but the special guest the movie is most interested in is Beyoncé’s 11-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, who often participated as one of the dancers on her mother’s songs “My Power” and “Black Parade.” I caught one of Blue Ivy’s first tour appearances last May in London, where she was still getting the hang of her choreography, but by the end of the Renaissance tour, she had everything — the moves, the attitude — down pat.Turns out, Blue Ivy’s performance was only supposed to be a one-off, and even that took some negotiating. “She told me she was ready to perform, and I told her no,” Beyoncé says in the film. Though she finally relented, Beyoncé was dismayed when Blue Ivy read comments on social media that criticized her lackluster moves. But it thrilled her mother that instead of quitting, she decided to put in the work and train even harder for future stops.Blue Ivy also pops up in much of the behind-the-scenes footage, offering her often unsugarcoated opinion on stage design, song choices and more. In a film where everyone else treats Beyoncé as a boss or a goddess, Blue Ivy is an amusingly irreverent presence: To this 11-year-old, Beyoncé is just a mom. More