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How Well Do You Know Modern Variations of “A Christmas Carol”? – The New York Times
Book Review|How Well Do You Know Modern Variations of “A Christmas Carol”?https://nyti.ms/3FRZJJk More
The Damien Chazelle epic is set in 1920s Hollywood and draws on figures from that time, including “the ‘It’ Girl,” Clara Bow.Crossing “Singin’ in the Rain” with “Boogie Nights,” Damien Chazelle’s fictional “Babylon” draws on just enough real film history to flatter cinephiles and to risk their ire. Here are some of the underpinnings of Chazelle’s three-hour opus.Clara BowWhen you hear that a movie star has “it” — whatever that means — you can thank Brooklyn’s own Clara Bow, advertised as “the ‘It’ Girl” for, well, “It,” a smash 1927 adaptation of a novel by Elinor Glyn. Chazelle told The New York Times in November that much of Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), the live wire who shoots to stardom in “Babylon” only to flame out in the sound era, was inspired by Bow. David Stenn’s well-regarded biography “Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild” suggests many similarities: Bow’s humble origins were a source of insecurity. She was said to be unusually good at crying on command. Doctors thought her mother, who died just as Bow was getting her start, suffered from a nervous disorder (which was in fact epilepsy). And her exploitative father took it upon himself to be her business manager.Douglas Fairbanks, John Gilbert and Rudolph ValentinoBrad Pitt has said he modeled his character, Jack Conrad, on Fairbanks, Gilbert and Valentino. Valentino exists in “Babylon” (his death in 1926 is mentioned), and unlike Jack, who sometimes pretends to be Italian, Valentino was born in Italy. Fairbanks and Gilbert are commonly cited as great silent leading men whose popularity petered out with sound, but there are sound movies in which they appear perfectly comfortable. (When Gilbert played opposite Greta Garbo in “Queen Christina” in 1933, the New York Times critic Mordaunt Hall praised him as “far more restrained” than in silents.) Both men died young, although their fates differed from Jack’s.Anna May WongThere’s no mistaking the inspiration for Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li). It’s Anna May Wong, the groundbreaking Asian American actress and daughter of a laundryman who for a time moved to Europe, though a little earlier than Fay does. The film groups Wong, who, like Fay, was rumored to be a lesbian, with casualties of the advent of sound. Wong’s best-known movie from Europe — the extravagant, London-set “Piccadilly” (1929) — was silent. By 1932, Wong was back in Hollywood appearing in Josef von Sternberg’s “Shanghai Express” with Marlene Dietrich.But Wong did lose work because her image didn’t fit with the times, as “Babylon” suggests, understating the role that racism played. Often typecast in supporting roles, Wong was considered a possibility for the lead in “The Good Earth” (1937), but there were concerns that casting her opposite the white actor Paul Muni would suggest miscegenation. The film was one of the last made by the producer Irving Thalberg (Max Minghella), one of a handful of figures in “Babylon” to use real names.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.The Transition to Sound“Babylon” alludes to the piecemeal nature of the transition to sound. Informed that the new Al Jolson sound picture at Warner Bros. is going to be big, Jack asks if it’s “like ‘Don Juan’”— a 1926 film that had synchronized music but no talking. In fact, the Jolson film is “The Jazz Singer” (1927), which, contrary to its popular reputation, was not the first sound film or even a full-fledged sound film. (Long stretches are silent.) But it was financially successful enough to indicate that talkies had a future.Bow in “The Wild Party,” an inspiration for a fictional film in “Babylon.”via The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills ArchiveClara Bow and Sound“The Dame and the Dean,” Nellie’s first sound film in “Babylon,” directed by Ruth Adler (Olivia Hamilton), is quite clearly inspired by Bow’s first sound film, “The Wild Party” (1929), directed by Dorothy Arzner. Nellie’s problems with sound begin with her entrance, when she declares, “Hello, college!,” and a technician cries that “she blew the valves.” A similar anecdote appears in Kenneth Anger’s dubious book “Hollywood Babylon.” Nevertheless, the movie fairly captures the restrictions of the early sound era, like the need to encase the noise-making camera in a booth.Though Nellie’s Jersey-accented tones are likened to a dying pig’s, Bow’s Brooklyn delivery played well enough. “Miss Bow’s voice is better than the narrative,” Hall wrote of “The Wild Party” in 1929. Seen today, it is a fun romp with an undercurrent of seriousness, and Bow is the best thing in it.Kenneth Anger’s ‘Hollywood Babylon’In 1959, the experimental filmmaker Anger (“Fireworks”) published “Hollywood Babylon,” which cataloged, with a tongue-clucking tone, the supposed details of deaths, drug habits and sex lives of members of the movie industry. Serious film historians regard it as pernicious nonsense and have been trying to correct its claims ever since.While Anger’s “Babylon” is not the official source for Chazelle’s “Babylon,” the connection is tough to ignore. When Nellie is trailed by University of Southern California football players after beating them at craps, the scene evokes Anger’s assertion that Bow played “party girl” to the entire U.S.C. football team “during beery, brawly, gangbanging weekend parties.” (Nellie’s overalls-and-nothing-else outfit, on the other hand, resembles a widely circulated photo of Bow’s contemporary Bessie Love.)In his biography, Stenn traces the rumor to Bow’s true-enough habit of hosting the U.S.C. Trojans on Saturday nights at her Beverly Hills bungalow. But Stenn, who interviewed players, concluded that “even the wildest party, which ended in a 4 a.m. game of touch football on Clara’s front lawn, was tame.”‘Singin’ in the Rain’Throughout “Babylon,” Chazelle nods to “Singin’ in the Rain,” which memorialized the transition to sound from the standpoint of 1952. But in “Babylon,” you’ll hear the song “Singin’ in the Rain” in a scene that takes place decades earlier: Chazelle shows the shooting of “The Hollywood Revue of 1929,” a characteristically stiff, celebrity-packed musical that featured Gilbert. The song is staged twice in “Hollywood Revue,” and Chazelle re-creates the reprise — the film’s Technicolor finale, in which cast members bob along to the tune on rock-shaped risers in front of a Noah’s Ark set. In “Babylon,” Jack is among them.Black Jazz GreatsDuring the “Singin’ in the Rain” shoot, the trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) tells the rising studio executive Manny Torres (Diego Calva) that the camera is pointed in the wrong direction. Soon Sidney and his band are starring in films, until he quits after being asked to don blackface to darken his skin.Chazelle took inspiration from Black musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, who appeared onscreen in the early sound era. And like Sidney, Armstrong and Ellington contended with degrading scenes. In “A Rhapsody in Black and Blue” (1932), Armstrong performed two numbers “dressed as an African savage in a sparsely cut leopard skin,” Thomas Brothers writes in “Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism.” In “Check and Double Check” (1930), a film version of the “Amos ’n’ Andy” radio show, lighter-skinned members of Ellington’s band “were ordered by the studio to wear dark makeup for a ballroom scene, a stipulation that was covered as news by the Black papers,” according to Terry Teachout’s biography “Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington.”Latino Success in 1920s HollywoodChazelle has cited multiple models for Manny, who eventually becomes an influential player in the early sound era. Those semi-analogues include René Cardona, a Cuban-born director with more than 100 credits, and the cinematographer Enrique Juan Vallejo. But his most interesting choice of model may be Joselito and Roberto Rodríguez, Mexican brothers who went to Hollywood and developed a sound recording system. Manny gets invited to become a studio’s head of sound, and like Joselito, he is an electronics expert. More
The actor, now in the movie “Something From Tiffany’s,” thrives on regular readings of “Our Town,” discussions of “Sapiens” and whiffs of her dog’s paws.Zoey Deutch wanted to be honest. “Rarely am I drawn to super joyful material,” she said. “I have, at least in the last couple of years, been interested in darker, tonally strange pieces.”An influencer who fakes surviving a terrorist attack in “Not Okay.” An F.B.I. informant in “The Outfit.”But four years ago, she recalled, Reese Witherspoon tweeted that she’d seen and loved Deutch in “Set It Up,” about a couple of overworked assistants who try to create some breathing room by getting their bosses together.The two women started talking, which resulted in Melissa Hill’s novel “Something From Tiffany’s” being sent to Deutch. That led to their collaboration on the Amazon Prime Video adaptation (Witherspoon as a producer, Deutch as the star and an executive producer) about mixed-up Tiffany’s bags, a zingy New York baker (Deutch) stunned by an engagement ring from the boyfriend she’s not sure about, and a captivating widower (Kendrick Sampson) whose proposal is sabotaged when his girlfriend opens her own blue box — and the ring isn’t there.Rarely has so much bread been consumed onscreen in pursuit of diamonds and love.“So now we get to share our great, feel-good romantic movie,” Deutch said, not sounding remotely dark on a video call from her home in Los Angeles, before elaborating on the deliciousness of her dog’s paws, the significance of her grandmother’s paintings and the lessons to be found in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.1. “The Book of Symbols” It was brought into my life by my Alexander technique teacher many years ago when I was preparing for a movie. One of the reasons he gave it to me is because when we’re working on a new character or a new project, we like to pick animals and colors and symbols and create a visual board for the character. This became sort of a guiding light. I have a million copies downstairs because I always give them to people.2. Farmers’ Markets I went to an acupuncturist once who said something that stuck with me: that it’s so important, especially in this day and age when we get our groceries sent to our house, to go to the grocery store or to the farmers’ market and look at the food, because we are going further and further and further away from our instincts. And we have great instincts about what our bodies need if we listen to them. The more I started to grow and pick out my own food, the more I realized that things looked good to me not just because they were necessarily pretty, but because my body was craving them and needed those specific nutrients.3. My Dog’s Paws You know that specific smell of dogs’ paws when they’re asleep? They smell like corn chips, like Fritos. It’s actually a thing. They have some sort of bacteria in their paws and the odor smells similar to corn chips and it’s released when they’re asleep.4. “The Joy of Cooking” The basics in there are really fantastic. I put my own spin on things, but I always go back to that roast chicken recipe with just butter and salt.5. Grandma’s Paintings My grandma was an amazing, prolific artist and a spiritual, eccentric woman. She has inspired me in every way, and I carry her with me always. Specifically, I carry with me a painting I have above my fireplace that I designed my whole house around. She painted a lot of abstract stuff, but oddly this one is a naked woman on a red background. It feels right to be able to see her work every day.6. “Our Town” I prefer reading plays to books or scripts. It’s very soothing for me. I read “Our Town” for the first time when I was 14 or 15, and I’ve read it every two years since. It’s just a heartbreaking, beautiful story that gets me every time. It’s about how little we appreciate the simple joys of life and don’t understand the value of life while we’re living it.7. Ceramics My love of ceramics began with my great-grandmother, who had a small box of Atomic Starburst, a dinnerware that’s kind of famous. I saw that in my mom’s garage and I loved them. Then I started collecting them and now I have a whole set. I think the hunt is very fun, with that one specifically, because I know exactly what I’m looking for. And I have started collecting ceramics in Ischia, in Ravello, in Oaxaca.8. “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari The way he explains things works for my brain. It’s like the intersection between natural sciences and social sciences. It’s very stimulating. It’s also very fun to discuss — dinner-table conversations that are very, like, “Whoa, I never thought about it that way.”9. Matching Tracksuits As a little girl I had aspirations of both being an actress and a fashion designer. So it sounds a little counterintuitive to say I love matching tracksuits, which are essentially just pajamas that you wear out. But after spending half of my life in fittings for jobs or events or whatever, the last thing I want to do is try on clothes. I just want to be comfortable.10. Adventure My parents worked so hard when we were growing up and didn’t really take a lot of time for themselves. And what happened as a result is I became obsessed with traveling and planning and doing things and enjoying the fruits of my labor and experiencing the world and having a really full life. It’s hard not to feel guilty because I have the part of my brain that’s like, “Work all the time.” And then I have to go to the other part of my brain, which is, “Enjoy your life.” I’m trying to reframe my American mind-set of live to work, not work to live. In the spirit of “Our Town,” you never know how good it is until it’s gone. More
Between a murderous Santa wielding a sledgehammer and an elf throwing a rave in a corporate mailroom, Christmas movies seem to get more outlandish every year. How well do you know your festive films?
Image credits: Hallmark Channel (“A Royal Corgi Christmas”); Bettmann/Getty Images (Queen Elizabeth II); Michael Reynolds/EPA, via Shutterstock (the Bidens); Pool photo by Jonathan Buckmaster (Muick and Sandy mourning the Queen’s death); Netflix (“The Princess Switch”); Universal Pictures (“Violent Night”); Hallmark Movies & Mysteries (“Christmas in Montana”); Hulu (“Happiest Season”); Netflix (“Falling for Christmas”); Paramount Pictures (“Mean Girls”); Disney (“The Parent Trap”); Paramount Pictures (“Once Upon a Christmas”); Disney (“Noelle”); Hallmark Channel (“Hanukkah on Rye”); Universal Pictures (“Last Christmas”).
Produced by Tala Safie and Josephine Sedgwick. More
He was best known for complex crime dramas like “Croupier.” But he also made the big-budget 1980 science-fiction yarn “Flash Gordon.”Mike Hodges, a director whose visceral feature-film debut, “Get Carter” (1971), is regarded as one of Britain’s best gangster movies, died on Saturday at his home in Dorset, England. He was 90.Mike Kaplan, a longtime friend and a producer of Mr. Hodges’s 2004 film, “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” said the cause was heart failure.Mr. Hodges wasn’t prolific — writing about him in The New York Times in 2004, the critic Terrence Rafferty said, “The English director Mike Hodges has made so few films he should be legendary,” like Stanley Kubrick and other limited-output directors. But he had successes, none bigger than his feature debut.Mr. Hodges had directed for a handful of British television series when he stepped up in class with “Get Carter,” a movie he wrote based on a novel by Ted Lewis. Michael Caine starred as a criminal out to avenge his brother, who had died under suspicious circumstances.“Its violence is so ghastly and unremitting and its view of the human condition is so perfectly vile that one would almost rather wash one’s mouth out with soap than recommend it,” Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The Times when the movie came out. “Yet it is so finely acted and crafted — and is so spectacularly better than the run of its genre — that as a lover of movies one feels practically duty‐bound to sing its praises.”After “Pulp” (1972), a crime comedy that also starred Mr. Caine, and “The Terminal Man” (1974), a blend of science fiction and horror based on a Michael Crichton novel, Mr. Hodges took on a high-profile assignment, the big-budget sci-fi yarn “Flash Gordon.” Released in 1980, the movie divided critics.“It means to be escapist entertainment,” Vincent Canby of The Times wrote, “but it’s all so extravagantly witless that it stirs the social conscience, if not too deeply. It reminds you that there are people in India who would be glad to eat the spinach you leave on your plate.”But Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times admired Mr. Hodges’s campy take on the story, which was based on the popular comic strip of the same name.“At a time when ‘Star Wars’ and its spinoffs have inspired special effects men to bust a gut making their interplanetary adventures look real, ‘Flash Gordon’ is cheerfully willing to look as phony as it is,” he wrote. “I don’t mean that as a criticism.”Michael Caine in “Get Carter” (1971). “As a lover of movies one feels practically duty‐bound to sing its praises,” the critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The New York Times.Everett CollectionLater in the 1980s Mr. Hodges made some flops, including the sci-fi comedy “Morons From Outer Space” (1985) and the crime drama “A Prayer for the Dying” (1987), which he disowned because he objected to the editing. But “Croupier” (1998), a crime drama about a writer (Clive Owen) who goes to work in a casino, brought him a burst of new attention.The movie didn’t get much notice when it had a limited release in Europe, but then a friend found an American distributor willing to give it a two-week run in some markets in the United States, and critics hailed a comeback.“‘Croupier,’ filmed by Mr. Hodges from a screenplay by Paul Mayersberg, shows that the director hasn’t lost his knack for whip-smart, tongue-in-cheek suspense,” Stephen Holden wrote in The Times in 2000.Mr. Hodges said that until those American reviews, his disappointment over the original lack of attention to “Croupier” had him considering quitting the business.“I was sitting at home in Dorset, getting over a hip replacement,” he told The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2001, “and these amazing notices from America started pouring from my fax machine. I couldn’t believe it. It was like some crazy fairy tale.”Yet he directed only one more feature, “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” which also starred Mr. Owen, as a gangster who investigates his brother’s suicide. With a plot not unlike that of “Get Carter,” it seemed like completing a circle.“It’s hard not to see ‘I’ll Sleep’ as a kind of unofficial sequel to ‘Get Carter,’” Xan Brooks wrote in The Guardian in 2003. “The film plays as a wearied elegy to the gangster life, full of characters slightly past their sell-by dates, angry and outmoded as they nurse their ancient feuds and clamber in and out of their E-type Jags. Hodges watches their decline with a cool, clinical eye.”Mr. Hodges, center, directing “Flash Gordon” (1980). The movie “is cheerfully willing to look as phony as it is,” Roger Ebert wrote. “I don’t mean that as a criticism.”Universal/courtesy Everett CollectionMichael Tommy Hodges was born on July 29, 1932, in Bristol, England, to Sandy and Norah Hodges. His father was a cigarette salesman, his mother a homemaker. He grew up watching the westerns and musicals of the 1940s and set his sights on becoming a director, though at his father’s urging he studied accounting for a time.He had grown up in Salisbury and Bath — “cities with soft centers,” as he put it — but in the mid-1950s, two years of national service in the Royal Navy, which sent him to “every fishing port in the U.K,” opened his eyes to a rugged, saltier side of life, an experience later reflected in his films.After the Navy he got a job as a teleprompter operator for the BBC in London, which introduced him to television. He began writing advertising copy and was eventually producing and directing.In 1999, when a retrospective of Mr. Hodges’s movies was showing in Los Angeles, Kevin Thomas of The Los Angeles Times said that the crime films stood out for their complexity and ambiguity.“Just when you think Hodges is building to a payoff that will clear everything up,” he wrote, “he may leave you to sort things out for yourself.”Mr. Hodges’s first marriage, to Jean Alexandrov, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Carol Laws; two sons from his first marriage, Ben and Jake; and five grandchildren.Mr. Hodges reflected on his career in an interview with The Evening Standard of Britain in 1999.“I’m always astonished that my messages in bottles, as I think of my films, ever got off the ground at all,” he said. “Astonished, but very happy too.” More
Damien Chazelle directs Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva in a 1920s story about Hollywood’s good and sometimes very bad old days.The best that can be said about Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” is that there are still big Hollywood studios like Paramount around to spend wads of cash on self-flattering indulgences. It’s perversely comforting. Despite all the real and imagined existential hurdles that the movie business is facing, its agonies over the future of theatrical exhibition and of streaming, the industry holds fast to the belief that audiences will turn out to watch an ode to its favorite subject: itself. So kudos to Paramount, which also released this year’s box-office titleholder “Top Gun: Maverick” — at the very least, “Babylon” is further proof of life.It’s also a bloated folly, which is in keeping with an industry that has a habit of supersizing itself in times of crisis. To tell his tale, Chazelle has turned back the clock to the years right before the business adapted synchronous sound as the industry standard. In basic outline, he frames this period largely as one of unbridled personal freedom, a time in which film folk partied hard, guzzling rivers of booze while snorting Sahara-sized dunes of drugs and joylessly writhing to jazzy squalling. The next morning, the freewheeling revelers then stumbled into the blazing California sun for another day of filmmaking.Written by Chazelle, “Babylon” centers on three industry types — a powerful star, a soon-to-be minted starlet and an up-and-coming executive — whose lives first intersect in a frenzied blowout crowded with attendees thrashing wildly, their mouths, arms, legs, breasts and assorted other bits flapping in a simulacrum of ecstasy. The star is Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt in usual smooth form), an M.G.M. headliner with a dashing mustache, a string of hits and a romantic life that, despite his boozing, is as robust as his health. The movie’s humor — and Chazelle’s amused approach — is signaled when Jack tells a flirty waitress to bring him multiple drinks. He slurps buckets, and then gets it energetically on with the server.Like the powder nasally vacuumed by another partyer, a grasping would-be star, Nellie LaRoy (a badly used Margot Robbie), Jack’s drinking is, for Chazelle, an emblem of the unfettered spirit of the age before the fun was spoiled by, well, it’s unclear by whom, since the only serious villain is a gangster played by a persuasively repellent Tobey Maguire. (Wall Street, which has done far more damage to the movies than any entity, is conspicuously M.I.A.) Jack’s and Nellie’s abilities to perform no matter what, on camera and off, are among their most defining traits, near-super powers as well as a steady source of strained comedy.Much of the first two hours restively bounces from Jack to Nellie and Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a doe-eyed Mexican naïf whom Jack hires as an assistant. A fast, smart problem solver and a total mensch, Manny soon assumes greater responsibility and becomes a studio executive, a straighter trajectory than either Jack or Nellie’s hairpin roads. Manny is an outlier, an immigrant of color in a predominantly white business, but he’s a survivor, too, open to change and highly adaptable. Like Calva, Manny is appealing, even if the character is preposterously nice for a clichéd Hollywood striver. But it’s never really clear what makes him run and mostly he functions as a proxy for the audience, a gaga witness to the looniness.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Compared to the larger-than-life, at times cartoonish, more physically demonstrative performances delivered by Pitt and especially Robbie, Calva is relatively tamped down and reactive, which brings his turn closer to contemporary notions of realism. These differences add complexity and much-needed rhythm changes. Similarly to his characters, Chazelle has embraced excess as a guiding principle in “Babylon, and like his film “La La Land,” this one shifts between intimate interludes and elaborate set pieces, one difference being that Chazelle now has a heftier budget and is eager to show off his new toys. At the inaugural bacchanal, the camera doesn’t soar; it darts and swoops like a coked-up hummingbird.Despite the relentless churn on set and after hours, the movie is strangely juiceless. I don’t simply mean that it’s unsexy (which it is), but that there’s so little life in the movie, despite all the frantic action. There isn’t much going on other than the spectacle of its busily spinning parts, which might be tolerable if the first two hours weren’t so unrelievedly unmodulated, with everything synced to the same monotonous, accelerated pace. This hyperventilated quality initially serves the story and Chazelle’s concept of the era’s delirious excess, but the lack of modulation rapidly becomes enervating. After a while, it feels punishing.There’s something juvenile and paradoxically puritanical about Chazelle’s focus on the characters’ drinking and drugging and hard-living, and not just because their exertions don’t seem very fun. They work and party, hit marks and cut loose, follow directions and run wild; you see their technique, stamina, flubs, upstaging tricks and power moves, as well as their bloodshot eyes. Jack, Nellie and Manny seem to like making films, or at least they like the perks, and each speaks of the magic (or whatever) of movies. But their offscreen habits aren’t interesting — people do drugs and have sex, big whoop — and the real scandal is that there’s nothing special about their films, which Chazelle makes look silly, slapdash and ugly.The shift to sync sound was cataclysmic for the industry and fascinating, though in ways that aren’t evident here, partly because Chazelle isn’t terribly invested in historical accuracy. Instead, with “Babylon” he has whipped up a Hollywood counter history that focuses on the era’s putative excesses and rebuts (and luxuriates in) the industry’s carefully sanitized, high-minded profile. This kind of revisionist take isn’t new; the movies love revisiting and lampooning themselves. Ryan Murphy took a different tack in his Netflix series “Hollywood,” which wishfully rewrites the past so that everyone who the industry marginalized or excluded — men and women of color, gay and straight — gets to triumph.Chazelle doesn’t bother with positive role models or social uplift. Mostly, he is entranced by what Hollywood tried to keep hidden, particularly in the wake of some highly publicized scandals in the 1920s. To deflect attention from the federal government and the censorship threat it posed, the industry began polishing its image and strictly enforcing its self-drafted Production Code (no extramarital sex, etc.). In public, the studios and their fixers promoted stars as ideals while quietly facilitating abortions, hiding affairs and keeping performers deep in the closet — all fodder for the veiled innuendo of gossip columnists and tabloid magazines.There are moments in “Babylon,” say, in one of its set pieces or in Nellie’s skillfully forced tears, when you see what it might have been if Chazelle had paid as much attention to the era’s films, their pleasure and beauty, as to its lurid stories. He’s crammed a lot in, including Irving Thalberg (Max Minghella), the legendary M.G.M. producer who butchered Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 masterpiece “Greed.” A clownish Stroheim-esque type (an uncredited Spike Jonze) also pops up in “Babylon,” and both he and the epic he’s directing are played for laughs. Here, as throughout this disappointing movie, what’s missing is the one thing that defined the silent era at its greatest and to which Chazelle remains bafflingly oblivious: its art.BabylonRated R for drugs, drinking, nudity and lots of elephant dung. Running time: 3 hours 8 minutes. In theaters. More
A transfixing Vicky Krieps plays the Empress of Austria who, at 40, begins to chafe against her predictably cosseted life.The princess industrial complex is usually associated with Disney and its procession of royal girls and women from Snow White to Ariel and Tiana. The category also works nicely for all of the many other ostensibly grown-up entertainments about girls and women with heavy crowns. Few ever seem happy with their station in life, and while some find a prince and secure a happily ever after, others break and still others mount improbable great escapes.“Corsage” is the Austrian writer-director Marie Kreutzer’s bold, visually striking and ingeniously anachronistic portrait of an empress in complicated rebellion. The rebel — a mesmerizing Vicky Krieps — is the Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie (1837-1898). Married at 16 to Franz Joseph, the ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Elisabeth now has two children, a retinue of servants and no obvious cares. A celebrated beauty, she wears tight corsets and glorious frocks, adhering to a regimen of regular exercise and a diet that often consists of little more than beef broth and the slenderest of orange slices.Elisabeth is whisper thin, but something other than vanity and social mores is eating away at her — boredom, despair, a sense of purposelessness — sending uneasy ripples through her life. “She scares me so much,” a maid timidly whispers of Elisabeth, who’s first seen submerged in the royal tub, the camera pointing down at her. Her eyes are open, and she’s holding her nose, timing her breath ostensibly for health reasons. It’s both a useful exercise and a suitable metaphor for “Corsage” (the word also means the bodice of a woman’s dress), especially given Elisabeth’s penchant for tightlacing her corset, which tests her very breath.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.“Corsage” takes place over a number of months starting in late 1877, the year Elisabeth turns 40. Hers is a predictably cosseted, sumptuous life. (The locations include the Hapsburg Palace in Vienna, the former principal residence for the titular dynasty.) Kreutzer — this is her fifth feature film — charts the coordinates of Elisabeth’s quotidian reality from the get-go, briskly presenting its luxuries but also, importantly, letting you see how at ease Elisabeth is in this rarefied world. It’s clear that she lacks for nothing, at least materially. From the way that she holds her head, directs her gaze and impatiently speaks to her maids and ladies in waiting, it’s also evident that she isn’t chafing against her entitlements.With wit, a cool eye and fluid precision, Kreutzer tracks Elisabeth across the next eventful months. Turning 40 proves a difficult milestone for the queen and disrupts her life, though not always for the worse. She’s already a subject of gossip inside and outside the palace, and her weight, habits and appearances can set tongues wagging. The pressure of getting older only makes matters worse. At 40, Elisabeth says in voice-over, soon after blowing out her birthday candles, “a person begins to disperse and fade.” Her distress is palpable, and it’s no wonder, given the creepy, slightly comic, near-threatening song that Franz Joseph (Florian Teichtmeister) and others sing to her on her birthday: “Beautiful may she remain.”There’s a knot of complication in the word “remain,” which suggests that Elisabeth is never permitted to change. That’s underscored by her regimented life — with its rituals of deference, its protocols, its quiet and violent power — which is structured to uphold the institution of the monarchy and the divine right of kings, even as the modern world shudders outside. Part of the story’s tension stems from Elisabeth’s role in the empire’s dual monarchy, which makes her leader of two countries she has no real say over. Her realm is the rooms she occupies; her subjects, her staff. She oversees her children, but Franz Joseph is the king.Elisabeth’s rebellion isn’t overt and obvious; it comes in stages, in small and large gestures, in furtive cigarettes, reckless flirtations and wild gallops across far-off fields. Krieps is wonderful to watch in motion, whether she’s in the saddle, crossing swords or just leaving a dinner. But she’s a virtuoso of stillness, and at times she brings to mind old Hollywood sphinxes like Garbo and Dietrich, whose inscrutable faces worked like wonderful screens on which you could project whatever fantasies you wanted. Yet Krieps is also a performer of the present moment, gesturally and otherwise, which is ideal for a character who’s caught between the old world and the new, and between the privileges that at once exalt and suffocate her.“Corsage” opens and closes with Elisabeth facing watery voids, ambiguous visions that speak to her desire for change, perhaps transcendence. Visions of escape run through stories about unhappily pampered women. Rarely, though, do the gilded agonies, especially of princesses and queens, offer real surprises, partly because anything too alien would break the profitable (binge-worthy) illusion of the relatable royal. Kreutzer retains a critical distance from Elisabeth; she’s sympathetic and skeptical of the character, and shrewdly doesn’t try to fashion her into a martyr or feminist role model. Making Elisabeth interestingly human proves more than enough, a feat that Kreutzer and Krieps accomplish to dazzling effect.CorsageNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More
Bill Nighy stars as a buttoned-up bureaucrat transformed by a grim diagnosis in this drama by the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, adapted from an Akira Kurosawa movie.There is a coziness to “Living,” despite the fact that it revolves around death. It’s not a holiday movie, at least not explicitly, but like “A Christmas Carol” and other Yuletide ghost stories, it’s a film that steps back to consider the rituals and routines we perpetuate, the ways we’ve changed since the last break. And the ways we haven’t.“Living,” directed by Oliver Hermanus from a screenplay by the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, is an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s drama “Ikiru” (or “To Live”). That Japanese classic from 1952 stars the great Takashi Shimura as a drab Tokyo functionary who learns he is terminally ill and begins to question his life.Ishiguro has called “Ikiru” a formative work for him. His books (which include “Never Let Me Go” and “The Remains of the Day”) limn the crisis of confronting one’s own life with newfound clarity, of perceiving the ways in which it is fraught and one’s complicity in its corruption. With “Living,” Ishiguro — a British writer whose parents moved the family from Nagasaki to Surrey when he was five — infuses his beloved parable with nostalgia closer to home.“Living” transposes “Ikiru” to a gloomy postwar London filled with buttoned-up men of dignity; bowler-hat-wearing worker bees who commute in and out of the city with the solemn demeanor of churchgoers. One of them is Williams (Bill Nighy), a cadaverous bureaucrat and the intimidatingly austere head of the Public Works Department. The film opens on a new hire’s first day, but the young man’s illusions are quickly dashed when his new boss, a total gentleman at first glance, proves to be an inert leader. A group of women with a petition asking for the construction of a new playground are kicked around the building — this is under that department’s jurisdiction, no, that one — because no one wants the hassle.Thinking of Nighy and holiday releases, Williams is the total inverse of Billy Mack, the washed-up rocker whom Nighy played in “Love Actually.” Where Mack is lovably sleazy, the creaky Williams is inhibition personified. The chipper Margaret (Aimee Lou Wood), the sole female employee of Williams’s wing, calls him “Mr. Zombie.”When Williams’s doctor tells him he only has a few months to live, his subdued response is both devastating and absurd: “Quite,” he mutters.As with the protagonist of “Ikiru,” Williams is transformed by the news. First, he turns to a local bohemian, Sutherland (Tom Burke), for a boozy tour of the city’s nightlife. Then he spends time with Margaret, a lively companion who gets him in trouble with his son and daughter-in-law, who are convinced the old man is having an affair. Eventually, he finds something to believe in, and alters his legacy in the process.At its worst, “Living” wallows generically, employing an overbearing piano score as the camera repeatedly sits with Williams’s sadness to diminishing effect. Though, captured by the cinematographer Jamie D. Ramsay, there’s also a warmth and twinkle to Williams’s existential plight; as in a David Lean movie, passion mingles elegantly with repression, and Williams emerges as a kind of romantic figure, a man shocked, then delighted, by the thrill of finding himself.LivingRated PG-13 for morbidity and scenes of drunken revelry. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More
