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      Sci-fi Movies to Stream: ‘Shin Ultraman,’ ‘Dry Ground Burning’ and More

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      This month’s picks include cute-robot charm and alien abduction angst.‘Shin Ultraman’Rent or buy it on most major platforms.From the start, it’s obvious that this is not a regular Kaiju movie. The genre, in which gigantic beasts à la Godzilla lay waste to cities and swaths of countryside, is not known for restraint, but “Shin Ultraman” is completely, unpredictably off the wall.Captain Tamura (Hidetoshi Nishijima, from the radically different “Drive My Car”) leads a task force dedicated to fighting the big monsters that turn up with clockwork regularity. “For some reason, Kaiju only appear in Japan,” someone quips about the creatures’s absence elsewhere in the world. But even this elite squad is flabbergasted when a mysterious helmeted giant clad in a superhero-like red and silver bodysuit shows up. Called Ultraman (a popular character who has been the subject of many iterations since its introduction in 1966), the newcomer helps the overwhelmed team battle aliens like Mefilas (Koji Yamamoto).Both a reboot and a riff, “Shin Ultraman,” which was directed by Shinji Higuchi and written by Hideaki Anno (the pair also collaborated on “Shin Godzilla” in 2016), is a surreal trip. It’s hard to oversell the eye-popping invention and droll humor on display here, but it’s Higuchi’s mise en scène that stands out, packed with odd angles and seemingly arbitrary shots, as when a character opens a computer file and the movie cuts to her feet under her desk. Shiro Sagisu’s score is equally bonkers and disruptive, incorporating 1960s pop, thrash riffs, chamber suites and jazzy noodlings. It all amounts to pure joy.‘Tang and Me’Stream it on Amazon.Chances are you haven’t heard of Deborah Install’s “A Robot in the Garden” (2015), unless you live in Japan, where the novel has been adapted into a radio play, a stage musical and now this charming kid-friendly movie.Ken (Kazunari Ninomiya) has a terminal case of arrested development, whiling away his days playing elaborate virtual-reality games and avoiding any hint of household work. One day, a rusty, taped-up robot turns up in the garden, offering its name as Tang. Shortly thereafter, Ken’s fed-up wife, Emi (Hikari Mitsushima), kicks him out of their house. So he sets out for Atobit Systems, the company that manufactured Tang, to trade that old model for a brand-new one, which he will then give to Emi to get back in her graces.The latest from the prolific director Takahiro Miki (“The Door Into Summer”) does not revolutionize the cute-robot genre, but it is very effective. Naturally, Ken will change for the best, thanks to Tang — whose mysterious origin and initial purpose are at the heart of the story — but this utter predictability is a feature, not a bug, and is embraced as such by the film. Young viewers are likely to clamor for a toy version of the adorable bot, while their parents are more likely to be interested in the movie’s awfully believable near-future, in which delivery drones crisscross the sky and robots are absolutely everywhere in our daily life.‘Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out’Rent or buy it on most major platforms.When the Levan family moves to a quaint Western town, the teenage Itsy (the excellent Emma Tremblay) is not especially pleased: She is now living in the middle of nowhere, plus being singled out as the new kid is never fun. Maybe that’s why she immediately connects with her new classmate Calvin (Jacob Buster, a charmer bound to resurface in bigger-budget projects), who is ostracized as the local weirdo. Calvin is a heartthrob in nerd clothing — more specifically in a spacesuit, which he is prone to wear to school — and is on a quest to find the parents (Will Forte and Elizabeth Mitchell) he hasn’t seen in 10 years. He is convinced they were taken by aliens one fateful night and has been searching the skies ever since. Itsy pretends to befriend him for a journalism project, though it’s clear she’s actually taken by Calvin’s quirky sincerity, and perhaps even by his far-fetched story about extraterrestrial creatures secretly visiting Earth whenever a certain comet gets close.Jake Van Wagoner’s film is a throwback to 1980s family-friendly fare, and it nicely captures the formula’s basic elements, down to the presence of a smart-aleck little boy (Itsy’s brother, Evan, played by Kenneth Cummins), an unironic embrace of the cutesy and the cheesy in equal proportions and, perhaps most important, a general good nature.‘Life Cycle’Rent or buy it on most major platforms.Carl (Adam Weber) lives in his grandparents’ rec-room-like basement, seems to survive on power bars and takeout, and watches old black-and-white movies on an ancient-looking TV set. The only other living presence in that den is Vetro (voiced by Kory Karam), an animatronic head with enormous blue eyes sitting on Carl’s desk. A computer programmer, Carl is ambitious: “You are to become human,” he informs his creation. To that end, Vetro has been endowed with the ability to generate “new expansions.” In other words, he is sentient and can upgrade himself. One of his first moves is to give himself a new “multilayered emotional matrix,” and it doesn’t take long for Vetro to exhibit somewhat cunning traits — he can be both obsequious and creepy.The writer-director Christopher Morvant’s most distinctive spin on the thriving A.I. genre was to make Vetro a cartoonish animatronic/puppet character that looks goofy yet comes across as unsettling, especially since Morvant often shows him in startling close-ups. The movie is, admittedly, overlong, especially since it’s essentially a talkathon between Carl and Vetro, and the writing is not quite strong enough to sustain the more complex philosophical issues it raises. But “Life Cycle” does have a few surprises in store, and Morvant’s sui generis world nimbly juxtaposes technologies that feel pulled from completely different eras. Pretty good for a movie shot in a garage in a month.‘Dry Ground Burning’Rent or buy it on Amazon.Set in an impoverished Sol Nascente, in Brazil, Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós’s film is tough to categorize. “Dry Ground Burning” follows the activities of a women’s gang, led by Chitara (Joana Darc Furtado), that steals oil and resells it as gas to groups of bikers. Add to that mix the re-entry into society of Chitara’s half sister, Léa (Léa Alves da Silva), who is newly released from prison. In conventional hands, these could be an action-packed thriller’s starting point. Pimenta and Queirós go down a completely different road, both in form and in content.We are in a dystopian pamphlet targeting the far-right policies of Brazil’s authoritarian former president Jair Bolsonaro, which were devastating for the poor, the minorities and the outcasts at the movie’s heart. All of this is put together with a documentarylike matter-of-factness, increased by the fact that the cast is made up of non- or semiprofessional actors. When scenes set during, say, a raucous bus trip or a religious ceremony hypnotically go on and on as if in real time, you might wonder if Frederick Wiseman had suddenly gone to Brazil. Tip: Go with the flow — you can’t rush life, politics or this film. More

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      Children’s Movies to Stream: ‘The Super Mario Bros.Movie’ and More

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      This month’s picks include a monkey’s quest, a splashy version of a beloved Nintendo franchise and a Lego adventure packed with Disney princesses.‘The Monkey King’Watch it on Netflix.This Netflix original is based on “Journey to the West,” a famous 16th-century Chinese novel written during the Ming dynasty. The story follows a magical monkey named Sun Wukong — voiced here by Jimmy O. Yang and referred to only as Monkey King — who is born from a rock and cast out by the other monkeys in the forest. Growing up, he longs to be one of the all-powerful Immortals. He goes on a quest to hell and back to defeat 100 demons, the requirement to fulfill his dream.The tale has been adapted for TV and games, and there’s an anime version, but this latest telling adds a character named Lin (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport), a scrappy village girl who becomes the monkey’s traveling companion. They encounter Buddha (BD Wong) and demons like the frenetic, fearsome Dragon King (Bowen Yang, from “Saturday Night Live”), who occasionally breaks into song. The main character goes from a lovable, pitiful little simian to a self-centered trickster who steals a glowing magical staff (which looks and sounds a lot like a “Star Wars” light saber). He’s not exactly endearing (my son loved him, though), but the propulsive energy of his quest will entertain smaller kids who aren’t scared of characters who have gleaming red eyes and sharp teeth. Ron J. Friedman, Steve Bencich and Rita Hsiao wrote the script, and Anthony Stacchi (“The Boxtrolls,” “Open Season”) directed.‘The Super Mario Bros. Movie’Watch it on Peacock.My son calls this movie “The Brothers Mario,” which sounds like another type of film entirely. This splashy big screen version of the beloved 1980s Nintendo franchise might not wow longtime fans of the game, but youngsters who will one day think the 1980s are ancient times should be wildly entertained.There was a 1993 live-action movie starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as Mario and Luigi, two Brooklyn brothers who work as plumbers and have to save the city from monsters. This time, the brothers inhabit a colorful animated world where Luigi (Charlie Day) becomes the prisoner of the evil Bowser (Jack Black), a dastardly villain who wants to wage war on Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy) and her kingdom, and then marry her. With Luigi held captive, Mario (Chris Pratt) teams up with the princess, Toad (Keegan-Michael Key) and Donkey Kong (Seth Rogen) to free Luigi and keep the princess safe.Yes, it’s a lot, but children who have no clue the games exist will still be able to follow the plot. When I asked my son why he loved the movie so much, his reply was simply, “I like the fighting.” So there you have it. Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic directed.‘Lego Disney Princess: The Castle Quest’Watch it on Disney+.If a smorgasbord of Disney princesses is what your kid needs, this 49-minute girl-power adventure — starring Ariel (voiced by Jodi Benson), Moana (Auli’i Cravalho), Tiana (Anika Noni Rose), Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) and Snow White (Katie Von Till) — should do the trick. An ominous storm brews, and the princesses are sent to a mysterious castle, where the dastardly Gaston (Richard White) holds King Triton (Jim Cummings) captive. Gaston plans to take over the kingdom of each princess, unless the five of them can complete a series of challenges, like getting Aladdin’s flying carpet and finding the Sundrop Flower in the Dark Forest. With their little claw-like Lego hands, the princesses follow Ariel’s cry of, “Let’s go slay all day, ladies!” — and set off on adventures across oceans and into the Dark Forest.There are plenty of fun references to the princess movies that came before (Gaston sings, “Look at this stuff, isn’t it neat!”) and a feisty Snow White reminds everyone, “I kept a house of seven bachelors orderly and on task!” The director Michael D. Black made several Lego shorts before taking this project on, and the screenplay by Jenny Lee and Rachel Vine leans into themes like the power of female friendship and the fact that girls — even those made of Legos — can slay.‘Rumble’Watch it on Amazon Prime Video.Imagine a planet where pro wrestlers are gigantic monsters instead of mere humans, and you have “Rumble,” a movie about an uncoordinated, out-of-shape underdog named Steve (voiced by Will Arnett) who takes on the sports world. The story is inspired by Rob Harrell’s graphic novel “Monster on the Hill,” which depicts a realm where each town is represented by a mighty monster, save for one town, where the not-so-menacing Steve lives.In this computer-animated film, a girl named Winnie (Geraldine Viswanathan) decides to coach Steve and turn him into a fearsome competitor who can restore glory to their town. Her dad used to coach monsters, so Winnie is trying to honor him by following in his footsteps. Hamish Grieve, who worked in the animation department on films like “Monsters vs. Aliens,” directs. There are fun training montages, shout-outs to movies like “Dirty Dancing,” and — most important for kids — humongous beasts wrestling each other. Steve and Winnie’s friendship also gives you two heroes to cheer.‘The Slumber Party’Watch it on Disney+.It starts with three teenage girls speeding through the streets of their quiet little town aboard a giant motorized hedgehog, and it only gets nuttier from there. Based on the book “The Sleepover,” by Jen Malone, this family-friendly riff on the “Hangover” franchise is about a sleepover birthday party that devolves into chaos when the girls wake up and realize their bestie Anna Maria (Valentina Herrera) is missing — and they don’t remember a thing. Of course booze, drugs and gambling are not to blame for the blackout. Instead, the girls had surprised Anna Maria with a magician called Mesmer (Tituss Burgess) who had hypnotized them all. And when they wake up, Megan (Darby Camp from “Big Little Lies”) discovers she has a shaved eyebrow and is wearing a hoodie that belongs to the hottest guy in school, Jake (Ramon Jose Rodriguez). The action kicks up when the girls embark on a quest to find Anna Maria (you’ll have to watch the movie to find out how they wind up on that hedgehog).There are plenty of comic moments courtesy of Camp’s Megan and her sleepover pals, Veronica (Alex Cooper Cohen) and Paige (Emmy Liu-Wang), and the writer Eydie Faye (“Fuller House”) and the director Veronica Rodriguez succeed in capturing the sweetness and absurdity of growing up. More

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      Stream These Great Movies Before They Leave Netflix in September

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      This month’s losses for U.S. subscribers include some of the most beloved titles and characters ever to grace a screen.The titles leaving Netflix in the United States are a real smorgasbord this month, from genre movies to children’s fare to two of the most beloved Oscar winners in cinematic history. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘Colette’ (Sept. 12)You may think you know what you’re getting when you click “play” on a period literary biopic starring Keira Knightley — but the director Wash Westmoreland is delightfully uninterested in hewing to expectations. This is no ordinary period literary biopic, because the French writer Colette was no period literary figure; she was an ahead-of-her time scribe and an unapologetically bisexual hedonist whose lust for life made for especially lively prose. Knightley is clearly having a good time subverting her prim-and-proper persona, while Dominic West is deliciously doofy as the man who brings her out of her shell before receding into her long shadow.Stream it here.‘Annihilation’ (Sept. 29)The writer and director Alex Garland is a rare creator of science fiction who truly seems interested in the “science” piece of the puzzle; unlike many of his contemporaries, who use the tools of futuristic fare as window dressing for mediocre action and adventure, he crafts films of ideas, approaching the possibilities of future technologies and alien interactions with contemplation and intellectual heft. Like his “Ex Machina” before it, this adaptation of the novel by Jeff VanderMeer is also as interested in character as it is in genre (if not more so), focusing on a biologist (a fine, and occasionally ferocious, Natalie Portman) who is investigating a possible alien life force while also grappling with the recent death of her husband (Oscar Isaac). Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez and Tessa Thompson round out the cast.Stream it here.‘Clear and Present Danger’ (Sept. 30)Harrison Ford’s second outing as Tom Clancy’s venerable hero Jack Ryan is a tense, well-crafted geopolitical thriller. Newly appointed as the C.I.A.’s acting deputy director, Ryan uncovers a scorcher of a secret: a covert war, conducted by intelligence operatives against a Columbian drug cartel, authorized at the top levels of the U.S. government. Willem Dafoe, Joaquim de Almeida and the “Mission: Impossible” favorite Henry Czerny are among the evil-doers, while James Earl Jones returns as Ryan’s boss and confidante. Ford’s “Patriot Games” director, Phillip Noyce, also returns, a director so deft at putting together a suspense sequence that he manages to generate nail-biting tension with a scene about deleting some files.Stream it here.‘Lawless’ (Sept. 30)The director John Hillcoat and the musician-turned-screenwriter Nick Cave reunited after the triumph of “The Proposition” (2005) for this 1930s crime film with a phenomenal cast, including Jason Clarke, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hardy, Shia LaBeouf, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce and Mia Wasikowska. Cave’s story, adapted from the historical novel “The Wettest County in the World” by Matt Bondurant, concerns the bootlegging Bondurant brothers (Clarke, Hardy and LaBeouf), who find their business interests threatened by a crooked U.S. Marshal (Pearce) and a rival bootlegger (Oldman), among others. The period costumes and settings are stunning, and the sprawling cast meshes nicely; Hardy is especially strong as a man of few words but furious fists.Stream it here.‘A League of Their Own’ (Sept. 30)This 1992 smash, directed by Penny Marshall, is based on the true story of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, formed in 1943 to help keep the national pastime going while World War II pulled male ballplayers out of the majors. Geena Davis stars as Dottie Hinson, star catcher of the Rockford Peaches, and Tom Hanks as Jimmy Dugan, the former baseball star and current drunk who coaches the team when he’s sober (which is infrequent). With able support from Jon Lovitz, Madonna, Lori Petty, David Straitairn and many more, this one is smoothly assembled, sensitively acted and riotously funny.Stream it here.‘Nanny McPhee’ (Sept. 30)A decade after winning the Oscar for her screenplay adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility,” Emma Thompson returned to the typewriter to pen the film version of a slightly less venerated literary property: the “Nurse Matilda” children’s novels, by the British author Christianna Brand. But it doesn’t feel like slumming; Thompson invests her screenplay with all the winking wit you would expect, and she absolutely goes for broke in her performance of the title role, a kind of warts-and-all Mary Poppins. The director Kirk Jones orchestrates the chaos with a sure hand.Stream it here.‘Rocky I-V’ (Sept. 30)The first five films of the Rocky franchise — starring, written and sometimes directed by Sylvester Stallone — vary wildly in style, quality and critical and commercial reception. But taken together, they create a fascinating portrait of mainstream American moviemaking from the late 1970s to the early ’90s, as the modest, character-driven drama of the 1976 original slowly but surely gave way to the montage-heavy, jingoistic bombast of “Rocky IV” from 1987. But for better or worse, each film offers its own pleasures, from the specificity of Stallone’s dialogue to the richly played supporting characters (particularly Talia Shire’s Adrian and Carl Weathers’s Apollo Creed) to the crowd-pleasing closing bouts.Stream “Rocky” here, “Rocky II” here, “Rocky III” here, “Rocky IV” here and “Rocky V” here.‘Star Trek’ / ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ (Sept. 30)When J.J. Abrams was announced as the director of a newly rebooted series of “Star Trek” films, he was still best known for his television work. The decision smacked of some desperation; after several “Star Trek” television spinoffs and numerous big-screen resurrections, what could anyone (let alone a not-yet-proven filmmaker) add to the mythos of the original “Enterprise” crew? But Abrams’s inaugural 2009 entry was an absolute treat, a sleek, well-cast popcorn picture that reinvigorated the original characters and story while also playing appropriate tribute. The 2013 follow-up, “Into Darkness,” is less successful but still an entertaining diversion, particularly for Benedict Cumberbatch’s take on Ricardo Montalbán’s villainous “Khan.”Stream “Star Trek” here and “Star Trek: Into Darkness” here.‘Titanic’ (Sept. 30)The 1912 sinking of the Titanic luxury cruise liner remains a source of fascination (and tragedy) in American culture, thanks in no small part to the long shadow cast by James Cameron’s 1997 Oscar winner and box office champion. It’s the kind of film that can be described only as “old fashioned”— not as a slam but simply as a statement of fact. Cameron so deftly mixes spectacle and special effects with poignant human interest (thanks primarily to the warmth and chemistry of its stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet) that one is legitimately reminded of “Lawrence of Arabia” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” It’s a throwback epic, and its appeal has proved timeless.Stream it here.‘Warm Bodies’ (Sept. 30)We’ve seen no shortage of zombie horror in the 21st century, from “28 Days Later” — written by the aforementioned Garland — to the “Dawn of the Dead” remake to the (paradoxically) unkillable “Walking Dead” series and its many spinoffs. But we haven’t seen very many zombie rom-coms, which makes this 2013 charmer from the writer and director Jonathan Levine (“Long Shot”) all the more commendable. Adapting the novel by Isaac Marion, Levine tells the story of R (Nicholas Hoult, later of “The Great”), a zombie who falls hard for the still-living Julie (Teresa Palmer). Well, every relationship has its issues.Stream it here. More

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      Venice Film Festival: Adam Driver Calls Out Netflix and Amazon Amid Strikes

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      His film “Ferrari,” a big-budget indie from Michael Mann, is the kind of adult drama the major studios have shied away from.The name placard on the dais said “A. Driver,” and if you’re making a Ferrari movie, you’d certainly better have one.This particular Driver happened to be in high demand at the Venice Film Festival, which bowed on Wednesday and has mostly had to make do without famous movie stars as the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike prohibits actors from promoting films made by most major studios. But since the new Michael Mann-directed film “Ferrari” will be released domestically by Neon and internationally by STX — two companies that aren’t members of the group that Hollywood guilds are striking against — its star, Adam Driver, was free to make the trip to Venice and add A-list appeal to a festival in dire need of it.“I’m proud to be here, to be a visual representation of a movie that’s not part of the A.M.P.T.P.,” Driver said on Thursday at the news conference for the film, referencing the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. He praised the interim agreement devised by SAG-AFTRA that allows stars to promote independent films as long as their distributors agree with the terms the actors’ guild is seeking.“Why is it that a smaller distribution company like Neon and STX International can meet the dream demands of what SAG is asking for — the dream version of SAG’s wish list — but a big company like Netflix and Amazon can’t?” asked Driver, who has previously promoted Netflix movies like “Marriage Story” and “White Noise” in Venice. “Every time people from SAG go and support movies that have agreed to these terms with the interim agreement, it just makes it more obvious that these people are willing to support the people they collaborate with, and the others are not.”After the crowd at the news conference applauded, Mann added, “No big studio wrote us a check. That’s why we’re here, standing in solidarity.”You wouldn’t think while watching it that “Ferrari” is an indie movie. With a reported budget of $95 million, this is the sort of lavish adult drama that Mann used to make for major studios all the time. But movies like “Heat,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “Ali” and “The Insider,” all films Mann made in the 1990s or early 2000s, have fallen out of favor in our superhero-saturated era, and expensive prestige releases like this one have recently struggled to break out at the box office.Can the record-breaking success of Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” reinvigorate the sort of big-budget dad drama that used to be a theatrical staple? “Ferrari” is counting on it, even if its fellow December releases, like “Wonka” and “The Color Purple,” don’t necessarily lend themselves to “Barbenheimer”-level portmanteaus. (“Wonkari” and “Ferple” just sound like off-brand Pokemon.)Like Nolan’s summer hit, “Ferrari” is about a midcentury visionary with a wandering eye: Driver’s Enzo Ferrari is a racer-turned-automaker who’s feuding with his wife (Penélope Cruz), hiding a mistress (Shailene Woodley) and trying to save his namesake company before it goes belly up. Mann tracks him during the summer of 1957, when it seemed like so many of Ferrari’s problems could be fixed by a single, momentous race. If one of his drivers can win the dangerous, thousand-mile race Mille Miglia, Ferrari reasons, it would stoke enough demand to lift the company’s fortunes. Still, his single-minded pursuit of that goal turns out to be a life-or-death matter with all sorts of unexpected casualties.It may be hard now to conceive of “Ferrari” as a Driver-less vehicle, but over the many years that Mann tried to mount it, the director flirted with leading men like Robert De Niro, Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, who went on to topline the Mann-produced “Ford v Ferrari” (2019). The 39-year-old Driver is called upon to play a man two decades older for most of the film’s running time, but that gray-haired intensity actually suits him: His Ferrari is hard-nosed and compelling, like a too-serious MSNBC commentator who slowly attracts an ardent, horny fan base.Regardless of whether “Ferrari” can chase the box-office success of “Oppenheimer,” Driver said it was a miracle it was made at all, summing up the film’s truncated production schedule and false starts in a way that his title character could understand.“It’s hard not to get philosophical about an engine — the amount of pieces that have to come together, similar to films, and work on the exact right timing in the exact right moment,” he said at the news conference. “And then there’s the element of human intuition and reflex. It’s a 50/50 marriage, and that’s very much filmmaking.”When all those different elements manage to coalesce on a premium race car — or a big-budget indie film — it’s beautiful, Driver said. “It also makes you aware of how many things could go wrong at any moment,” he noted. “It’s a special thing to be part of.” More

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      Overlooked No More: Chick Strand, Pioneering Experimental Filmmaker

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      Often turning her lens on women, she emerged as one of independent cinema’s fiercest proponents on the West Coast.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In Chick Strand’s 1979 film “Soft Fiction,” five women speak openly to the camera about their sexual histories, including one who describes being molested by her grandfather. As she talks, images of her performing household activities like cooking breakfast appear in splintered frames and enigmatic shapes.“It is a film about women who win,” Strand explained in a 1998 interview with the conceptual artist Kate Haug for the journal Wide Angle. “It is not about women who were victims or who had survived.”“They carry on,” she added, and by doing so they become “more potent, more powerful, more of themselves.”In “Femme Experimentale,” a research paper based on her interviews with several pioneering female filmmakers, Haug wrote that Strand’s “experimental techniques” in that 55-minute film disrupted “the visual codes of documentary film” with its “poetic transitions between narrators.”“Soft Fiction,” which is regularly screened in university film programs, retrospectives and museums around the world, was one of dozens of movies made by Strand, an experimental filmmaker who often trained her lens on women. Among the others were “Anselmo and the Women” and “Fake Fruit Factory,” both from 1986.Strand was a late bloomer by the standards of her day: She didn’t make her first film until she was 34. But she would go on to have momentous impact on the West Coast’s experimental film movement.A still from Strand’s film “Fake Fruit Factory” (1986), about women who work in a factory making wooden fruit.Canyon Cinema Foundation“She rejects the classification of ‘feminist artist,’” the film scholar Gene Youngblood told The Santa Fe New Mexican in 1999, when some of Strand’s films were being shown at the College of Santa Fe. “And yet she has produced some of the most memorable portraits of female characters in the history of cinema.”Though she never achieved the same level of fame as contemporaries like Barbara Hammer and Shirley Clarke, scholars say her work was just as groundbreaking.Chick Strand was born Mildred Totman on Dec. 3, 1931, in Berkeley, Calif., to Russel and Eleanor Totman. Her father was a bank teller, her mother a homemaker. (Chick was a nickname given to her by her father).She first developed an interest in film while studying anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. By then she had already dabbled in photography.In the 1960s, inspired by the growing free speech movement, Strand began hosting makeshift screenings in her backyard with her first husband, Paul Anderson Strand, an artist, and the experimental film impresario Bruce Baillie. These “happenings,” as they called them, were intended to showcase highly personal, often esoteric audiovisual experiments among friends. As word spread, they quickly became carnivalesque productions, with Strand, Baillie and other regulars dressing in costumes and performing live while the films were shown to an increasingly large group of strangers.A still from Strand’s “Soft Fiction” (1979), in which five women speak openly to the camera about their sexual histories.Canyon Cinema FoundationIn 1961, she founded The Canyon Cinemanews, a journal for local filmmakers that Stanford University called “the main organ of the independent filmmaking community” when it purchased the journal’s archives in 2010. The journal offered what it described as “a cornucopia of announcements, letters, classifieds, how-to information, call-outs and more” for local filmmakers who lacked access to Hollywood.In 1966, the same year she began studying ethnography at the University of California, Los Angeles (and the same year her son, Eric, was born), Strand presented a three-minute short, “Angel Blue Sweet Wings,” at the New York Film Festival. The film captured the luminous, psychedelically colored landscape of Strand’s second home, in Mexico, through a roaming, almost dancing camera, with the faces of her friends collaged seamlessly over fuzzy bodies, plants and mountains. It was described as “an experimental film poem in celebration of life and visions” by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.In 1967, Strand helped start the Canyon Cinema collective with Baillie and the filmmakers Lawrence C. Jordan, Robert Nelson, Lenny Lipton and Ben Van Meter. The organization — part pop-up cinematheque, part artists’ cooperative — distributed experimental films by now-famous directors like Hammer, Clarke and Peggy Ahwesh. Canyon Cinema later became a full-time nonprofit, with many of its members’ works incorporated into the National Film Registry.By then Strand and her second husband, Neon Park, the artist known for his imaginative album covers, were splitting their time between California and Mexico. In Mexico, she began to explore assemblage and ethnography more formally in her art, resulting in several works now considered landmarks of West Coast cinema, including “Fake Fruit Factory,” about women who work in a factory making wooden fruit.“I’d be tripping over the rocks and speaking this terrible Spanish,” Strand told L.A. Weekly in 2006. “But I was so incredibly interested, and people really responded.”Strand with her second husband, the artist Neon Park. They split their time between homes in California and Mexico.Canyon Cinema FoundationStrand then delved into what would become perhaps her best-known work: a 20-year trilogy of ethnographic films on the life of Anselmo Aguascalientes, a poor Mexican Indian tuba player. The first of these, “Anselmo” (1967), about his music, “represents an early example of Chick Strand’s abiding interest in documenting people, objects, animals and events through a heightened and poetic subjectivity, while at the same time using assemblage techniques that allow her to incorporate disparate, sometimes jarring elements,” Maria Pramaggiore, a professor of media studies at Maynooth University in Ireland, wrote in an essay, “Chick Strand’s Experimental Ethnography,” published in the book “Women’s Experimental Cinema” (2007).The techniques used in “Anselmo” — and later in “Cosas de Mi Vida” (1976), about Anselmo’s life, and “Anselmo and the Women,” about his wife and mistress — would, Pramaggiore noted, become hallmarks of Strand’s documentary practice.Another key work, “Kristallnacht” (1979), was more technical, using the whites and blacks of 16-millimeter film negatives to craft a luminous existential tribute to Anne Frank. In that film, reflections play across shots of women swimming in a pool of water, sparking glimmers in the chiaroscuro darkness of each inverted image.Throughout her filmmaking career, Strand taught at the film arts program at Occidental College in Los Angeles, ultimately becoming the program’s director. She retired in 1996 but continued to produce groundbreaking experiments in film in her twilight years. As she told L.A. Weekly a decade into retirement: “I’m very satisfied creating works of art. I can’t seem to keep my mind from doing this, from painting or planning new films. It’s just what I love to do.”Strand died of cancer on July 11, 2009, at 77. But she lived long enough to see 350 of her personal items permanently entered into the Motion Picture Academy’s Film Archive in 2007. More

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      Taylor Swift Eras Tour Concert Film Coming to Movie Theaters

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      A theatrical version of the billion-dollar tour — a cultural juggernaut that just ended its North American leg — opens Oct. 13.Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, the billion-dollar juggernaut that has dominated the cultural calendar this year, may be on a break before picking up internationally, but its momentum will only rest so long: The show is coming to movie theaters this fall.“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” concert film will be released in the United States, Canada and Mexico on Oct. 13, Swift announced on social media Thursday, with U.S. AMC Theaters promising at least four showtimes per day from Thursday to Sunday upon opening.“The Eras Tour has been the most meaningful, electric experience of my life so far and I’m overjoyed to tell you that it’ll be coming to the big screen soon,” Swift said. “Eras attire, friendship bracelets, singing and dancing encouraged.”Anticipating the white-hot demand that has followed the tour since its announcement, crashing ticketing systems around the world, AMC promised in a news release that it had “bolstered its ticket server capacity to handle traffic at more than 5 times the current record for the most ever tickets sold in an hour.” (The company added, however, that it was “also aware that no ticketing system in history seems to have been able to accommodate the soaring demand from Taylor Swift fans when tickets are first placed on sale.”)Tickets are on sale now. Prices start at $19.89 for adults and $13.13 for children, substantially less than what fans paid for the tour itself — especially on the robust secondary market — as the concert industry adjusts to sometimes prohibitively high costs for its biggest events.Swift, 33, wrapped this year’s North American dates with four shows in Mexico last week. Her downtime, though, will be brief. In addition to the movie version of the concert, the singer will release “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” the fourth of rerecorded original albums, two weeks later, on Oct. 27. By November, the Eras Tour will pick up in Argentina before traveling around the world in 2024, with dates — including nine additional U.S. shows — continuing into November 2024.“1989 (Taylor’s Version),” the new edition of her 2014 pop blockbuster, marks Swift’s seventh release in barely three years, a period of artistic productivity that has fueled pent-up, post-pandemic demand for the singer’s live show. Jon Caramanica, a critic for The New York Times, said in a review of the first concert in March that the Eras Tour put on display “how many pivots Swift has undertaken in her career, and how the accompanying risks can have wildly different consequences.”The trade publication Pollstar has estimated that the singer sold about $14 million in tickets for each show so far. By the end of next year, the 146 stadium dates could reach $1.4 billion or more in sales. More

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      Review: In the ‘Ernest & Celestine’ Sequel, a Prodigal Cub Returns

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      The delightful odd couple of the Oscar-nominated French film head to the mountains in ‘A Trip to Gibberitia.’ Every frame brims with painterly detail.One of the many enduring pleasures of “Ernest & Celestine,” the 2014 French film about the unlikely bond between a bear and a mouse, is its rhapsodic bridging of music and imagery. The tale (based on books by Gabrielle Vincent) is rendered with gossamer line drawings so wedded to their accompanying score that the images sometimes ripple, swell and curl in tandem with the musical notes.“Ernest & Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia” is the gem of a sequel to that Oscar-nominated film, centering the story this time around on music as the sine qua non of community. The plucky, petite mouse Celestine (voiced by Pauline Brunner) and the surly troubadour Ernest (Lambert Wilson) trek to Ernest’s hometown, Gibberitia, a majestic but autocratic city in the mountains where music is no longer legal. Not even birds are exempt; tuneful warblers are shooed and hosed down by the police.While the earlier film tilted toward Celestine, “A Trip to Gibberitia,” directed by Julien Chheng and Jean-Christophe Roger, hangs on Ernest, a prodigal cub who soon learns that his father, a state judge, instated the ban out of spite.The brisk, lively plot has shades of a French Revolutionary spirit — a band of insurgent musicians call their underground movement “the resistance” — but the film’s real magic lies in the illustrations. Backdrops brim with painterly detail, and tiny changes in characters’ faces convey worlds of feeling. In a film whose moral emphasizes the necessity of artistic freedom, there is a deceptive simplicity to this aesthetic style that makes it all the more special.Ernest and Celestine: A Trip to GibberitiaNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘We Kill for Love’ Review: Soft-Core Erotica of the VCR Years

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      This documentary explores a narrow genre of direct-to-VHS soft-core thrillers that found a niche with the advent of video rentals and home viewing.If “Boogie Nights” had a villain, it was videotape. For the characters, the arrival of that technology put an end to a golden age of pornographic movies and spoiled the illusion that they were making art.The documentary “We Kill for Love” counters that the home video market inaugurated a heady era of its own: not a renaissance of hard-core porn, but the boom in direct-to-VHS soft-core that peaked in the 1990s, thanks in part to demand at outlets like Blockbuster, which at least officially shunned anything rated NC-17.These movies had a parallel production system, an alternate universe of stars (Shannon Tweed, Joan Severance) and titles that the documentary likens to a magnetic-poetry kit of recurring adjective-noun combinations: “Dangerous Obsession,” “Criminal Passion,” “Inner Sanctum 2.” As the film notes in a funny sequence, the industry also complicated life for archivists by recycling cover art and altering names.“We Kill for Love,” subtitled “The Lost World of the Erotic Thriller” — and wittily billed not as “a film by” but “a video by” its director, Anthony Penta — makes clear that it’s primarily interested in this semi-forgotten subculture and its product, much of which never reached DVD. Enduring mainstream smashes like “Fatal Attraction” and “Basic Instinct” might have similar subject matter, but they don’t quite count.Both of those films come in for analysis, though, with the “Fatal Attraction” screenwriter James Dearden particularly thoughtful in an interview. Somewhat contradictorily, “We Kill for Love” tries to elevate its catalog of Grade-Z erotica to an ostensibly rightful place beside those hits — and even into the canon, alongside Hitchcock, “Double Indemnity” and “Dressed to Kill.” The documentary deftly mixes interviews with vintage-noir scholars like James Ursini and Alain Silver with observations by veterans of direct-to-video productions. The actress Monique Parent says her output was so prolific in the 1990s that she can’t always remember which movie is which.These films certainly offer fodder for academics. “We Kill for Love” notes that they could only flourish once private viewing became possible, and that distribution through video stores enabled filmmakers to recoup their costs. Nina K. Martin, the author of “Sexy Thrills: Undressing the Erotic Thriller,” argues that these neglected movies pay more attention to women: “If we only had films like ‘Jade,’ ‘Fatal Attraction,’ ‘Basic Instinct,’ ‘Body of Evidence,’ then we would just think that women were these sexual creatures — dangerous, deadly, mysterious — and that men had to somehow be careful of them or tame them.”Despite a game effort to vouch for the aesthetic vision of the director Zalman King (“Red Shoe Diaries”), whose daughter Chloe King appears here as a frequent commentator, the dialogue, acting and mise-en-scène in the clips does not support the notion of a lost universe of classics, or even a cycle rich enough to sustain 163 minutes of close reading — a soft-core companion to Thom Andersen’s great cinematic essay “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” a template that “We Kill for Love” intermittently evokes. Many of the sociological insights — about the tropes used to signify wealth and status, for instance — could apply to Hollywood equivalents.Still, there’s something tough to resist about how “We Kill for Love” rescues works from the shadows.We Kill for LoveNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 43 minutes. Available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More