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      How Russian Action Movies Are Selling War

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      For an American, it can be easy to forget how much ideology is packed into the genre — until you watch a film from elsewhere, and see their cartoonish heroes and villains.Recently, on YouTube, I watched “Granit,” a Russian action movie from 2021. I did this knowing a few relevant things about the film. One is that it was produced by Aurum — a company controlled by one of Vladimir Putin’s allies, Evgeny Prigozhin — in part to glorify the actions of the Wagner Group, a mercenary network Prigozhin founded; the syndicate has been accused of fueling chaos from Syria to the Central African Republic to Ukraine, where Wagner mercenaries have become an increasingly significant part of Russia’s grinding invasion. Another is that “Granit” was just one artifact in a whole trove of content — memoirs, comic books, travel videos — that is variously referred to as the Wagner subculture, the Wagnerverse or the Wagner Extended Universe. Not unlike old American mercenary magazines, all of it puts a righteous and alluring face on going off to kill and die in unofficial operations aligned with Kremlin interests.But it’s “Granit” and other big-budget shoot-em-ups, like “Touriste” and “Solntsepyok,” that are the best known elements of the W.E.U. They are aimed, in part, at the countries where Wagner operates: As The Financial Times has reported, “Touriste,” set in the Central African Republic, had a premiere at the national stadium in the country’s capital, Bangui. Another audience, of course, is Russians, though not necessarily the Russian mainstream. Wagner movies air on state TV, but at odd times; they feature recognizable actors, but not elite talent. It’s possible Prigozhin is aiming for Russians with a taste for action and weaponry and a paucity of job options — people who might be enticed to fight for money, and who may already see enough pro-Wagner social media to follow the Extended Universe’s memes and internal references.It is in its hints of explicit politicization, though, that ‘Granit’ sings.Knowing these grim motivations is part of why I wanted to watch “Granit.” But it’s also true that I was raised in the monoculture-era Massachusetts suburbs on exactly the kind of jingoistic American action movies that “Granit” is trying to replicate, and so there are certain tropes to which I’m hard-wired to react. When Granit, the character, finally popped up, 13 minutes into the film, and promptly disarmed a bunch of dudes, I involuntarily gasped: He was shredding.Granit — that’s his code name — is a righteous ass-kicker. He is in Mozambique to help train the country’s armed forces as they combat indistinct ISIS-backing bandits, but he is not there to fight heroically alongside them; his boss even says, “I warn you — no fighting and no heroics.” But Granit cannot help himself. He and his fellow mercenaries whip the Mozambican forces into shape, then shoot it out with the bandits. He also finds time to look out for a local kid who, inevitably, learns to say spasibo, or “thank you.”As a movie, “Granit” is bad in predictable ways, echoing your lesser dumb-fun Steven Seagal flicks. Oleg Chernov, the lead actor, has a natural world-weariness, a catlike grace and the kind of nice, big head of which Josh Brolin might approve. Occasionally he makes the insane dialogue work. (“In war, it’s not the guns that decide, but balls,” he says at one point. “The one with the stronger balls wins.”) It is in its hints of explicit politicization, though, that “Granit” sings. “For a Russian, an idea is more important than money,” says one villain. “If you give a Russian an idea, he’ll work for free.” When someone suggests that the Russian fighters are out of their depth in Mozambique, this same villain — now clearly enthralled by the Russians — counters that the Maputo street on which they’re speaking is called Av. Vladimir Lenine. Presumably “Granit” is not carrying the torch for Marxism-Leninism. The street is meant to represent the power and historical significance of Russia in general.The messaging in this film is so scattered that you may be left seeing signs everywhere. At one point, Granit and the crew smash glass Coca-Cola bottles to build a makeshift booby trap. Clever knock of American imperialism, or a nod to “Home Alone”? In the end, Granit dies on his back, smiling up at birds. According to recovered Wagner documents, a Russian code-named Granit really did die in Mozambique in 2019. But reporting indicates that Wagner soldiers bumbled their way through the mission in a manner nearly the complete opposite of what’s seen in the movie. “The undergrowth is so thick there that all the high-tech equipment Wagner brought ceases to be effective,” a Mozambican intelligence specialist told The Moscow Times. “The Russians arrived with drones, but they can’t actually use them.” In “Granit,” of course, the drones work fine.The action movie, as a format, has always been great at presenting a worldview. As an explicit recruitment vehicle, the Wagner movies’ closest American analogue might be Frank Capra’s World War II series, “Why We Fight.” But their inspiration definitely comes from the Cold War 1980s, when America was churning out nationalistic stuff like “Red Dawn,” “Invasion U.S.A.” and “Rambo III” — films with an obvious, unexamined arrangement of global good guys and bad guys. More recent American propaganda is known for a neutered abstractness — this year’s “Top Gun: Maverick” is deliberately vague about the identity of its foreign enemy, and while the “Transformers” movies pan droolingly over expensive Pentagon-provided hardware, the soldiers in those movies are fighting space robots. Movies in which Americans save the planet from evil may be part and parcel of a political reality in which cutting the Pentagon budget is a nonstarter, but at their inception, the point of these films is to make money.For an American, it can be easy to forget how much ideology is packed into the genre — until you watch a film from elsewhere, and are confronted with the cartoonish heroes and villains of other cultures. The Wagner movies don’t ever actually say the name “Wagner,” and Prigozhin only recently admitted that he is the group’s founder. But in September a video surfaced in which a man assumed to be Prigozhin stands in the yard of a Russian penal colony and explicitly recruits for Wagner by offering sentence-reduction in exchange for service. Just as in the Wagner movies, the inevitability of death is front of mind. “Do you have anyone who can get you out of prison alive?” he asks. “There are two, Allah and God. I am taking you out of here alive. But it’s not always that I bring you back alive.” In another portion of his speech, he is more specific. “The first convicts who fought with me, that was at the Vuhlehirsk power station, with 40 people,” he says, referring to an actual battle in Ukraine. “Out of the three dead, one was 52 years old. He served 30 years in prison. He died a hero.”When I first saw this video, I wondered if a tonal shift might be coming for the Wagner Extended Universe — one in which cinematic tributes to moralizing mercenaries are replaced by a fatalistic social realism. Then I learned that Prigozhin’s production company has already announced the production of a new big-budget feature. Online, Wagner watchers are guessing it will depict the group’s battles in Ukraine. It’s going to be called “The Best in Hell.” More

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      Eileen Ryan, Actress of Stage and Screen, Dies at 94

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      She put her career on hold for a time to raise her sons, the actors Sean and Chris Penn and the musician Michael Penn.Eileen Ryan, a stage, television and film actress who paused her career to raise her sons, the actors Sean and Chris Penn and the musician Michael Penn, then later racked up dozens of acting credits, sometimes working with her sons and her husband, the director Leo Penn, died on Sunday at her home in Malibu, Calif. She was 94.Her family announced her death through a spokeswoman.Ms. Ryan was in her late 20s and appearing in “The Iceman Cometh” at Circle in the Square in Greenwich Village in 1956 when she met Mr. Penn, who stepped into a role being vacated by Jason Robards. They married soon after.Her career was going well at that point; she had already made her Broadway debut in “Sing Till Tomorrow” in 1953 and would return to Broadway in 1958 in “Comes a Day.” But she prided herself on making her own decisions — “I don’t think anybody could have felt stronger than I did about controlling my own destiny,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1986 — and soon she made a difficult one, choosing to scale back her acting.The choice, she said, began to be clear when she had a job that took her away from home and had to leave Michael, then a baby, with Leo.“I was out of town and all I did was cry,” she told The Times. “That made it very clear to me that I wanted to be home with the kids.”The family moved to the West Coast, and she still performed occasionally in the 1960s and ’70s; she appeared in episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” “Bonanza” and other shows, some of them directed by Leo Penn, who, though blacklisted in the 1940s and ’50s, emerged to become a prolific television director.But, she said in 1986, for a long stretch her most important performance came in a supporting role in a home movie made by young Sean Penn and his neighbor Emilio Estevez, son of the actor Martin Sheen.“I was a background mother screaming from the kitchen,” she said.Ms. Ryan went back to acting more regularly with her appearance in the 1986 film “At Close Range,” a crime drama in which she played the grandmother of characters played by her sons Sean and Chris. Two years later she played the mother of Sean Penn’s character in the movie “Judgment in Berlin,” a drama directed by Leo Penn whose stars also included Mr. Sheen.Ms. Ryan and her husband also returned to the stage, starring in “Remembrance,” a drama by the Irish playwright Graham Reid staged in 1997 at the Odyssey Theater in Los Angeles, with Sean Penn as producer.Leo Penn died in 1998. Ms. Ryan continued to act, accumulating more than two dozen additional TV and film credits, most recently in the 2016 movie “Rules Don’t Apply,” directed by Warren Beatty.Eileen Rose Annucci was born on Oct. 16, 1927, in the Bronx. Her father, William, was a lawyer and a dentist. Her mother, Rose (Ryan) Annucci, was the source of the surname Eileen later adopted for her acting career.That career, or at least the aspiration to it, started early. As a child growing up in New York she would stage plays in the courtyard of her apartment complex.“I remember beating up all the little boys in my apartment building so they’d be in my plays,” she said.She earned a bachelor’s degree at New York University, then embarked on an acting career, putting her on a path to meet Mr. Penn.Once she restarted her career in the 1980s, among her first credits was Ron Howard’s comic drama “Parenthood” (1989). She played one-half of an older couple; the male half was played by Mr. Robards, the man whose departure from “Iceman” decades earlier had allowed her to meet Mr. Penn.Ms. Ryan’s son Chris died in 2006. In addition to her other sons, she is survived by three grandchildren. More

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      Nikki Finke, Caustic Hollywood Chronicler, Is Dead at 68

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      At newspapers and then at Deadline, the website she founded, she served up the opposite of fluff entertainment journalism.Nikki Finke, the acerbic, widely read entertainment reporter and blogger who broke Hollywood news, antagonized moguls and in 2006 founded the website Deadline Hollywood Daily, now known simply as Deadline, died on Sunday in Boca Raton, Fla. She was 68.Madelyn Hammond, a spokeswoman for her family, announced her death, saying only that it resulted from a long illness.After working for a time as a staff assistant in the Washington office of Representative Edward I. Koch, the New York Democrat who would later become mayor of New York City, Ms. Finke joined The Associated Press in 1975 as a reporter. By the early 1980s she had moved to The Dallas Morning News, and then joined Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times and other outlets before starting a column called Deadline Hollywood in LA Weekly in 2002.There, and on the Deadline website, she mixed reportage and gossip in a lively style that took no prisoners, whether scooping the world on who would host the Oscars, detailing the dealings among stars and agents or scrutinizing the deal-making of top executives.“Ms. Finke is the queen of the ritual sacrifice,” David Carr wrote in The New York Times in 2013, “having roasted industry leaders like Marc Shmuger of Universal and Ben Silverman of NBC until they caught fire and ended up out of their jobs.”That was fine by her.“If there’s an open wound, I’m going to pour salt in it,” she told Jon Friedman of MarketWatch in 2006 for an article that carried the headline “In-Your-Face Finke Keeps Hollywood Honest.”Ms. Finke was the antithesis of the entertainment journalists who show up at every red-carpet event and jostle for sound-bite quotes. She was often described as reclusive, so much so that in 2009 the website Gawker offered $1,000 for a recent photograph of her.“Here’s what makes me weird,” she told MarketWatch. “I care about what happens in the boardroom, not the celebrities.”Executives weren’t her only targets. Sacred cows of all sorts, including the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, incurred her disdain.“I don’t get all aflutter at the mere mention of the Park City film festival like some media,” she wrote on Deadline in 2007. “That’s because I’m much too cynical. If you accept the premise that the film business is the folly of the filthy rich, then the independent-film business must seem the folly of the stupidly rich.”In 2015, by then out of the entertainment journalism business and working on a new venture, a fiction website called Hollywood Dementia, Ms. Finke reflected on her career and reputation in an interview with Vulture.“I am a very old-school journalist,” she said. “I believe you make the comfortable uncomfortable, and that’s the whole point of doing it.”One who was made uncomfortable was Brad Grey, chairman of Paramount Pictures during Ms. Finke’s heyday.“Like it or not, everyone in Hollywood reads her,” Mr. Grey, who died in 2017, told The New York Times in 2007. “You must respect her reach.”Nikki Jean Finke was born on Dec. 16, 1953, in Manhattan to Robert and Doris Finke.Growing up in Sands Point, on the North Shore of Long Island, she “ran in an Upper East Side social stratum,” as she put it in a 2005 essay in The Times lamenting the decline of the Plaza Hotel, where in the late 1950s her mother would take her and her sister for afternoon tea.“My cliquish world consisted of ladies and gents from Manhattan’s exclusive private schools and preppies down from New England boarding schools who played bit-parts on weekends and holidays,” she wrote.Her parents traveled frequently, taking Nikki and her sister, Terry, along. In another 2005 essay for The Times, Ms. Finke recalled her mother’s obsession with seeing the finest sights of Europe and staying in its finest accommodations while doing so.“In her view,” Ms. Finke wrote, “travel was a privilege not to be squandered by booking stingily or mechanically.“When I begged to be taken to Disneyland to see Cinderella’s castle,” she added, “my mother responded, ‘Why do you want to see fake castles when you’ve seen the real ones?’”Ms. Finke was a debutante, making her debut in 1971 at the International Debutante Ball in New York. She graduated from the Buckley Country Day School in North Hills, on Long Island, and the Hewitt School, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, then earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Wellesley College, where she worked on the campus newspaper, The Wellesley News.Her travels as a child prepared her well for her Associated Press job, which included covering foreign news.Her entertainment column and blog didn’t play by the same rules as mainstream journalism; she was noted for publishing rumors and innuendo and sometimes being a little ahead of events. “Toldja!” was a favorite exclamation she would use when something she had foreseen actually occurred.Starting Deadline was something of a leap of faith, coming at a time when the business model for independent online publishing ventures was unclear. But the site succeeded, and in 2009 she sold it to the Jay Penske company, now known as Penske Media Corp. She remained as editor in chief but clashed frequently with Mr. Penske, and in 2013 they parted ways.A legal clash with Mr. Penske resulted in an agreement that effectively barred her from practicing entertainment journalism, so in 2015 she started the fiction site.“There is a lot of truth in fiction,” she told The Times. “There are things I am going to be able to say in fiction that I can’t say in journalism right now.”Ms. Finke’s marriage to Jeffrey Greenberg ended in divorce in 1982. Her sister, Terry Finke Dreyfus, survives her. More

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      Douglas Kirkland, Who Took Portraits of Movie Stars, Dies at 88

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      His many memorable shots included one of his earliest assignments and probably his most famous: Marilyn Monroe in bed, wrapped in a silk sheet.Douglas Kirkland, a photojournalist and portraitist whose subjects included Marilyn Monroe wrapped in a silk sheet and Coco Chanel at work in her Paris atelier, died on Oct. 2 at his home in the Hollywood Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 88.Francoise (Kemmel-Coulter) Kirkland, his wife and manager, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.For more than 60 years, Mr. Kirkland was a leading celebrity photographer, first for Look and Life magazines and then as a freelancer for various magazines, Hollywood studios and advertising agencies. Courteous and exuberant — he was no annoying paparazzo — Mr. Kirkland was welcomed into stars’ homes and hotel rooms and onto movie sets.The tall, dashing Mr. Kirkland “had this magical quality,” said Karen Mullarkey, who worked with Mr. Kirkland as director of photography at New York and Newsweek magazines. “He had this way of making people comfortable — he was so enthusiastic.” For an issue of New York, she recalled, she brought the model Kathy Ireland a bunch of peonies, and as he photographed Ms. Ireland, Ms. Mullarkey heard him saying: “Caress them! Kiss them! They’re your boyfriend!”“I am new with this magazine,” Mr. Kirkland recalled telling Elizabeth Taylor, whom he was assigned to shoot for Look. “Can you imagine what it would mean to me if you let me photograph you?”Douglas KirklandIn 1961, a year after joining Look, Mr. Kirkland had two dramatic encounters. For the first, he accompanied Jack Hamilton, a reporter, to Las Vegas for an interview with Elizabeth Taylor, then one of the biggest stars in the world. When the three met, Ms. Taylor said that she would talk but not sit for pictures.After the interview, Mr. Kirkland recalled to the website Vintage News Daily in 2021, he tried to persuade her to pose for him. He held her hand and said: “I am new with this magazine. Can you imagine what it would mean to me if you let me photograph you?”“I did not let go of her hand; she wore jungle gardenia perfume which I could smell later on,” he continued. “She thought for a while and said, ‘Come back tomorrow at 8 p.m.’”Mr. Kirkland perched himself on a balcony to photograph Marilyn Monroe.Douglas KirklandHiding everything but her face in the sheet and hugging the pillow, she was, it seemed, directing herself.Douglas KirklandThe result — a picture of Ms. Taylor in a yellow jacket, wearing spectacular diamond earrings — appeared on the cover of Look’s Aug. 15, 1961, issue.Later that year, Look sent Mr. Kirkland to Los Angeles to photograph Ms. Monroe. They met at her house, where she told him what she wanted for the shoot: a white silk sheet, Frank Sinatra records and Dom Perignon Champagne.When they met at a studio four days later, she slipped out of a robe and got into a bed, swaddled herself in a sheet and posed for Mr. Kirkland, who for part of the shoot perched himself in a balcony above her. She was, it seemed, directing, herself, with what looked like joy. She hugged the pillow, hid everything but her face in the sheet and turned her back to the camera.“I had everything technically right,” Mr. Kirkland said in an interview with “CBS This Morning” in 2012. “My Hasselblad — click, click, click — but it was Marilyn Monroe who really created these images.”Ann-Margret in Las Vegas in 1971.Douglas KirklandHe recalled that shoot in the 2020 documentary “That Click: The Legendary Photography of Douglas Kirkland,” directed by Luca Severi: “What the pillow represents is what she would like to be doing to a man, and I could have been in there and been the pillow. But I chose to keep taking pictures, because that’s how Douglas Kirkland really, bottom line, is.”Look used only one of the Monroe pictures, inside the magazine, but Mr. Kirkland collected many of them in a 2012 book, “With Marilyn: An Evening/1961.” His other books of photographs include “Light Years: 3 Decades Photography Among the Stars” (1989), “Icons” (1993) and “Legends” (1999).At Look and Life, and then as an on-set photographer, Mr. Kirkland shot pictures during the production of more than 100 films, including “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Sophie’s Choice,” “Rain Man” and several Baz Luhrmann films, starting with “Moulin Rouge!” in 2001. Mr. Luhrmann said in “That Click” that Mr. Kirkland’s photography “captures the romance of cinema.”Sophia Loren in Rome in 1972.Douglas KirklandHis career started at a time when his subjects were accessible to journalists, and it continued into a time when stars and their handlers exerted greater power over the media. “In the ’60s, there was an idea of letting the camera be revealing of truth,” he told The New York Times in 1990. “Today, it’s more like ‘Entertainment Tonight.’”Douglas Morley Kirkland was born on Aug. 16, 1934, in Toronto and raised from age 3 in Fort Erie, Ontario. His father, Morley, owned a shop where he made men’s made-to-measure clothing, and his mother, Evelyn (Reid) Kirkland, kept the books in the store.He took his first picture with a Brownie camera as a young child: his family standing at the front door of their home on Christmas Day. By 14, he was photographing weddings. After high school, he studied at the New York Institute of Photography and then returned to Canada, where he worked for two local newspapers, and then moved to Richmond, Va., to work as a commercial photographer.In 1962, Mr. Kirkland spent three weeks with the designer Coco Chanel in Paris.Douglas KirklandWhile there, he wrote three letters to the influential fashion photographer Irving Penn, seeking a job. In 1957, Mr. Penn hired him as his assistant.“I was paid $50 a week, and even in those days in New York it was not too simple,” he said in an interview with the American Society of Media Photographers in 2017. “But I was with Penn and I was quickly learning.”In 1960 he joined Look. He stayed there until the magazine folded in 1971, when he was hired by Life, where he remained until it stopped weekly publication the next year. For the rest of his career he was a freelancer, working for Time, Paris Match, Sports Illustrated, Town & Country and other magazines.He received the American Society of Cinematographers’ Presidents Award in 2011 for his photographic work on film sets. The next year, he was commissioned by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to create a series of official portraits of the Oscar nominees in the four acting categories, among them George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep and Glenn Close.One of them, Michelle Williams, had been nominated for playing Ms. Monroe in “My Week with Marilyn.” In the documentary “That Click,” she said that being photographed by the same man who had photographed Ms. Monroe a half-century earlier had been a moving experience.“Never could I have imagined this sort of circumstance,” she said.Mr. Kirkland with examples of his work at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles in 2009.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn addition to his wife, Mr. Kirkland is survived by his son, Mark, and his daughters, Karen Kirkland and Lisa Kirkland Gadway, from his marriage to Marian Perry, which ended in divorce; five grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.In August 1962, Mr. Kirkland spent three weeks with Coco Chanel in Paris for Look. At first she was wary of him, permitting him to shoot only the outfits she had designed but not her. But after he showed her his first set of prints, she backed off, letting him observe her at work — always in a hat and usually surrounded by her staff. On his last day there, she suggested that they take a ride to the Palace of Versailles. He took one last picture of her, walking alone in the palace’s gardens.“It was chilly and had started to rain, even though it was August, so I gave her my raincoat,” Mr. Kirkland told The Guardian in 2015. “She put it over her shoulders and it looked almost like a fashionable cape. She said that she often liked to go there because it gave her an opportunity to get lost in time while being surrounded by the magnitude of old French culture.” More

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      Streaming Services Want to Fill the Family Movie Void

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      With theatrical releases way down, the streaming giants have been pumping out multigenerational fare, including a number of live-action films.Sony Pictures unleashed the singing reptile “Lyle, Lyle Crocodile” in 4,350 theaters across the country this weekend to the tune of an estimated $12 million to $13 million.It was the first wide theatrical release for a family film since “DC League of Super-Pets” from Warner Bros. in July, and only the 12th family film to hit theaters this year. Just two more are expected before the end of December.That’s a far cry from the prepandemic days of 2019, when 24 family movies came to theaters. They accounted for $8.9 billion in box office receipts, a whopping 32 percent of the worldwide total for Hollywood studios that year.The decline today is due to a combination of factors: a hangover from the pandemic, efforts by studios like Disney and Paramount to bolster their own streaming services with fresh content and the risks of greenlighting family films that aren’t based on well-known intellectual property.It’s affecting the health of the theatrical business.“The movie industry needs a big and thriving family moviegoing business to return to strength,” David Gross, a box office analyst, said. He’s predicting that gross profits for family films in 2022 will total $2.75 billion to $2.8 billion. “Success with families is essential to the long-term health of the business. We consider this to be the biggest production challenge ahead.”So where have all the family movies gone?To streaming, of course. While last month was the worst September at the box office since 1996 — excluding the pandemic year of 2020 — Netflix, Disney and others have been pumping family films to their services. “The Adam Project” arrived on Netflix in March and the animated “The Sea Beast” in June, while Disney+ released “Pinocchio” in September and just announced that “Hocus Pocus 2,” which debuted Sept. 30, was streamed for more hours over its first three days than any previous premiere on the service.And the streaming giants are just getting started. While both remaining theatrical releases of family films this year are animated — Disney’s “Strange World” and Universal’s “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” — Netflix plans an onslaught of the kind of live-action family fare that studios are producing less and less. The titles include “The School for Good and Evil,” starring Charlize Theron and Kerry Washington; “Slumberland,” from the “Hunger Games” director Francis Lawrence; the sequel to “Enola Holmes”; and “Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical,” starring Emma Thompson as Miss Trunchbull.Disney+ will debut the “Enchanted” remake “Disenchanted” on Thanksgiving weekend, and Apple TV + plans to make “Spirited,” its holiday musical-comedy starring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds, available on Nov. 18.The majority of the Netflix projects look expensive, with “Slumberland” costing around $90 million. Contrast that with the budget in the $50 million range for “Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile,” which is based on a children’s book and stars Javier Bardem, Constance Wu and Shawn Mendes (as the voice of Lyle).The Race to Rule Streaming TVApple’s Will Smith Problem: The actor is the star of a $120 million Civil War drama that finished filming earlier this year. Apple envisioned the film as a surefire Oscar contender. But that was before the slap.Cable Cowboy: The media mogul John Malone opened up about the streaming wars, the fast-changing news business and the future of his own career.Warner Bros. Discovery: The recently formed media colossus announced plans for a free streaming service and a paid subscription streaming service combining HBO Max and Discovery+.Turmoil at Netflix: Despite a loss of subscribers, job cuts and a steep stock drop, the streaming giant has said it is staying the course.The filmmakers behind “Lyle” are bullish on its prospects. “The combination of a live-action CGI crocodile, the fact that it’s also musical and a family film, I think give it multiple points of attraction that will hopefully lure audiences off their couches,” said one its producers, Hutch Parker, a former president of production at 20th Century Fox.Also helping the film’s fate is the very thing that has theater owners more broadly concerned: a lack of product in the marketplace.“Every movie I’ve made for the last 30 years had four or five other movies coming out on the same weekend, with four to five movies that had come out the previous weekend that were still out,” Mr. Parker said. “And this is unique in that you’re coming into a market that on the one hand is less vibrant. On the other hand, the opportunity in an open marketplace is unique.”Josh Greenstein, Sony’s president of the motion picture group, added: “If we can open in the low- to midteens we can play and play. The lack of competition will be very good for the movie.”Indeed, the lack of product this year has kept films in theaters longer, generating more ticket sales along the way. Sony’s “Where the Crawdads Sing,” for instance, earned close to $90 million domestically, and “Elvis,” from Warner Bros., had $150 million in box office revenue.The “Lyle” directors Will Speck and Josh Gordon, who turned to family fare after a career making broad-based comedies like “Blades of Glory,” hope that their crocodile will encourage family audiences to change their moviegoing tendencies.“We’re excited that we’ve made something that we feel like if people actually can shift out of the habit of what they might be in with streaming, we’ll deliver them something that brings joy and escape and happiness and all the things you want it to do,” Mr. Speck said in an interview.Complicating this challenge is Netflix’s burgeoning interest in family entertainment, specifically live-action projects. The streaming service sees an opportunity to develop films based on original characters and story lines.“We loved going to see great original family films,” said Ori Marmur, vice president of studio film at Netflix. “Sadly, now when you look at what a lot of the offerings are, they aren’t live-action family. It’s usually animated for family, and then it’s reboots, remakes, sequels, low-budget horror. We saw a real opportunity in seeing those kinds of movies, and building up a slate like that.”The company’s quest to dig deep into films that appeal to all ages has prompted it to acquire big-budget spectacles — often ones the studios turned down because of costs or the risks of releasing a family movie not based on existing intellectual property. “The School for Good and Evil,” for example, originated at Universal Pictures almost a decade ago.While family films released on streaming do not receive the same kind of marketing blitz that theatrical releases do, they often have other attributes coveted by studios hoping to succeed at the box office. “Slumberland” and “The School for Good and Evil” have the spectacle; “Matilda” has the musical elements, and “Enola Holmes” is a known property.Marlow Barkley and Jason Momoa in “Slumberland,” which comes out on Netflix on Nov. 18.Netflix“Slumberland” began at Fox, but things got complicated once the company merged with Disney in 2019, said Mr. Lawrence, the film’s director. Disney, after all, prides itself on its expertise in making family films. It didn’t need Fox doing the same thing.The Chernin Group, which produced “Slumberland,” had a deal that if one of its films had a director, an actor and a completed shooting script, Disney had 30 days to decide whether to make it. The company passed.“It almost instantly turned over to Netflix,” Mr. Lawrence said in an interview, adding: “Releasing it around Thanksgiving, I am hoping that families will watch it together. That’s sort of the ideal scenario.”Set to debut on Nov. 18, the action-adventure is based on the comic book series “Little Nemo in Slumberland,” by Winsor McCay. It features a young female protagonist, mystical dreamlands, numerous special effects, and a story about grief and loss.“I find it comforting knowing that when it actually comes out, I won’t have that same sort of box-office stress that happens on every movie where by Friday afternoon, everybody knows what it’s made for the weekend and it’s either a success or a failure,” said Mr. Lawrence, who directed three of the four movies in the “Hunger Games” franchise and is currently shooting the prequel, “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.” “Not having that sort of pressure on it is interesting.”And he’s hoping some audiences will find the film in the Netflix-owned theaters, too.“Would I have loved a slightly longer theatrical release, maybe some IMAX screens or something like that?” he said. “Sure.” More

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      The Power Player of ‘Triangle of Sadness’: Dolly de Leon

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      The Palme d’Or-winning class satire hinges on her surprising character, but the veteran Filipina actress never thought she had a chance to land the role.This interview includes spoilers about the plot of “Triangle of Sadness.”LOS ANGELES — Humble though not self-deprecating, the actress Dolly de Leon speaks of the shortcomings in her process with a casual matter-of-factness that makes her sincerity clear. “I really do poorly at auditions,” she confessed.Despite her assessment, she clearly did well enough at one of them: At 53, the Filipina veteran of theater, television and film in her home country is enjoying international attention for her trope-defying role in the class satire “Triangle of Sadness,” in theaters Friday.De Leon plays Abigail, a crew member on a luxury cruise ship carrying entitled oligarchs and fashion models. After things go awry, her practical skills are much more valuable than wealth or beauty on a seemingly deserted island.The multinational ensemble piece, which features Woody Harrelson, Harris Dickinson and the late Charlbi Dean, earned the top prize, the Palme d’Or, at the Cannes Film Festival in June. There, Indiewire described de Leon’s performance as “bold and heartsick,” while Screen Daily praised her for “playing it canny and ruthless.”But when the film’s writer-director, Ruben Ostlund, traveled to the Philippines in 2019 to cast the pivotal role, de Leon couldn’t fathom that she would get the job — in part because of her troubled relationship with auditions. Yet Ostlund recalled being impressed with her playfulness in a romantic scene they tried. Her lack of expectations probably played to her advantage.“Dolly has a fox behind her ear, as we say in Sweden,” the director Ruben Ostlund said. “That is to say that she is not who you expect.”Rosie Marks for The New York Times“I’m just an actor who needs the work,” de Leon said. “Whatever the role was, it was just another job for me. But, of course, I knew there was prestige attached to it because it was Ruben,” and she had seen his art-world satire, “The Square,” which won the Palme d’Or in 2017.Interested in inverting the power dynamics between the superrich and those underpaid to serve them, Ostlund found de Leon’s transformation from shipboard housekeeping staffer to authoritative captain ashore to be searingly convincing. “In very few scenes you have to buy that she is taking control of this group,” he said via video call.De Leon explained: “I admire Abigail because she just took it upon herself to be in charge without asking for approval from anyone. If I were in her situation, I’d probably still be following people around.”Sitting in a hotel meeting room in West Hollywood during a recent interview, de Leon, in a white top and tennis shoes and light bluejeans, exuded a relaxed energy while occasionally inhaling from a minuscule vape.A native of Manila, she traced her acting epiphany to a grade-school skit. A teacher asked students to pretend their mother had died. In that tragic scenario, she found a therapeutic outlet for her real, long-suppressed emotions.“It felt so good because at home we weren’t allowed to cry,” she explained. “It was liberating. And after that, I was hooked.”As a theater arts student at the University of the Philippines Diliman, de Leon played extras on TV until parts with dramatic substance gradually came her way. “I wasn’t choosy. I would take any role that was offered to me,” she said. Meanwhile, the stage — her first love — provided greater artistic challenges.De Leon with Charlbi Dean, left, and Vicki Berlin in a scene from “Triangle of Sadness.”Plattform ProduktionWith time, cinema also became an option as she developed a following as a character actor in projects involving top local talent. One director, the celebrated Filipino auteur Lav Diaz, cast her in his 2019 film, “The Halt,” based solely on her reputation. Back then, he had not seen any of her performances.“Here in the Philippines, she’s earned that imprimatur, that status, that level of respect already,” Diaz said via email of his blind trust in de Leon. The two would collaborate again on “History of Ha” (2021), a period drama about a famed puppeteer.Unlike Ostlund, who requests anywhere from 30 to 70 takes per shot, Diaz does only one take per setup, tacitly asking his cast for hyper focus.“When I say I trust an actor, the fundamental transcriptions of that act are responsibility and commitment,” Diaz explained. “An affirmation of that would be an actor’s eventual portrayal. All I can say is that Dolly is amazing in ‘Ha’ and great in ‘Triangle of Sadness.’”In Ostlund’s biting comedy, de Leon embraced the task of dignifying a character who essentially represents the millions of Filipinos working abroad to support their families back home.“To a lot of Filipinos, they’re heroes because they bring dollars into our country and boost the economy,” she added.For de Leon, “Triangle of Sadness” isn’t only about financial inequality but also about physical attractiveness as currency, illustrated by Abigail’s transactional affair with a model (Dickinson). Their encounters were de Leon’s first-ever onscreen love scenes.That Abigail’s abilities to fish and make fire turn her into a leader in this microcosm demonstrates, de Leon said, that authority can take many forms.“We often feel so powerless in this world because we’re surrounded by beauty, fame and money,” she explained. “We forget that no matter how less privileged you are, you still hold a certain power in the world that we can harness to our advantage.”By putting someone unexpected in a position of power, however, Ostlund wanted to examine whether abuses would occur. “There’s a possibility that it really corrupts her,” he said of Abigail.De Leon said she admired the way her character took charge: “If I were in her situation, I’d probably still be following people around.”Rosie Marks for The New York TimesIn the film’s open-ended conclusion, Abigail faces a dilemma about whether to protect her status. Ostlund zeroed in on de Leon’s face for dozens of takes.“I could feel this was the scene that Dolly had been charging for during the whole production,” Ostlund said. “Dolly has a fox behind her ear, as we say in Sweden. That is to say that she is not who you expect.”Initially, de Leon tackled that moment with a version of Abigail determined to use force. But ambiguity and doubt ultimately rendered the scene psychologically richer.“We tried a different approach where she’s at a crossroads and is torn,” she said, adding, “It was ultimately a better choice in that it highlighted Abigail’s humanity.”As de Leon looks ahead at the possibility of collaborating with American and European storytellers, she remembered Dean, who died in August. It was her friend Dean who encouraged her to get a manager to expand her professional horizons.“I really feel the loss of her while I’m in L.A. because she used to live here,” de Leon said. “I imagine that if she were still with us, she would be sitting next to me doing this interview.”The Cannes reception to her performance still astounds de Leon. But even if her children playfully mock her newfound profile in the West, she maintains a modest outlook.“What an incredible feeling to experience something like this, however late in life,” she said. “I’m not in my 20s anymore, so this happened at the perfect time because my head is not up in the clouds. I’m more grounded as a person and as an actor. If I were younger, I’d be acting like I’m better than everyone,” she said with an unassuming laugh. More

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      ‘Pretty Problems’ Review: A Getaway Goes Quirky

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      A woman spends a weekend with some wealthy new acquaintances and discovers something (though not nearly enough) about herself.It’s laughter at first sight when two strangers meet in the wan indie “Pretty Problems.”Lindsay (Britt Rentschler) is clerking at a Los Angeles consignment boutique and sipping some of the wine the store offers shoppers when the florally resplendent Cat (JJ Nolan) strolls in, catching the other woman mid-gulp. They smile and giggle and chat, making a connection that quickly intensifies when Cat starts plying Lindsay with compliments and then nearly buys out the store. Soon, a besotted Lindsay — her ego and sales commission both padded — and her poky husband, Jack (Michael Tennant) are en route for a weekend getaway at Cat’s.Cat’s house turns out to be a sprawling estate tucked in Sonoma and, as her boutique spree suggested, she is wealthy, a touch eccentric and has found a new distraction in Lindsay. Jack has his doubts about the trip, halfheartedly joking to Lindsay “this could be some weird, rich person sex thing” or maybe something scary à la the horror flick “The Purge.” If only! Instead, the weekend turns into an overlong, undercooked comedy of manners about how, yes, indeed the rich are different; although mostly this is about how Lindsay needs to shake up her life, revitalize her dreary marriage and, you know, find herself.It takes Lindsay almost the entirety of this sitcom-y silliness to figure it out (the viewer will get the idea in 10), which doesn’t speak well of her or the filmmakers. Written by Tennant and directed by Kestrin Pantera, “Pretty Problems” takes an indulgently long time getting to its obvious conclusion, which it does by drawing out Lindsay’s neediness and narcissism while making light teasing fun of Cat and her husband, their lifestyle and First-World problems. That Nolan gives the best performance by far here undercuts the movie’s apparent aims and its comedy — Cat may be a joke, but she’s the only one that lands.Pretty ProblemsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      An Empress Ahead of Her Time Is Having a Pop Culture Moment

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      A Netflix series and a new movie explore the life of Elisabeth, the 19th-century Empress of Austria who had a tattoo, worked out daily and wanted more from life than just producing heirs.VIENNA — The 19th-century Empress Elisabeth of Austria is everywhere in Vienna: on chocolate boxes, on bottles of rosé, on posters around the city. The Greek antiques she collected are at Hermesvilla, on the city outskirts; her hearse is at Schönbrunn Palace, the former summer residence of the Hapsburg royal family; and her cocaine syringe and gym equipment are on display at the Hofburg, which was the monarchy’s central Vienna home.These traces paint an enticing, but incomplete, picture of an empress who receded from public life not long after entering it, and spent most of her time traveling the world to avoid her own court. She had a tattoo on her shoulder; drank wine with breakfast; and exercised two to three times a day on wall bars and rings in her rooms. These eccentricities, combined with her refusal to have her picture taken after her early 30s, fueled an air of mystery around her.Now, nearly 125 years after Elisabeth’s assassination, at age 60, two new productions — a new Netflix series called “The Empress” and a film called “Corsage” that debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May and will hit American theaters on Dec. 23 — offer their own ideas.“Growing up in Austria, she was the main tourist magnet, aside from Mozart,” said Marie Kreutzer, who wrote and directed “Corsage.” Nevertheless, she added, Elisabeth, who was married to Emperor Franz Josef I, is largely a mystery. “Her image is one you can reimagine and reinterpret and fill with your own imagination, because we have a lot of stories about her, but you don’t know if they’re true,” Kreutzer said.The moody, intellectual and beauty-obsessed empress has had many reincarnations.While alive, Elisabeth, who also went by “Sisi,” traveled constantly, often to Hungary, Greece and England, and was rarely seen by the Viennese public. In private, she wrote poetry, rode horses and hunted, hiked high into the Alps, read Shakespeare, studied classical and modern Greek, took warm baths in olive oil and wore leather masks filled with raw veal as part of her skin care routine.A photograph of the empress reproduced at Hermesvilla, a Vienna palace.David Payr for The New York TimesA famous photograph of the empress from 1865. After her early 30s, she refused to have her picture taken.David Payr for The New York TimesMichaela Lindinger, a curator and author who has studied Elisabeth for more than two decades, with a 1882 portrait of the empress, at Hermesvilla.David Payr for The New York Times“She was such a recluse,” said Michaela Lindinger, a curator at the Wien Museum, who has studied Elisabeth for more than two decades and wrote “My Heart Is Made of Stone: The Dark Side of the Empress Elisabeth,” a book about the Empress that inspired “Corsage.” “People didn’t see her, and she didn’t want to be seen,” Lindinger said.Nevertheless, she was the empress of Austria, and later the queen of Hungary, too, so she was widely discussed. “No matter how much she fled the attention and scrutiny and the court, she was always pursued,” said Allison Pataki, who wrote two historical novels about Elisabeth, “The Accidental Empress” and “Sisi: Empress on Her Own.” “She was thrust into the spotlight as this young girl who was chosen by the emperor, in large part because of her physical beauty.”After Elisabeth was killed by an anarchist in Switzerland, in 1898, she became an object of fascination throughout the Hapsburg Empire, and her image appeared on commemorative coins and in memorial pictures. In the 1920s, a series of novels about her were published, focusing on her love life.During the 1950s, the “Sissi” film trilogy, starring Romy Schneider, revived Elisabeth as a happy-go-lucky Disney princess come to life, clad in bouncy pastel dresses and beloved by animals and people alike. The syrupy films, which appear on German and Austrian TV screens every Christmas, are part of the “Heimatfilm” genre, which emerged in the German-speaking world after World War II and feature beautiful scenes of the countryside, clear-cut morals and a world untouched by conflict.“I grew up watching the Romy Schneider movies in a campy way,” said Katharina Eyssen, the show runner and head author for “The Empress,” who is from Bavaria, in southern Germany. As played by Schneider, Elisabeth is “just a good-hearted girl that has no inner conflicts,” she said.Eyssen’s take on Elizabeth, played by Devrim Lingnau in “The Empress,” is feistier, wilder and edgier than Schneider’s. The series opens shortly before Elisabeth meets her future husband (and cousin), during his birthday celebrations in Bad Ischl, Austria. As the story goes, Franz Josef was expected to propose to Elisabeth’s older sister, Duchess Helene in Bavaria, but he changed his mind once he saw Elisabeth.Where Schneider’s eyes sparkle with joy and excitement, Lingnau’s are heavier and signal a darker inner worldPhilip Froissant as Emperor Franz Joseph II and Devrim Lingnau as Elisabeth in “The Empress,” a new Netflix series.NetflixIn the biographies Eyssen read while developing the show, she said, Elisabeth’s character is portrayed as “difficult, fragile, almost bipolar, melancholic.” But Eyssen didn’t fully buy this perspective. “There has to be a creative and passionate force, otherwise she wouldn’t have survived that long,” she said.Much of what is known about the empress’s personal life comes from her poems, as well as letters and written recollections from her children, her ladies-in-waiting and her Greek tutor. “She’s a myth in so many ways,” Kreutzer said. “It was a different time, there was no media as there is today. There are so few photographs of her.”After her early 30s, Elisabeth refused to have her picture taken, and the last time she sat for a painting was at age 42. Photos and paintings of her that are dated later are either retouched, or composites. “She wanted to stay in the memory of the people as the eternally young queen,” Lindinger said.“Corsage” goes further than “The Empress” down the dark pathways of Elisabeth’s character, offering a punk-gothic portrait of the empress at 40, as a deeply troubled soul who grasps for levity and freedom in the stifling atmosphere of the Hapsburg court. She smokes, she’s obsessed with exercise and the sea, and she weighs herself daily (all true, according to historians).The title of the movie, in German, translates as “corset.” Famously, Elisabeth maintained a 50-centimeter waistline throughout her life.Kreutzer and Vicky Krieps, who stars as Elisabeth, decided that, for the sake of authenticity, Krieps would wear a corset like the Empress’s during filming.“It’s a real torture instrument,” Krieps said. “You can’t breathe, you can’t feel. The ties are on your solar plexus, not on your waist.” She said she almost gave up on filming because of how miserable the corset made her.Kreutzer also noticed a change in Krieps, with whom she had worked on another movie several years earlier, that began during one of the first fittings.Krieps, center, with veil, in a scene from “Corsage,” which offers a punk-gothic portrait of the empress at age 40.IFC Films“She became slightly impatient with the women working on it and the women who were surrounding her and touching her,” she said. “I know now it was the physical tension and pain that made her feel unwell and act differently than I know her to be. It was like her getting into the skin of somebody else.”Having grown up on the Romy Schneider films, Krieps said she felt as a teenager that there was something darker in the empress that was being shielded from view, and started to relate to the entrapment she imagined Elisabeth had felt during her life.After Krieps went through puberty, she said, “suddenly I had a sexuality and my body was always related to this sexuality.” Later, as a mother, she said, “my body became something like a prison,” and society expected her to be an entirely different person.She began to see in Elisabeth’s struggles with her body and the roles assigned to her as “a heightened version of something every woman experiences,” she said.The final years of Elisabeth’s life have remained largely unexplored in popular culture. (“Corsage” takes artistic liberties with the portrayal of her death.) After Elisabeth’s only son, Crown Prince Rudolf, killed himself in 1889, her longstanding depression became deeper and more permanent. While sailing on her yacht, Miramar, she would sit on the deck even in bad weather, her ever-present black lace parasol her only defense against the rain and breaking waves, according to “Sisi: Myth and Truth” by Katrin Unterreiner. Once, during a heavy storm, she had herself tied to a chair above deck. According to her Greek tutor, Constantin Christomanos, she said: “I am acting like Odysseus because the waves lure me.”Pataki, the novelist, said that throughout her life, Elisabeth fought against the constricting role of being an empress. From her poems, intellectual pursuits and travels, it appears as though Elisabeth was always looking outward, imagining herself anywhere but where she was. In one poem from 1880, she gave a hint of what she might have been thinking during all the time she spent on the deck of the Miramar: “I am a sea gull from no land/I do not call any one beach my home./I am not tied by any one place,/I fly from wave to wave.”In some ways, Pataki said, she might have felt more comfortable in today’s society than in 19th-century Vienna. “Her primary role and the expectation put on her was, have sons, produce heirs,” Pataki said. “But Sisi was very ahead of her time in wanting more for herself as a woman, an individual, a wife and a leader.” More