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      ‘S.N.L.’ Season Premiere Weighs in on Its Own Trump Sketch

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      The show kicked off its 48th year with a cold open that was also a commentary on the expectations it faces after big cast changes.If you have thoughts about the new season of “Saturday Night Live,” rest assured, so too does “Saturday Night Live.”In the first episode of its 48th season, “S.N.L.” went meta in the opening sketch, recruiting the host, Miles Teller, and cast member Andrew Dismukes to play the sibling sports commentators Peyton and Eli Manning as they offered their running criticism on a seemingly standard satire of former President Donald J. Trump.For the sketch-within-a-sketch, James Austin Johnson reprised his recurring role as Trump and Chloe Fineman played an adviser encouraging him not to stay at Mar-a-Lago during Hurricane Ian. “Actually it’s the safest place I’ve been in two years,” Johnson told her. “There’s no lawyers, no F.B.I. I’m in my happy place.”Teller and Dismukes mocked various (scripted) elements of the sketch, like an awkward entrance from new cast member Michael Longfellow and Heidi Gardner’s impersonation of Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota.“A political impression that no one asked for,” Teller said. “What about a fun impression, like Anthony Fauci or Lindsey Graham or Rudy Giuliani?”Dismukes replied, “Those were all Kate McKinnon.”The absence of several familiar faces was noticeable in this episode, which also featured the musical guest Kendrick Lamar. Eight veteran cast members left “S.N.L.” ahead of this weekend’s broadcast, starting with McKinnon, Aidy Bryant, Pete Davidson and Kyle Mooney, who all made their exit plans known before last May’s season finale. The departures of Melissa Villaseñor, Alex Moffat and Aristotle Athari were announced at the start of September, and Chris Redd left later that month.Lorne Michaels, the “S.N.L.” creator and executive producer, hired four new featured performers over the summer and has said this new season would be “a year of reinvention.”As he told The New York Times in an interview last month, “We got to a point where we had a lot of people, and people weren’t getting enough playing time. The way the series has survived is by that level of renewal.”The opening sketch went on to poke fun at these expectations, as when Bowen Yang appeared as President Xi Jinping of China and (deliberately) mispronounced the word “corgis.”“It’s a surprising fumble from the veteran Yang,” Dismukes said. “He was supposed to take a step up this year, but you can tell the pressure is getting to him.”The sketch continued to pile up with cameos, including appearances from new cast member Devon Walker (as the viral celebrity Corn Kid) and snowboarder Shaun White.Meanwhile, Jon Hamm, the “Mad Men” alumnus and veteran “S.N.L.” host, joined Teller and Dismukes in their dismay over the segment.Responding to White’s appearance, Teller said, “That is just gratuitous stunt casting.”With an eye toward Teller, Hamm replied, “Sometimes they need to bring in a real celebrity when the host isn’t that famous.”Teller tried to rebut him: “Well, I heard they rarely put the host in cold opens, so when they do, it is special,” he said.Hamm replied, “Special or is it desperate?”Game Show Parody of the WeekHow much of a rebuilding year can it really be at “S.N.L.” if the show is still relying on the tried-and-true staple of the game show parody? Well, how’s this for a changeup: this time, Kenan Thompson played a contestant and not the host! Instead, the spoof — called “Send Something Normal” — was hosted by Teller, who offered the participants $100 million if they could provide a normal reply to a woman’s DM on Instagram. No easy feat when the panelists include Adam Levine (Mikey Day), Armie Hammer (Johnson) and Neil deGrasse Tyson (Thompson). The returning champion, Bowen Yang playing himself, explained the secret to his success at the game: “Being gay,” he said.Internet Education of the WeekThis filmed segment, in which Teller and Day play bank robbers whose heist goes awry, is not just a clever commentary on the popular photo-sharing platform BeReal — it’s also a helpful explanation of the site to anyone who hadn’t actually heard of it before. (Not us, of course.) As the inept criminals learn, the app sends users a notification once a day, at a random time, to post a picture of themselves. (“Oh, so there’s no posturing and it’s not status-oriented,” an understanding Teller says.) The catch is that neither the thieves nor their hostages can resist when a BeReal alert goes off during the crime in progress. Great, now who can help us make sense of cryptocurrency?Weekend Update Jokes of the WeekOver at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che riffed on a belligerent speech from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and a widely discussed gaffe by President Biden.Jost began:“In a speech after annexing sections of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin attacked the U.S. for Satanism and denounced the many genders in fashion in the West. It was a hateful unhinged speech which has many Americans calling him electable.”Che continued:“The Kremlin celebrated the illegal annexation of Ukraine with a night of entertainment in Red Square. Say what you will but a gig’s a gig.” [His screen showed a photo of Che standing in Red Square.]Jost also joked:At a White House event, President Biden asked if Representative Jackie Walorski was in the audience, asking, “Where’s Jackie?,” apparently forgetting she died last month. Worse, he keeps forgetting that this woman is still alive. [His screen showed a photo of Vice President Kamala Harris.]Weekend Update Desk-Side Segment of the WeekProlific “S.N.L.” impressionists Johnson and Thompson joined forces for this bit about Mitch McConnell (Johnson), the Republican Senate minority leader, and Herschel Walker (Thompson), the Republican candidate for Senate in Georgia. Thompson offered awkward defenses of past remarks that Walker has made, like his claim that “when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move.” By way of explanation, Thompson said, “We all know air, right? Air Bud. Air Jordan. Air-n Brockovich. You see, science don’t understand.” Johnson, as McConnell, read from a list of policy proposals Thompson gave him that included “Barbecue Tuesday”; “Let’s get a daytime moon — that way, no more rain”; and “Create a Department of Instagram Booty.”New Cast Member of the WeekThough he was taunted in the opening sketch, new hire Michael Longfellow made a strong showing in this Weekend Update segment in which he riffed on having different political views from his family in Arizona. Longfellow joked, “You shouldn’t cut anti-vax people out of your life. They could be dead tomorrow. Spend time with them. Call them. Get in the will.” He also said that when he learned his father was voting for Trump, “I sat him down and I told him, hey, if you keep going down this path, I might have to pay for my own car insurance next year. Then he told me how much it was and I said, well, I didn’t know that when I said that, so, I’m sorry.” More

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      ‘Bros’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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      Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More

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      Watch Billy Eichner and Luke Macfarlane on an Awkward Date in ‘Bros’

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      The director Nicholas Stoller narrates a sequence from the romantic comedy.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.Neither Bobby (Billy Eichner) nor Aaron (Luke Macfarlane) are the dating type, which only adds to the tension of their Central Park encounter in this scene from “Bros.”Bobby has brought a large blanket to sit on, and Aaron instead chooses a spot on the grass. Aaron also seems distracted by the shirtless dudes playing football, while Bobby becomes convinced that he’s not Aaron’s type. Narrating the scene, the director Nicholas Stoller, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Eichner, said it was based on Eichner’s real experience when he brought a blanket to the park and his date refused to sit on it.But the scene, in both a passive-aggressive, and then just plain aggressive way, shows how the two characters are beginning to fall for each other.“It was important to me to dramatize this shift from trying to be not vulnerable in any way to slowly letting their guard down,” Stoller said. “And because it’s a comedy, we needed to do it comedically, but it also needed to play romantically.”Because Bobby feels a little threatened by Aaron’s attraction to athletic, sports-focused “dumb guys,” as he puts it, he interrogates Aaron about that attraction, which leads to some shoving that mirrors that of the guys playing football. That transitions to an intimate moment, which acts as both a tension-breaking joke and a narrative bridge to a possible new direction for these characters.Read the “Bros” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      ‘My Best Friend’s Exorcism’ Review: Like, Totally Satan

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      A group of high schoolers contend with a friend’s demonic possession in this 1980s-set horror-comedy.“My Best Friend’s Exorcism,” a horror-comedy directed by Damon Thomas, is set in 1988. As far as I could tell, there is no historical, cultural, or sociopolitical reason for its period setting, which has no significant bearing on the themes, characters or plot; it doesn’t even strengthen the film’s relationship to its most obvious influence, “The Exorcist,” which came out in 1973. In any case, the ‘80s, in this movie’s conception, are nothing more than a nebulous composite of vaguely evocative signifiers: big hairdos, fluorescent tracksuits, Trapper Keepers, and an old hit by Tiffany or Rockwell on the soundtrack every few minutes. I suppose as long as “Stranger Things” continues to be popular, we’re going to see a lot more like this.Abby (Elsie Fisher) and Gretchen (Amiah Miller) are best friends. After an encounter at a spooky cabin in the woods, Gretchen is possessed by a demon, which restyles the ordinarily sanguine high schooler into a cruel, coquettish bully — think the satanic scares of “The Conjuring” crossed with the sardonic queen-bee squabbling of “Mean Girls.” Some of Gretchen’s villainous overtures are genuinely upsetting — a full-blown body-horror set piece involving an 11-foot tapeworm almost made me look away from the screen — but the film repeatedly undercuts whatever tension is mustered with its frustrating tendency to crack goofy, juvenile jokes. This clash of tones is especially flagrant during the climactic exorcism, which pits Miller’s serious performance against an over-the-top turn by Christopher Lowell as a Christian bodybuilder. At the same time, Fisher, so wonderful in “Eighth Grade,” is stuck trying her best in a film that wastes her efforts.My Best Friend’s ExorcismRated R for graphic violence, strong language and disturbing imagery. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime. More

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      Billy Eichner Wrote Himself Into the Romance He Wanted With ‘Bros’

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      When he was still figuring out who he was as a gay man, Billy Eichner found himself at the movies. As a college student in Chicago, he caught “Jeffrey” and “Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss” at the Music Box. Later, after a move to New York, Eichner watched films like “All Over the Guy,” “The Broken Hearts Club,” and “Another Gay Movie” at the Quad.“Some of them were great and some of them were a little less great,” he said, “but I always ran to see them because I had a hunger to see our stories onscreen.”Now it’s Eichner who gets to star in one of those stories. In “Bros,” which Universal is releasing in theaters on Friday, Eichner plays Bobby Leiber, a cynical Manhattanite who is surprised to find himself falling for Aaron (Luke Macfarlane), an affable jock. With most romantic comedies, the question is whether the central couple will ever get together, but these modern gay men quickly tumble into bed with each other (and sometimes with guest stars). Here, the conflict arises from whether they’ll actually stay together, since Aaron can be aloof and Bobby has never dated someone who’s such a … well, bro.Though Eichner became famous for loudly haranguing passers-by about pop culture on his series “Billy on the Street,” in real life, the 44-year-old comic actor is low-key and thoughtful. He hopes that “Bros,” which he co-wrote with the director Nicholas Stoller (“Forgetting Sarah Marshall”), will demonstrate that he’s capable of much more than just bellowing.“I think until very recently, if Hollywood was willing to put a gay character in anything, it was often to be some version of a live-action cartoon,” Eichner told me recently over dinner in Los Angeles. “But with ‘Bros,’ one of the things that excites me the most about it is I get to be a real, multidimensional person.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Eichner in a scene from “Bros,” with, from left, Dot-Marie Jones, Ts Madison, Miss Lawrence and Eve Lindley.Nicole Rivelli/Universal PicturesAt what point did you decide to call this film “Bros”?Very early on. One of the initial inspirations for the movie was this “Billy on the Street” segment I did with Jason Sudeikis called the “Bro Lightning Round.” where I dropped my normal “Billy on the Street” persona and did a different character. It was this very bro-y guy, and I would ask [a passer-by], “Hey bro, is masculinity a prison?” and the guy would say, “Yes,” and we’d all cheer. A gay friend of mine said to me, “You were kind of hot in that segment, when you talked like that. You should dress like that more often.” He was half-joking but half-not.Inside every joke, there’s a kernel of truth.One hundred percent, and I could tell. I said to him, “Are you saying I should have a completely different voice and dress like a completely different person in order to seem sexually attractive to you?” I always thought there was something there to further explore about gay men, at least those of my generation — I can’t speak to the younger ones, I don’t think they’re as focused on this issue of masculinity. But I told Nick that anecdote, and that’s when the idea of calling the movie “Bros” came to me. I liked the irony of it, that this big mainstream gay rom-com would be called “Bros,” but also when people see the movie, they’ll realize it actually is tied into one of the themes.How would you define that theme?That the gay male community, or at least parts of it, put a certain type of jocky, all-American masculinity on a pedestal. I think that for gay men of my generation, it was less of an issue to simply be gay — many of us were OK with that, for the most part — but we wanted to be masculine, and we were attracted to this very old-fashioned sense of masculinity. And although things are definitely changing for the better, a lot of that stuff is still ingrained in us.What’s your own journey been like with masculinity?Complicated. When I was in my 20s, you would go to the gay bar with your friends and we always talked about how we’re gay, but we’re not that gay. I remember my father saying that to me as if that was a good thing.Meaning you presented more masculine?Right, that I was presenting as more “straight-acting,” which is an outdated term, but that’s what we used to use all the time. Then an interesting thing happened when I started to perform live onstage: I was more flamboyant. It’s like I leaned into the opposite extreme, but that wasn’t a premeditated choice, it’s just what came out when I started to develop what eventually became the “Billy on the Street” persona.Eichner’s loud “Billy on the Street” character opposite Sarah Jessica Parker.TruTVWas there a freedom in leaning into that side of yourself?I guess there was. I think it was a bit of a [screw you] to what I was observing in gay men at the time. Also, I know I’m so loud and outgoing onstage or on camera, but I can be very shy. At gay bars in my 20s, I was known as the quiet one who stood next to my best friend, who was extremely social and gorgeous. He would bring his gay friends to see my live show, where I was so outrageous, and they would look at me like, “Who is that person?”So how do you reconcile those extremes?The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but I struggled with it. I remember being in Provincetown once, when “Billy on the Street” had been on TV for a few years, and a guy came up to me and said, “Hello, I’m a fan.” And I was talking to him for a while and he said, “Oh, I guess you’re really gay on TV but you’re not in real life?” That was such a confusing moment, but it stuck with me. In a way, you do start to question which is the real you.Do you think he wanted you to be more performative?Yes, and I do think that’s a little silly, because I’m clearly playing a character. I’ve sat down with journalists sometimes and they’d be disappointed that I was just normal and I wasn’t coming at them and shouting. They wanted the character, and I would always say, “Do you think Sacha Baron Cohen shows up as Borat?”There are some comedians who are always on, who never drop the act.I would rather die than be that way.“Bros” has an almost entirely L.G.B.T. cast, but your director, Nick Stoller, is straight. Was there ever a conversation about whether a gay person should direct it?This was five years ago, and I think the culture and the industry have evolved a lot since then. If we were making the movie now, would the studio maybe insist it was a gay director? It’s possible, but the project started with Nick emailing me and saying, “I love your work. Do you want to write a gay rom-com with me and you can star in it?” I’d never written a movie before, I’d never even had a large supporting role in a live-action movie, and he’s made many movies. I was confident that he could walk me through all of that and protect my vision.I do love working with gay people. I’m writing my next project with Paul Rudnick, and Greg Berlanti is producing it. But at the same time, I love that Judd [Apatow, a producer of the project] and Nick and I made this movie together. I love the idea that we could make a movie that has three raunchy sex scenes, two of which are orgies, but it still has this Nora Ephron glow.To what extent is this film drawn from your own dating life?The inspiration for it came from an experience I had in real life, but I’ve never had a relationship like the one Bobby and Aaron have in the movie.“I love the idea that we could make a movie that has three raunchy sex scenes, two of which are orgies, but it still has this Nora Ephron glow,” Eichner said.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesWhat was that real-life experience?For the vast majority of my life, I always prided myself on not needing a boyfriend. I always silently judged friends that I thought were codependent, and then in 2015, I met a guy and instantly felt a really strong connection to him. He was really smart, a little aloof and emotionally unavailable — which, of course, makes you want them even more.Overnight, I went from a person who never needed anyone to being completely obsessed, dying to star in a Hallmark Christmas movie with this guy. I remember being out to dinner with some very close friends around that time, telling them that I was just obsessing over this guy and I couldn’t tell how he feels, that we hooked up but I can tell that he’s not into it. All these things were driving me insane, and my friends looked at each other and they said, “Wow, Billy has feelings,” and they all laughed. Literally, that could be in “Bros.” And then a year and a half later, after trying any which way to convince this person to date, I finally got over it.How long was your longest relationship?Oh, boy. I dated someone for two and a half years, but that ended in 2003, a really long time ago. After that, I was very much like Bobby Leiber — I loved my work and it was hard to get this career off the ground, so I put all my energy into that. The experience I had with that guy in 2015 really shifted my focus for the first time, and after that, my walls went right back up. But even though it didn’t work out, it taught me not to ignore these other parts of my life.When I’m watching “Bros,” and the guys start becoming more romantic and intimate … well, everyone can make fun of me for saying this, but I get swept away by it, too. Especially at those first screenings, I remember thinking, “Wow, those guys in the movie are so happy.” Then I was like, “Why is the fictional version of me happier than I am?”A lot of rom-coms end with the first kiss. You never saw Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks have sex …God, I wish they would have!… but in “Bros,” sex happens early and often. Did you have an idea about how you wanted it to be portrayed?I think sex can be very funny. Maybe not in Nora Ephron movies, but in Judd Apatow movies, there’s nudity and raunchiness that’s played for laughs and can also be really poignant. I love “Borat,” and I don’t think I’ve ever laughed harder in a movie theater than that scene where Sacha Baron Cohen and that naked guy are wrestling. The audience was really falling out of their seats laughing.Do you think part of the reason they laughed is because they found the mere idea of male nudity to be funny?Maybe it was shocking to them that Sacha was willing to go there, but I did think to myself, “Well, if they can do that, then 15 years after ‘Borat,’ we can certainly do this.” It’s also on-story for the characters in “Bros”: They’re trying to keep up this masculine persona even when they’re intimate, and they’re both fighting so hard against being vulnerable with each other. I just saw no reason not to do it. If it shocks people a little, well, I grew up with Madonna. I like to be a little shocking, a little provocative. I really never cared about being for everyone.Your character is insecure that he’s not enough of a jock, but you’re pretty fit, Billy. Do you feel pressure to look a certain way?I work out, I exercise, but I don’t consider myself a jock by any means. I never really played sports.Eichner with Luke Macfarlane as his love interest in “Bros.”Nicole Rivelli/Universal PicturesWhen gay men call themselves jocks, I don’t think it has anything to do with sports.No, of course it doesn’t. But I do feel that pressure, and that’s part of being a complicated human being. You can criticize people who are trying to conform to that look and be buff — you can know intellectually that this is a ridiculous thing to pursue — and also, at the same time, you can want to actually be part of that convention. Look, it’s complicated. As Madonna once said, “Life is a paradox.”It’s interesting to go back and read old interviews with you because once you started working out and became fitter, every profile mentions it.On Vulture, bless their hearts, I remember waking up one day and seeing an article that my publicist did not pitch that said, “When did Billy Eichner become hot?” It’s an odd thing. I’ve seen tweets saying that I’m too hot to play the role, and tweets saying I’m too ugly to play the role. Literally in the same breath, “Oh, how could Billy be playing the nerdy guy that no one wants when he’s so fit?” and guys saying, “There’s no way Billy could pull Luke Macfarlane.”How much of a say did you have in the film’s marketing campaign?Ultimately, Universal makes those calls. I’m not someone who’s constantly starring in three movies a year, so they knew that this was a first for me personally and they wanted to make sure that I felt comfortable with everything. But they did initially present a poster for the movie that had Luke and I in tuxedos, like we were having a gay wedding.Like you guys were a wedding topper?Exactly. I did politely push back on that and I said, “Guys, I know that we have a movie to sell here, but this is not a gay wedding movie. In fact, on multiple occasions, my character specifically talks about how he doesn’t want to get married.” Then almost overnight, they were like, “Well, what about this?” And it was the picture of us grabbing each other’s asses. I said, “Oh, wow. Yeah, that’s great.” Then I got a scare, I was like, “That might be too far,” and they said, “No, we love it. It’s bold, like the movie. Let’s be unapologetic.”How will you measure the success of this movie?I want the people who see it to laugh a lot and to be moved. A lot of what we get in movie theaters and even on TV to a certain degree is cynical and dark and gritty, but “Bros” is about the good things in life. It’s about love and sex and romance. That’s something that I think is lacking in a lot of our lives — it certainly has been lacking for a good part of my adult life, and I don’t want it to be. I think movies like this are a reminder that we shouldn’t ignore those things.Ben Stiller came to the premiere in New York, and he looked at me like, “Wow! I’ve never seen anything like that.” Meaning the movie and the sex scenes. We premiered the trailer on Jimmy Kimmel and he watched an advance screener of it, and he said to me, “Wow, is it really like that?” I think for us as gay people, we’ve lived these lives, but for straight audiences, it is a bit eye-opening. And that’s good, because that’s why we go to the movies — not only to be entertained, but to develop a richer understanding of who we are and who other people are. More

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      Film Festival Season Comes to New York

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      Wanda ProductionsIn the mood for something shorter? The New York Shorts International Film Festival has over 300 films, including “Booksmart” (shown here, 3 minutes, France), “Quico” (12 minutes, United States), “Genius Artist” (8 minutes, China) and “Bienvenidos A Los Angeles” (15 minutes, United States). More

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      The Empty Spectacle of Marilyn Monroe’s Fantasy Fetus in ‘Blonde’

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      “Blonde” pretends to imagine how Monroe would have felt about her pregnancies. Instead, it jarringly shoves a C.G.I. fetus into her midcentury mind.In “Blonde,” the director Andrew Dominik’s fever-dream fictionalization of Marilyn Monroe’s life, Monroe (Ana de Armas) gets pregnant in a celestial fantasy sequence. As she swigs champagne on the beach with her two lovers, the stars above them realign into an expanse of wiggly sperm. Cue gestational montage! A clump of cells appears. A pulsating embryo sprouts, resembling a gelatinous crimson shrimp. Soon a beatific, photorealistic fetus is floating in a sparkling peach brine, its fully articulated form dappled in inexplicable rays of light.Monroe is lured into aborting that pregnancy, but when she conceives a second time, her sentient fetus reappears. Now, it’s telepathic. “You won’t hurt me this time, will you?” the fetus asks Monroe. “You’re not the same baby,” she whispers toward her own belly. The fetus replies: “That was me. It’s always me.”Marilyn Monroe’s chatty, regenerating fetus — she calls it “Baby” — has emerged as a scene-stealing sensation. Critics have called it “goofy,” “despicable” and “cruel.” Some have even pegged it as inadvertently propagandistic — this mode of fetal puppetry is a familiar anti-abortion gimmick. But Monroe’s dialogue with her pregnancy, which originated in the 2000 Joyce Carol Oates novel on which the film is based, is also a product of the star’s troubled self-conception, and in that context, the fetus’s corny, sanctimonious message makes a kind of sense. What is jarring is the contemporary look of the fetus: a schlocky, seemingly computer-generated figure that recalls pop-culture fantasy images invented long after Monroe’s death. It’s a rendering so lazy, it suggests a stubborn incuriosity about how Monroe would have actually experienced her pregnancies, even as the film presents them as character-defining events.Pregnancy can inspire profound acts of projection. The fetus, an unseen body inside of a body, suspended between nonexistence and existence, is defined by parental expectation and cultural imagination. It is the personification of a mother’s desires and fears, her sublimated anxieties and internalized judgments. And the Monroe of “Blonde” has plenty of issues to cast onto a prospective baby. Abandoned by her father and abused by her mother in childhood, she has become world famous as an infantilized sex object who calls all of her lovers “Daddy.” Her ventriloquized fetus is voiced by the child actor (Lily Fisher) who plays Monroe as a little girl, when she was still Norma Jeane. When Monroe communicates with her fetus, she is talking, with pity and loathing, to herself.“Blonde” is stubbornly incurious about how Monroe (Ana de Armas) would have actually experienced her pregnancies.NetflixWhat I can’t understand is why the thing looks the way that it does. In putting the fetus on display, Dominik has made a tediously literal attempt to depict Monroe’s interior life. But why would Monroe, in the early 1950s, imagine her fetus in the form of a C.G.I. baby? Why would her visualization of pregnancy resemble the smooth-skinned, preternaturally glowing fetus that appears, 70 years later, in the pregnancy app on my iPhone?The maternal imagination is not, after all, a spontaneous soul connection. It’s a historical construction, one informed by the aesthetics, politics and technology of the time in which the pregnancy occurs. And the magic unborn in “Blonde” is an ahistoric imposition — an image that feels plucked from the narrow imagination of a modern male director. At the time of Monroe’s first pregnancy in the film’s version of her life, fetal imagery was a rudimentary fascination. Photographs published in Life magazine in the 1950s included black-and-white images of a squid-like translucent embryo and skeletal fetal remains. The vision of the fetus in “Blonde” — spectacularly well lit, fused with cosmic imagery, presented as a free-floating independent being — was not developed until after Monroe’s death. It has its roots in a 1965 Life magazine spread, “Drama of Life Before Birth,” by the Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson.For the magazine, Nilsson produced a series of photos of sperm, embryos and fetuses representing the stages of human gestation. Though the cover subject is advertised as a “Living 18-week-old fetus shown inside its amniotic sac,” a note inside clarifies, “This embryo was photographed just after it had to be surgically removed from its mother’s womb,” a process it “did not survive.” Nilsson was celebrated for capturing “living” fetuses within their “natural habitat” (women), but he largely photographed the lifeless products of surgical abortions and miscarriages, which he then submerged in aquariums, lit sumptuously, staged to appear as if they were floating amid starry skies, and shot at a remove.Nilsson’s photographic tricks obliterated any trace of an actual woman’s body. The images, published at the height of the space race, were constructed as alien, analogized to galactic exploration and coded as masculine. One image of a 13-week fetus, which looks as if it is nestled inside a nebula, is titled “Spaceman.” Life quotes “a leading Swedish gynecologist” who declares: “This is like the first look at the back side of the moon.”The 1965 Life magazine spread of Lennart Nilsson’s photography has profoundly influenced the pop-cultural life of the fetus. A note accompanying the article said the “embryo was photographed just after it had to be surgically removed from its mother’s womb,” a process it “did not survive.”Photo 12/Universal Images Group, via Getty ImagesThe Life feature would profoundly influence the aesthetics of both anti-abortion activists and the director Stanley Kubrick, whose model of the Star Child in his 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey” was partially based on Nilsson’s shots. In turn, Kubrick’s serene, fiberglass-smooth, omnipotent being would inform decades of imagined pop-culture fetuses, from the wisecracking, doll-eyed fetus of the 1989 rom-com “Look Who’s Talking” to the computer-generated fetal images that drift through pregnancy-tracker apps and animated internet videos purporting to explain “life.”These images have the power to remove the fetus from the realm of a pregnant woman’s visceral experience and expose it as a public visual spectacle. And they yank the mind toward a pernicious modern suggestion: that the idealized fetus exists independent of a woman’s body; that it floats, in the cultural imagination, far above the earthbound woman herself.Now, this vision has been nonsensically ported into the midcentury brain of Marilyn Monroe. That is a suspect choice, given Dominik’s insistence on recreating the iconography of Monroe’s life in obsessive detail. “Blonde” blinks between full color and black-and-white, shuffling aspect ratios and swapping lenses to more closely mirror Monroe’s most famous photographs and scenes, which Dominik then twists to signal Monroe’s perspective on being made an object.In an interview with Decider, Dominik explained that he visualized the fetus in an attempt to access “Norma’s feelings” about her pregnancies. “Baby was real,” he said. “I wanted Baby to be real.” And yet Dominik’s brief glimpse into Monroe’s mind reveals nothing. All that can be found in there is a YouTube womb-cam.In her book “Disembodying Women,” the medical historian Barbara Duden traces the public exposure of the fetus — and its rising cultural supremacy — over the latter half of the 20th century. She calls this process “the skinning of woman.” “Blonde” is also a movie about a woman being flayed by the culture at large. First, by the Hollywood of her own era, which made her into a sex symbol. And now, by the Hollywood of ours, which has claimed to access her mind, only to serve up a recycled stock image of a magic fetus. More

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      ‘Ten Tricks’ Review: Trying to Drum Up Some Magic

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      In Richard Pagano’s indie comedy, Lea Thompson plays a brothel’s business-savvy madam with a ticking biological clock.The microbudget comedy “Ten Tricks” pairs a last performance of a burned-out magician (Albie Selznick) with the erotic goings-on of the brothel nearby. The film follows a madam, Grace (an earnestly crafted turn by Lea Thompson), in her last-ditch effort to become pregnant, and intersperses slapstick scenes of her prostitutes servicing clients with magician-related plot for comedic relief in between.The veteran casting director Richard Pagano (“X-Men: The Last Stand,” “Hotel Rwanda”) wrote and directed the film, adapted from his play of the same name that debuted in Los Angeles in 2003. The film version, set in a nonspecific recent time and shot in black-and-white by the cinematographer John Bailey, feels decidedly stuck in the past. Pagano makes frequent use of silent film-era-style intertitles, which pinpoint the key dialogue from a scene in advance only to end up highlighting the script’s inability to stand on its own. The mishmash of an incessant, distracting musical score also fails to provide first-aid.The film deluges viewers with cringe-worthy moments sourced from harmful stereotypes, like a “crazy” Asian prostitute and a Pakistani customer made to look like Aladdin, who is into the Kama Sutra.The movie also serves as a textbook example of the male gaze; the only male brothel worker is excluded from the nudity and hyper-objectifying camera angles, which the film traffics in when it comes to the women. And despite her strong effort, even Thompson can’t deliver the film’s attempt at a three-dimensional female protagonist.There is truly no magic here.Ten TricksNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Fandor. More