Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Amber Heard Recounts Unraveling of Marriage to Johnny Depp

      by

      The defamation trial involving the actors is entering a new stage as Ms. Heard faces aggressive cross-examination from Mr. Depp’s lawyers.Amber Heard testified on Monday in the defamation case brought by her ex-husband, Johnny Depp, that she filed for divorce and for a restraining order against him in 2016 after two blowout fights that made her fear for her safety.“I knew I had to leave him,” Ms. Heard testified. “I knew I wouldn’t survive it if I didn’t.”But after detailing the collapse of their marriage for several hours, Ms. Heard faced aggressive cross-examination from a lawyer for Mr. Depp, Camille Vasquez, who sought to discredit her account that the actor had beaten her repeatedly throughout their relationship.Citing incidents during which Ms. Heard testified that she had been struck, Mr. Depp’s lawyers displayed photos taken at the time that show no apparent bruising or swelling. Ms. Heard testified that she covered the injuries with makeup so the abuse would remain hidden after many of the incidents.“You should see what it looked like underneath the makeup,” Ms. Heard said of one photo she described as being taken the night after Mr. Depp hit her so hard that she thought her nose had been broken.As the trial at Fairfax County Circuit Court in Virginia entered its final two weeks, Ms. Heard spent the opening hours of the day finishing her testimony before facing off with Mr. Depp’s legal team, who questioned whether her accounts of spousal abuse were accurate and whether she had actually donated the money she secured through her divorce to charity, as she had pledged.Her testimony included her account of the first time the issue of spousal abuse by Mr. Depp came into public view, in May 2016, after paparazzi photographed Ms. Heard at a California court, where she obtained a temporary restraining order against him. She had what appeared to be a bruise under one eye, and she told the court then, in a filing, that Mr. Depp had hurled a cellphone at her during an argument about a week earlier, hitting her in the face.“The violence was now normal and not the exception,” Ms. Heard told the jury on Monday.Mr. Depp, 58, sued Ms. Heard, 36, for defamation after The Washington Post published an oped by Ms. Heard in 2018 in which she called herself a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” The article did not mention Mr. Depp by name, but he has asserted that it clearly alluded to their relationship. The jury is also considering a countersuit filed by Ms. Heard, which accuses Mr. Depp of defaming her when his former lawyer made statements saying her accusations were a hoax.In addition to repeated physical abuse, Ms. Heard has described multiple instances of sexual assault by Mr. Depp. He has accused her of being the aggressor in the relationship and denied ever hitting or sexually assaulting her.Ms. Heard testified on Monday about one confrontation that occurred after Mr. Depp missed her birthday dinner in April 2016 because he had a business meeting. When they were alone later that night, he initiated a physical fight, she said, and shoved her, grabbed her by the hair and threw a bottle of champagne at her, missing her.Ms. Heard said she did not see her then-husband for about a month after that. But in May 2016, when Mr. Depp visited the penthouse in Los Angeles where Ms. Heard was staying, the couple ended up arguing about Mr. Depp’s accusation that she or a friend had defecated in the couple’s bed as a “prank.” Ms. Heard called the accusation a “delusion,” attributing the feces to one of the couple’s dogs.During the confrontation, Ms. Heard said, she was on the cellphone with a friend, who, overhearing the commotion and screaming, warned Ms. Heard that she wasn’t safe. That prompted Mr. Depp, she said, to grab the phone from her.“He pulls his arm back with the phone and throws it at my face,” she said. “I put my head in my hands and immediately start crying.”According to court papers, the friend on the phone called 911, but when the police arrived, Ms. Heard refused to cooperate.“I wanted to protect Johnny,” she testified on Monday. “I didn’t want him to be arrested.”But two days later, she said, she filed for divorce, and several days after that, she filed for the restraining order because she was experiencing extreme anxiety and wanted an assurance that Mr. Depp would not return to where she lived. (She agreed to drop a request for a permanent restraining order as part of their divorce agreement.)Johnny Depp, waving to observers in the gallery in the courtroom on Monday.Pool photo by Steve Helber via ReutersMr. Depp’s account of those two incidents was markedly different during his testimony earlier in the trial. He said he had an important meeting about his finances and was late for Ms. Heard’s birthday party, prompting her to lash out at him later that night. He testified that she punched him in the face twice before he left the building and stayed elsewhere. His mother died while the couple was separated, and when he called Ms. Heard to tell her the news, he also told her he planned to file for divorce, Mr. Depp testified.“Somebody had to call it,” he acknowledged.When he returned to the penthouse to pick up some of his belongings, Mr. Depp testified, the couple got into an argument about the feces that an employee had found in the bed the previous month. Mr. Depp said he did not throw the phone at her, but rather, he “flopped” it onto the couch. He accused Ms. Heard of faking that she had been injured during the confrontation in order to convince her friends that she was in some peril.Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber HeardCard 1 of 6In the courtroom. More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Family Camp’ Review: Born to Be Mild

      by

      There’s little new in this comedy about parents and kids on a church outing in the wilderness.Dad humor abounds in “Family Camp,” a vanishingly mild comedy that resembles other films about parents and kids bumbling in the wilderness. The lessons about being good to your folks are the same; “family is family,” to quote the absolutely undeniable title of one song in the film. But this summer trip, replete with cabins (or yurts) and goofy activities, is a church outing: the family that prays together, glamps together.Tommy (Tommy Woodard) can’t tear himself away from work and be “present” with his wife, Grace (Leigh-Allyn Baker). They head to camp with their teenage daughter (Cece Kelly) and camera-wielding son (Jacob M. Wade). Tommy gets into a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses rivalry with Eddie (Eddie James), another dad, who rallies his wife, Victoria (Gigi Orsillo), and kids like a motivational team leader. He serves as the eager-beaver counterpart to Tommy’s phoned-in approach to worship.As Eddie, James mugs furiously, while Ackerman’s low-key wisecracks struggle to register, making their long hike in the film’s second half feel even longer. (The two have a following as a podcast and performance duo called “The Skit Guys.”) As for Grace and Victoria, their concerns are phrased in terms of feeling overshadowed or neglected by their husbands. And “Meatballs” this is not: a rude boy’s interest in Tommy and Grace’s daughter ends up getting shut down.The film wasn’t screened for review by critics but it cracked the top 10 in the weekend box office, just behind “The Northman,” which I personally preferred as an outdoor adventure.Family CampRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets’ Review: Is This Loss?

      by

      In this documentary, the Reddit users who spawned the GameStop gold rush recall their speculation creation.The documentary “Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets” starts with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, as new traders began to use their stimulus checks to try the stock market. The most bullish traders gathered on the subreddit WallStreetBets, where get-rich-quick dreamers share tips for undervalued stocks. At the end of 2020, GameStop was among their juiciest prospects.The amateur investors who made the first GameStop recommendations are an eclectic and irreverent bunch, from a grocery store worker to a day trader who wears a metal helmet to protect his identity. As this group of outsiders saw it, GameStop had been targeted by hedge funds for short investments, essentially making it a stock that earned established investors money if the business went bankrupt. But if the stock rose, those who bought in could benefit from the bubble while generating huge losses for hedge fund managers.It was the dream meme stock, and the film’s subjects recall using the trading app Robinhood to execute their plan to rob the rich and give to themselves. Some made millions. Others failed to cash out, and experienced the consequences of speculation.The filmmakers Zackary Canepari and Drea Cooper primarily build the story through their interviews, but they are savvy to match the film’s style to the hyper-online vernacular of their gain-obsessed subjects. Interviews are intercut with the memes that these cheery forum trolls shared when they believed they were in for a fortune. It’s a zippy, entertaining approach that offers a surprising degree of insight into the psychology that produced the GameStop phenomenon. Investors played with serious money, but their mind-set was a farcical dive into hyperspace — a week of gambling in a cyber-Vegas that, for some, was worth the hangover.Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBetsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on Peacock. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Nobody Makes Films Like Alex Garland. But He Might Stop Making Them.

      by

      The man behind “Men” says of directing, “I don’t particularly enjoy it. It’s something I have to force myself to do.”Alex Garland knows that calling his new film “Men” is a provocative act. “It’s quite interesting that such a short, simple word can be so freighted with massive and entirely subjective meanings,” he said.As a writer and filmmaker, Garland is drawn to subjects that demand discussion: In the twisty robot parable “Ex Machina” (2015) and the Natalie Portman sci-fi drama “Annihilation” (2018), he favored a bold, stark setup that sat at the intersection of a cultural flash point. The tricky “Men” operates in a similar vein, casting Jessie Buckley as Harper, a woman coming to terms with her husband’s death and the blame he levied at her in his final moments.Harper rents a British country house to work through her trauma, but the men of the local village (all of whom are played by the actor Rory Kinnear) insinuate, belittle and wheedle her, too. One of them even stalks her, appearing naked in her front yard, but whom can Harper register a complaint with when all of the men around her — or all men, period — are, deep down, the same guy?I spoke to Garland on a video call this month while he was in the middle of directing “Civil War,” an A24 action epic starring Kirsten Dunst. Garland, who is 51 and British, sounded a bit weary. Before making “Ex Machina,” he only wrote screenplays for other filmmakers to direct — including “28 Days Later,” “Sunshine” and “Dredd.” The more we spoke, the more he questioned whether he wanted to continue directing at all.“I’m tired of feeling like a fraud,” he told me. “I’ve got so many other reasons to feel like a fraud, I don’t need to add to it in a structural way with my job.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.In “Men,” Jessie Buckley plays a widow coming to terms with her husband’s death. Kevin Baker/A24Do you read reviews of your films?Sometimes, because there’ll be a set of websites that I go to, and then I will see — with a horrible, sinking feeling — that they’ve reviewed the thing I worked on, and I’d have to be a monk to not read it. I broadly try to keep away from them. The first thing I did in any kind of public forum was write a book, “The Beach.” I was 26 or 27 when it came out and read everything, and I realized that I could get incredibly wounded, that it was really personal. It was a slow stepping back, because it’s now 25 years that I’ve been doing this. I think I’m probably stepping back from all sorts of different things.What else are you stepping back from?I think it is partly a function of getting older: I know less and less people, I have a smaller and smaller circle, and I go out less and less. Everything’s just getting progressively quieter and smaller, I’d say.Your films kind of reflect that attitude. They have very small casts and very circumscribed locations. There isn’t much clutter.That would definitely be fair to say. I find my myself interested in less and less things, but the things I’m interested in, I might go deeper and deeper into. And also, I’m not really a film director, I’m a writer who directs out of convenience.You didn’t expect to have this career as a director?It wasn’t that I had any great urge to direct, it was more born out of anxiety based on writing: I’d find it very agitating if something [in the film] felt totally wrong to me, or something that I felt was important was absent. But I have been thinking that after the film I’m directing at the moment, I should stop and go back to just writing. That might be part of the reversing away from the world — it’s time to get away from it, I think. I’m not temperamentally suited to being a film director.Why is that?It would be more honest, probably, to say I don’t particularly enjoy it. It’s something I have to force myself to do. It’s incredibly sociable, because you are with a large group of people the whole time — and, in my case, having to do a lot of role play. At the end of the day, you feel a bit fraudulent and exhausted.Garland is having second thoughts about directing: “I’m tired of feeling like a fraud.”Olivia Crumm for The New York TimesBecause you have to become sort of a showman?Yeah, exactly. I will find myself standing in front of a group of extras saying, “All right, so what’s happening now is dah, dah, dah,” raising my voice and being encouraging and intense. It just feels incredibly performative. Whenever I watch a chat show, and I see the host engaging in witty banter with a guest, I look at them and think, “What if they’re feeling really depressed right now?” Here’s the requirement for a quip, here’s the requirement to be interested in something you’re not interested in, and inside you’re feeling incredibly bleak and existential. It always makes me shudder — I almost can’t watch those programs because I feel that so strongly. And my version of being a talk-show host is standing on a film set.Still, I would think that you’d want to be on set to supervise the physical realization of your worlds and themes.Oh yeah, but that’s the limit of it. There are many directors where the set is where they need and want to be more than any other place, and as soon as the film is finished, they’re scheming to be in that space again with as short a delay as possible. And that’s just not me.I’ve seen some directors reach old age, and it’s as though they have to keep directing in order to live. Sometimes, there’s another film placed in front of them even before they’ve finished the last one.No question. Immediately, as you said that, I had a Rolodex of names appear in my head, and I was thinking, “That’s exactly who he’s talking about.” But there’s also another kind of director who suddenly stops, people like Peter Weir and Alan Parker. They must have been walking away from something, and maybe they just tired of it.Is this the shortest period of time between you being on two movie sets? You shot “Men” in the middle of last year and started “Civil War” not long after.Yeah, the last day of postproduction on “Men” was 48 hours before the first day of principal photography on “Civil War.” Literally, it was a Saturday and a Monday.I remember speaking to Kirsten Dunst after she was cast in “Civil War,” and she said she was excited that she finally got to play “the boy part” in a movie.I hope she feels happy with the process, but you never know. I don’t think it’s just me that finds it difficult. Film sets are strange places. They’re Calvinist, punishing spaces of abstinence. People work really, really hard — like drop-down exhausted hard — and you see it on everyone’s faces at the end of the day. There can be elements of addiction in that, but it’s like, I’ve got an alarm bell in my head ringing the whole time, thinking, “You need to stop doing this.”Was “Men” that arduous to make?“Men” was really difficult. The subject matter gets into you, and you have to live with it, but it was also difficult on a technical level. We had a very short shoot, and we were trying to get a lot done very quickly. I often worried about Rory particularly, because the last few weeks of the shoot, he’s naked in the middle of the night, and it’s freezing cold. An enormous amount of filmmaking is actually logistics, and it’s like a managerial job. How do you execute this number of things within this many hours? Literally, how do you do it?Rory Kinnear plays all the men in “Men.”Kevin Baker/A24It’s the sort of movie that will leave people arguing about its intent, and about what it’s trying to say. You once told me that with “Ex Machina,” you wanted at least 50 percent of the film to be subject to the viewer’s interpretation.Over the years, I have been consciously putting more and more into the hands of the viewer. There’s probably another element to it, too, if I’m honest, which is that it’s making the viewer complicit. This is another reason to pull back, because there’s a part of me which is really subversive and aggressive and is kind of [messing] with people. At times, I felt with “Men” that I’ve gone so far that it’s borderline delinquent.What kind of reaction have you gotten to the film?I’ve got good friends who I really respect who I’ve shown “Men” to, and their convinced interpretation — “I know what this film is saying, it’s saying this” — is 180 degrees different from what I thought it was.When that happens, does that feel like a successful experiment?No.No?No, it just feels inevitable. When we’re watching a film, we have these responses that on a rational level, we know are subjective, but we treat them as if they’re objective, and that’s just the way it is. I have such distrust in my own responses and other people’s responses as being reliable — they could vary on a day-by-day level. So when I offer something up, I have no expectation that everybody’s going to agree on it. I have a full expectation that people will disagree, and I see it primarily as a reflection on them.What are some of the things your friends said about it?“Who’s the protagonist?” “Is this about what a woman thinks, or is it about what a man thinks?” It’s people’s certainty that I find strangest: “This means this, this means that.” I find myself getting less and less certain about everything.Even your own work?Oh, I have no certainty about that. That’s just a bunch of compulsions. More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      How Hollywood and the Media Fueled the Political Rise of J.D. Vance

      by

      “Hillbilly Elegy,” a best-selling memoir that became a star-studded film, raised the profile of the onetime “Never Trump guy” who won an Ohio primary with the help of the former president.Members of New York’s smart set gathered on a warm Thursday evening in the early summer of 2016 at the ornately wallpapered apartment of two Yale Law School professors in the elegant Ansonia building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to toast a Marine Corps veteran, venture capitalist and first-time author named J.D. Vance.They were celebrating Mr. Vance’s new memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which chronicled his working-class upbringing in southwestern Ohio and an ascent that brought him to Yale, where his mentors included Amy Chua, one of the party’s hosts. Mr. Vance seemed modest, self-effacing and a bit of a fish out of water among guests drawn from the worlds of publishing and journalism, a half-dozen attendees later recalled. “It was almost stupid how disarmed the people were by that,” said one of them, the novelist Joshua Cohen.“Hillbilly Elegy,” which came out as Donald J. Trump was overcoming long odds to win the presidency, became a phenomenon, and Mr. Vance — a conservative who reassured Charlie Rose that fall that he was “a Never Trump guy” and “never liked him,” and later said he voted for a third-party candidate that year — became widely sought out for his views on what drove white working-class Trump supporters, particularly in the Rust Belt. The book, which had a modest initial print run of 10,000 copies, went on to sell more than three million, according to its publisher, HarperCollins. It was made into a 2020 feature film by Hollywood A-listers including the director Ron Howard and the actresses Amy Adams and Glenn Close. But the J.D. Vance story did not end there.The former “Never Trump guy” went on to embrace Mr. Trump last year, and eagerly accepted his endorsement in the Republican primary for an open U.S. Senate seat in Ohio that he won earlier this month. Mr. Vance, who once called Mr. Trump “reprehensible,” thanked Mr. Trump “for giving us an example of what could be in this country.”Mr. Trump’s endorsement proved critical in the race, along with the financial support of Peter Thiel, the conservative Silicon Valley billionaire, and favorable coverage by Tucker Carlson on Fox News. But Mr. Vance’s political rise was also made possible by the worlds of publishing, media and Hollywood, fields long seen as liberal bastions, which had embraced him as a credible geographer of a swath of America that coastal elites knew little about, believing that he shared their objections to Mr. Trump.“The reason ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ was such a high-octane book was academics, professors, cultural arbitrators — liberals — embraced it as explaining a forgotten part of America,” said Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University who once introduced Mr. Vance at an event. “They wouldn’t have touched Vance with a 10-foot pole if they thought he was part of this Trump, xenophobic, bigot-fueled zeitgeist.”Mr. Howard, who has said that he sought to downplay the political implications of “Hillbilly Elegy” in directing the film, describing it as a family drama, declined to comment for this article. But he told The Hollywood Reporter that he was “surprised by some of the positions” Mr. Vance has taken and the “statements he’s made.” He has not spoken with Mr. Vance since the film’s release, he said.Many of the entities in publishing and Hollywood who helped fuel Mr. Vance’s rise — including HarperCollins, which published his book; Mr. Howard and his co-producer, Brian Grazer; and Netflix, which financed and distributed the film — declined to comment on his reinvention as a Trumpist who rails against elites and who campaigned with polarizing far-right figures, including Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida.“Hillbilly Elegy” was made into a film starring Amy Adams and Gabriel Basso.Lacey Terrell/NETFLIX“Hillbilly Elegy” was published by a subsidiary of News Corp., which is controlled by the conservative Murdoch family, but through a flagship imprint that puts out broadly appealing books. It did not originally mention Mr. Trump. In an afterword added to the paperback edition, Mr. Vance wrote that despite his reservations about Mr. Trump, “there were parts of his candidacy that really spoke to me,” citing his “disdain for the ‘elites’” and his insight that Republicans had done too little for working- and middle-class voters.Mr. Vance’s book had a modest initial print run of 10,000 copies but ended up selling more than three million, according to its publisher, HarperCollins.HarperCollins“Hillbilly Elegy” tried to explain some of those voters’ concerns, and in appearances on CNN (where he was named a contributor) and National Public Radio, as well as in opinion essays in The New York Times in 2016 and 2017, Mr. Vance tried to connect those concerns to their support for Mr. Trump.“He owes nearly everything to having become a ‘Trump whisperer’ phenomenon,” Rod Dreher, whose interview with Mr. Vance for The American Conservative in July 2016 was so popular it briefly crashed the magazine’s website, said in an email. “The thing is, he didn’t seek this out. J.D. became celebrated because he really had something important to say, and said it in a way that was comprehensible to a wide audience.”But he also found a particular audience among liberals. “Though ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ was read widely across the political spectrum, my impression was that the book helped liberals to understand the causes of what had happened to them in the election of 2016,” said Adrian Zackheim, the publisher of several Penguin Random House imprints, including Sentinel, which focuses on conservative books.Mr. Vance’s work was embraced at a moment when Mr. Trump’s surprising election prompted many media executives to consider what audiences they had been overlooking. ABC, for instance, decided to make a reboot of the sitcom “Roseanne,” a lighthearted prime-time portrayal of people who supported Mr. Trump, including Roseanne Conner herself. (The show was later canceled after its star, Roseanne Barr, posted a racist tweet.)In 2019, Netflix won a bidding war and pledged a reported $45 million to finance the “Hillbilly Elegy” film. It received poor reviews, but was reportedly among Netflix’s most-streamed films the week of its release in November of 2020. Both Mr. Howard and Mr. Grazer have been generous Democratic donors, according to Federal Election Commission filings. In the run-up to the 2020 election, Ms. Close, who played Mr. Vance’s grandmother, put up a series of social media posts urging voters to support Joseph R. Biden Jr. Ms. Close’s representatives did not respond to inquiries.As Mr. Vance ran as an outsider and a conservative, some of his opponents have sought to link him to Hollywood.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesLast year, as Mr. Vance began his Senate run, he renounced his earlier criticism of Mr. Trump. He deleted some old tweets, including one that had called Mr. Trump “reprehensible.” Last month, Mr. Trump embraced Mr. Vance as a prodigal son “who said some bad” stuff about him, using a stronger word than stuff. (Mr. Vance’s campaign declined to comment for this article.)As a Republican candidate in a Republican-leaning Midwestern state, Mr. Vance did not appear eager to tout the central role the publishing, media and film industries played in his rise. But his political opponents have been more than happy to draw the connection.An ad last month for Josh Mandel, a Republican who ran against Mr. Vance in the primary, said Mr. Vance “wrote a book trashing Ohioans as hillbillies, then sold his story to Hollywood.” And Elizabeth Walters, the chairwoman of the Ohio Democratic Party, charged that Mr. Vance had landed “a New York City book deal to cash in on Ohioans’ pain” and made “untold millions from a Netflix Hollywood movie.”Accepting the nomination, Mr. Vance attacked “a Democrat party that bends the knee to major American corporations and their woke values, because the Democrats actually agree with those ridiculous values, you know, 42 genders and all the other insanity.”The fact that a rising star in the Republican Party, which has recently emphasized cultural grievances with the likes of Twitter, CNN and Disney, came to prominence through elite media institutions is not surprising to scholars and cultural critics who have long understood the symbiotic relationship between those ostensible antagonists: the conservative movement and the media-entertainment complex.“To establish populist bona fides — since they represent economic elites — cultural elites are the ones they can rally against,” said Neil Gross, a professor of sociology at Colby College.Frank Rich, an essayist, television producer, and former New York Times critic and columnist, said that some of the contemporary Republican Party’s biggest stars — including Mr. Vance, Mr. Trump and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri — are “the products of elite institutions” whose “constant railing against the elites is just odd, because it’s so disingenuous.”“Where would Vance be if it hadn’t been for mainstream publishing and book promotion, if it hadn’t been for Ron Howard — an important person in show business who identifies as liberal — and Glenn Close and Netflix?” Mr. Rich asked. “Where would Trump be without NBC Universal, Mark Burnett, the whole showbiz world?”Kathryn Cramer Brownell, an associate professor of history at Purdue University, situated Mr. Vance in a lineage of figures from the entertainment world who became Republican politicians, including George Murphy, an actor turned senator from California; Ronald Reagan, whose success as a film actor helped him become California governor and president; Arnold Schwarzenegger, another movie star and California governor; and Mr. Trump, a longtime tabloid fixture who gained newfound celebrity during the 2000s as host of the NBC reality competition show “The Apprentice,” created by Mr. Burnett.“This is something they are really quick to criticize the left for — relying too much on Hollywood for support and glamour,” Brownell said.“But,” she added, “the Republican Party has been more successful at turning entertainers into successful candidates than Democrats.” More

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Fred Ward, Actor Who Starred in ‘The Right Stuff’ and ‘Tremors,’ Dies at 79

      by

      The versatile actor was known for bringing a grounded charisma to roles across a decades-long career.Fred Ward, the versatile actor who played an astronaut in “The Right Stuff,” a grizzled drifter in “Tremors” and the titular writer in “Henry and June” across a decades-long career, died on Sunday. He was 79.His publicist, Ron Hoffman, confirmed his death. He did not specify the cause of death.“The unique thing about Fred Ward is that you never knew where he was going to pop up, so unpredictable were his career choices,” Mr. Hoffman said in a statement.Mr. Ward was likely best known for his performances in “The Right Stuff,” the acclaimed 1983 adaptation of a book by Tom Wolfe, and “Tremors,” a monster movie that ascended to cult classic status since its release in 1990.But his long career included a broad range of roles in which he applied a sometimes gruff but almost always grounded charisma to parts on film and TV: among other parts, a union activist in “Silkwood,” a detective in “Miami Blues,” Henry Miller in “Henry and June,” and a motorcycle racer in “Timerider: The Adventures of Lyle Swann.”Mr. Ward also played the lead in “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins,” which was intended to be the first in a series but fared poorly in theaters in 1985 and drew mixed reviews.In an interview with The New York Times in 1990, Mr. Ward explained how he chose some roles, saying, “I look for change, a person that changes — he’s on a voyage.”He said he was drawn to the part of Henry Miller because, “I’m part of a generation that, I think, was heavily influenced by Henry Miller, Paris, the ideals there: liberation, a kind of personal and benevolent anarchy that sings through all his pages.”He is survived by his wife, Marie-France Ward, and his son, Django Ward. More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Firestarter’ Review: A Horror Remake With No Spark

      by

      Zac Efron stars as the father of a girl, Charlie, who is learning to control her powers.The first “Firestarter” (1984) starred a not-yet-10-year-old Drew Barrymore as a girl who can start fires — with her mind, which makes all the difference. It was based on a Stephen King novel that wedded “Carrie”-redolent telekinesis to the kind of paranoia of “Three Days of the Condor.” The little girl’s power, and the powers of her parents, were the results of shadowy government agency experiments.That’s true here, too, in a remake directed by Keith Thomas from a script by Scott Teems. But the paranoia theme, which has the girl, Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), and her family living off the grid at the movie’s outset, is quickly shrugged off. This movie brushes aside a lot of things — the most shocking thing about it is how soggily noncommittal it is.Zac Efron pays Andy, Charlie’s father, and he’s got powers, too — with a twitch of the neck, he can cloud people’s minds. Only this action pains him and makes his eyes bleed like Ray Milland at the end of “X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes.” Charlie has inherited his power (without the bleeding).You would think this would add some punch to the proceedings, but no. The final face-off between Charlie and a supercilious military villain (Gloria Reuben) is startlingly anticlimactic, and the subsequent when-children-kill coda is just plain limp. This is also one of those movies where you can’t quite tell if the special effects are janky on purpose.The best thing in this movie is the tense electronic score, concocted by Daniel Davies, Cody Carpenter and his father, John Carpenter. Yes, that John Carpenter — one of the great American directors, and one who makes genre films almost exclusively. As the old magazine puzzles used to ask, what’s wrong with this picture?FirestarterRated R for fire, cursing. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters and on Peacock. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’ to Close on Broadway, After Reopening

      by

      The musical, which shuttered temporarily in January as the Omicron variant spread, has struggled with the slow return of tourists to the theater.“Mrs. Doubtfire,” the Broadway musical adapted from the popular 1993 film, announced that it will close later this month after a bumpy run that was interrupted by the pandemic closure in March 2020, and included a return amid the tumultuous current Broadway season.The show’s producer said late Thursday night that the musical’s final performance, at the Stephen Sondheim Theater, would be May 29, just over a month after it reopened after a three-month hiatus.The news comes days after the show’s star, Rob McClure, scored a Tony nomination for his comedic and chameleonic performance in the title role, but the musical failed to garner nominations in any other category.The closing reflects the challenges of this Broadway season — the first since the pandemic shutdown — when tourism remains down, coronavirus cases are a constant complication, and a large number of new shows opened around the same time in April, making it difficult for a returning “Mrs. Doubtfire” to break out.“Even though New York City is getting stronger every day and ticket sales are slowly improving, theatergoing tourists and, especially for our show, family audiences have not returned as soon as we anticipated,” Kevin McCollum, the show’s producer, said in a statement Thursday. “Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to run the show without those sales, especially when capitalizing with Broadway economics on three separate occasions.”Other Broadway productions have also struggled in this new landscape. A much-praised revival of “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” which had struggled at the box office, announced last week that it would close May 22, just a month after opening and three months earlier than planned. But on Thursday, after receiving seven Tony Award nominations and a social media campaign to sponsor female-identifying people of color with a pair of gifted tickets, it announced it will now play an additional two weeks, through June 5.Last week “Mrs. Doubtfire” grossed $477,132, and the audience was just 69 percent full. Still, the show is moving forward with a British engagement, which McCollum said is scheduled to play for a month starting Sept. 2 in Manchester, England; a U.S. tour is also scheduled to kick off in October 2023.In development for years and capitalized for $17 million, the production had gotten through just three preview performances in March 2020 when Broadway shut down. After a 19-month hiatus, “Mrs. Doubtfire” resumed previews last October and opened on Dec. 5, bolstered by a nearly $10 million grant from the Small Business Administration. It opened to tepid reviews — and a pan in The New York Times — just as Omicron began causing cases to spike again.Then, in a startling example of the financial damage caused by the pandemic shutdown, McCollum decided to close his production for several months, saying he saw no other way to save it. The musical comedy temporarily closed Jan. 10, and had planned to reopen on March 14, but later postponed its reopening until April 14. The closure cost 115 people their jobs for that period.In the statement on Thursday, McCollum expressed admiration “for our extraordinary Broadway cast, crew, orchestra, creative team and entire company who brought the show to the stage.” And he said, “They have risen to every challenge thrown at them over the last two years with a remarkable amount of resilience, good humor, passion and love for one another.”“Mrs. Doubtfire,” which had a five-week pre-Broadway run at Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theater, is about a struggling, out-of-work actor who loses custody of his children in a divorce. The father (memorably portrayed in the 1993 film by Robin Williams) is so determined to spend time with his children that he pretends to be a woman to land a job as the housekeeper.The brothers Wayne and Karey Kirkpatrick wrote the music and lyrics for the show, directed by Jerry Zaks; the book is by Karey Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell. More