Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Portraits of Serena and Venus Williams, Ava DuVernay Coming to the Smithsonian

      by

      Serena and Venus Williams and Ava DuVernay, and the artists who portrayed them, talk about their choices, which will be on view at the National Portrait Gallery.Three strikingly personal and introspective new portraits of three famous women — the tennis champions Serena and Venus Williams and the filmmaker Ava DuVernay — go on view at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington on Nov. 10 as part of the institution’s Portrait of a Nation Award.The award, recognizing individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to the United States, includes the gallery’s acquisition of the new portraits of these groundbreaking Black women and the other honorees this year — the chef José Andrés, the music executive Clive Davis, the president’s chief medical adviser, Anthony S. Fauci, and the children’s rights activist Marian Wright Edelman. (For Edelman, the gallery’s curators acquired a photograph by Ruven Afanador from 2013.) Each of the other honorees worked with the curators to select the artist to represent them, and the works will remain on view in the exhibition “Portrait of a Nation” until Oct. 22, 2023.This award program, begun in 2015 and honoring people every two years, is an effort “to grow our collection in a way that truly recognizes the diversity of the country,” said the director, Kim Sajet, “working with dynamic contemporary artists who are pushing the boundaries of what portraiture can be.”The Williams sisters and DuVernay each chose to collaborate with a rising Black artist on the new commissions (as did Andrés, selecting Kadir Nelson; Davis worked with DavidHockney and Fauci with Hugo Crosthwaite). DuVernay took the opportunity to support Kenturah Davis, an artist she knows and collects. Serena Williams had followed the career of Toyin Ojih Odutola and selected her from a shortlist under consideration. Venus Williams was more exploratory, meeting with multiple artists culled by the gallery’s curatorial team and her own research and picking Robert Pruitt from some two dozen possibilities.Here is how those three portraits came together.From left, Robert Pruitt, Toyin Ojih Odutola and Kenturah Davis.From left: Brandon C. Luckain; Beth Wilkinson; via Kenturah DavisVenus Williams and Robert PruittThe idea of Venus Williams dropping by for a visit was surreal to Pruitt, born in Houston and based in the Bronx. He typically hires models for his large-scale figurative portraits, informed by comic book graphics and symbolic objects, which explore Black experiences and mythologies. “She came to my studio and was so down to earth,” Pruitt said. They immediately bonded over his huge comic book collection on display.The Fine Arts & Exhibits Special SectionBigger and Better: While the Covid-19 pandemic forced museums to close for months, cut staff and reduce expenses, several of them have nevertheless moved forward on ambitious renovations or new buildings.A Tribute to Black Artists: Four museums across the country are featuring exhibitions this fall that recognize the work of African and African American artists, signaling a change in attitude — and priorities.New and Old: In California, museums are celebrating and embracing Latino and Chicano art and artists. And the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum is working to engage visitors about the realities of climate change.A Cultural Correction: After removing all references to Columbus from its collections the Denver Art Museum has embraced a new exhibition on Latin American art.More From the Special Section: Museums, galleries and auction houses are opening their doors wider than ever to new artists, new concepts and new traditions.After being selected, Pruitt visited Williams in Florida armed with a massive photo download. “I wanted to get a sense of what kind of images of herself she likes and she was very clear, picking a photo she had taken of herself in the mirror,” Pruitt said.He used that as the compositional reference to build out his double-figured portrait of her — with Williams in one instance facing the viewer and encircled by a celestial halo of kinetic white beads (referencing her beaded hair in motion on the court as a young girl). A mirrored Williams, shown from behind and in profile, wears a tennis skirt made of raffia and the Wimbledon trophy dish refashioned as a collared chestplate apropos for a warrior superhero.Williams gave Pruitt information about her family and her relationship to tennis history that he has embedded, such as studding the swirling beads with the birthstones of her siblings. “It was really interesting to work with another voice involved in the process,” he said, a first for him.Pruitt sees “a fertile space of reflection” between his two Venuses. “My hope,” he said, “is that the duality of the portrait gives us this sense of a person looking back at themselves, considering where they came from and where they’re going.”Ava DuVernay and Kenturah DavisKenturah Davis’s portrait of Ava DuVernay. “I wanted to push myself in a different direction than I’m used to seeing myself,” DuVernay said.National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian InstitutionKenturah Davis takes language as a departure point, using rubber stamps of letters spelling out personal texts meaningful to her portrait subjects to draw their images. This process mesmerized DuVernay when she first met Davis several years ago.When the two women, based in Los Angeles, met up to discuss the portrait, Davis suggested using a blur technique she has recently introduced. “I was really interested in making a figure in motion and thought it paired well given Ava’s relationship with motion pictures,” Davis said. DuVernay was hesitant initially, she said, but “I wanted Kenturah to feel free.” And, she added, “I wanted to push myself in a different direction than I’m used to seeing myself.”They collaborated on a photo shoot, where Davis used a long exposure to capture the turning of DuVernay’s face from front to side view in a single elongated image. Then, Davis translated the photographic information onto a larger-than-life-size drawing, rendering DuVernay’s double-faced image pixel by pixel using rubber stamps dipped in ink spelling out a message of encouragement that DuVernay received from her father shortly before he died.“It’s a kind of embodiment, that she’s made up of these words,” said Davis. DuVernay likes that the message is only legible in pieces up close, like “a secret inside of the work.”DuVernay described being startled, in a good way, when she saw the result. “I’ve never seen anything like that of myself — that large, that personal,” she said. “There’s a spirit moving between the two countenances that feels revelatory.”Serena Williams and Toyin Ojih Odutola“I wanted to show her physique but also show her relaxed,” Ojih Odutola said of her portrait of Serena Williams.National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution“What I am interested in as an artist is what is often overlooked, what people might not notice about a subject,” said Toyin Ojih Odutola, the Nigerian-born, New York-based artist known for her life-size figurative drawings exploring identity and rendered in charcoal, pastel, ballpoint pen and pencil. With Serena Williams, among the most photographed people in the world and often framed as fierce or glamorous, what was missing in representations was her sense of joy, Ojih Odutola felt.“I thought about her being a mother, a sister, a daughter, and how funny she is,” Ojih Odutola said. In a first exploratory Zoom conversation, the artist asked about depicting her laughing, Ojih Odutola said. “Serena loved that.”Ojih Odutola traveled to Williams’s home in Florida to take reference photos, from which she would construct a composite. “Serena looked at them on the day and liked it, but kind of left it to me,” Ojih Odutola said.Ultimately, the artist decided to go with her gut, presenting Williams with a wide rapturous smile and resting her head on her hand, almost becoming enveloped by vibrant green foliage encroaching from behind.“I wanted to show her physique but also show her relaxed,” Ojih Odutola said. “I wanted to show her as a beautiful Black woman.” She finished the portrait before Williams announced she would step away from tennis after the recent U.S. Open, giving the image another layer of meaning.“This year had been a season of change and evolution for me,” Williams said in an email. “Toyin’s perspective as an artist is unparalleled and to be able to say Toyin Ojih Odutola painted my portrait feels surreal.” More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Ben Platt on the Unfortunate Timeliness of His ‘Parade’ Revival

      by

      When Ben Platt was a kid, listening to show tunes in the family car, he developed a fondness for “This Is Not Over Yet,” an optimistic and upbeat Jason Robert Brown song from the short-lived musical “Parade.”It was only years later, as Platt grew up, that he encountered the rest of the show, and realized what it was actually about — the 20th-century lynching of a Jewish Southerner, fueled by antisemitism.Now Platt is starring in a seven-performance revival of the 1998 musical at New York City Center, and says the timing is sadly perfect, given the antisemitism once again coursing through the nation’s culture. “It’s felt urgent,” he said, “in a way that is shocking to all of us.”The musical, which won Tony Awards both for Brown’s score and Alfred Uhry’s book, tells the story of Leo Frank, an Atlanta factory manager who was convicted in 1913 of murdering a 13-year-old girl. A public outcry over whether Frank was actually guilty prompted the Georgia governor to commute Frank’s death sentence, at which point Frank was lynched by a mob.Laura Dreyfuss with Ben Platt as Evan in “Dear Evan Hansen.” “It was my ultimate dream come true, to originate something,” he said in an interview, “and it inspired me to start looking inward and writing my own music.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe City Center revival, directed by Michael Arden, begins performances Tuesday and runs through Sunday; there is already talk of a possible Broadway transfer, but no firm plans.Platt, 29, vaulted to fame, and won a Tony, playing the title character in the 2016 musical “Dear Evan Hansen.” In the years since, he has been working onscreen, starring in “The Politician” for Netflix and a film adaptation of “Dear Evan Hansen,” as well as the forthcoming “The People We Hate at the Wedding” for Amazon Prime Video and a movie called “Theater Camp,” which he wrote with a group of friends. He also created a new lane for himself as a performer: writing songs, recording albums and touring.In an interview, he talked about “Parade,” the ups and downs of “Dear Evan Hansen” (the stage version was a hit; the film adaptation was panned), and his decision to drop off Twitter. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Tell me why you wanted to do “Parade.”This was a character I related to. I recognized this guy. And I realized how much modern application there is for it. It’s a lot harder to distance from than I was hoping it would be. This show is all about not only antisemitism, but the failure of the country to protect lots of marginalized groups, and we’re all feeling that really intensely right now.How do you connect to your character?The very obvious thing is that we’re both Jewish. He’s also, similar to other characters that I’ve played, not the best at expressing his emotions. Leo learns during his journey that vulnerability does not mean you’re any less strong, and I definitely relate to that journey. Being wrongly convicted of murder, I fortunately cannot relate to. I hope I never learn that.What does this show tell us about antisemitism?I don’t necessarily want to dictate what people feel when they come away from the show. There’s a lot of gray in the show. It doesn’t make any decisions for you. Hopefully, most of all, it shows how hatred is learned. With every character, you see how they got to where they are.“Hopefully, most of all,” Platt said of the show, “it shows how hatred is learned. With every character, you see how they got to where they are.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesWhat’s it like being back onstage after five years away?It’s just the best. I spent my whole life doing it, pretty much nonstop, from 6 years old to 24. It just feels like a homecoming.I never fully understand why actors want to do these short-run shows. You put in all this time for a few nights.Two reasons. One is the unselfish reason, which is it’s just a story worth telling, especially right now. The selfish reason is that I carry ulterior hopes that maybe we’ll have a longer opportunity in the future.You spent so many years working on “Dear Evan Hansen.” How are you feeling about that experience?I’m feeling really grateful for it. It was my ultimate dream come true, to originate something, and it inspired me to start looking inward and writing my own music. It will always be a piece of me. I feel a simultaneous constant pride and desire to keep it in my heart at all times, but also a real readiness and excitement at having moved forward and embracing my adulthood and playing characters that live in different worlds than that. I got to live in that world for a very long time, and it was not the easiest world to live in. So I look at it fondly but I’m also happy to be moving ahead.Your boyfriend is your successor in the role, Noah Galvin. Is that weird?I don’t think about him in that way, because I knew him for three or four years before we even had that experience. There’s this lore that that’s how we met, but it’s not. But it’s nice to have that detail of him understanding deeply what that experience was. And I feel very lucky to be with him — he’s changed my perspective, and made things, in a very positive way, feel a bit smaller and more manageable.You’ve been working on a film version of “Merrily We Roll Along,” to be shot over 20 years. What’s that like?There are so many variables. The only way I’ve found to approach it is that you have to treat [each shoot] like short films, let it go, and move on and live your life, and as the next one rolls around, find your way back into it. If I constantly have it in the back of my head, it just feels so unimaginable to get to the end, that I get scared about it in a way that’s not productive. So I’m just taking each of the little gifts along the way and hoping we make it to the end of the road.Platt in “Dear Evan Hansen.” After the film version of the musical was criticized, he left Twitter. “I wasn’t getting anything positive,” he said, “and it’s been really nice to be away.”Erika Doss/Universal PicturesOne of your closest friends, Beanie Feldstein, who is also starring with you in “Merrily,” had a bumpy ride with “Funny Girl” on Broadway. I wonder what you make of how her experience went.I know more than anything, she just wants everybody to move on. So I’ll just say that I love her and I admire her strength.You had your own rough ride with the film version of “Dear Evan Hansen.”It was definitely a disappointing experience, and difficult, and it definitely opened my eyes to the internet and how horrific it can be. You’d think, after doing “Dear Evan Hansen” onstage for four years, I would have already known that. I try my best to focus on people who tell me it was moving to them and they really felt seen by it. It is very easy for the good to get drowned out by the bad.I don’t know if this is connected, but I noticed that you’re no longer on Twitter. What’s that about?I find that Twitter is almost exclusively for tearing people down. I wasn’t getting anything positive, and it’s been really nice to be away.Since “Evan Hansen” you’ve become a pop performer, recording and touring.It’s a whole different animal because it’s been the only avenue in which to express my perspective. I find that in everything else — film and TV and especially theater — as much as you’re giving of yourself, you’re also doing your best to disappear, to serve somebody else’s mission or tell somebody else’s story. I love that experience, being a cog in a larger wheel. But I also think that being afforded the opportunity to do the opposite is a very liberating and freeing experience. One makes me really appreciate the other.Do you see yourself back on Broadway?I would love to, yes. I’m very much so hoping, whether it’s this or something else, to get back there as soon as I can. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Sacheen Littlefeather and the Question of Native Identity

      by

      The actress, who died Oct. 2, became famous for a protest at the 1973 Oscars. Now a researcher and Littlefeather’s own sisters dispute her claims that she was Native American. Her defenders say Indian identity is a complex matter.Two days after the death of Sacheen Littlefeather, her estranged sister was angrily scrolling Twitter.She was furious, she said in an interview this week, at the outpouring of praise for Littlefeather, the actress and activist who became famous when Marlon Brando sent her to the 1973 Oscars to refuse his best actor award and denounce Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans.“I was reading what all these people were saying: ‘Oh, rest in peace and she was a saint, and she sacrificed herself,’” the sister, Rozalind Cruz, said. The sisters had been estranged for about 13 years for a variety of reasons, Cruz said, but at that point she still believed her family had Indian ancestry.Then she saw tweets by the writer Jacqueline Keeler, a citizen of Navajo Nation who has stirred controversy with her efforts to expose what she calls “pretendians.” Keeler was disputing Littlefeather’s claims that her father was White Mountain Apache and Yaqui.Cruz replied to Keeler on Twitter on Oct. 4 that her grandmother was of “Yaqui and Spanish” descent. Cruz herself had tried to enroll in the White Mountain Apache Tribe. But over the next few weeks, Cruz said, Keeler showed her genealogical research that traced her father’s family back to Mexico in 1850 and said there was no evidence of Native ancestry.Cruz and the middle sister of the family, Trudy Orlandi, were both persuaded by the research. Last Saturday, less than a month after their sister’s death at age 75, The San Francisco Chronicle published an opinion column by Keeler under the headline, “Sacheen Littlefeather was a Native American icon. Her sisters say she was an ethnic fraud.”The column unleashed an intense response in Native American circles on social media.Some condemned Littlefeather, saying she had fabricated an identity to promote her Hollywood career. But others strongly objected to Keeler’s investigation, saying it ignored the complicated ways Native identity can be formed, particularly for those who do not meet the formal criteria for tribal membership. Enrollment typically requires proof of tribal ties, often described in terms of one’s percentage of “Indian blood,” or “blood quantum.”“What many people don’t understand about Native existence is that some Natives aren’t enrolled,” Laura Clark, a journalist who is Muscogee and Cherokee, wrote in Variety in response to Keeler’s column.“Some Natives are reconnecting with their tribes,” Clark wrote. “Some Natives don’t have enough ‘Indian blood’ to register because of blood quantum minimums. And some Natives have had their tribes nearly erased to the point that organized citizenship records simply don’t exist.”The Shoshone poet nila northsun, a friend of Littlefeather’s from their college days in the 1970s, said this week that she was not surprised that Keeler had failed to find tribal affiliations in family records.Native Americans, she said, might have hidden their backgrounds to avoid discrimination or were misidentified.“It’s what you feel in your heart, and what your belief system is,” said northsun, who lowercases her name. “Just because she’s not enrolled or can’t be identified in records doesn’t mean she’s not Indigenous.”In an interview on Wednesday, Keeler rejected such assertions, saying she and volunteer researchers had reviewed records for hundreds of Littlefeather’s relatives. None identified as Native American, nor did they live with or marry members of any Apache tribe or anyone identifying as Yaqui, according to a summary of the research she published on Substack.“Could their family have some distant drop of Indigenous blood from hundreds of years ago?” she wrote in the column. “It’s possible; many people of Mexican descent do. But Indigenous identity is more complicated than that. A U.S. citizen of distant French descent does not get to claim French citizenship. And it would be absurd for that person to wear a beret on stage at the Oscars and speak on behalf of the nation of France.”It was not known if Littlefeather had ever tried to enroll in a tribe. The Pascua Yaqui Tribe in Arizona said in a statement that Littlefeather was not an enrolled member of the tribe, and neither were her parents.“However,” the tribe said, “that does not mean that we could independently confirm that she is not of Yaqui ancestry generally, from Mexico or the Southwestern United States.”The White Mountain Apache Tribe in Arizona did not immediately release a statement.Littlefeather was born Marie Cruz in 1946 and said in interviews over the years that her father, Manuel Ybarra Cruz, was White Mountain Apache and Yaqui and had abused her and her mother, Geroldine Cruz, who was of French, German and Dutch lineage.Rozalind Cruz, 65, of Big Arm, Mont., and Orlandi, 72, of San Anselmo, Calif., have strongly disputed their sister’s accounts of their father’s alcoholism and abuse. He died in 1966 at age 44, when Littlefeather was 19.At the 1973 Academy Awards, Sacheen Littlefeather refused the Academy Award for best actor on behalf of Marlon Brando for his role in “The Godfather.”BettmannBy age 26, Littlefeather was fully identifying as Native American when she protested at the Oscars, wearing a buckskin dress, moccasins and hair ties. She spent the next five decades as an activist in the Native American community and was married to Charles Johnston, a member of the Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Oklahoma, who died last year.She became a revered figure for some. In August, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that it had apologized to Littlefeather, calling her treatment at the Oscars, where she was booed, “unwarranted and unjustified.”In a statement on Thursday, the Academy Museum, which hosted an event honoring Littlefeather in September, said that it was aware of claims going back decades about her background but that “the Academy recognizes self-identification.”Cruz said that her father, who was deaf and communicated with sign language or a chalkboard, had never told her about Native American relatives.She said she had grown up knowing she had Spanish and Mexican heritage but also believed for most of her life that she was “probably about a quarter” Native American because of her older sister’s professed identity.Cruz said she had even applied last November to become a member of the White Mountain Apache Tribe but was denied because the tribe could not find records to support her claim. But that all changed after her sister’s death. She recalled telling Keeler on the phone: “You’re right. She’s a fraud. She’s a phony.”Some scholars agree, saying Keeler’s research was persuasive.“Keeler proves Littlefeather was a troubled woman who made the stories of others her own,” said Liza Black, an associate professor of history and Native American and Indigenous studies at Indiana University, and a citizen of Cherokee Nation.She said that many Native people understand the complexity of identity because of multiple tribal affiliations, blood quantum restrictions and adoptions, but that “Littlefeather does not fall into any of these true, real and complex Native identities.”Keeler’s research to prove that people are faking Indian identities has prompted blowback from critics who said that her work casts a cloud of suspicion over all Indigenous people.It suggests that “Native people need to create a system where they have to prove who they say they are,” said Andrew Jolivétte, the director of Native American and Indigenous studies at the University of California San Diego, who describes himself as Creole of Opelousa, Atakapa Ishak, French, African, Irish, Italian and Spanish descent.“Why do American Indians have to do that and not other people?” he added.For Keeler, to be Native American or American Indian is to be part of a clearly defined political group that existed before European colonial contact.“We’re not just an identity,” she said. “We are actually a political class. We are citizens of nations. We are sovereign.” Her goal, she said, is to stop non-Indians from profiting off false claims of being Native American.“We want real change and we want real justice, and that’s not going to happen when it all comes down to actors playing us,” she said.For her part, Cruz said she had no regrets.“All I did was, I put a pebble out there,” she said. “And I let the water rip.” More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Overlooked No More: Dorothy Spencer, Film Editor Sought Out by Big Directors

      by

      She worked with Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, Frank Capra and John Ford, and she was known for her deft touch, particularly with action movies.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.When Dorothy Spencer was asked what it took to become a film editor, her answer was always the same: patience.In a five-decade career, she worked as an editor on more than 70 movies and received four Academy Award nominations across a range of genres: the Oscar-winning 1939 western “Stagecoach”; the espionage thriller “Decision Before Dawn” (1951); the costume epic “Cleopatra” (1963); and the disaster movie “Earthquake” (1974). She was sought out by directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Joseph L. Mankiewicz for her deft touch, both with fight scenes and with subtle character moments.Bringing clarity to a confusing sequence might require sifting through 11 reels of footage, but Spencer easily got lost in her work.“I enjoy editing, and I think that’s necessary, because editing is not a watching-the-clock job,” she wrote in American Cinematographer magazine in 1974. “I’ve been on pictures where I never even knew it was lunchtime, or time to go home. You get so involved in what you’re doing, in the challenge of creating — because I think cutting is very creative.”Bill Elias, who worked with Spencer in the Universal Pictures editing department, spoke to her work ethic.“Every time I saw her,” he said in an interview, “she was sitting down at a Moviola” — the industry-standard film-editing machine in the era when the job required physically cutting and splicing film.In the movie industry, where important behind-the-camera roles have generally not been open to women, editing was an exception: Though the field was still dominated by men in Spencer’s day, there have been many notable women editors over the years, including Anne Bauchens (who edited Cecil B. DeMille’s films) and Thelma Schoonmaker (who edits Martin Scorsese’s). That might be because the job, which involved sorting and restitching, was somewhere between librarian and quilt maker — professions that were traditionally considered the domains of women.Spencer’s specialty was action movies, but one would not guess that from her short stature or from her quiet demeanor. “For some reason, I always seem to get assigned to pictures that are very physical,” she wrote in 1974.Not that she was complaining.“I like working on action pictures very, very much,” she said. “They’re more flexible, and I think you can do more with them.”“Stagecoach” (1939), the movie that made John Wayne a star, was one of four films for which Spencer was nominated for an Academy Award.Movie Poster Image Art/Getty ImagesDorothy Spencer, who was known as Dot, was born on Feb. 3, 1909, in Covington, in northern Kentucky, near the border of Ohio. She was the youngest of four children of Charles and Catherine (Spellbrink) Spencer. When she was a child, the family relocated to Los Angeles, where her older sister, Jeanne, began acting in movies (which she didn’t enjoy) and then became a writer and editor (which she did).Following her sister’s example, Dot started working in the film industry when she was a teenager — first as a junior employee at the Consolidated-Aller Lab, then as an assistant editor on silent movies like “The Strong Man” (1926) and “Long Pants” (1927), the first two features directed by Frank Capra.For four years beginning in 1937, Spencer worked with the editor Otho Lovering, cutting 10 films. She earned $5,000 in 1939 (about $102,000 in today’s dollars), but she still lived with her parents. That year marked the release of John Ford’s acclaimed western “Stagecoach,” which follows a group of strangers traveling together through perilous territory in the American Southwest in 1880. It was her most notable collaboration with Lovering — and not just because it made John Wayne a star.The editing of “Stagecoach” was regarded as masterly. Orson Welles said that he taught himself film editing by screening a print of “Stagecoach” 45 times at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Some aspects of the editing were groundbreaking: In his book “Film Editing: History, Theory and Practice” (2001), Don Fairservice pointed out that “Stagecoach” contained one of the earliest uses — maybe even the first — of the now-commonplace technique called a prelap, in which as one scene ends, dialogue from the next is already beginning on the soundtrack.Also innovative was the editing of the climactic action sequence, when Apache warriors attack the stagecoach. A fundamental law of film editing is the 180-degree rule: Although you can splice together a scene from diverse angles, you will confuse viewers if you cross an invisible 180-degree boundary, flipping the perspective so that a character who was facing left now faces right.In the attack sequence, Spencer and Lovering repeatedly and deliberately broke that rule. As David Meuel observed in his book “Women Film Editors: Unseen Artists of American Cinema” (2016), “by disorienting and confusing the audience, it created a closer bond between viewers and the characters in the stagecoach, who are themselves thoroughly disoriented and confused. So, rather than compromising the cinematic experience, this deliberate breaking of the 180-degree rule actually intensified it.”Spencer began working solo in 1941, and over the next decade she averaged two movies a year, working with notable directors like Hitchcock (“Lifeboat,” 1944), Elia Kazan (“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” 1945) and Ernst Lubitsch (five movies in which Spencer showed off her impeccable comic timing, including “To Be or Not to Be,” 1942).She made most of those films as a staff editor at the 20th Century Fox studio, a job she took in 1943 and kept for the next 24 years. During her tenure, the Hollywood studio system collapsed and the aesthetics of editing evolved; for example, dissolving from one scene to another went out of style.Spencer remained a constant, working with geniuses and journeymen, deferring to directors who had a vision in mind but offering creative flourishes when there were opportunities.“When you work with a new director who has never had any editing experience, he often asks for the impossible,” she wrote in 1974. “You can’t tell him it won’t work. You just have to do it his way and let him realize that maybe he was wrong.”In the soapy “Valley of the Dolls” (1967), directed by Mark Robson and based on Jacqueline Susann’s best seller about three young women struggling with the temptations of show business, she cut together some striking montages that nodded to the French New Wave. In one sequence, Patty Duke spits out water in the shower, does a multiple-exposure somersault, exercises on a rowing machine (with the top half and the bottom half of the screen deliberately out of sync) and gets married — a significant plot point, seen only in a black-and-white still photograph.Spencer needed all her unflappability and dedication on “Earthquake,” the eighth movie she made with Robson, which featured Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, Richard Roundtree and the destruction of Los Angeles.Many scenes of seismic mayhem were filmed with multiple cameras, meaning that she had to wade through 200,000 feet of film. Her feedback spurred Robson to change his approach to filming the earthquake: Early in the shoot, she realized that “the shake wasn’t very noticeable because there was nothing in the foreground to serve as a reference for the degree of background movement.” So Robson made sure there was a prominent steady object to orient viewers.By the time of “Earthquake,” Spencer was mostly retired and living in the rural town of Encinitas, Calif. She edited one last movie — “The Concorde … Airport ’79,” another disaster film — but otherwise kept her distance from Hollywood; her death at 93, on May 23, 2002, went unnoticed in the press.Frank J. Urioste, a three-time Oscar nominee for film editing himself, said in an interview, “I wanted to work for her one time, just so I could say I got to work for Dorothy Spencer.”If he had, he might have learned a lesson about striving for perfection: “The more you see a film, the more critical you get,” she wrote in 1974. “But a paying audience sees the film only once, so perhaps they won’t catch it.” More

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Good Nurse’ Review: Bad Medicine

      by

      This true-crime tale, starring Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain, dramatizes the story of Charles Cullen, a nurse who was discovered to be a serial killer.Tobias Lindholm narrates a sequence from his film featuring Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne.JoJo Whilden/Netflix No one knows how many patients Charles Cullen murdered in his career as a hospital nurse. Cullen confessed to 29 intentional deaths; some experts speculate the actual count may be as high as 400. Why poison the people entrusted to his care? Cullen, currently serving multiple life sentences at New Jersey State Prison, has yet to share his motives, and the “The Good Nurse,” a grim feel-bad drama by the director Tobias Lindholm (a co-writer of the feel-good Oscar winner “Another Round”) isn’t interested in scrounging up a guess. When the film’s Cullen, played by Eddie Redmayne, tries to explain himself, Lindholm muffles his voice with a police siren and wailing violins.Instead, Lindholm and the scriptwriter, Krysty Wilson-Cairns, set out to answer a more fundamental question: how did Cullen get away with it for 16 years across nine different hospitals? Were his employers too strapped for resources and personnel to notice — or were they so scared of lawsuits that they selfishly pushed out Cullen to become another community’s problem without so much as a single bad letter of reference, let alone a call to outside authorities?Jessica Chastain, right, with Eddie Redmayne in “The Good Nurse.”JoJo Whilden/Netflix The movie implies the latter. Lindholm and Wilson-Cairns, who were both raised in countries with nationalized health care, view the United States medical system as a business centered on having patients, not helping them. They’ve fictionalized the names of the hospitals, as well as the names of the dead, to give themselves leeway to reconstruct Cullen’s last place of work as a house of horrors shot in such dingy, dungeon-y grays by the cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes that Dr. Frankenstein would fit right in.Nearly every scene is an indignity: corpses left neglected in beds, loved ones grieving next to the sickly glow of a vending machine, managers haranguing their exhausted staff about the cost of coffee filters. Even the story’s heroine, a nurse named Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain) who provides the only empathy in this miserable tale, is also one of its victims. The single mother of two is tirelessly devoted to her patients despite a heart condition that puts her at high risk for a stroke. Yet her own hospital won’t provide her with health insurance until she’s worked there for a year, a common plight for contract workers that Lindholm sees as a moral affront that falls somewhere between bitter irony and indentured servitude.There’s a touch of Gogol-esque satire in a subplot in which two investigating detectives (Nnamdi Asomugha and Noah Emmerich) are thwarted by hospital bureaucrats who downplay deaths as “unexplainable incidents,” in the words of a chillingly placid risk manager (Kim Dickens), and, when low on excuses, put the cops on hold with punishing Muzak. Similarly, while Redmayne mostly plays his murderer at a low hum, he allows himself one scene to unleash his big mime energy, theatrically gasping and twitching and letting his long fingers crawl over his face. The moment is reminiscent of Anthony Perkins at the end of “Psycho,” but “The Good Nurse” offers no assurances that its danger is safely locked away. In the judgment of the film, Cullen is just a side effect of an institutional cancer.The Good NurseRated R for language. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. Watch on Netflix. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Good Nurse’ | Anatomy of a Scene

      by

      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

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Stream These 7 Movies and Shows Before They Leave Netflix This Month

      by

      The losses for U.S. subscribers aren’t that heavy in November, but a few bona fide greats and quirky favorites are among them.Fans of made-for-cable sci-fi, quirky stand-up comedy and romantic comedies will want to jump on the titles leaving Netflix in the United States in November. And if you’re looking for a superhero sendup or one of Spielberg’s first cracks at serious drama, a few of those are leaving soon as well. Move them to the top of you “to watch” list while there’s time. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘Suffragette’ (Nov. 15)The director Sarah Gavron assembled a high-caliber cast — including Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Brendan Gleeson, Ben Whishaw and (in a brief but memorable role) Meryl Streep — for this stirring account of the women’s equality movement in London, circa 1912. Mulligan stars as a laundry worker who is swept up into the suffragette protests, which the screenwriter Abi Morgan is careful to frame as a continuing concern. “Suffragette” asks compelling questions that continue to resonate, about the responsibility of the vote, the impenetrable structure of power and the place of violent resistance in the politics of protest.Stream it here.‘Donald Glover: Weirdo’ (Nov. 18)Donald Glover wasn’t particularly famous yet when he released this stand-up special in 2012; he was still best known as a supporting player on “Community,” and he makes a side reference here to the recent release of his first EP. His primary focus, at that time, was still this stage act, a fast-paced set filled with pop-culture references, social commentary and semi-surrealist observations. Some of the references have dated, as one would expect from an of-the-moment special released 10 years ago. But the funniest and smartest material, covering relationships, sex and (especially) racism, is timeless.Stream it here.‘Bridget Jones’s Baby’ (Nov. 30)Twelve years after the underwhelming sequel “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason,” Renée Zellweger returned to the cozy cardigans of Helen Fielding’s heroine for one more go-round. The third film in the series has Bridget finally at peace with her weight but still struggling for satisfaction with her career and love life — and the latter concern becomes especially keen when she gets pregnant. She’s unsure of the father; it could be new beau Jack (Patrick Dempsey) or her old flame Mark Darcy (a returning Colin Firth). Zellweger’s delightful characterization creates a breezy mood, and if this installment is featherweight even by rom-com standards, our affection for the characters holds it aloft.Stream it here.‘Clueless’ (Nov. 30)This 1995 comedy from Amy Heckerling catapulted a slew of careers (including those of Alicia Silverstone, Donald Faison, Brittany Murphy and Paul Rudd), as well as an entire ’90s glut of teen comedy adaptations of classic literature (including “10 Things I Hate About You,” “She’s All That” and “Cruel Intentions”). But the first remains the best. The writer-director Heckerling, who directed “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” continued to display an impeccable ear and eye for the dialogue and behavior of her teen protagonists, and she managed the miraculous feat of writing a script that satires their vapidness and privilege without condescending them.Stream it here.‘The Color Purple’ (Nov. 30)Whoopi Goldberg made her film debut in Steven Spielberg’s 1985 film adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Alice Walker’s — a stunning bit of trivia, considering how confident and assured her work is here. (She was nominated for an Oscar for best actress.) She stars as Celie, a young Black woman in the midcentury rural South who must cope with racism, cruelty, sexism and worse, yet manages to find her true self, and the joy within. It was Spielberg’s first attempt at serious, prestige drama, and while those growing pains are occasionally apparent, the picture is nevertheless directed with sensitivity and grace. Co-stars Margaret Avery and Oprah Winfrey (also making her film debut) were deservedly nominated for Oscars as well, while Danny Glover and Adolph Caesar are memorably monstrous in the key male roles.Stream it here.‘Hancock’ (Nov. 30)The current (and seemingly endless) superhero vogue was barely underway back in 2008 — the summer of “Iron Man” and “The Dark Knight” — when the director Peter Berg released this clever subversion of comic book conventions. Co-written by the “Breaking Bad” mastermind Vince Gilligan, it stars Will Smith as a burned-out, alcoholic superhero whose careless escapades are more likely to cause serious property damage than save any lives. But when he rescues an opportunistic public relations man (Jason Bateman, at his smarmiest), his attempts at media rehabilitation just cause more problems. (Charlize Theron co-stars as the P.R. man’s wife, who turns out to be much more than a homemaker.) Some viewers resisted “Hancock” because it cast Smith against type as an unlikable antihero … maybe the timing is better now?Stream it here.‘Stargate SG-1’: Seasons 1-10 (Nov. 30)The phrase “cult favorite” gets thrown around for just about anything with an identifiable fan base these days, diminishing its true meaning as a badge of honor and admission among certain subsets of antisocial weirdos. But unless you’re really, really into low-rent turn-of-the-millennium sci-fi, you may not even know that the hit 1994 film “Stargate” was turned into a television series — much less one that ran for a staggering 200+ episodes. Richard Dean Anderson, of “MacGyver,” takes over for Kurt Russell as the Air Force Colonel who discovers the Stargate, an alien pathway to other worlds and times. The mythology is elaborate and the scripts are occasionally silly, but it offers engaging characters, go-for-broke performances and hours of low-calorie entertainment.Stream it here. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Sigourney Weaver Has Us All Fooled: She’s Really Quite Silly

      by

      In her life onscreen, Sigourney Weaver has faced down ghosts, aliens and serial killers, romanced the likes of Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson and studied the clannish movements of gorillas in the mist and of suburban swingers in Connecticut. But before you knew her for any of those feats, an outrageous stage performance bestowed a lesson that has spanned the length of her five-decade career.“It was so good for me,” Weaver said, “to play a girl with a hedgehog in her vagina for a few months.”The year was 1976, and the production was “Titanic,” an Off Broadway play by Weaver’s frequent stage collaborator Christopher Durang (not her frequent film collaborator, James Cameron, who would make his own, very different “Titanic” two decades later). Durang’s sex farce asked her to play roles that ran the gamut from a black widow with deep décolletage to a pigtailed girl hiding a hedgehog in her vagina. The New York Times, in an amused review, described Weaver as “a cover girl beauty with a dry wit” and the play’s principal attraction.But what’s all that praise worth when weighed against one withering comment? One night, after an Actors Studio teacher came to see “Titanic,” Weaver asked for his take on her performance.“Well,” he sniffed, “I didn’t really feel that you had a hedgehog in your vagina.”This season Weaver will be seen in four very different roles, including a teenager in “Avatar: The Way of Water” and an abortion-rights activist in “Call Jane.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesUndone by the criticism, Weaver spent the next day overthinking things. Every waking minute was devoted to imagining the hedgehog and mapping out the little creature’s wants and desires; by the time she was onstage that night, throwing her leg onto a table to feed the hedgehog some lettuce, she could swear she felt a real animal moving to claim its prize.And how was all that hard work received? “There was not a laugh in the house,” she said. “It was absolute stone-cold horror.”Well, the performance earned one laugh, at least — a rueful, belated one from Weaver herself, as we sat by the beach at the Venice Film Festival in August. “I think the Actors Studio and comedy may not go together,” she told me, chuckling.Acting can sometimes be a battle between intellect and instinct, and by either measure, the 73-year-old Weaver is formidable. Co-stars talk about the way she marks up her scripts, scribbling down the motivations behind every line, action or lifted prop; onscreen, she projects that intelligence in a calm, cool way and can handily outthink any scene partner. But Weaver’s natural instincts have proved important, too, ever since her first starring role as the resourceful Ellen Ripley in the 1979 sci-fi classic “Alien.”“She’s reduced to instinct and survival, and goes from this person who knows the rules to someone who’s just flying by the seat of her pants,” Weaver said. “So I got a very good drenching in that right away.”The Return of ‘Avatar’The director James Cameron takes us back to the world of Pandora for the sequel “Avatar: The Way of Water.”What to Know: The sequel opens on Dec. 16, 13 years after “Avatar” shattered box office records. If you remember little about the original movie, here is a refresher.Holding Their Breath: Cameron and the sequel’s cast discussed what it took to get the new “Avatar” made and to bring it to life in a changed world.Sigourney Weaver: Hollywood has never quite known what to do with the actress, who has four films out this season, including the “Avatar” sequel. She spoke to us about her unusually fluid career.Back to the Theater: To help reacquaint audiences with the 3-D filmmaking that dazzled audiences in 2009, the first movie was rereleased in theaters on Sept. 23.Some things about Weaver are immutable, like her height (she stands nearly six feet tall) and honeyed voice, but she is credible in comedy, drama and action tentpoles and has put together an unusually fluid career that’s on full display this season. In September, you might have caught her in the indie comedy “The Good House,” in which she played Hildy, a witty, oft-soused real estate agent; the next month, New York Film Festival audiences met Weaver’s Norma, a wealthy woman having an affair with Joel Edgerton in the fraught, Paul Schrader-directed drama “Master Gardener.”Weaver can currently be seen as Virginia, an abortion-rights activist in the period drama “Call Jane” (out this weekend) and in December, she reunites with Cameron in “Avatar: The Way of Water,” despite the fact that her character died in the first film. Since the “Avatar” movies are shot mainly via motion capture, Cameron crafted a whole new role for Weaver, and it’s a corker: She plays Kiri, a 14-year-old, blue-skinned alien.It’s a role that reminded Weaver of her own adolescence and the winding path she has carved since. Born Susan Weaver to a television-executive father and actress mother in Manhattan, she picked the name Sigourney out of “The Great Gatsby” as a teenager, an act of willful reinvention in a life that would be full of such choices. “But I have gotten very far away from the intellectual person I was when I started my career,” she told me in Venice. “I’m pure instinct, and I’ve learned to trust those instincts.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Weaver as a 14-year-old Na’vi girl in the “Avatar” sequel. Early on “I was very self-conscious and shy, so it wasn’t until I hit 14 — when I began to find my footing and I picked the name Sigourney — that my life actually began.”20th Century StudiosDoes this feel like an unusually prolific phase of your career?I’ve just been doing one film a year, but they’re all coming up at the same time as if I threw some magic beans out the window and suddenly there were all these great plants. But I’m happy about it because I’ve always secretly had this dream of being an actress in a repertory theater. Once that didn’t happen, I thought, “Doesn’t matter, I can do it myself. I’ll play the maid one day and the queen another, and I’ll keep jumping around, hopscotching from one genre and one kind of role to another.” So it’s a lovely expression of my earliest dream.When you pick a role, is it informed by the last role you played?It’s never about the role for me, ever. It’s about the script, I don’t even care who the director is. I was an English major, I can’t help it: I know about structure — beginning, middle, end — and I know the story has to be about more than the people in it. If it doesn’t pass those tests, I don’t care how good you are, it’s not for me. The next thing is the director and their vision, and to work with someone who’s passionate. Not with someone who says, “Well, let’s get this over with.”You’ve had those experiences?Only a little. And that’s why I decided I would stay in New York, after going out to L.A. in the ’70s and waiting to be seen by casting people. I felt that in New York, we talked much more about the nobility of our profession, how important it was and also how much fun it was. And being around actors at that time in L.A., there was a real feeling that it wasn’t a noble profession, that you were there to get famous or something. I found it all too confusing, so I went back.Tell me about playing Virginia, the abortion-rights activist in “Call Jane.”Virginia seemed to pop right out of me. I could have been Virginia in another life, I just felt her rangy style in my body. But it was very hard to get the movie financed. We tried to shoot it in other states, and no state wanted us, and Connecticut finally gave us a place to shoot.Were those states rejecting the film because it was about abortion?Maybe they didn’t like the script either, but it certainly was the subject matter. They didn’t want to be tarred with that.A prelude of events to come.Such a prelude, and I didn’t see it coming. I just thought, “Well, it was probably a conservative mayor, or whatever.” I didn’t see the big picture.Opposite Elizabeth Banks in “Call Jane.” Weaver said it was hard to find a state to film in, in large part because the subject was abortion. Officials “didn’t want to be tarred with that.”Wilson WebbDo you remember your political awakening as a young woman?Freshman year, I arrived at Sarah Lawrence, and a bunch of girls were burning their bras — I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting.” It was quite an exciting place, and I happened to be at college during a very political time. Almost every spring there would be protests, sit-ins. Every time I talked about politics, my father [Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, the creator of the “Today” and “Tonight” shows] would say, “Are you on drugs?” And I’d say, “No, not yet. Give me time.”Did you grow up in a conservative family?Well, my parents seemed quite conservative. I worked for a Republican congressman on Capitol Hill for a summer, but I never voted for a Republican. I think as an artist, we tell these stories about self-expression, about the people’s welfare and how vulnerable they are, and I don’t know how you could be a Republican and tell the stories that actors tell. I’m sure I’m wrong, I’m sure there are lots of Republicans that could, but you have to be able to play anyone, which forces you to have compassion for people with other positions and reinforces your conviction that people need freedom.What were you like at 14, the age you play in “Avatar: The Way of Water”?It was a period of my life when my parents were traveling a lot, and I felt a little like a lost soul. I was this tall when I was 12, and I was very self-conscious and shy, so it wasn’t until I hit 14 — when I began to find my footing and I picked the name Sigourney — that my life actually began. I remember so well being that age, and to be given an opportunity to revisit that in a safe way is a great gift, isn’t it?The role is motion-capture. Do you recognize yourself in Kiri, or does the character seem like someone else?I’ve only seen a couple of scenes, but all I hope is that it’s truthful. When I would do my warm-up, I was able to drop 60 years and feel the 14-year-old bubbling up, and then I just let her go.Does she fall in love?I don’t know if I can answer that question. I know that she just wants to be with Spider, a human boy, all the time. Even though she’s seven feet tall and he’s a human, they just complement each other. He actually puts blue on himself to pass, but I don’t think she notices much else besides the fun of being with him and being in the forest. They’re just free urchins at the beginning, and they have a kind of golden life there, even though they’re at war and in hiding.“If you’re tall, people expect you to be more mature, and for many, many years, I was not that.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesNorma, the character you play in “Master Gardener,” is at the other end of the spectrum. She makes every situation so fraught — even the way she wields a wine glass is like it’s a loaded gun.She’s certainly one of my favorites. Norma is a really complex character — I saw her referred to as icy, but I think she’s a cauldron.She can operate at a remove, but it’s not an icy remove.I’m so glad you see that because I think there’s a tendency to dismiss older women and, if they’re wealthy, to refer to them as icy. It’s one of the best parts I’ve ever had, but I’ve always avoided that kind of character.She’s a fun character to watch, because she’ll so often say or do something that’s wildly inappropriate.It’s one of the best roles I’ve ever had because she is so complex and was never meant to be one thing. There used to be so much emphasis on playing a woman sympathetically, and they only do it to women — nobody worries about the man being sympathetic. Also, I must say, it’s great to play competent women who still have sex lives. It’s something that didn’t used to happen that much in the old days, so I feel very optimistic for me and my peers that as long as they make good stories, older women are going to be a part of it, because they are very powerful in our real lives.When do you feel most powerful in your own life?Gosh, I’m not sure I know how to answer that. Powerful. Well, the Supreme Court decision made me feel very un-powerful, and I think that’s what a lot of women are feeling.In the 1980s, as you were coming into your own as a movie star, did you feel powerful?Whenever I used to go to Hollywood and have to deal with these different studio heads, I was never comfortable. I always felt incredible sexism there, and a kind of resentment that they had to listen to me because I did have this power and I was smart enough to put several sentences together. I used to think, “Oh, it would be fun to direct, but I don’t want to have to deal with those people.”I remember I was trying to raise money for our theater [she was a founder of the Flea Theater in New York], and I asked a studio I have a good connection with if they would make a charitable donation. And they said, “You know what we’ll do? We’re going to give you a bonus, and you can sign that over to your theater.” I said, “It’s not really the same thing. I can make my own charitable contribution.” I was so astonished by their lack of interest, and you’d think after several movies together that there’d be some kind of mutual respect.“I have gotten very far away from the intellectual person I was when I started my career,” Weaver said.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesIn a 1994 interview, you said, “I always felt a little bit illegitimate. Whenever they talked about serious actresses, I always felt that I had one foot in the land of Arnold Schwarzenegger, one foot in the land of Ivan Reitman and maybe a toe in the land of Meryl Streep and Glenn Close.”If you’re a woman, they want to know, are you a babe? Are you a comedian? Are you this or are you that? They didn’t know what to do with me. It was always off-the-track directors who would wake up in the middle of the night and go, “Oh, Sigourney Weaver, she could do this.” And then these things would come to me out of nowhere.After “Alien,” I was sent all these serious-person scripts and most of what I’d done was comedy onstage. I thought, “God, when am I going to get back to that?” That has been frustrating because a good comedy is hard to find, and so are love stories — I love them, but they couldn’t really imagine me in a love story. If I came in the room, all the producers would sit down, and if there was a leading man, he’d usually sit down, too, because they wanted someone different, someone much smaller.Did you feel pigeonholed because of your height?If you’re tall, people expect you to be more mature, and for many, many years, I was not that. I think because of my career, I’ve kind of fooled people into thinking that I’m a serious person. There are some things I feel quite serious about, but in general, I’m on the silly side. I think that’s why I love working with Jim Cameron — if it’s an adventure, let me at it. But this is something any actor has to deal with. Anytime a movie registers, you get 10 more offers like that — after “Ice Storm” [1997] I got so many mean, cold ladies. I think the only recourse is just find things to surprise yourself, and you’ll surprise your audience.What’s a good example of that?They didn’t want to see me for “Galaxy Quest” [1999], but I thought, “This is my chance to show my own insecurity when I go out to L.A.,” because no matter who you were, [Hollywood] could make you feel as vulnerable as [her character] Tawny feels. It was one of the reasons I made her such a babe: Babes should have all the friends in the world, but I’m not sure they feel secure about that because they think it’s only skin-deep when it’s not.So now that you have planted these magic beans, and by sheer luck they’ve all bloomed at the same time, what do you do with this garden that you have outside your window?I don’t want to pick it! Probably no one will get as much enjoyment out of these four films as I do. Imagining Norma and Hildy and Virginia and Kiri together, I just feel like I hit the jackpot, man.I would love to see those four characters in a room. Who would get along?I’m not sure what Kiri would think being in a room like that — I’m sure she’d find Norma completely terrifying. I guess it would depend on what kind of wine Hildy brought to the gathering. More