Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Inspector Ike’ Review: A Murder Mystery Send-Up, ’70s-TV style

      by

      This microbudget comedy, an affectionate parody of old-time television “mystery movies,” is an often-inspired goof.Cinephiles tend to associate American microbudget filmmaking with raw, edgy earnestness, but some aspirational indies are very much into knowingly silly comedy — see, for instance, the 2017 short “Snowy Bing Bongs Across the North Star Combat Zone.”“Inspector Ike,” directed by Graham Mason from a script he wrote with the comedian Ikechukwu Ufomadu, who stars in the title role, is almost as daffy as they come.The movie is an affectionate parody of TV-made murder mysteries of the 1970s, specifically “The NBC Mystery Movie,” the umbrella under which, among others, Peter Falk’s beloved Lieutenant Columbo operated.Ufomadu’s Inspector Ike is not Columbo-esque. Far from shambling, like Columbo, he’s ceaselessly cheerful and confident. In every “episode” he stops the action to present a recipe, which viewers are asked to copy onto special “Inspector Ike” cards. (I was not provided with a card.)But the plot — in which a couple of theater types in turtlenecks and corduroy blazers banter before one of them hoodwinks the other into recording a videotaped suicide note of sorts — is very much like one of those “Columbo” stories in which a mad quasi-genius overestimates his criminal acumen.To establish an alibi, the villainous Harry Newcombe (Matt Barats) takes a date to an avant-garde theater performance. “How long is this play,” the date asks. “Well, let me ask you this,” the pompous Harry replies. “How long is the workday of the average American?” Once she dozes off, he slips out to do his evil deeds.Mason and company did not have the means to accurately recreate the mise-en-scène of the real deal, but they maintain credibility in the writing and acting departments. The long-pause humor here is the opposite of the barrage we expect from “Airplane!”-style genre goofs. It’ll work best with viewers whose funny bones are of the dry varietyInspector IkeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Dog’ Review: Man and Beast Hit the Road

      by

      In his directing debut, Channing Tatum plays an Army Ranger on a healing journey with a canine comrade.Road comedies that pair an animal and a movie star are a minor genre unto themselves. The best examples, in my opinion, involve Clint Eastwood and an orangutan named Clyde, though the recent one with Eastwood and a rooster wasn’t bad. Channing Tatum is a different kind of screen presence — sweeter, chattier, bulkier — and in “Dog,” which he directed with Reid Carolin, he amiably shares the screen with (spoiler alert!) a dog.She is a Belgian Malinois named Lulu (played by three talented canines), and she has served in the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. So has Tatum’s character, Jackson Briggs, a former Army Ranger living in a cabin in the Northwest. A history of brain injuries has kept him out of action, but he hopes that a good word from his commanding officer will give him a chance to go back overseas.To make that happen, Jackson agrees to accompany Lulu from Fort Lewis, Ore., to Nogales, Ariz. The reason for the road trip is the funeral of her handler, a Ranger whose death in a car crash haunts Jackson and the film. While “Dog” is a man-beast buddy movie, it’s also preoccupied with grief, trauma and the challenges of post-combat life. Lulu and Jackson are both wounded warriors who must learn to trust each other and help each other heal.Though much is made of Lulu’s ferociousness, the film’s humor is gentle and mostly unthreatening. She chews up the seats in Jackson’s already battered Ford Bronco, disrupts his potential threesome with a pair of Tantra practitioners in Portland and causes an unfortunate ruckus in a San Francisco hotel. Jackson has variously awkward, hostile and touching human encounters, notably with New Age cannabis growers and a resentful, racist police officer.“Dog” is unabashedly sentimental. A movie about a dog and a soldier could hardly be otherwise. Luckily, Tatum’s self-deprecating charm and Carolin’s script keep the story on the tolerable side of maudlin. It’s also circumspect about Lulu and Jackson’s experiences of war, which is vaguely understood as something horrible but also glorious. Neither one is as complex as a real dog or a real man would be, which makes the movie an easy watch, but at the cost of some credibility. It’s friendly and eager to please, but it won’t quite hunt.DogRated PG-13. More barking than biting. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 75 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Ted K’ Review: An Eerie Descent

      by

      Tony Stone directs an expressionistic portrait of Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber.Shot largely in the secluded mountains outside Lincoln, Mont., where the real Theodore J. Kaczynski lived before his arrest by the F.B.I. in 1996, “Ted K” is a blinkered portrait of the infamous domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber.The director Tony Stone — whose 2016 documentary “Peter at the Farm” also put the spotlight on a mean (if far less sinister) recluse — dramatizes Kaczynski’s psychological state throughout the 17 years he spent building and sending bombs that killed three and injured dozens more. Sections from Kaczynski’s extensive writings are narrated in voice-over like drifting thoughts by Sharlto Copley (“District 9”), who takes on the titular role with vulnerability and palpable fury. As Kaczynski learns how to construct more sophisticated weapons, we observe his brief interactions with the outside world — his perpetual struggle with a finicky public phone booth, his irregular conversations with his concerned mother and the brother whose marriage he resents.The film is a tad reductive, leaning too heavily on currently fashionable explanations for why lonely white men resort to violence. But Stone makes up for it with some magnificently eerie moments.An original score by the electronic artist Blanck Mass, anachronistically interwoven with classical numbers by Vivaldi, certainly helps, creating a mood of grandiose delirium. Filled with menacing slow zooms and fade transitions, the film nevertheless feels inconsistent when it jerks back and forth from stylized depictions of Kaczynski’s crimes, building him up as a kind of anti-villain badass, to a tone of gentle, ultimately sympathetic mockery — as when Kaczynski begins courting an imaginary girlfriend.The script’s emphasis on Kaczynski’s relentless bachelorhood and his feelings of castration is too neat an explanation. More convincing is the film’s expressionistic fixation on the technologies that torment Kaczynski — the ugly roar of dirt bikes, snowmobiles and tree-razing bulldozers. In one remarkable dream sequence, we see Kaczynski seemingly shooting through the space-time continuum, looking small and terrified and like the kind of man who would kill to feel a sense of control.Ted KRated R for nudity, language and stylized violence. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      ‘A Banquet’ Review: Starving for a Higher Purpose

      by

      A family of grieving women is thrown once more into chaos when the eldest daughter refuses to eat, saying she must do so by divine decree.When it gets down to it, demonic haunting bears striking similarities to divine possession. So who gets canonized and who receives an exorcism? “A Banquet,” the first feature film from the director Ruth Paxton, smartly asks audiences to consider the overlaps between reality and fantasy, psychosis and evangelism.The film follows the Hughes family, Holly (Sienna Guillory) and her daughters Betsey (Jessica Alexander) and Isabelle (Ruby Stokes), in the wake of their patriarch’s suicide. Betsey has a mysterious encounter in the forest that leaves her lethargic and unable to eat, but she insists it’s not a mental disorder, and that the starvation does not hurt her. She says she has been chosen for a higher purpose. As her mother, Holly must decide whether to enable Betsey’s newfound dogma or institutionalize her.It’s a pretty grueling watch. There are clear parallels to be drawn between the Hughes’ dynamic and that of a family afflicted by addiction or debilitating mental illness; and Guillory, Alexander and Stokes ground the story with wrenching performances.The film’s slow-burn magic lies in the many questions it raises as it skitters to a fitful, explosive end. Where other tales of divine female possession, like Rose Glass’s chilling “Saint Maud,” might cast their prophets as either blessed or delusional, “A Banquet” favors ambiguity. You’re likely to leave this film starving for answers, but that hunger can be just as stimulating as it is burdensome.A BanquetNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      Sarah Polley Is OK With Oversharing

      by

      In her new essay collection, “Run Towards the Danger,” the actress and filmmaker examines intensely personal stories she’s still sorting out for herself.It’s been more than six years since Sarah Polley was struck on the head by a fire extinguisher, one that was unwisely hung over a lost-and-found box at her local community center, leaving her with a debilitating concussion.When its symptoms were at their worst, Polley, the preternaturally poised actor (“The Sweet Hereafter”) and filmmaker of probing dramas (“Away From Her,” “Take This Waltz”) could not concentrate on her family or her screenwriting. She suffered headaches and nausea, brought on by everyday levels of light and sound.But over a period of nearly four years, she recuperated, emerging with restored focus — and with an upgraded philosophical outlook that has infused nearly every aspect of her life.“When people say, ‘Are you better?,’ I’m like, I’m better than I was before the concussion,” she said last month, almost in disbelief at her own words.Her newfound perspective arises from her work with a doctor who instructed her not to retreat from the activities that triggered her symptoms but to seek them out and embrace the discomfort they caused.That guidance provides the title for Polley’s first book, “Run Towards the Danger,” a collection of autobiographical essays that Penguin Press will release on March 1.“Run Towards the Danger” is out next month.The essays often link moments from her childhood, adolescence and adulthood, spanning her experiences as an artist and entertainer, a mother, a daughter and a woman. What they have in common, she said, is that they chronicle events “from the past that have been fundamentally changed by my relationship to them in the present.”“They were things I didn’t talk about, because I didn’t know what the stories even were,” Polley, 43, added. “Part of this is figuring out, what the hell happened?”That includes her account of the concussion and her recovery, and while that accident was not her inspiration for writing “Run Towards the Danger” — “It’s a bit messier and more complex than that” — Polley said the book’s contents were informed by the paradigm-shifting worldview her treatment yielded and its exhortation to confront sources of pain.“The thing that will get you better is moving towards the things you’re avoiding,” she said. “But it’s kind of exhilarating, realizing that whatever story you’ve been telling about yourself — and everyone tells those stories — isn’t you. That got exploded for me as this prison I was living in.”On a Saturday morning this past January, Polley was speaking in a video interview from her home in Toronto. She sat in a brightly lit room, undaunted by the prospect of staring into a computer monitor for an hour or so and putting herself under a microscope.“I thrive on too-intimate conversations with people,” she said. “I don’t have this need for secrecy around almost every part of my life.”In its first chapter, “Run Towards the Danger” offers a melancholy reflection on Polley’s teenage struggles with scoliosis, her body horror juxtaposed with several anxious, frustrating months spent playing the lead in a Stratford Festival production of “Alice Through the Looking Glass.” Her mother died of cancer when Polley was 11; her father sank into a depression and by age 14 the author had left home to move in with an older brother’s ex-girlfriend and largely figure out the world for herself.This entry, titled “Alice, Collapsing,” is one that Polley said she’d made multiple attempts at completing since she was 19. “That essay’s written by four different people,” she said.Polley also revisits her work as a child actor in an essay called “Mad Genius,” about the making of Terry Gilliam’s 1988 fantasy “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.” That film, for which she was cast at the age of 8 to play the Baron’s young companion, Sally Salt, left her deeply traumatized.Sarah Polley, center, was 8 when she played Sally Salt in “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.”Columbia Pictures, via Everett CollectionFor one battle scene, she was repeatedly made to run a terrifying gauntlet of explosives and debris. She jammed cotton balls into her ears to drown out the noise. Another action sequence sent her to the hospital when a detonation startled a horse, causing it to thrust an explosive device in Polley’s direction.In the essay, Polley reproduces an email exchange she had with Gilliam several years later, writing to him that “i was pretty furious at you for a lot of years,” though she says “the adults who should have been there to protect me were my parents, not you.” (Gilliam replies with an apology for the chaotic film shoot, writing, “Although things might have seemed to be dangerous, they weren’t.”)Yet a few pages later, Polley finds herself regretting that she absolved Gilliam too easily, having bought into the archetype of “the out-of-control white male genius”: “It’s so pervasive, this idea that genius can’t come without trouble, that it has paved the way for countless abuses,” she writes.To this day, Polley told me her emotions surrounding “Baron Munchausen” are not easily categorized.“Was it worth my feeling like my life was at risk and people didn’t care enough about it?” she said. “Probably not.” But when she contemplates Gilliam, “it doesn’t help me particularly to think of him as a villain.” (A press representative for Gilliam said he was unavailable for comment.)In another chapter, “The Woman Who Stayed Silent,” Polley revisits what she used to call “a funny party story about my worst date ever” with Jian Ghomeshi, the musician and former CBC radio host who in 2016 was acquitted of five charges related to sexual assault.Describing the episode now without euphemism, Polley says that when she was 16 and Ghomeshi was 28, she left his apartment after he became violent during a sexual encounter in which he ignored her pleas to stop hurting her.Polley writes that, as other charges mounted against Ghomeshi in this era before the #MeToo movement, she was dissuaded from coming forward by friends, lawyers and other experts who warned that her memory and sexual history would be subjected to merciless cross-examination. Her subsequent interactions with Ghomeshi — friendly radio interviews and playful emails in the years that followed — could be used to undermine her credibility and attack her character.But after years of reconsideration, Polley said during our interview, “I felt a deep, ethical obligation, especially to the women who came forward in that case, to tell that story, and a deep haunting that I wasn’t able to tell it sooner.” (Ghomeshi didn’t respond to requests for comment sent to Roqe Media, where he hosts a podcast and serves as chief executive.)“I feel a relief in finally just standing up,” she said. “But I’ll always wonder if it’s just too little too late. That’s always going to be with me.”Polley is hardly a novice when it comes to untangling knotty personal narratives in front of an audience. She previously directed the 2012 documentary “Stories We Tell,” which used interviews with her family members and re-enactments to reveal that her own birth had been the result of her mother’s affair with a man who was not the father who raised her.Polley in a scene from her 2012 documentary “Stories We Tell.” Roadside AttractionsJohn Buchan, Polley’s brother and an on-camera subject in “Stories We Tell,” said in an interview that he had some hesitation about entrusting so much family history to her for that film.“I’m very open and I don’t have a lot of secrets, but who doesn’t have some?” Buchan said. “I’m indiscreet about myself sometimes. It’s different if somebody else is indiscreet about you.”But Polley’s choice to share herself in “Run Towards the Danger” did not make him anxious in the same way, and he praised her for taking the risk and acknowledging her own vulnerability.“She’s an artist,” he said. “You can’t be an artist unless you put yourself into it. You’re not just borrowing from yourself — you’re putting yourself on the line.”The filmmaker Atom Egoyan, who directed Polley in his movies “Exotica” and “The Sweet Hereafter,” said that not even his long friendship and past collaborations with her had fully prepared him for what he read in early drafts of her book.“As a director, you have conversations with your actors and you get to know things about their lives,” Egoyan said. “To be reintroduced to her world with such detail and such a brilliant sense of self-observation, so many years later, was really shocking.”Though Polley did not express misgivings about the films she made with him, Egoyan said he still felt guilty for her tenuous relationship to her past acting work.“In a strange way, I contributed to that,” he said. “I was hiring her as an actress. As generous as she’s been, I’m also part of that weird conspiracy against her ability to grow up normally.”(Polley responded in an email, “I had transformative, beautiful experiences working on Atom’s films. And I think the ship bearing my chance at a normal childhood/transition to adulthood had sailed long before I met Atom.”)“I thrive on too-intimate conversations with people,” Polley said. “I don’t have this need for secrecy around almost every part of my life.”Jamie Campbell for The New York TimesThe author Margaret Atwood, a longtime friend who also read drafts of “Run Towards the Danger,” said that she has seen Polley strive for greater honesty in her work and in her life.“I think actors are trained to go to the emotion in them that is most suitable for their character at that moment,” Atwood said. “But being candid doesn’t mean that you always know what the truth is. Being candid can also mean, I’ve got no idea. Did I really feel that? What was really going on?”While Polley was recuperating from her concussion, Atwood said she held the rights to her novel “Alias Grace” — a book that Polley first asked her if she could adapt when she was 17 — so that she could complete a TV mini-series based on it.During her recovery, Polley gave up her screenwriting duties on a film version of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” which instead was written and directed by Greta Gerwig. (Polley writes in the book that she saw Gerwig’s film, calling it “beautifully realized.”)Polley was in the midst of another film project, an adaptation of Miriam Toews’s novel “Women Talking” that she wrote and directed, when the pandemic forced its temporary suspension. This at least afforded her the time to finish the essays in “Run Towards the Danger” while her three children slept or her husband looked after them.(Polley said that she is still editing “Women Talking” and that she completed its production last summer without a single headache: “If I could get through that with three small children, I think it’s a pretty hopeful prognosis.”)Now, as she waits for a wider world to discover the sides of herself she reveals in “Run Towards the Danger,” Polley said that her sharing these stories doesn’t necessarily mean she is done with them — or that they are done with her, either.“There is just this messiness to the human experience that’s extraordinarily inconvenient if you’re trying to tell one story about it,” she said. “As I get older, I’m realizing it’s OK for stories to be messy or go down circuitous paths that don’t lead anywhere.”She added, “We create these clean narratives to make sense of our basically bewildering lives. Hopefully, over time, we can loosen our iron grip and let other complexities in.” More

    • 125 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      How Jonathan Larson Taught Me to Become a Better Critic

      by

      In the film version of “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” about a composer who dreams of Broadway, a “Rent” die-hard discovers more to love in musical theater.I watched “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” Netflix’s film adaptation of the Jonathan Larson musical, four and a half times in the span of three weeks. I’ve listened to the soundtrack three times, with the exception of the opening song, “30/90.” That I’ve listened to at least a dozen times.When you replay a song that often, whole verses start to inscribe themselves into your memory. You begin to see beneath the surface, unearthing the bones of the music: a key change, a tempo shift, a bluesy bass line that sashays in and is gone in an instant.When I talk about Larson’s work, I get romantic. That’s been the case since I was 15, thanks to his Pulitzer Prize winning musical “Rent,” and now, thanks to “Tick, Tick … Boom!” But there’s a vital difference in the way I engaged with his work then versus now: Then, it was as a fan just beginning to discover an art form that would shape her personal and professional life; now, it’s as a critic who better understands the possibilities of musical theater.But I still have a ways to go — I’m continually learning how to be a better fan and critic of the theater, and 26 years after his death, Jonathan Larson is my unlikely mentor.Larson, left, with the director Michael Greif before the final dress rehearsal of Larson’s breakthrough show “Rent.”Sara Krulwich/TheNew York Times“Tick, Tick … Boom!,” Larson’s precursor to “Rent,” is a musical about the playwright’s attempts to get his dystopian rock musical, “Superbia,” produced. His ambitions and anxieties create tension with his girlfriend and his best friend, whom he pushes to the sidelines.Though Larson’s show stars a composer named Jon and is, in large parts, autobiographical, the film — written by Steven Levenson and directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda — bridges the gap between the writer and his work, making Larson himself the protagonist. We shift back and forth between his staged production of “Tick, Tick … Boom!” and the correlating events in his life.The film casts an affectionate eye on Larson’s life and legacy. Larson (Andrew Garfield, who was recently nominated for an Oscar for the role) is an innocently aloof artist and yet also intimately present, transparent to the audience through his songs, which seem to erupt from the top of his head in an effervescent gust of rhythm.Garfield bounces across the screen with the energy of a child on a trampoline; his downright kinetic performance is a flutter and flush of gestures, limbs jerking and flailing in all directions. In some scenes, Larson stops to consider a thought or a phrase; his head cocks to the side and his jaw relaxes open, just slightly, as though to make room for new lyrics to fly out. It’s kooky. And endearing.As is the world Miranda builds: a bespoke version of 1990 New York City for theater nerds, where André De Shields strolls in as a haughty patron at the Moondance Diner, where Bernadette Peters is having her coffee and where three of the original “Rent” cast members (Adam Pascal, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Wilson Jermaine Heredia) are bums singing on the street.That I even recognize so many of those faces is because of Larson.The original cast of “Rent,” which went on to a long Broadway run. Several of the performers show up in “Tick, Tick … Boom!”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI’ve already written about my love for “Rent,” a love I share with my mother — how it provided a Bohemian fantasy that could be the repository of my teenage insecurities, anxieties, rages and woes. I also discovered the musical around the time I was taking baby steps toward becoming a critic, writing arts pieces for my high school newspaper.Larson taught me that the constellation of notes in a score has space enough to hold immense grief and irrepressible delights. That a musical doesn’t have to be breezy and carefree, nor campy and dated. It could be bold and contemporary — even tragic. Or as strange and subversive — “Rent” is full of sex and drugs, bonkers performance art and mentions of B.D.S.M. — as any form of art.The musical, I came to appreciate, has a nested structure: The book is the spine, and each song in the score contains its own micro-narrative, its own voice, conveyed through music.I still love “Rent” like I did when I was 15, but as my affections for it have aged, they’ve taken on the sepia tone of nostalgia.I’m not the same person I was a teenager — thankfully. I’ll raise a glass to la vie boheme but won’t stay out with the eclectic crowd at the Life Cafe for quite as long.Watching the “Tick, Tick … Boom!” movie for the first time, I immediately fell hard for “30/90,” which felt adapted from my own experience. Long before I became a critic, I was an artist, and I’ve always worked under a self-imposed sense of urgency; when I was a kid, I expected to be a famous poet, journalist and novelist by the time I was 25.When I turned 30, in the middle of our first pandemic summer, I had a monthlong existential crisis. Hitting that milestone age, as Larson sings in “30/90,” means “you’re no longer the ingénue.” I still fret needlessly about time and mortality, clinging to the same clichéd, self-important worries about one’s legacy that so many artists do, Larson included.Garfield, as Larson, struggles with anxiety about not fulfilling his creative dreams at an early enough age. Macall Polay/NetflixAt some point, as I rewatched the film after an anxious and depressed afternoon, I recalled how I used to do the same with “Rent.” Again Larson helps, not just in those joyless moments of mental panic but also in the moments of joy, when I sing along to the new film’s “Boho Days” while preparing dinner, shimmying over the kitchen counter.This is love.But I must admit that “Tick, Tick … Boom!” gave me pause when Larson’s work is being workshopped by Stephen Sondheim and a theater critic. Sondheim recognizes the potential in Larson and in the piece, while the critic quickly dismisses it. Seeing the critic’s closed-mindedness and pretentious posturing, I wondered: Have I done that? Have I failed a work of art in this same way?Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘For Lucio’ Review: The Voice of Italy for Four Decades

      by

      A new documentary pays tribute to Lucio Dalla, a popular and passionate Italian singer whose songs captured the country’s political turmoil.Pudgy and hirsute, favoring floppy hats and round glasses, Lucio Dalla didn’t look much like a pop star. A jazz clarinetist who reinvented himself as a singer-songwriter, Dalla nonetheless became one of Italy’s most beloved troubadours in the later decades of the 20th century. His songs were rhapsodic and discursive, polemical and observant — often within the span of a single verse — and his voice could shift from conversational intimacy to full-throated passion just as quickly.“For Lucio,” Pietro Marcello’s new documentary, offers a portrait of Dalla that is both informative and enigmatic. More an essay film than a standard musical biography, it emphasizes personality over chronology, and dwells more on the work than the life. Instead of assembling the usual squadron of talking heads, Marcello concentrates on just two interview subjects, both of whom knew Dalla well.His manager, Umberto Righi — everyone calls him Tobia — appears alone in the first part of the movie, putting flowers on Dalla’s grave and recalling the early years of their association. Later Tobia is joined by Stefano Bonaga, who knew Dalla when they were children in Bologna. This being Italy, the two men sit and reminisce over a leisurely pasta lunch, pausing to sip wine and light cigarettes. Their conversation sometimes veers into abstraction, and the ways they describe their old friend (who died in 2012, at 68) don’t always paint a vivid picture. We hear that he was unpredictable, brilliant and generous, but there is a curious shortage of anecdotes that might bring those traits to life.More satisfying is the archival material Marcello assembles. We get to see Dalla in concert, on television variety shows, in proto-music-videos and in conversation with journalists. These moments go a long way toward explaining his appeal. They show a plain-spoken intellectual who could be impish, ardent or gnomic, and whose songs captured both the exuberant spirit of Italian popular culture and the country’s political agony and social turmoil in the ’60s and ’70s.Though Dalla released hit records through the ’80s and ’90s, it’s the earlier period that most interests Marcello, in particular the years in the early ’70s when Dalla collaborated with the left-wing Bolognese poet and writer Roberto Roversi. The filmmaker, who has made both documentaries and fictional features (recently, and notably, “Martin Eden”), is fascinated by histories of class struggle, ideological conflict and intellectual agitation. He juxtaposes images of war, poverty and labor unrest with Dalla’s songs to underline their messages and explain their context. A grim climax is provided by the bombing of Bologna’s central train station in 1980, an act of right-wing terrorism that was the deadliest single incident of political violence in an era known in Italy as the Years of Lead.Even when a song’s subject isn’t explicitly political — as in “Nuvolari,” a rambling ballad about a celebrated racecar driver — there is a feeling of urgency and struggle in Dalla and Roversi’s lyrics and in the voice that delivers them. One of the most striking passages in “For Lucio” is a performance, in front of an audience of factory workers, of “Itaca,” a song that evokes Homer’s “Odyssey” from the standpoint of ordinary sailors. That kind of romantic populism links Dalla to the Latin American Nueva Canción movement, while his music incorporates influences from Brazilian bossa nova and tropicália as well as European and North American popular styles.For all his cosmopolitanism, he remains a distinctively Italian figure, and “For Lucio” is a movie preoccupied above all with Italy’s cultural memory and identity. This can make it a bit of a challenge even for Italophiles or students of history, musical and otherwise. This isn’t “Lucio for Beginners” by any means. Nor is it a greatest-hits anthology or a “behind the music” tell-all. It’s a tribute and an invitation to further research.For LucioNot rated. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Alec Baldwin and ‘Rust’ Producers Sued for Halyna Hutchins’s Death

      by

      The suit charges that Baldwin “recklessly shot and killed Halyna Hutchins on the set” and that the production’s “aggressive cost-cutting” had endangered the crew.The suit, filed by the family of Halyna Hutchins, the film’s cinematographer who was fatally shot by Mr. Baldwin on the set, accused him and other defendants of reckless conduct and dangerous cost-cutting measures.Swen Studios/Via ReutersThe family of Halyna Hutchins, the cinematographer fatally shot by Alec Baldwin on the set of the movie “Rust” last year, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit on Tuesday in New Mexico against crew members and producers, including Mr. Baldwin.The suit, filed by Ms. Hutchins’s widower, Matthew Hutchins; her 9-year-old son; and the personal representative of Ms. Hutchins’s estate, accused Mr. Baldwin and the other defendants of reckless conduct and cost-cutting measures that endangered the crew, including failing to follow basic industry standard safety checks and gun safety rules.“Halyna Hutchins deserved to live, and the Defendants had the power to prevent her death if they had only held sacrosanct their duty to protect the safety of every individual on a set where firearms were present,” the lawsuit said, “instead of cutting corners on safety procedures where human lives were at stake, rushing to stay on schedule and ignoring numerous complaints of safety violations.”Ms. Hutchins, 42, was shot on Oct. 21 while the production was lining up camera angles for a scene in which Mr. Baldwin draws an old-fashioned revolver from a shoulder holster. Shortly before the gun went off, discharging a bullet that killed Ms. Hutchins and injured Joel Souza, the film’s director, the crew had been told that the revolver did not contain live ammunition and was safe to handle.The lawsuit said Mr. Baldwin “recklessly shot and killed Halyna Hutchins on the set.” Mr. Baldwin has said in the past that he was not to blame for her death. “Someone put a live bullet in a gun, a bullet that wasn’t even supposed to be on the property,” Mr. Baldwin said in an ABC television interview in December. “Someone is ​responsible for what happened, and I can’t say who that is, but I know it’s not me.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Aaron Dyer, a lawyer for Mr. Baldwin and other “Rust” producers, said in a statement that “any claim that Alec was reckless is entirely false,” arguing that Mr. Baldwin and other members of the cast and crew were relying on professionals tasked specifically with checking firearms.“Actors should be able to rely on armorers and prop department professionals, as well as assistant directors, rather than deciding on their own when a gun is safe to use,” the statement said.He noted that “everyone’s hearts and thoughts remain with Halyna’s family as they continue to process this unspeakable tragedy.”At a news conference, lawyers for Mr. Hutchins played a video that used animation to recreate what they say happened on the day of the shooting, based on interviews with crew members and at one point including Mr. Baldwin’s comments from the ABC interview.The lawsuit said that the defendants should not have allowed live ammunition onto the set, that Mr. Baldwin should not have pointed a gun at anyone, and accused the production of “aggressive cost-cutting” that it said had “jeopardized and endangered the safety of the cast and crew.” The suit claimed that the producers had hired an “inexperienced” and “unqualified” armorer, and that members of the production had ignored earlier firearms discharges on the set that had led to complaints about a lack of safety.Brian Panish, a lawyer for Mr. Hutchins, said at a news conference in Los Angeles: “There are many people culpable, but Mr. Baldwin was the person holding the weapon that, but for him shooting it, she would not have died. So clearly he has a significant portion of the liability, but there are others.”Last month, lawyers for the Hutchins family indicated that they were contemplating a lawsuit when they asked a court to appoint a representative in New Mexico for Ms. Hutchins’s estate. Under New Mexico law, half of any proceeds from the lawsuit would go to Mr. Hutchins and half would go to her son.Ms. Hutchins was a rising cinematographer from Ukraine; friends and colleagues described her as fiercely dedicated to the art of filmmaking.It remains unclear why live bullets were on the film set and how one of them got into the gun that Mr. Baldwin was handling. The sheriff’s office in Santa Fe has been investigating that question since the fatal shooting, but officials have made no new public disclosures about the inquiry since last month, when Mr. Baldwin turned his cellphone over to the authorities.Several other lawsuits have been filed in relation to the shooting. Two crew members filed separate lawsuits in California, alleging that cost-cutting measures by the production contributed to lax adherence to safety protocols and that Mr. Baldwin should have checked that the gun was safe to handle. Lawyers for Mr. Baldwin and other producers behind “Rust” filed a motion seeking to dismiss one of the lawsuits, arguing that Mr. Baldwin could not have intentionally shot a live bullet from the gun because he had been told it was “cold,” meaning it did not contain any live bullets.Mr. Baldwin has denied responsibility in the shooting, saying in the television interview last year that Ms. Hutchins was instructing him on where to point the gun when it discharged. He said he did not pull the trigger, suggesting that it could have been set off when he pulled back the hammer.The lawsuit accused him and others of not properly following safety protocols. Other defendants include Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the film’s armorer, who the lawsuit accuses of being unqualified for the job; Dave Halls, the first assistant director, who told an investigator that he did not check all of the rounds in the gun before handing it to Mr. Baldwin; and Seth Kenney, a supplier of guns and ammunition for the film.Jason Bowles, a lawyer for Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, said she inspected the gun before handing it over to Mr. Halls that day and asked that she be called back to recheck it later, but the production did not do so. Mr. Kenney and a lawyer for Mr. Halls did not immediately respond to requests for comment.“Had Defendant Baldwin, the Producers, and the Rust Production Companies taken adequate precautions to ensure firearm safety on the set of Rust or if basic firearm safety rules had been followed on the set of Rust on Oct. 21, 2021,” the lawsuit said, “Halyna Hutchins would be alive and well, hugging her husband and nine-year old son.” More