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    ‘Call Jane’ Review: Abortion History That’s Being Repeated Now

    A fictionalized drama about the Jane Collective, a clandestine group that helped women secure safe, illegal abortions before 1973, is of the moment.When I first saw “Call Jane” in January, I filed it away as an appealing if familiar period piece, more dusty than revelatory. It’s a fictionalized drama about the Jane Collective, a real-life clandestine Chicago group that, starting in the late 1960s, helped women secure safe, illegal abortions, stopping only in 1973 with the Roe v. Wade decision. Watching it again recently, four months after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, it felt like a different film. History can do that to a movie — and to a critic.The aesthetic qualities of “Call Jane” haven’t changed since my first viewing, of course. It’s an intimate, fine-looking work that has a lightly grainy visual texture (it was shot on film) and the usual era-appropriate swinging hair, skirts and the like. The director, Phyllis Nagy, making her feature film debut, has embraced unobtrusiveness as a style, perhaps to soft-pedal the material. She doesn’t overuse close-ups or indulge in irritating contemporary habits: The camera doesn’t hover pointlessly, there are no self-aggrandizing crane shots. The cast is as appealing as I remembered it; the awkward scenes still jar as do the upbeat music choices.Written by Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi, the movie focuses on a fictional character, Joy (a solid Elizabeth Banks), a genial pregnant housewife with a nice husband, a teenage daughter, a pleasant home and not much else going on. Shortly after the movie opens, Joy’s doctor tells her that she has a heart condition that will probably kill her unless her pregnancy is terminated. Because abortion is criminalized in Illinois, she is forced to petition a hospital board to obtain one. At the meeting, her doctor makes the case for her — she brings a tight smile and some home-baked goodies — but the all-male board votes against providing the procedure, deeming that there’s a 50 percent chance Joy will survive the pregnancy.Joy is an appealing character, but she’s also about the most anodyne emblem for abortion rights imaginable: a pretty lady with a life-threatening condition who wants to carry her pregnancy to term but can’t. Nagy tries to push the story beyond its cautious framing, but it’s tough going. She wrote Todd Haynes’s “Carol” — about two women in love in the early 1950s — and here shows a similar interest in exploring the smooth surfaces of repression. The first time that you see Joy, she is floating through a hotel like a soap bubble. Chicly dressed with a complicated upsweep that evokes Hitchcock’s blondes, she moves as if in a trance all the way through the front doors, where she sees people rioting. It’s 1968, and youth is in revolt.Joy soon is too, if slowly. She begins pushing back and breaking free after the medical board’s initial ruling, first by claiming to be suicidal so she can obtain a therapeutic abortion. She keeps pushing, and when she discovers the Jane Collective, the movie settles into a liberation story about women, emancipation, autonomy and power. Before long, Joy has joined the activist ranks of a vibrant organization made up of gutsy, opinionated, mouthy law-breakers, most notably Virginia and Gwen — the spiky tag team of Sigourney Weaver and Wunmi Mosaku — characters who amp the energy considerably. No more nice girls, well, almost.“Call Jane” squeezes a lot into its two hours, tethering Joy’s coming-into-consciousness arc to gobs of family drama, a touch of thriller-style intrigue (the Jane activists are always dodging the cops), legal questions, the larger political landscape (enter Nixon) and internecine feminist debates. Both Virginia and Gwen have to explain far too much, with each delivering chunks of exposition that are clearly more for the benefit of the movie’s audience than for any of its characters. Gwen, as the pre-eminent Black member in the collective, carries an additional burden because she has to deliver a righteous lecture about race and intersectionality, a lesson that the filmmakers should have heeded better themselves.If the references to race and class feel ritualistic, it’s because the movie largely centers on one woman, a focus that’s profoundly at odds with the political radicalism of the Jane’s collectivism. The real organization used Jane as a code name, as a generic moniker for a group of radicals, many of them veterans of the civil rights movement, who were risking everything, including prison, to help women. Some of that background filters into “Call Jane,” but the movie’s embrace of the traditional heroic narrative is exasperating and does a disservice to the history it relates. To borrow the title of a relevant book, it’s “Our Bodies, Ourselves.”So, should you see “Call Jane”? You bet. And not just because it’s satisfying to watch Banks, Weaver, Mosaku et al as feminists fighting the patriarchy with wit, intelligence and medical know-how. This is a story that needs to be told, again and again. The Jane Collective has been the subject of several documentaries, including the very engaging recent one, “The Janes,” but in the years between Roe’s passage and overturning, fictional movies have largely avoided abortion and specifically avoided it as a means of female emancipation.“Call Jane” helps modestly correct that sorry history by showing women organizing, raising consciousness and helping one another at great personal cost. In many ways it’s a process movie. It’s also eerily of the moment. Because, by the time I saw the film a second time, its vision of direct action no longer looked musty, but instead resembled the new underground abortion networks operating in states that have banned abortion. It looked like now.Call JaneRated R for language and cannabis. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters. More

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    Henry Selick and Jordan Peele Team Up on ‘Wendell & Wild’

    The stop-motion animator and the horror writer-director collaborated on the screenplay for Selick’s latest darkly comic fable “Wendell & Wild.”Nearly two decades ago, the uncanny forces inside Henry Selick’s own home inspired him to summon the original concept for “Wendell & Wild,” his first stop-motion animated feature in 13 years, which is streaming on Netflix.“My two grown sons were once little kids who acted like demons sometimes, so I did a loose drawing of them as demons,” Selick, 69, said by phone. Based on that personal doodle, he wrote a seven-page story about the mishaps of two diabolical brothers, Wendell and Wild, trying to escape hell and come to the land of the living to become rich.To materialize this idea many years later, Selick, an accomplished animation veteran whose credits include “James and the Giant Peach” (1996) and “Coraline” (2009), joined talents with the comedian-turned-director Jordan Peele, long before “Get Out” positioned Peele as a hit-making genre storyteller. Their shared ability for weaving horror and comedy cohesively in their work made for great synergy in their artistic partnership.“The best thing about Jordan, besides that he’s a genius — as a comic, a writer and now as a horror director — is that he loves stop motion animation and he knows all about it,” said Selick. “Even the logo for his company, Monkeypaw Productions, is stop-motion animation.”In 2015, Selick approached Peele and Keegan-Michael Key about collaborating. A fan of their Comedy Central sketch show “Key & Peele,” the filmmaker thought the duo would make the perfect Wendell and Wild. They were both interested, but Peele wished to become further involved by helping to shape the narrative. He shares screenplay credit on the film with Selick.Selick, right, on the set of the film. Paul McEvoy/Netflix“When Henry reached out, he didn’t know I was already a huge fan of his, ever since ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas,’” said Peele during a recent call. “He is a modern-day Roald Dahl in how he can weave the humor and the horror into a whimsical and perfectly inappropriate package.”Originally, Sister Helley (voiced in the film by Angela Bassett), a nun battling supernatural entities at an all-girls boarding school, served as the protagonist of Selick’s story. But because of Peele’s desire for this creation to look and feel unlike any stop-motion vision he’d ever seen before, the spotlight shifted to Kat, one of the young pupils at this institution who lost her parents in an accident.Selick worried that after directing “Coraline,” making another humorously frightful fable centered on a young heroine would seem as if he were repeating himself. Ultimately, Peele’s argument to not only make Kat the lead but also to make her Black convinced the animator. Kat became the angsty Hell Maiden who ushers Wendell & Wild into our realm.Lyric Ross, who voices Kat, understood the unique significance of her character.“I thought her style, her hair, even her mean mug was dope,” said Ross. “I personally had never seen a little dark-skinned Black girl being in a stop-motion picture and being the star of it. I loved everything about her, down to her sick boots.”“I knew that if I had seen a film in Henry’s style featuring someone who looked like her, it would’ve been really life-affirming of my place in the world as a kid,” noted Peele.But when it came to the look of the characters Wendell and Wild, at first Peele and Key were hesitant of Selick’s intentions to use their likeness. It wasn’t until the director showed them the designs by the Argentine artist Pablo Lobato, who specializes in unique caricatures of celebrities, that their perspective changed.“Keegan and I spent so much time dressing up and doing all these characters on ‘Key & Peele’; in a way, becoming these animated demons felt like the ultimate dress up,” said Peele.From the conversations between Peele and Selick, another subject also grew in prominence in the film: the prison industrial complex as a malevolent force. As with his live-action efforts, Peele never sought to sermonize but only to spark dialogue about important social topics.Sweetie (voiced by Ramona Young), with Sister Helley (Angela Bassett) in the film. Selick decided to keep the face seams on the puppets instead of digitally removing them.Netflix “What we owe the younger generation is the ability to have the language and references that we didn’t have, so they can discuss all things,” said Peele. “I believe in pushing the boundaries of the art form for the sake of creating a bigger pool of understanding.”Although they didn’t set out to receive a PG-13 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, Selick admits that they hoped for that classification because of the creative freedom it offered them. He recalls facing pushback from executives who argued a PG label would enable them to reach a wider audience. But he disagreed.“Let’s face it, a 10 or 11-year-old does not necessarily want to watch a PG movie,” said Selick. “They want to watch what their big brothers and sisters watch.”Kindred devotees of the bizarre, both Selick and Peele credit their mothers for their affinity for offbeat animation. Selick remembers his mother’s love for Halloween and watching “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” and the “Night on Bald Mountain” segment of “Fantasia” with her.Similarly, Peele holds dearly to the memory of the night his mother took him to see Selick’s “Nightmare Before Christmas” as a teen. “My mother knew that this was going be a special film,” he said. “She even got me the toys for it, even before the movie came out.”With “Wendell & Wild,” Selick didn’t try to advance stop motion on a technical level but instead went back to basics. In aiming for a more raw aesthetic that showed how these worlds and characters are physically manipulated by the hands of artists, he decided to keep the face seams on the puppets instead of digitally removing them, as they did on “Coraline.”“I wanted to retreat to what’s at the heart of what we do,” said Selick. “We touch these things and we breathe a performance into them.” Peele agreed with that sentiment, describing stop motion as a technique that “appeals to something innate, magical and childlike in all of us.”“The craftsmanship Henry and his puppeteers perform is something very special that only few people know how to do,” added Peele. “He’s the best in the world at it.”Selick believes that it was Peele’s success with “Get Out” that allowed them to set up this movie at Netflix — the only company that promised them the resources to make it as they had envisioned it.“We’re cousins in a way,” Selick said. “Jordan is much younger than me, but he has a worldly knowledge of cinema and likes a lot of unusual, weird and fun things.”For Peele, the foundation of their fruitful bond was the mutual and sincere admiration between them. “We’re each other’s biggest fans,” said Peele. 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    Sheriff Delivers Results of ‘Rust’ Shooting Investigation to Prosecutors

    The Santa Fe County District Attorney’s Office must now decide whether to file charges. The sheriff’s office sought to determine how a live round got into the gun Alec Baldwin was holding.The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office on Thursday delivered to local prosecutors its investigative report into the shooting on the set of “Rust” that killed the film’s cinematographer and wounded its director, bringing the district attorney’s office closer to a decision about whether to file criminal charges.The submission of the report, which the sheriff’s office declined to immediately release, came more than a year after the office began investigating how live bullets ended up on the set in New Mexico. The film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, 42, was fatally shot when a gun the actor Alec Baldwin was rehearsing with went off.On Thursday morning, the sheriff’s investigative team met with the district attorney, Mary Carmack-Altwies, and the special prosecutor appointed to help with the case, Andrea Reeb, said Heather Brewer, a spokeswoman for the Santa Fe County District Attorney’s Office.“The district attorney and her team of investigators and prosecutors will now begin a thorough review of the information and evidence to make a thoughtful, timely decision about whether to bring charges,” Ms. Brewer said in a statement.A spokesman for the sheriff’s office, Juan Rios, said the report would not be publicly released before Nov. 10. Ms. Brewer said the sheriff’s office needed to redact the document before sharing it with the public.In an August request asking state officials for more money, Ms. Carmack-Altwies wrote that she did not have sufficient funds to prosecute such a high-profile case, and that up to four people could be charged.County investigators have interviewed dozens of people about the shooting, including Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the armorer who was in charge of guns and ammunition on the film set; Dave Halls, the movie’s first assistant director, who took the gun from Ms. Gutierrez-Reed and later handed it to Mr. Baldwin; and Seth Kenney, who has been described as the primary supplier of guns and ammunition for “Rust.”Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, Mr. Halls, Mr. Kenney and Mr. Baldwin, an actor and producer of the movie, have all denied culpability. Several lawsuits have been filed, alleging, among other things, a failure to properly follow safety protocols; Ms. Hutchins’s family recently reached a settlement with Mr. Baldwin and other “Rust” producers.Ms. Hutchins was fatally shot during the filming of the western on Oct. 21, 2021, while Mr. Baldwin was practicing drawing an old-fashioned revolver for a scene inside a spare wooden church. He had been told it contained no live rounds, but it suddenly fired, killing Ms. Hutchins and wounding Joel Souza, the film’s director.In a television interview last year, Mr. Baldwin said that he was told the gun was safe to handle and that Ms. Hutchins was instructing him where he should point it. The actor said he did not pull the trigger, but rather that he pulled back the hammer of the gun and let it go just before it discharged.State regulators at the New Mexico Occupational Health and Safety Bureau found a serious breach of industry standards, which require that live ammunition should never be brought on set. The production, which plans to resume filming in January, is contesting the fine issued by regulators.If the district attorney decides to bring charges, a judge in New Mexico would consider whether there is probable cause for the charges to move forward. More

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    ‘Run Sweetheart Run’ Review: Escape in L.A.

    Bursts of experimental style are at odds with a simplistic premise in this slasher movie that poses the tired idea that the patriarchy is a killer.Steeped in social commentary but lacking in basic logic, “Run Sweetheart Run” follows a woman over one desperate night in Los Angeles. The story begins when Cherie (Ella Balinska), a young mom working as an executive assistant, agrees to a client dinner with Ethan (Pilou Asbaek), an affable moneybag. But the slasher thrills really kick into gear once the sweet date turns sour, and then savage: During a nightcap, Ethan attacks Cherie and reveals his plan to hunt her until dawn.Like a bloodstained “After Hours,” the movie goes on to trail Cherie as she scampers away and seeks refuge in a series of urban sites: police station, apartment, overpass, church, nightclub, bathhouse. The director, Shana Feste, renders these settings in a green palette and high-contrast lighting, and their surreality suggests that Cherie has fallen down a rabbit hole; the horror Wonderland where she lands is peopled with doomed women and leering male brutes.Playful elements punctuate the menace. When danger approaches, “RUN!” appears across the screen, like a private alarm bell for our heroine. In other moments, Ethan cheekily breaks the fourth wall to aim the camera elsewhere before he inflicts harm on victims. These bursts of experimental style feel at odds with the movie’s core: a simplistic parable of pervasive sexism. We get it: The male villain is a stand-in for the patriarchy, and for women, it’s an uphill battle just to survive. No need to bludgeon us over the head with it.Run Sweetheart RunRated R. Butchery and battle of the sexes. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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    ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Review: The Spectacle of War

    Edward Berger’s German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel aims to rattle you with its relentless brutality.In his auteurist film history “The American Cinema” (1968), the critic Andrew Sarris compared similar scenes in two World War I films, King Vidor’s “The Big Parade” (1925) and Lewis Milestone’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930), the first screen adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel. Vidor, Sarris felt, had a more satisfying approach to showing two soldiers from opposite sides in a shell hole, one dying. Vidor emphasized the faces of his characters, Sarris wrote, rather than pictorialism and spectacle.The first sequence of Edward Berger’s new German-language adaptation of Remarque’s novel announces about as loudly as possible that it’s on the side of pictorialism and spectacle. It opens with a landscape: a quiet wood and mountains, seemingly at sunrise. A fox sucks from its mother’s teat. A Terrence Malick-like shot looks upward at impossibly high and peaceful treetops.Berger then cuts to an aerial view of drifting smoke, which clears to reveal an array of corpses. A barrage of bullets suddenly pierces the near-still composition, and the camera turns to show the full extent of the carnage and the muck. This is war as a violation of nature. And that’s even before Berger trails a scared soldier named Heinrich (Jakob Schmidt), who charges ahead in a pair of unbroken shots — take that, “1917” — only to die offscreen. In a device that owes something to the red coat in “Schindler’s List,” Heinrich’s uniform will be stripped from his body, cleansed, stitched up, shipped to Northern Germany and eventually reused by Remarque’s protagonist, Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), who notices someone else’s name on the label.Does this version of a literary classic go hard or what? In truth, opting for pure bombast — a pounding, repeated three-note riff by Volker Bertelmann, who did the score, never fails to quicken the pulse — isn’t necessarily an ineffective way of translating Remarque’s plain-spoken prose. Berger has more tools at his disposal than Milestone did with the challenges of the early sound era, yet those advantages somehow make this update less impressive: The magnification in scale and dexterity lends itself to showing off. Still, the movie aims to pummel you with ceaseless brutality, and it’s hard not to be rattled by that.This “Western Front” places its faith in big set pieces and powerful images. Even the scope has been widened. Berger cuts between Paul’s experiences in the trenches and cease-fire talks between Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl), who chaired Germany’s armistice commission, and Marshal Ferdinand Foch of France (Thibault De Montalembert). The 72-hour deadline that Foch gives Erzberger to sign adds an element of ticking-clock suspense to the overall narrative, albeit by departing from Remarque’s first-person point of view.The fates of the author’s soldiers are also tweaked. But there are moments here that resonate. When Paul trudges through the trench and collects dog tags from his fallen comrades, he finds a friend’s distinctive eyeglasses in the mud. Rats scurry to avoid the earthquake of approaching tanks. Paul, his face caked in dirt, tries to silence the dying gulps of the French soldier he has stabbed, in this movie’s counterpart to the Vidor-Milestone scene. Tjaden (Edin Hasanovic) jabs at his neck after realizing he’ll have to live as an amputee.The closest thing the movie has to affecting character work comes in the relationship between Paul and Katczinsky (Albrecht Schuch), who enjoy one last mission to steal food from a farm during the final hours of the war — when neither the violence nor Berger plans to relent.All Quiet on the Western FrontRated R. Extreme war violence. In German and French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 27 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    John Jay Osborn Jr., Author of ‘The Paper Chase,’ Dies at 77

    His 1971 novel became a movie, with John Houseman giving an award-winning performance as the imperious Professor Kingsfield, and later a television series.John Jay Osborn Jr., who while attending Harvard Law School wrote “The Paper Chase,” a 1971 novel following the tense relationship between an earnest student and his imperious contract law professor that was made into a feature film and then a television series, died on Oct. 19 at his home in San Francisco. He was 77.His daughter, Meredith Osborn, said the cause was squamous cell cancer.“The Paper Chase,” Mr. Osborn’s best-known book, tells the story of two antagonists: Kingsfield, an austere, curmudgeonly Harvard elder, and Hart, an industrious first-year student from the Midwest who is trying to survive the cutthroat intellectual world of an elite law school.“For days I sit in that damn class,” Hart says to his girlfriend, who is Kinsgfield’s daughter, late in the novel. “Then I read his books in the library and I abstract the cases he’s chosen. I know everything about him. The stripe of his ties. How many suits he has. He’s like the air or the wind. He’s everywhere. You can say you don’t care, but he’s there anyway, pounding his mind into mine. He screws around with my life.”Although Mr. Osborn said that Kingsfield was a composite of several of his law professors, Martha Minow, a former dean of the law school, said in an email, “I do know that some now long-gone law professors here vied over who was the real model for Kingsfield.”When “The Paper Chase” was made into a film in 1973, Kingsfield was played by John Houseman, who was a longtime theater, film and television producer and a former colleague of Orson Welles’s but had only occasionally acted, and Hart was portrayed by Timothy Bottoms. Mr. Houseman won the Academy Award for best supporting actor.In the movie, which was written and directed by James Bridges, Kingsfield famously tells his class: “You teach yourself the law but I train your mind. You come in here with a skull full of mush. You leave thinking like a lawyer.”Mr. Houseman reprised his role in the series that ran, first on CBS and later on Showtime, between 1978 and 1986. James Stephens took on the role of Hart.“The Paper Chase” was a reflection of Mr. Osborn’s experiences at Harvard Law amid an era of fervent student protests over the Vietnam War.The school “did not have the flexibility to allow individuals to express themselves,” he wrote in the Harvard Law Bulletin in 2003. “It did not allow for reciprocity between faculty and students. In short, it really had no desire to be loved, or even to be respected.”“The Paper Chase” started as a required third-year writing project. Because it was a work of fiction, Mr. Osborn used it to hedge against following the career path to a major Wall Street firm that Harvard Law was preparing him for.“It was an attempt to create more options for myself, a new story with a new ending,” he wrote in 2011 in the preface to the 40th-anniversary edition of the book.He went outside the law school to find an adviser, William Alfred, a Harvard English literature professor who was also a poet and playwright. Ms. Osborn recalled her father saying that Mr. Alfred was effusive about the first rough draft but suggested some changes.When he made the fixes, she said, Mr. Alfred told him: “Thank goodness. It was terrible when you first gave it to me. Now it’s a lot better and it’s got a lot of promise.”A year after Mr. Osborn’s graduation in 1970, Houghton Mifflin published “The Paper Chase.”Reviewing “The Paper Chase” in The Philadelphia Inquirer, David Appel wrote that it was written in a “lean, forthright manner” that “captured the urgency and immediacy of the law school experience.”For the rest of his career, Mr. Osborn would balance writing novels, as well as television and film scripts, with teaching law — even, like Kingsfield, contract law.20th Century Fox, via Everett CollectionJohn Jay Osborn Jr. was born on Aug. 5, 1945, in Boston. His father was a doctor and an inventor of one of the first heart-lung machines. His mother, Ann (Kidder) Osborn, was an abstract painter. The Osborns are descendants of John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad baron.In 1967, Mr. Osborn graduated from Harvard College, where he had met Emilie Sisson, a student at Radcliffe College, whom he married in 1968.“As a jaded graduate of Harvard College,” he wrote in 2011 of his law school experience, “all I wanted was not to be browbeaten (and I was).”After Harvard Law, Mr. Osborn clerked in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., for Judge Max Rosenn of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He then worked for about a year as an associate at the white-shoe law firm Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler in Manhattan.He left for postgraduate work at Yale Law School, then taught law, first at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University and then at the University of Miami School of Law. At about the same time, he was writing novels: “The Only Thing I’ve Done Wrong” (1977), a family drama, and “The Associates” (1979), about life at a Wall Street law firm.A sitcom based on “The Associates,” starring Martin Short, Alley Mills and Wilfrid Hyde-White, made its debut in 1979. But it lasted only 13 episodes.Between 1978 and 1988, Mr. Osborn was credited with writing 14 episodes of “The Paper Chase” and one episode apiece of “L.A. Law” and “Spenser: For Hire.” In that period, he also wrote his fourth novel, “The Man Who Owned New York” (1981), about a lawyer trying to recover $3 million missing from the estate of his firm’s biggest client.In the 1990s, he became a private estate planner and taught at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and then at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where he taught contract law until his retirement in 2016.His approach to teaching contract law was quite different from Kingsfield’s. The balance of power, he wrote, rested with the students, not the professor. He said that in his first class of each semester, he stood at the lectern until the students were totally silent.“I explain to them that I’m not going to call on anyone,” he wrote in 2011. “They will have to volunteer to talk. Why am I not going to just call on students? I am not clairvoyant like their other professors. I have no idea which students have something to contribute to the discussion. Therefore I’m going to have to rely on them to tell when they have something to say.”Two years after his retirement, he published his final novel, “Listen to the Marriage” (2018), set entirely in the office of a marriage counselor.In addition to his daughter, who graduated from Harvard Law in 2006, Mr. Osborn is survived by his wife, a retired doctor; his sons, Samuel and Frederick; six grandchildren; his brothers, Oliver, Joseph and Ed; and his sisters, Mimi Oliver, Cindi Garvie and Anne Weiser-Truchan.At the end of Mr. Osborn’s novel, Hart stops Kingsfield on campus to tell him how much his class had meant to him.“Good,” Kingsfield says. “That’s fine.” And, as the professor starts to smile, he asks, coldly, “What was your name?”“Hart, Mr. Hart,” Hart says.“Well, thank you, Mr. Hart,” Kingsfield says.Mr. Osborn, who was a technical adviser for the “Paper Chase” film, recalled that at their first meeting, Mr. Houseman asked him if Kingsfield really knew Hart’s name.“Of course he had to know it,” Mr. Osborn told SFGate.com in 2003. “But I think the ambiguity was important, and Houseman understood that.” More

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    ‘Please Baby Please’ Review: Hyper-Masculinity, on Its Head

    This 1950s satire from Amanda Kramer broadens the scope of the queer leather canon.A gang of greasers roams the smoggy streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. They’re decked out motorcycle caps straight out of “The Wild Ones” and “Jailhouse Rock‌”-like striped ‌T-shirts, and they pause their prowling for a dance before violently bludgeoning two passers-by. In the satire “Please Baby Please,” these hoodlums are known as the Young Gents, and their hyper-stylized assault is witnessed by a beatnik couple, Arthur (Harry Melling) and Suze (Andrea Riseborough). The duo is transfixed.This chance first meeting with the Young Gents spells trouble for the married pair — trouble with a capital T that rhymes with G and that stands for gender. From this encounter, the film spins out into a romp through the muddle of 1950s masculinity. Arthur has spent his life resisting what he sees as the prison of his own manhood, and he finds himself drawn to the gang’s pouting pretty-boy leader (Karl Glusman). Suze is unleashed as a blossoming leather daddy in a beehive, taking further inspiration from a provocative neighbor, Maureen (Demi Moore). As Arthur and Suze navigate the physical threats to their safety imposed by their introduction to the Young Gents, they question their relationship and the roles that they play as husband and wife.The director Amanda Kramer takes aesthetic and erotic cues from the traditions passed down by artists like Kenneth Anger and Tom of Finland. The film’s ironic tone largely defangs the transgressive films it parodies, but Kramer does broaden the scope of the queer leather canon. She includes women among those searchers who might find their sense of identity through a performance of hyper-masculinity. Riseborough offers a dynamite performance as Suze, leaning into a thick New York accent as she slouches and slinks through her character’s awakening.Please Baby PleaseNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘A Chance Encounter’ Review: Bland Days In Taormina

    Andrea von Kampen, a singer-songwriter who has a way with the acoustic guitar, is the most engaging part of this tentative romantic drama.Can a motion picture be shockingly inoffensive? The question sauntered into my mind about a third of the way through “A Chance Encounter.” (A bad sign, as the movie is only about 90 minutes.)The movie’s components are not unfamiliar. A young man, Hal (Paul T.O. Petersen, who also wrote the script with the film’s director Alexander Jeffery), still not close to being settled in life, travels to the Sicilian seaside town of Taormina to honor his mother’s memory (his inheritance is footing the bill) and to find inspiration for his poetry.On a terrace with a killer view, he meets Josie, an American singer with a recent hit single, strumming and singing away.Josie is played by the real-life singer Andrea von Kampen, who’s the most engaging part of the picture. She’s a fine singer and, at times, her guitar work is reminiscent of the cult hero Nick Drake. But that’s the far end of whatever idiosyncrasy this movie has. After Hal and Josie’s meet-cute, they see sights blandly, philosophize blandly, blandly tiptoe around the notion of romance, and criticize each other — yes, blandly, but with an occasional touch of “salty” language. Josie is frustrated with Hal because she considers him a rare talent and thinks he won’t properly commit to the poetic vocation.“And perhaps the sun blows kisses to the moon as it departs/they work two separate shifts with one beating heart” is a representative couplet from Hal’s verse. As too often happens in movies that depict literary aspirants, the writing raises the dreaded question, “Wait, is this actually supposed to be good?” One supposes it is supposed to be. And one just has to sit with that, as “A Chance Encounter” ambles to its inevitable conclusion.A Chance EncounterNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More