Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Terra Femme’ Review: How Women Have Seen the World

      by

      An assemblage of travelogues shot by women from the 1920s through the 1950s, this experimental essay film can be seen with either live or prerecorded narration.Blurring the line between experimental essay film and performance piece, Courtney Stephens’s “Terra Femme” can be seen in two versions. Most screenings will have regular voice-over, but at the Thursday screening and at one of the screenings on Sunday, Stephens will deliver the narration live, in the spirit of how some of the material in the movie was originally screened.“Terra Femme” compiles amateur travelogues shot largely by women from the 1920s through the 1950s. The footage filmed by Kate and Arthur Tode, a couple who circumnavigated the globe, for example, was shown at cinema clubs in the 1930s and 1940s, and as with Stephens’s presentation, the films would be narrated while they unspooled.Although the two versions are said to be similar, the live edition — the one I saw at a press screening — conceivably adds something extra, because “Terra Femme” is partly about Stephens’s own relationship to the material. At one point, she discusses trying to recreate certain shots from India and not quite framing them correctly.Stephens asks whether these travelogues might reveal that women, who at the time had few opportunities to direct movies professionally, see the world differently. She considers the lives of the camerawomen, like Annette Dixon, of Philadelphia, whose films were archived under her husband’s name; Adelaide Pearson, who captured what may have been the first color cinematic footage of Gandhi; and Armeta Hearst, who filmed in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Seattle in the 1950s. The first reel of Hearst’s footage was accidentally scanned backward, making it look as though subjects who were exiting their homes were instead being absorbed back into them, inescapably.“Terra Femme” addresses many more issues: changing domestic roles in the 20th century, self-consciousness in amateur filmmaking, women’s potential access to historic moments and even — obliquely — climate change. Stephens’s ideas and presentation make for a dense, continually absorbing hour.Terra FemmeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 2 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 175 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Jokes + Exasperation + Subtext = a New York Club Comic on the Rise

      by

      In Raanan Hershberg’s standup, the punchline is not the point; it’s what his runaway emotions reveal that’s funny.Like genius, great comedy requires some mix of inspiration and perspiration, but when it comes to the stand-up of Raanan Hershberg, neither is more important than exasperation.One of the funnier moments in his 2019 special, “Downhill Ever Since,” was his extreme incredulousness over the name of the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter: “We’re supposed to believe,” he said, pausing to let the crowd register his umbrage, “there’s this cannibal who just happens, just happens, on the rarest of odds, to have the only name in the history of names to rhyme with cannibal.”His breakthrough new special, “Jokes From the Underground,” which premieres Wednesday night on YouTube, finds him plumbing comic aggravation more deeply, this time sparked by a sentence spoken by his mother: “I can’t believe it’s already April.” This sends the comic, a Comedy Cellar regular with a growing reputation, into a head-swiveling frenzy, spitting consonants. Of all the things to disbelieve? Hershberg, 37, launches into an operatic tour of the bizarre events of the past few years. (“Last year marked the only time where the Baldwin brothers weren’t jealous of Alec’s career.”) What began as a skewering of a cliché culminates in the baroque comedy of a man unhinged.Stand-up is an art form full of control freaks, and most reliably funny stand-ups are poised performers who orchestrate laughs from the surprise and insight of their premises and punchlines. In his recent Netflix special “Same Time Tomorrow,” Sam Morril, another skilled Comedy Cellar craftsman, offers a clever bit comparing the jobs of police officers and teachers that relies on an abrupt misdirection he calls a switcheroo. This kind of joke has the structure of a trick: get viewers leaning one way, then startle them by going the other.Hershberg tells some of these kinds of jokes, too, but they tend to be more minor key and straightforward: jabs, not big swings. He favors benign lies or the thuddingly obvious stated with conviction. At one point, he confides that when it comes to sex, his penis is “his spot.” What really distinguishes Hershberg, and makes him the next great practitioner of that fabled artistic genre known as New York club comedy, is when he seems to be losing control, letting his runaway emotions become the joke. His most ambitious set pieces, the ones that get the belly laughs, work not by outsmarting the audience but by playing the fool.To be specific, he has a premise arguing that women talk more about sex than men, but the real punchline is how the unruly intensity of his emphasis on this point actually shows he’s worried about secrets revealed by certain women. The biggest laugh is in the subtext, not the line. This is tricky, clever writing that relies on making sure the crowd sees something the comic isn’t telling them.In his new special, Hershberg displays this gift. He’s more strategic about his delivery than in his previous special, varying the pace, taking a break from his roaring vexation to become softer on occasion, allowing silence for a jarring contrast. It’s also a more stylish production, with camerawork that nicely serves the joke, including a close-up from the side, where his face is framed by candy-colored lights, a shot often employed after a sly comment.Exasperation can easily tip into anger, and there are easy laughs to be had there. But Hershberg wisely steers clear. He wades into touchy territory — the Holocaust, #MeToo, his mother’s sex life — but the aim here is not to tell it like it is but to find obstacles for his hapless protagonist to navigate. His jokes aren’t just tightly written. They have stakes.And yet, his greatest strength is clearly his gravelly, booming voice. Rub sandpaper and the wrapper for a corned beef sandwich together and you might hit its frequency. It can remind you of Gilbert Gottfried, but the comic he most frequently resembles — this comparison has so much baggage that I hesitate to make it — is Louis C.K. The way Hershberg wanders into uncomfortable territory, draws attention to it, then pushes further along the tightrope. His radical shifts of perspective. Even his hand gestures. In some of Hershberg’s punchlines, there are hints of a delight in pure nonsense that suggests a more surreal direction in his future. You see it in some of his most banal jokes, like one about President Biden’s age. It’s almost as if Hershberg needed to find a way to make this bland premise more interesting.Several times he returns to a refrain — “More information beats bad information” — but to say this show has a theme, other than trying desperately to make you laugh, would be a stretch.New York is the best training ground for comics honing ruthless jokes that work for the widest array of audiences. That’s because there are more places to perform than anywhere else. But the scene has its own groupthink that can resist certain kinds of ambition. Some of Hershberg’s most familiar premises, like complaining about cable news, feel dutiful, less personal. But digging into well-worn topics can also be a challenge that excites an imaginative mind.There’s no subject more overdone now than Covid. But he finds a fresh take: This is the first pandemic that people admit to enjoying. “No one in the 1500s said the bubonic plague really gave me a chance to slow down and just live in the moment,” he says. “Thank God the Black Death came along and I finally got to work on myself.”Hershberg is the kind of New Yorker that E.B. White argued brought passion to the city: the one born elsewhere, in his case, Kentucky. You would never know it from his act, which feels firmly located in New York club comedy, a category that for some evokes a certain neurotic sensibility or swagger or density of punchlines.To me, its defining trait is an ineffable comic sound, as nervy and raucous as the subway during rush hour. Hershberg plays that rumbling music beautifully. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Do Revenge’: Paying Homage to Teen Classics by Way of Hitchcock

      by

      Though Gen Z is the subject, the director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson wanted to honor and critique high school movies of the ’90s.“You’re probably going, ‘Is this like a Noxzema commercial or what?’” Cher Horowitz mused in the opening montage of “Clueless,” laughing with friends in her Jeep Wrangler and splurging at Tiffany’s on Rodeo Drive. That scene, set to the Muffs’ pop-punk cover of “Kids in America,” painted a heady portrait of ’90s youth and excess.Twenty-seven years later, a new version of “Kids in America” — by the indie-pop singer Maude Latour — plays in “Do Revenge” as throngs of rich, Gen Z teens spiral into various states of ecstasy and despair after they unwittingly ingest hallucinogenic mushrooms at a school dinner.The Netflix dark comedy (out Sept. 16) is full of such winks to its teen film forebears. There’s a guided tour of the school’s cliques (as seen in “Mean Girls,” “10 Things I Hate About You” and more) and a requisite makeover (a staple in “Clueless,” “She’s All That” and so many others). But many of the “Do Revenge” references also serve as a playful reckoning, blending nostalgia with wholly contemporary tastes and issues.“I’m obsessed with high school movies,” the director and writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson said. “But, very specifically, this type of film that I just feel like doesn’t get made anymore.”While in postproduction on her first film, the 2019 rom-com “Someone Great,” she and one of the producers, Peter Cron, began analyzing her favorite ’90s entries in the genre — “Clueless,” “Cruel Intentions,” “10 Things” and “Jawbreaker” — and common threads of campiness and satire emerged. And, with the exception of “Jawbreaker,” they were all reimaginings of classic works. (That would be “Emma,” “Dangerous Liaisons” and “The Taming of the Shrew,” respectively.)Camila Mendes said her role defied the usual studio note to make women more likable: “What ends up happening is you get these really one-dimensional female characters.” Kim Simms/NetflixRobinson and Cron brainstormed vintage material they could rework in a high school setting. Cron suggested looking to Alfred Hitchcock. “Rear Window” had gotten the teen treatment in the 2007 thriller “Disturbia.” What about his 1951 noir “Strangers on a Train”? Instead of two grown men swapping murders, two teen girls could concoct a plot to “do revenge” of the nonviolent kind on their exes.The similarities pretty much end there, but from that germ of a concept, Robinson and her co-writer, Celeste Ballard, crafted the acerbic tale of Drea, a queen bee who becomes a social pariah after an intimate Snapchat video she sent to her boyfriend, Max, is leaked to their entire Miami prep school; and Eleanor, a mysterious outsider looking to bring down a girl from summer camp.“Teenage girls are fascinating. They are these little engines of chaos,” said Robinson, who created the MTV series “Sweet/Vicious” and co-wrote “Thor: Love and Thunder.” She added, “High school in and of itself is its own stage and the perfect way to tell these types of twisty, turny stories.”She found her leads in the “Riverdale” star Camila Mendes and the “Stranger Things” actress Maya Hawke. In supporting roles are standouts from other recent teen-centric fare, including Austin Abrams (“Euphoria”), Alisha Boe (“13 Reasons Why”), Talia Ryder (“Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between”) and Rish Shah (“Ms. Marvel”). The assembled cast, fittingly, dubbed themselves “The Revengers.”Both Mendes, 28, and Hawke, 24, were skeptical about taking on another teen role, but Robinson’s vision and the characters’ complexities on the page convinced them this wouldn’t be a typical return to the genre.“I was like, ‘Oh, wait, this is really good and really smart. And it’s not just another high schooler. It’s the most badass, psychopath high schooler that I’ve ever read,’” Hawke said of her character, Eleanor. She’s not simply chaotic and crazy, Hawke added, “she’s a hurt person with motive.”Camila Mendes, left, and Hawke were both wary of playing another teenage character but signed on after reading the script. “I was like, ‘Oh, wait, this is really good and really smart,’” Hawke said.Kim Simms/NetflixMendes, who plays Drea, echoed her: “You get this note so much in Hollywood that’s always like, ‘We don’t want her to be too unlikable. She’s got to be likable.’ And then what ends up happening is you get these really one-dimensional female characters. Drea is not that.”While a leaked Snapchat serves as the MacGuffin and texting is pervasive, the director, along with the production designer Hillary Gurtler and the costume designer Alana Morshead, didn’t try to force too many Gen Z-specific trends. Instead the three millennial women tried to create a vibrant “girl world” that blended the past and the present in a colorful way.“Between Gen Z and millennials, you’ve got an incredibly smart audience, visually attuned more than any other previously,” Gurtler said. “So instead of pandering directly to somebody, it’s like, let’s build this incredible world, and their tastes and vision will meet it.”Morshead modeled the Rosehill prep school uniforms after those common in South Korea but reimagined them in a Miami-fied pastel palette of lavender and mint. She sourced accessories and streetwear from small labels run by women and people of color, including Miracle Eye, the Mighty Company and Muaves, and added a smattering of vintage couture where the budget allowed.But perhaps most important in crafting the film’s overall feel, Robinson said, was the music. To achieve a no-skips CD experience like the movie soundtracks she loved as a teenager, Robinson opted for hits by Hole, Meredith Brooks and Fatboy Slim alongside newer needle drops from Olivia Rodrigo, Muna and Caroline Polachek. She hired Este Haim and Amanda Yamate to create an original, neo-noir-tinged score, and enlisted the music supervisor Robert Lowry to pull it all together.“I didn’t really care about them being the most recognizable songs. I wanted them to elicit a feeling in you,” Robinson said. “It was less about the name-iness of the artists or the songs, and it was way more about, does the song bring you back to a time?”Visual nostalgia is likewise key. Teens play croquet on a lawn à la “Heathers.” The popular kids perch on a fountain just as they did in “Scream.” There’s a “10 Things”-inspired paintball date. Eleanor drives a vintage luxury car in a nod to Sebastian’s prized possession in “Cruel Intentions.” And to explicitly tie up the connection between “Do Revenge” and ’90s pop culture, Robinson cast Sarah Michelle Gellar in a small but satisfying role as Rosehill’s headmaster, virtually the only adult character.The costume designs used a Miami-inspired palette of pastels. Kim Simms/NetflixYet, unlike the homogeneity of many high school films of the past, the filmmakers wanted “Do Revenge” to more broadly reflect the youth of today. It centers the stories of Latina and queer teens and, aspirationally, doesn’t allow characters to hurl insults about physical appearance or sexuality. These girls might dub someone a “human Birkenstock” but never a “full-on Monet,” a shift Robinson said she felt a “responsibility” to convey.“We tried to root it all in character, rather than appearance or identity,” Robinson said. “You can be biting. You can be satirical. But those surface-level jabs, those types of mean comments, I hope that they just go away. They’re so boring. If you’re going to be mean, be smart.”Here, the popular bad boy is a nail-polish-wearing, earring-adorned trust fund kid whose androgynous style was partly inspired by that of Harry Styles. “I liked updating that from the mean guys in those ’90s movies we’d seen before,” the costume designer Morshead said. “He doesn’t have to be the stereotypical, brooding jock.”Max’s villainous nature hides behind performative ally-ship — he starts a school club called the Cis Hetero Men Championing Female Identifying Students League — and faux feminist gestures.“I know so many people like that in Hollywood,” Mendes said. “There’s definitely this ongoing joke with me and my female actress friends where we talk about how there are so many Maxes in Hollywood, it’s insane. They’re adored by the public, but all the people in the industry know what they’re capable of, and it can be incredibly frustrating.”In fact, in “Do Revenge” no one is what they seem on the surface. The lines between good and evil characters are blurred, and many who do terrible things find their way to accountability and redemption by the film’s end.“I think that cancel culture is stunting people’s want and ability to actually grow past the wrongs that they’ve committed,” Robinson said. “This whole film is about saying, ‘Yeah, you did some bad stuff. You made some bad choices, but every day is a day where you can become better if you want to turn the corner.’” More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Irene Papas, Actress in ‘Zorba the Greek’ and Greek Tragedies, Dies at 96

      by

      She was best known for commanding movie roles in the 1960s but received the greatest plaudits for playing heroines of the ancient stage.Irene Papas, a Greek actress who starred in films like “Z,” “Zorba the Greek” and “The Guns of Navarone” but won the greatest acclaim of her career playing the heroines of Greek tragedy, died on Wednesday. She was 96.The death was confirmed by a spokesman for the Greek Culture Ministry in an email. He did not know the cause of death, but in 2018, it was announced that Ms. Papas had been living with Alzheimer’s disease for five years.Ms. Papas was best known by American moviegoers for her intensely serious and sultry-strong roles in the 1960s. In “The Guns of Navarone” (1961), filmed partly on the island of Rhodes, she played a World War II resistance fighter who dared to do what a team of Allied saboteurs (among them Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn) would not: shoot an unarmed woman because she was a traitor.In “Zorba the Greek” (1964), with Mr. Quinn, she was a Greek widow who is stoned by her fellow villagers because of her choice of lover. In Costa-Gavras’s Oscar-winning political thriller “Z” (1969), set in the Greek city of Thessaloniki, she played Yves Montand’s widow, who evoked the film’s meaning with one final grief-ridden look out to sea.But in the same decade, she was making her name in Greek film versions of classical plays, often directed by her countryman Michael Cacoyannis, who also directed “Zorba.” She played the title characters in “Antigone” (1961), Sophocles’s tale of a woman who pays dearly after fighting for her brother’s right to an honorable burial; and in “Electra” (1962), in which she and her brother plot matricide. She was also Electra’s mother, Clytemnestra, in “Iphigenia” (1977), the drama of a daughter offered as human sacrifice.In 1971, she received the National Board of Review’s best actress award for her role as Helen of Troy in “The Trojan Women.” Her co-stars were Katharine Hepburn and Vanessa Redgrave.Ms. Papas was born Eirini Lelekou on Sept. 3, 1926, in Chiliomodi, Greece, a small village near Corinth, and grew up in Athens. She was one of four daughters of two schoolteachers and entered drama school at age 12. By the time she was 18, she had already played both Electra and Lady Macbeth. But her first professional stage role, in 1948, was as a party-hopping society girl in a musical.She made her film debut the same year, in Nikos Tsiforos’s drama “Hamenoi Angeloi” (“Fallen Angels”), and appeared in 14 films during the 1950s — some American, some European — before her breakout role in “The Guns of Navarone.”Ms. Papas with James Darren, center, and Anthony Quinn in “The Guns of Navarone” (1961). Everett CollectionThe director Elia Kazan is often credited with discovering Ms. Papas. On a 1954 trip to the United States, she read a scene from “The Country Girl” for him. The following year, she was given a seven-year contract by MGM, although she made only one film under it: “Tribute to a Bad Man” (1956), a western starring James Cagney.Ms. Papas’s other films included “Bouboulina” (1959), in which she played an 18th-century Greek revolutionary heroine; “The Brotherhood” (1968), as a Mafia wife (to Kirk Douglas); “Anne of the Thousand Days” (1969), as the discarded Catherine of Aragon opposite Richard Burton’s Henry VIII; and “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” (1987), based on the novel by Gabriel García Márquez.The Greek tragedies were the focus of her New York stage career as well. She made her Broadway debut in 1967 in “That Summer — That Fall,” based on “Phèdre,” playing a passionate second wife in love with her stepson (Jon Voight), but the production closed after only 12 performances. The following year, she was Clytemnestra in a Circle in the Square production of “Iphigenia in Aulis.” She returned to Circle in the Square as the title character, a woman who kills her own children, in “Medea” (1973) and as Agave, who mistakenly kills her own son during an orgy of drugs, drink and violence, in “The Bacchae” (1980).She was also a singer. She made two albums of Greek folk songs and hymns, “Odes” (1979) and “Rapsodies” (1986), and created something of a scandal with vocals that were condemned by some as lewd on “666,” the 1971 album by the rock group Aphrodite’s Child.Ms. Papas had strong political feelings about her country and made them public. In 1967, she risked her citizenship by calling for a “cultural boycott” of Greece after a military junta took control, saying “Nazism is back in Greece” and describing the country’s new leaders as “no more than a band of blackmailers.” Although Ms. Papas spoke in interviews about a desire to give up acting and a regrettable tendency to be too obedient to directors, she continued film acting well into her 70s. Her final screen appearances included “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” (2001), in which she played Drosoula, the formidable mother of Mandras (Christian Bale), and “Um Filme Falado” (“A Talking Picture”), Manoel de Oliveira’s 2003 meditation on civilization, in which she portrayed a privileged actress sailing the Mediterranean.She married Alkis Papas, a director and actor, in 1947, and they divorced four years later. A brief 1957 marriage to José Kohn, a producer, was annulled. She never married again.She is survived by her nephews, the spokesman for the Greek Culture Ministry said.Having played all those characters from ancient Greece, Ms. Papas had a worldview that took thousands of years of history and philosophy into account. “Plato made the first mistake,” she told Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times in 1969, lamenting an unnecessary delay in the scientific revolution. “He began to talk about the soul and morality, and he prevented the Epicureans from searching the nature of man.” More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Gameboys: The Movie’ Review: An Online Relationship Gets Real

      by

      This spinoff film from a web series deals with how a young couple handles the highs and lows of a relationship during the pandemic.In “Gameboys: The Movie,” the consequences and uncertainties of the pandemic are the star of the show.Before this feature-length spinoff, the Filipino web series “Gameboys” (later shown on Netflix) used the boys’ love genre — made popular in manga — to confront how the pandemic was taking a toll on relationships. The show introduced audiences to the livestream gamer Cairo (Elijah Canlas) and one of his fans, Gavreel (Kokoy De Santos), with the two finding one another during Luzon’s lockdown and, amid intense isolation, interfacing online. With the film, their relationship moves from the virtual to the in-person realm.And when the two move in with each other, they, like with many pandemic pairings, are forced to deal with some of the more unsavory parts of being together (too much attention, when to shower and the like). Their evolving dynamic is complicated when the quarreling quasi-lovers Terrence (Kyle Velino) and Wesley (Miggy Jimenez), and Gavreel’s conservative Aunt Susan (Angie Castrenc), crash their pandemic home.“Gameboys: The Movie,” directed by Ivan Andrew Payawal and written by Ash M. Malanum, does not take the comic situation and run with it. Instead, it leads with a teen soap tone, and despite billing itself as a film, feels structurally more like a string of episodes smashed together. It toggles between a desktop movie (like the horror film “Unfriended”), with characters on FaceTime or livestreaming, and a straightforward one. But it is at its best when it lets harsh reality — particularly the sacrifices people who love each other have to make — disrupt its more predictable and adolescent impulses.Gameboys: The MovieNot rated. In Tagalog and Filipino, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Opening Old Wounds as the Man Who Warned About the Holocaust

      by

      In the solo play “Remember This,” David Strathairn portrays Jan Karski, a witness to the Nazi genocide during World War II.The actor David Strathairn would rather you didn’t read this. He has his reasons.They’re not so much specific to his Off Broadway project — “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski,” the solo play he’s starring in for Theater for a New Audience — as they are rooted in the general principle of preserving some mystery for audience members who haven’t yet seen a show. He prefers to keep his art pristine.“If you have the facts before you have the emotive experience, it’s a different process,” Strathairn, 73, was saying the other day in a dressing room at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, where “Remember This” is in previews.By the time he made that point, he had been speaking for nearly an hour — about Karski, a member of the Polish Underground during World War II who warned the Allies to no avail of the Holocaust in progress, and about the play, in whose successive iterations Strathairn has portrayed Karski since 2014.Did Strathairn, then, take exception to his interview about the show even as he was giving it?“Kind of yeah,” he said, smiling behind his face mask and meaning it anyway. “I kind of do. Just, objectively speaking, I find that it diminishes the magic of the experience if they know too much coming in. They have preconceptions.”Strathairn — whose most cherished credits include the films “Nightmare Alley,” “Nomadland,” “Lincoln” and “Good Night, and Good Luck,” for which he received a best actor Academy Award nomination — also takes issue with critics who, as he put it, “lay the patient out on the table and you see every organ, every tumor.”Which doesn’t mean that Strathairn, who is currently on movie screens in an Atticus Finch-style role in “Where the Crawdads Sing” and was last seen on Broadway in 2012 opposite Jessica Chastain in “The Heiress,” is broadly anti-journalism.“There are things in the world that absolutely need to be outed, revealed, that need that transparency,” he said. “I don’t think the creative arts does.”So, a warning: Facts ahead. There’s zero chance, though, of this article spoiling everything about “Remember This,” let alone everything about Karski. There simply isn’t the space.Even if there were, Karski himself — who died in 2000 and was posthumously awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2012 — knew how abstract a thing can seem when it is imparted as a story, and how unignorably potent when it is experienced firsthand.Strathairn, left, with the play’s writers, Derek Goldman, center, and Clark Young during rehearsals for Theater for a New Audience’s production of “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski.”Emon Hassan for The New York TimesHours into “Shoah,” Claude Lanzmann’s colossal 1985 documentary about the Holocaust, an urbane, silver-haired man sits before the camera in suit and tie, gathering his courage to tell a story. This is Karski. He takes a breath.“Now I go back 35 years,” he begins, a strong Polish accent flavoring his words. But almost instantly his poise crumbles, and he begins to weep; the memories he is being asked to tap are too excruciating.“No. I don’t go back,” Karski says. As the camera watches, he flees the room.To Strathairn, who saw the nine-hour-plus “Shoah” in a single stretch when it was first released, that “microscopic moment” in the movie is “the portal into 35 years of silence.” In the theater’s dressing room, glasses perched atop his head, he traced a timeline of Karski’s life on the tabletop — events that, in Strathairn’s mind, are all contained somehow in that brief, tormented bit of film.At the start of the timeline, Karski’s childhood, when his Roman Catholic mother taught him to tell her when he saw “bad Catholic boys” throwing dead rats at Jews, so she could do something about it. Next his late 20s, in German-occupied Poland, when Jewish leaders sneaked him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a German concentration camp, so that he could tell the world what he’d seen happening there. Then the many postwar years when, having written a book about his experiences, he no longer spoke of them, even as he taught for decades in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Last, the chapter that began in the late 1970s, when Lanzmann convinced him that it was his responsibility to bear witness again for “Shoah” — which, after that initial loss of nerve, Karski did, and kept doing elsewhere.“Remember This,” which opens on Thursday in Brooklyn and is scheduled to run through Oct. 9, was created as a multicharacter piece at Georgetown for a centennial celebration in 2014 of Karski’s birth. Written by Derek Goldman, the artistic director of the university’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, and one of his former students, Clark Young, who graduated in 2009, it was initially titled “My Report to the World,” a phrase borrowed from the subtitle of Karski’s best-selling 1944 war memoir, “Story of a Secret State.”That book and E. Thomas Wood’s 1994 biography, “Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust,” were among the source materials for “Remember This,” alongside “Shoah” and other oral histories. The playwrights’ research also drew on the memories of people who knew Karski at Georgetown — and, in one case, Young said, at a local dentist’s office.In its ensemble form, the play traveled to Warsaw in 2014, and New York in 2015. Reshaped into a solo piece, it went to London in early 2020, and last year to Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington and Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Goldman, who directs the play, said that its current form allows Karski to stir “the moral conscience” as he talks to his students — that is, the audience — about his life and what he saw of the Holocaust.“Karski, I think, was that kind of teacher, who wanted to offer students access to the most elemental questions, because he had been grappling with them his whole life,” Goldman said. “‘How is this possible?’ ‘What does it mean to know?’ ‘What is a nation and what is a government if it can turn away from this?’”Goldman, 52, and Young, 35, both spoke of the failure that Karski felt when his eyewitness account of the Nazi slaughter, which he delivered in person to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, among numerous influential others, did not stop the Holocaust.“In many ways,” Young said, “I see him as someone who internalized a sense of failure that wasn’t his to hold. He was holding failures of nation states and individuals in power.”If that terrible sense of a vital mission not accomplished was part of Karski’s trauma, Strathairn observed that we can only speculate about the reasons for his decades of silence.“He never said why,” Strathairn said, and turned contemplative as he noted older generations’ sometimes overwhelming impulse to shield the younger from pain.“Do we impart horror upon our children? Or do we want to protect them?” he asked. “In many ways, we protect them from things that are part of life. We protect them from seeing us dying. We protect them from our grief, and we protect them from our fears. We don’t want to burden them with those things. And is that in service of their maturation, or is it not?“For me,” he continued, “that’s a teeter-totter. ‘I don’t want to talk about the war.’ ‘I don’t want my kid to think that the world is horrible and people did this to each other.’ ‘No, I’m going to stay on the sunny side of the street.’ Or do we prepare the next generation for the possibilities? Do we give them the awareness that this could happen again? In order to prevent that, you have to know what it was.”Onstage as Jan Karski, opening old wounds for his students to see, he is telling them what it was: barbarity. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      In ‘The Fabelmans,’ Steven Spielberg Himself Is the Star

      by

      But it’s Michelle Williams who burns brightest in this film based on Spielberg’s childhood, which just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans” is the movie every fall film festival was dying to have, but only Toronto got it. And at the Saturday-night premiere, the collective excitement was making people lose their minds.It wasn’t just the enthusiastic audience, many of whom had come straight from the well-received premiere of the “Knives Out” sequel “Glass Onion.” And it wasn’t just the giddiness of Cameron Bailey, who runs the Toronto International Film Festival, as he introduced the filmmaker for the first time. Even Spielberg himself got carried away in the madness.“I’m so glad I came to Toronto,” he said. Thank you, Steven. Same. #TIFF22 pic.twitter.com/wLAwQW58IW— Cameron Bailey (@cameron_tiff) September 11, 2022
      “I’m really glad we came to Toronto!” exclaimed the 75-year-old director, noting that this would be the first time a film of his had played at a film festival. That claim would appear to sweep away the New York Film Festival showings of “Bridge of Spies” and “Lincoln,” the Cannes premieres of “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and “The BFG,” and the South by Southwest bow of “Ready Player One,” but hey, sometimes you’ve got to clear the table before you can set it.And at least his lie felt emotionally true, since the stakes were so significant: By landing “The Fabelmans,” Toronto could fortify itself after two pandemic-diminished years, while Spielberg could claim the friendliest possible audience for his most personal film yet.Written by the director and his frequent collaborator Tony Kushner, “The Fabelmans” is an only slightly fictionalized retelling of Spielberg’s own coming-of-age. Sammy Fabelman (played as a teenager by Gabriel LaBelle) is a movie-mad kid who stages increasingly elaborate short films that star his sisters, classmates and semi-supportive parents. His dad, Burt (Paul Dano), is too swept up in his computer-programming job to understand Sammy’s artistic inclinations, but his mother, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), is a free spirit who never got to realize her dreams of working as a pianist and encourages Sammy to follow his bliss.Their mother-son bond is strong, and when Sammy films her dancing on a family trip and later shows her the edited footage, Mitzi beams. “You see me,” she says. But Sammy sometimes sees too much: As he gets older, he notices that Mitzi’s strong bond with her husband’s best friend (Seth Rogen) borders on an emotional affair. And as the family moves from New Jersey to Arizona and then finally to California, the ties that bind begin to fray.I found “The Fabelmans” to be only secondarily Spielberg’s origin story; primarily, it’s a look-at-what-she-can-do Michelle Williams vehicle, and the actress really goes for it, attacking this part like someone who knows she’s been handed her signature role. Based on Spielberg’s late mother, Leah, Mitzi is a dramatic personality, prone to flights of fancy and intense mood swings, and at any given moment, she’ll laugh, cry, sing or pack the kids into the car for an impromptu tornado chase. You love her, but she’s a lot — on this, the viewer and Sammy both agree — and Williams finds exactly the right moments to dial back the bigness and remind you that there is something private and vulnerable at the core of this very outgoing woman.Spielberg told the Toronto crowd that he’d had Williams in mind to play his mom ever since he saw her work in “Blue Valentine” (2010), which earned Williams the second of her four Oscar nominations; if she is campaigned as a supporting actress for “The Fabelmans” (as I suspect she will be, despite her ample screen time), this could very well propel the well-respected 42-year-old to her first win, just a year after Spielberg’s “West Side Story” actress Ariana DeBose topped that same race.Spielberg films always have plenty of Oscar upside, and “The Fabelmans” will be a strong contender in the picture and directing categories (and could even score a nod for Judd Hirsch, who puts in a scene-stealing cameo as Mitzi’s uncle), but the film is gentler, shaggier and more intimate than some of his other awards-season juggernauts, and there’s no need to oversell it at this early date. Even Spielberg, sensing all the hype in the room, sought to downplay speculation that “The Fabelmans” served as any sort of magnum-opus finale.“This is not because I’m going to retire and this is my swan song,” he told Toronto. “Don’t believe any of that!” More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed’ Wins Best Film at Venice Film Festival

      by

      The director, Laura Poitras, praised Nan Goldin, the photographer and subject of her film, in her acceptance speech.“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” directed by Laura Poitras, was awarded the Golden Lion for best film at the 79th Venice International Film Festival on Saturday by a competition jury led by Julianne Moore. The film, about the photographer Nan Goldin, was the rare documentary to win the Golden Lion and won over strong competitors.“I’ve never met anyone like Nan,” Poitras said in her acceptance speech, praising Goldin as “courageous” in her protests against the Sackler family, whom Poitras described as “ruthless.” The film examines Goldin’s art, life and her activism in protesting the family and Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, for their roles in the opioid crisis. Poitras, whose 2014 film “Citizenfour” won the Oscar for best documentary, thanked the festival for recognizing that “documentary is cinema.”Poitras also called for the release of Jafar Panahi, the imprisoned Iranian director who directed “No Bears,” which premiered at the festival, and encouraged “all of us to do whatever we can.” She also spoke of the memory of the late influential documentary executive, Diane Weyermann.The 79th edition of the festival opened with Noah Baumbach’s “White Noise,” an adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel, starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig. Other prominent films included “The Whale,” “Blonde,” “Tár,” “Bones and All,” “The Banshees of Inisherin,” “Un Couple,” “Bardo,” “The Son” and “The Eternal Daughter.”Unlike many other festivals, the Venice Film Festival continued in person during the past two years, despite the pandemic. But this year, the Venice event especially thrived. Stars like Timothée Chalamet and Ana de Armas enthralled the robust crowds, and critical debate and red-carpet buzz were never in short supply. (Still, Covid remained a presence: Absent at the ceremony was one competition jury member, the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, who Moore explained had tested positive.)The Silver Lion Grand Jury prize went to Alice Diop’s “Saint Omer,” her feature about a novelist who becomes engrossed in the trial of a woman accused of leaving her baby on a beach to perish — a story based on a true tale. The Silver Lion award for best director went to Luca Guadagnino for “Bones and All,” the first Lion for the Italian film director.The Special Jury prize went to Panahi for “No Bears.” His award was accepted by two of the film’s actors, Mina Kavani and Reza Heydari, in his absence. The audience gave a standing ovation.The Volpi Cup for best actress was awarded to Cate Blanchett, who played the fictional famous composer at the center of “Tár,” directed by Todd Field. The best actor award went to Colin Farrell for his portrayal of an Irishman whose pal abruptly ends their friendship in Martin McDonagh’s “The Banshees of Inisherin.” Taylor Russell won the Marcello Mastroianni Award, which recognizes an outstanding emerging actor, for her performance as a young cannibal in “Bones and All.”The best screenplay honor was given to McDonagh, who wrote and directed “The Banshees of Inisherin” and who won the same honor in 2017 for “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” Diop’s “Saint Omer” also received the Lion of the Future Award for best debut feature. (Diop has already directed an acclaimed feature, the documentary “We,” which won a top award at the Berlin Film Festival.)In the Orizzonti section of the awards, which runs parallel to the primary competition, the top honor was given to Iranian filmmaker Houman Seyedi’s “World War III.” The film also featured a best actor award winner in Mohsen Tanabandeh, who played the protagonist.This edition’s Golden Lions for lifetime achievement went to Paul Schrader, whose film “Master Gardener” played out of competition, and to Catherine Deneuve. A Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award went to Walter Hill, whose film “Dead for a Dollar” played out of competition. More