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      Let’s Look Back on 2021, When We Couldn’t Stop Looking Back

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      There’s now a thriving cottage industry for content that re-examines the recent past through a contemporary critical lens. Is that a good thing?Time is an abstract and collectively imaginary concept, and often our brains must latch onto contemporary metaphors to fathom its churn. So I will say, with all due respect to our (gulp?) probable future president Matthew McConaughey, this was the year I no longer felt that time was a flat circle.I found it to be moving more like a social media feed, dominated by freshly excavated and somewhat randomly retweeted remembrances of the recent past. A bit of cultural flotsam from the last 25 years would suddenly drift back up to the top of our collective consciousness and spread wildly, demanding renewed attention in the context of the present.Sometimes this was harmless fun — a welcome distraction from the fact that, this being Year 2 of a global pandemic, the actual present was depressing and exhausting to think about for too long. So everybody started watching “Seinfeld” and “The Sopranos” again. Taylor Swift released note-for-note replications of two old albums, allowing everybody a brief opportunity to get mad at an ex-boyfriend she had stopped dating a solid decade ago. “Bennifer,” the most gloriously of-their-time celebrity couple of the early aughts, were back together, baby! It was almost enough to make you want to live-tweet a contemporary rewatch of “Gigli” and declare it an unfairly maligned and subversive take on sexual fluidity, or something. (I said “almost.”) In 2021, the turn-of-the-millennium past was back in a big way, even if the eyes and ears through which we were taking it all in had grown older and — just maybe — wiser.Documentaries like “Framing Britney Spears” helped bring fresh attention and outrage to old injustices in part because they took the popular form of the streaming true-crime series.Brenda Chase/Online USA, Inc.,via Getty ImagesA word I sometimes noticed bandied about this year when talking about pop culture was “presentism.” Like so many other terms whose meaning has been distorted and hollowed out by contemporary, social-media-driven use — “problematic,” “intersectionality,” “critical race theory” — it began its life as jargon confined mostly to college classrooms and undergraduate term papers. As the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, “presentism” is a philosophical term describing “the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts.” To translate that into pop-culture speak, it is the modern tendency to look at an old video of David Letterman grilling Lindsay Lohan on late-night TV and feeling compelled to tweet, “Yas queen, drag his ass!”But this year some of these reassessments went refreshingly deeper, and they were long past due. What’s the opposite of partying like it’s 1999? Recycling the empties, dumping out the ashtrays and soberly assessing the damage to property or — worse — people? Whatever it was, there was suddenly, and very belatedly, a lot of it going on in 2021.All year, headlines and trending topics were monopolized by old, familiar names suddenly being scrutinized under new lights, using language and means of critical thinking that had gone mainstream in the wake of both the #MeToo reckoning and last summer’s protests for racial justice. The lines separating heroes and villains, victims and monsters, were being redrawn in real time. Flashbacks to salacious media coverage of the late ’90s and early 2000s were reminding people how horribly both Britney Spears and Janet Jackson had been treated in the court of popular opinion, and how Justin Timberlake’s white male privilege had allowed him to skate through both of these controversies unscathed. (The New York Times released documentaries about both Spears and Jackson.) In a New York courtroom, the victims of R. Kelly were telling the same stories they’d been telling for years and finally being heard, if damnably too late to reverse the trauma he had inflicted in plain sight, while far too many of us turned away..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-1g3vlj0{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-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.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;}So many of these conversations were so long overdue, kicked down the road because of how difficult it is for masses of people to face hard truths. But documentaries like “Framing Britney Spears,” “Allen V. Farrow” and “Surviving R. Kelly” (from 2019) helped bring fresh attention and outrage to old injustices in part because they took the popular form of the streaming true-crime series, using a familiar narrative vocabulary to sharpen viewers’ understanding of familiar events they thought they knew all about. As uncomfortable as most of these documentaries were to watch, their mass consumption helped shift public opinion, set the terms of cultural conversation, and in some cases maybe even expedited justice.Victims of R. Kelly were finally heard this year, if regrettably too late to reverse the trauma he had inflicted for years in plain sight.Tannen Maury/EPA, via ShutterstockBut not every reconsideration felt as vital as the next. By now it feels like there is also a thriving and somewhat formulaic cottage industry for content that reconsiders the recent past through a contemporary critical lens. In September, Rolling Stone released an updated version of its “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” list, a fascinating and (given the racial and gender biases of its previous iterations) even noble endeavor whose critical perspectives will nonetheless, in time, look as dated and of-their-moment as those of the one it replaced. A month later, the online music magazine Pitchfork caused a brief furor when it “rescored” 19 of its old reviews, seemingly to reflect changing public opinions. (I worked there from 2011 to 2014, and one of the rescored reviews was mine.)Operating from a similar point of view, HBO has released several music documentaries in partnership with the entertainment and sports website The Ringer that invite the viewer to relive massively popular ’90s cultural phenomena (the rise of Alanis Morissette; Woodstock ’99) through the seemingly more enlightened perspective of 2021. (I worked at The Ringer from 2016-19.) Directed by the filmmaker Garret Price, “Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage” first came to HBO Max in July. The documentary makes the case — through repeated and rather heavy-handed montages of Columbine, the Clintons and music videos featuring angry young men in cargo shorts — that 1999 was a very particular time in pop culture, seemingly alien to anyone who didn’t live through it. The economy was prosperous and so bands were apolitical, raging against nothing in particular, or so we were told.“The intention was to do something contemporary,” the Woodstock promoter Michael Lang says at the end of the film, summing up the hubris of the original festival’s turn-of-the-millennium update. Woodstock ’99’s catastrophic failures — countless sexual assaults; several preventable deaths; massive, horrifying crowds of white people gleefully rapping the N-word — are presented in the documentary with a comforting assurance that this was the kind of thing that only could have happened in the wacky, angsty late ’90s. Never again! Right?It is surreal to watch this documentary in the aftermath of November’s Astroworld Festival tragedy, which led to 10 deaths. The parallels to Woodstock ’99 (or, since time is still kind of a flat circle, the 1969 Altamont Free Concert) are haunting, with security forces that were inadequate to control such large crowds. The past, it seemed, wasn’t even past.At one point in “Woodstock 99,” the music critic Steven Hyden reflects back on the aura surrounding the original 1969 festival, and how much of it was constructed by the idyllic documentary “Woodstock.” “The problem is that instead of learning from mistakes that were made, we instead created this romanticized mythology in the form of the documentary,” Hyden said. “People watched the film, and they chose to believe that’s the way it really was.”Todd Haynes’s “The Velvet Underground” didn’t so much depict the past through the limited critical lens of the present, but instead conjured its own visceral temporality. Apple TV+I wonder if something like the opposite is happening now: The allure of presentism is causing people to romanticize contemporary perspectives at the expense of an excessively vilified past. It’s uncomfortable to dwell in gray areas, to admit imperfections, to acknowledge blind spots — better to have a 100-minute documentary or four-part podcast to allow us to tidily “reconsider” something that we got wrong the first time around, so we never have to think too hard about it again.But to believe the linear, one-dimensional narrative that Woodstock ’99 or misogynistic media coverage of Britney Spears can only be visible in hindsight is to gloss over the fact that plenty of people felt uncomfortable with these phenomena while they were happening. To dutifully perform belated horror at how tabloids wrote about Spears in the early 2000s, how macho rock culture was in the late ’90s, how blithely racist white people who listen to hip-hop used to be, is in some ways to believe a comforting fiction that all of these problems have been solved once and for all.The past was imperfect, yes, but so is the present. Inevitably, the future will be too. The lesson to be taken from all these reconsiderations is not necessarily how much wiser we are now, but how difficult it is to see the biases of the present moment. If anything, these looks back should be reminders to stay vigilant against presentism, conventional wisdom and the numbing orthodoxy of groupthink. They invite us to wonder about the blind spots of our current cultural moment, and to watch out for the sorts of behaviors and assumptions that will, in 20 years’ time, look nearsighted enough to appear in a kitschy montage about the way things were.The best movie I saw this year broke this cycle, essentially by presenting another, more harmonious way the past and present coexist. Todd Haynes’s remarkable and immersive documentary “The Velvet Underground” didn’t so much depict the past through the limited critical lens of the present, but instead conjured its own visceral temporality — a little bit like Andy Warhol did in his own slow, strange art films.I was not alive in 1967, the year the Velvet Underground released its debut album, but for a heady and hypnotic two hours, I could have sworn I was. Split-screen images suggested the validity of multiple truths. The music’s blaring brilliance rained down self-evidently rather than having to be overexplained by talking heads. Lou Reed, John Cale, Nico and Moe Tucker all seemed, at various moments, to be both geniuses and jerks. Neither glorified nor condemned, 1967 came flickering alive and seemed about as wonderful and awful a time to be alive as 1999 or 2021. Or, it stands to reason, 2022. More

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      I Watched ‘Encanto’ With My Dad. It Brought Him Back Home.

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      The animated Disney movie is set in Colombia, where my father is from — a place he rarely talks about. Would he fall for the film?The first time I saw the teaser trailer for Disney’s “Encanto” — an animated musical set in Colombia — two feelings flooded me. First came a surge of excitement for what it could be. Then, almost instantly, a shift to the defensive. “They’d better not mess this up,” I thought.After “Narcos” hit Netflix in August 2015, glossing drug lords, the Medellín cartel and cocaine with a sheen of glamour, couples dressed for Halloween as Pablo Escobar and his wife, María Henao. Escobar’s mug shot and mustache were plastered onto canvas tote bags. Introducing myself as Colombian American became tinged with perceived intrigue — before “Narcos,” my peers may not have immediately associated Colombia with drug violence. Now, the country was a curiosity.But “Encanto” was a chance for a new generation to view Colombia in a fresh light.In October, I watched an early screening of “Encanto” for an article I was working on. Not long into the film — as towering wax palm trees filled the screen — my eyes glazed with tears. The filmmakers hadn’t messed it up. Directors Jared Bush and Byron Howard, it turns out, had a close relationship with the Colombian filmmakers Juan Rendon and Natalie Osma, with whom they traveled on a research trip to Colombia. A group of Latino Disney Animation employees called Familia shared their experiences and perspectives to help shape the film. Charise Castro Smith, who wrote the screenplay with Bush and is a co-director, is Cuban American.The movie captivated me, as someone who had grown up with my heritage held an arm’s length away from me. I knew where my father’s family came from — I had visited Colombia — but I always itched to know more. But what about my dad, who left home behind to build a new one?“Encanto” means “enchantment” or “spell” in Spanish, and the movie lives up to its name: Years ago, Alma Madrigal fled her home while escaping armed conflict. She saved her three infant children, Julieta, Pepa and Bruno, but lost her husband, Pedro. Devastated, Alma clung to the candle she was using to light her way, which became enchanted. Its magic imbues each member of the Madrigal family with a fantastical gift when they come of age — except for Julieta’s youngest daughter, Mirabel.Julieta can heal physical ailments with the food she cooks (often arepas de queso or buñuelos). Pepa’s moods influence the weather, and Bruno sees visions of the future. Isabela, one of Julieta’s two older daughters, makes flowers bloom; Luisa, her sister, has superhuman strength. Pepa’s three children each have a power, like talking to animals. And our protagonist, Mirabel? Well, she never got a gift.For me, as the only cousin in my family born outside of Colombia — and the only one not raised speaking Spanish — that resonated.My father, Francisco Zornosa, is from Cali; he emigrated to the United States when he was around my age, at 25. He was born a year after a five-decade-long armed conflict began in Colombia and grew up amid warfare between leftist guerrilla groups, right-wing paramilitaries and government forces. It’s an aspect of his childhood we’ve never really talked about.Laura Zornosa, left, and her father, Francisco, at the Castillo San Felipe de Barajas in Cartagena.Laura ZornosaI had just started college in 2016 when the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was signed. Growing up, I was fascinated by the mysterious land where my dad was from, where my grandmother, aunt, uncle and cousins lived. But with my fair skin, red hair and mangled Spanish, I would stand out like a sore American thumb. It was deemed too dangerous for me to visit.Once the peace agreement was signed, though, my incessant wheedling began. Finally, my father caved: We embarked on a tour of his homeland. We stayed with my grandmother in Cali, nestled comfortably between the mountains. We drank in the sun in Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast. And we hiked through Cocora Valley in the Zona Cafetera, where the wax palm trees stretched impossibly tall, through the mist toward the sky.Walking out of the screening, I knew I had to show “Encanto” to my dad. “Look!” I wanted to tell him. “I recognize these trees! That animal! This pastry!” I wanted to hold up a shiny piece of him — of both of us — to be proud of.On Thanksgiving weekend, I dragged him to a theater. Maybe 20 minutes in, his glasses came off and the tissues came out. I had only ever seen him cry once, when his father died.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      This Monster's Not Eager, but His Coach Is Ready to Rumble

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      Steve is being pressed into service as a wrestler in training, but if he had a choice he’d prefer a rumba to a rumble.The lackluster computer-animated movie “Rumble” hinges on what should be a boisterous high concept: Colossal monsters, living peacefully among people, compete as pro wrestlers. Armed with human trainers and cheered by fiery hometown fans, these fantastical creatures ascend to sports superstardom.The story takes place in a wrestling-obsessed town called Stoker, where the tenacious teenager Winnie (voiced by Geraldine Viswanathan) vows to fill the void left by her late father, a renowned coach, and his title-holding titan, Rayburn. Seeking a new contender to represent the town, she sees promise in the pudgy, horned Steve (Will Arnett), an amateur who’s built his career on losing fixed matches. He also happens to be Rayburn’s son.Cycling through daddy issues, lazy quips and training montages, Winnie and Steve rev up to reclaim the glory of their fathers. But while their goal is clear enough, the director, Hamish Grieve, leaves their identities only half formed. Spunk and moxie define Winnie, yet for a central character, her thoughts, feelings and interests beyond motivating her desultory new pal are not. And once Steve reveals that his true passion isn’t wrestling but salsa dancing, it’s a wonder he doesn’t give up the Goliath game and join a dance troupe instead.For such a tactile aesthetic, the visual jokes are few, and of the movie’s WWE references, a fleeting voice cameo of Michael Buffer as an announcer is the only one that resonates. Low on inspiration and creative juice, “Rumble” would like to bring down the house but hardly causes a tremor.RumbleRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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      ‘The Hand of God’ Review: A Portrait of the Cineaste as a Young Man

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      Paolo Sorrentino’s autobiographical drama about growing up in Naples is sensual, sad and occasionally sublime.What good are movies? According to one line of thinking cited in “The Hand of God,” they are useless except as a “distraction from reality,” something we need because “reality is lousy.”No argument here! I should note that those opinions are attributed to none other than Federico Fellini. It’s the mid-1980s, and he has come to Naples to cast his next film. We don’t see him onscreen, but his words reach the ears of Fabio Schisa (Filippo Scotti), the skinny, watchful teenager at the center of this coming-of-age story.It’s also the story of how a young filmmaker wrests his vocation from a reality that is by turns ridiculous, enchanted, bewildering and tragic. Lousy? Perhaps, but also for Paolo Sorrentino, the writer and director, a treasury of material to work with and through. Sorrentino — who in his previous features (“Il Divo,” “The Great Beauty”) and television series (“The Young Pope,” “The New Pope”) has swooped like a curious, keen-eyed bird through the social, political and sexual thickets of modern Italy — has now turned his attention to his own past.There are precedents, both in Italian cinema and in the work of some of Sorrentino’s contemporaries. “The Hand of God” keeps company with recent memoirish movies like Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma,” Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast” and Joanna Hogg’s two-part “Souvenir.” To keep it Fellini: If “The Great Beauty,” an Oscar winner in 2014, can be called Sorrentino’s “La Dolce Vita,” then this is his “Amarcord.”But every autobiographical film is, almost by definition, a genre unto itself: a layer cake of feeling, memory, imagination and score-settling for which no recipe exists. Fabio — who usually goes by the diminutive nickname Fabietto — never meets Fellini, but late in the movie, he encounters a lesser-known Italian director named Antonio Capuano (Ciro Capano) and begs him for advice. Stripping down for a late-night swim in the Bay of Naples, Capuano harangues his would-be protégé about the importance of courage, independence and originality in the pursuit of cinema. It’s all a bit abstract and rhetorical, or it would be if this particular piece of cinema were not so visibly and palpably full of those qualities.And much else besides. Do movies distract from the lousiness of reality or try to redeem it, alchemizing its awfulness into beauty? “The Hand of God” leans hard into the second possibility, a tendency it shares with Sorrentino’s other work. However sordid, sad or grotesque the raw material — addiction and Mafia violence (“The Consequences of Love”), rock-star middle age (“This Must Be the Place”), Silvio Berlusconi (“Loro”) — he is a compulsive, unabashed aestheticizer.“The Hand of God” begins with a ravishing aerial view of Naples, backlit by sunrise. The next shot is of a noisy, angry nighttime traffic jam, but this too becomes an occasion for delectation, as a beautiful woman steps out of a bus queue to speak with a gray-bearded gentleman in an antique car.The man (Enzo Decaro) may or may not be who he says he is — San Gennaro, the city’s patron saint — but the woman is absolutely Fabietto’s Aunt Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri). Her nephew regards her with an unsteady, adolescent mixture of lust and compassion. The movie shares his sentiments.The extended family they occupy is a noisy, caustic, sometimes violent clan. A genealogical chart is not supplied: The audience is tossed into the domestic scrum like a new spouse or a country cousin, to make sense of things as they happen. We are invited to a sprawling luncheon full of bad manners, brutal teasing and useless advice. Aunt Patrizia stretches out naked on the deck of a boat. A foul-tempered matriarch in a fur coat bites into a ball of mozzarella as if it were the apple in the Garden of Eden.Given this background, how could Fabietto not grow up to make movies? His nuclear family is equally chaotic, though less garishly dysfunctional than some of the collateral branches. His mother, Maria (the wonderful Teresa Saponangelo), is adept at juggling oranges and playing pranks. (One of them involves another Italian cinematic notable, Franco Zeffirelli, whose assistant Maria impersonates on the phone.) Her husband, Saverio (Toni Servillo, a fixture of the Sorrentino cinematic universe), works at the Bank of Naples, though he proudly calls himself a communist. As a matter of ideological principle, he refuses to buy a television with a remote control.Fabietto’s brother, Marchino (Marlon Joubert), is an aspiring actor until an audition with Fellini, who finds his face “too conventional.” Sorrentino shares Fellini’s taste for odd, sometimes grotesque human faces and physiques. His most Felliniesque quality, though, may be his commitment to emotional anarchy. Feelings don’t come in neat packages or move in straight lines. Anguish and amusement are neighbors, sometimes even synonyms. Delight swerves into pain. Sarcasm gives way suddenly to earnest sentiment.The disharmony in the Schisa household is comically banal — an all-but-unseen sister monopolizes the bathroom; an aristocratic landlady bangs on the ceiling with a broom — until Saverio’s infidelity cranks it up to melodrama. And then, almost exactly halfway through the film, something terrible happens, a hammer-blow of fate that transforms the family, Fabietto and “The Hand of God” itself.The title, by the way, refers not to theology but to the history of soccer. When Sorrentino’s Neapolitans are not bickering, gossiping or ogling one another, they are consumed with the question of whether the great Argentine midfielder Diego Maradona will come play for the city’s team. When he does, it seems like a miracle, and glimpses of him on the field or on television are like small eruptions of magic — especially the notorious hand-assisted goal in the 1986 World Cup that Maradona attributed to divine intervention.Fabietto is less a fairy-tale prince than an apprentice sorcerer. Scotti, graceful and alert, is a quiet presence but not a passive one. The shift in Fabietto’s perspective from no-longer-boy to almost-man is the subtlest achievement in a film that isn’t much interested in subtlety.A lot happens to him, some of it what you would expect from a movie about growing up. He makes a new friend (a smuggler named Armando, played with down-to-earth mischief by Biagio Manna). He loses his virginity. His experiences may be, to some degree, conventional, but Sorrentino refuses to treat anything as ordinary. His compositions are lush, sensual and strange. (The images are captured by the cinematographer Daria D’Antonio.) At times, it can seem like too much. At times, it is too much!But I wouldn’t say that this movie is a distraction from reality, any more than I would call it a work of realism. It’s a beautiful tautology: a true-to-life movie about a life made for movies.The Hand of GodRated R. Aunt Patrizia. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ at 20: When Wes Anderson Imagined New York

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      The film’s vision of the city is at once entirely made up and very real seeming, both dated and contemporary. But the movie couldn’t outrun current events.Wes Anderson’s sprawling comedy-drama “The Royal Tenenbaums,” released 20 years ago this month, tells the story of a family of famed child geniuses, the disappointments and neuroses that define their lives as adults and the estranged father whose (feigned) illness brings them back together, under one roof in Upper Manhattan. It’s Anderson’s only film to date shot entirely in and around New York City, his sole entry in the canon of Gotham cinema, which was so formative to his youth in the Southwest.“I wanted to live in New York when I was young,” Anderson, a Houston native, confessed to The New York Daily News in 2012. “So many books and plays and movies that I love were set in New York. It really gave me an idea of the city before I had even moved here.”But that wording — “an idea of the city” — is telling. Anderson wasn’t seeking the authenticity and verisimilitude of a native New Yorker (a Spike Lee or Martin Scorsese, for example); in fact, though “The Royal Tenenbaums” was shot on location, its settings are unrecognizable, and the places it name-checks leave Gothamites scratching their heads. The bulk of the action takes place in the shambling Tenenbaum home on “Archer Avenue,” though daughter Margot has “a private studio in Mockingbird Heights” and patriarch Royal has spent the past several decades at the “Lindbergh Palace Hotel.” A secondary character teaches at “Brooks College”; others travel via the “Green Line Bus” or the “22nd Avenue Express” train; mention is made of the “City Public Archives,” “Maddox Hill Cemetery,” “Little Tokyo,” “Kobe General Hospital,” “the Valenzuela Bridge” and, in a true feat of city-stretching ingenuity, “the 375th St. Y.”The result is a New York that blurs fact and fiction, a fantasy vision of the city, less reflective of the realities of urban life than the fanciful notions of them ingrained in Anderson’s sensibility. Many an observer has noted the resemblances between the Tenenbaum brood and the Glass family of J.D. Salinger’s short fiction — much of which initially appeared in The New Yorker, a publication whose wry, busy, detailed covers seem no small influence on Anderson’s idiosyncratic visual style. (His most recent film, “The French Dispatch,” takes the influence even further, unspooling like an issue of a New Yorker-style magazine.) Other literary influences from the city abound as well, including the colorful personalities of A.J. Liebling’s profiles, the strained family dynamics of John Cheever’s short stories, and the hotel life of Kay Thompson’s “Eloise” books. In a way, “The Royal Tenenbaums” is the inverse of many New York movies of the 1930s and 1940s — when on-location photography was so rare, and film production so centralized in Hollywood, that ex-New Yorker writers and designers recreated an idealized, fantasy vision of Gotham on backlots and soundstages clear across the country.Anderson was far from a tourist when he made “The Royal Tenenbaums”: after a bumpy migration from Texas to Los Angeles, he moved to Manhattan in 1999 and found it a better fit. (He currently lives in Paris.) Yet he maintained that apotheosized idea of the city, born from those formative years of consuming “Talk of the Town” items and witticisms from Algonquin alumni. “It’s an alternate universe,” the historian Mark Asch writes in his book “New York Movies,” explaining that it’s “familiar yet out of reach, like all the tattered books written by the Tenenbaums and dusty magazines featuring them on the cover.”The picture’s vague sense of geography extends to its historical timeliness. There are no contemporary references of note, and the costumes and cars are not of any specific era. The hotel where Royal first lives and then works feels transplanted from the 1940s (complete with multiple elevator operators), and the neighborhoods seem closer to the city of the ’70s than the 2000s — a bit trashy, decorated by graffiti, prowled by rusted-out gypsy cabs and thoroughbred mice. “Wes wanted it to be Nowheresville, New York, a kind of New York but not New York,” the production designer David Wasco explained to Newsday. He added that while the movie comes off as a valentine to New York, “that was not intentional. We went to the trouble to redesign the license plates and the street signs, which are variations on the old yellow street signs with the camel bump on them. He’s really specific about wanting those things.”The family home was a real residence on Convent Avenue in Hamilton Heights.CompassThe Tenenbaum house on Archer Avenue seems a bit otherworldly as well. Anderson spent months searching for the right location. “It needed to be a New York house that wasn’t stereotypical, and where you’d have a real strong sense of family history,” he told The New York Observer. Obviously, finding the kind of big, shambling, multilevel home he was looking for on the island of Manhattan was a big ask, but they finally found it in Hamilton Heights, specifically at 144th Street and Convent Avenue. Anderson was so in love with the house that he rewrote his script to better accommodate it, though contacting its owner for permission to shoot was, at first, difficult. The feat was ultimately accomplished by leaving a note on the door; the owners had been elusive because they had just purchased the vacant home, and had not yet begun their planned, and extensive, renovations. By the time Anderson and company rented it for six months of prep and shooting — performing many of the structural repairs themselves — the house had paid for itself.Yet for all of Anderson’s effort to place his film in a New York free of modern markers, one pang of recognition was unintended but unavoidable. Son Chas (Ben Stiller) is in the midst of a nervous breakdown following the death of his wife in a plane crash; he’s in a perpetual state of fear and paranoia, particularly about the safety of his sons. “It’s been a rough year, Dad,” he tells his father near the end of the film, following a particularly, terrifyingly close call.For audiences at the New York Film Festival, where “The Royal Tenenbaums” first unspooled in October 2001, Chas’s state of mind seemed undeniably, unnervingly contemporary.Jason Bailey is the author of the new book “Fun City Cinema: New York and the Movies That Made It,” a history of the city and movies about it. More

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      Sterlin Harjo Can Do a Lot More Than ‘Reservation Dogs’

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      The filmmaker directed “Love and Fury,” a Netflix documentary about Native American artists, before his hit Hulu series.Sterlin Harjo has had a year.In August, FX on Hulu released the series “Reservation Dogs,” the acclaimed dark comedy about four Native American teenagers in rural Oklahoma that Harjo created with Taika Waititi. The next month, Harjo presented a prize at the Emmy Awards alongside the show’s four young breakout stars. Two days before I talked to him, “Reservation Dogs” won the Gotham Award for short format breakout series. (Was he expecting it? “I was not. I would have had less wine.”)And to top it off, Netflix this month released “Love and Fury,” Harjo’s second documentary, about Native artists navigating their careers, both in the United States and abroad. What happens, the film asks, when they push Native art into a postcolonial world?The dancer Emily Johnson, as seen in Harjo’s “Love and Fury.”Netflix For roughly a year, Harjo and his crew followed more than 20 artists, few of whom were complete strangers: Members of the band Black Belt Eagle Scout, the recording project of Katherine Paul, sometimes stay with him in Tulsa, Okla., when they are on tour. Tommy Orange, the author of the acclaimed “There There,” asked Harjo to moderate an event he was speaking at. (Harjo then filmed the event for this documentary.)Harjo, of course, is a Native artist, too: The Seminole and Muscogee Creek filmmaker directed three features (“Four Sheets to the Wind,” “Barking Water” and “Mekko”) and a documentary (“This May Be the Last Time”) before brainstorming “Reservation Dogs” over tequilas with Waititi.These artists pass through one another’s orbits constantly, drawing closer and closer together. As he explained on a recent call, Harjo wanted to express that notion himself — but through the lens of community.Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Why love and fury? How are those two concepts related?As artists, I think collectively we have all of these different experiences and these different types of survival that we come from. And you can take that survival, you can take any sort of oppression, and feel bitter and feel like things are hopeless. Because some of us are displaced, some of us have lost our language, a lot of us have, there’s a lot of abuse in boarding schools, a lot of things that happened throughout history. Not just Western expansion. It was also a lot of things, a lot of U.S. policies, that really did oppress our people.And so you can take that and convert that into feeling bitter and angry. Or you can take that anger and turn it into love and creation. And I think that’s what each of these artists do. All of them are connected to community, all of them have community-driven work. And they take this history and try to make sense of it and express themselves in this way that people can connect to. And I think that that is love.Devery Jacobs, left, and Paulina Alexis in “Reservation Dogs,” which Harjo created with Taika Waititi.Shane Brown/FXThe last film you made was in 2015. Does it feel different this time around, after “Reservation Dogs”?I made this before “Reservation Dogs.” So I was making this very low-budget, and I just really wanted to tell a story that needed to be told. Contemporary Native art has not been looked at and presented in a way that I felt like it should be. There’s such a dated view of what Native art is in the world. I’m friends with all of these artists, and I’ve just known artists forever. It felt like an opportunity to show this world that hasn’t been seen and also help reframe Native art.I wanted it to organically expand. So if I’m filming with one artist and then I meet a couple more artists, I would follow them and go do stuff with them.I’ve done many documentaries where I do the sit-down interview with slow motion B-roll over it, and that’s great. But I wanted to do something different. I purposely didn’t do a lot of sit-down interviews. I was looking at a lot of Les Blank films, specifically, “A Poem Is a Naked Person,” about [the musician-songwriter] Leon Russell. But you watch the film, and it’s really about this time period [the early 1970s].We watched this documentary called “Heartworn Highways” that’s about Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, back in the ’70s. It was what it sounds like: It’s a visual document of what was happening. That’s what I wanted to do with this: film people doing their thing.Did you go into this with specific people you knew you were going to follow?Yeah, originally it was [the singer] Micah P. Hinson, [the interdisciplinary artist] Cannupa Hanska Luger, [the painter] Haley Greenfeather English and my friend Penny Pitchlynn, who has the band Labrys. Penny’s tour didn’t happen, so I didn’t end up going with her on tour. She’s still on the film, but [the dancer] Emily Johnson becomes a bigger part of the documentary. And it was really following them, and then organically letting it expand with other people.I wanted to show this community: how everyone’s connected in this Native art world. If you look at “Reservation Dogs,” it’s similar; it’s about a community. I’m really interested in community-driven filmmaking and storytelling.You’ve now made three features and two documentaries. Is there as much room for artistic freedom with documentaries as there is with a feature film?There’s not, but I think it’s just a different way of telling a story; I really like the boundaries that you have with documentary. With “Love and Fury,” I set up these rules [for] each person on the camera, including myself. I said, “Act like you’re the only person in the room getting footage, like it’s 1970 and we only have one camera.” If you don’t get it, no one will.We all shot with zoom lenses. So instead of cutting and reframing, we could zoom in to do close-ups or zoom out for wides. The idea was, act like we’re not editing. So don’t do a fast zoom; let it be fluid so I can keep it in the film. I love working that way because it’s a challenge. And it’s very different from the control you have on a narrative. There’s something in that challenge that I really like as a storyteller.What do you think the documentary itself, and these artists, have to say about endurance?All of these artists have been working for so many years. And we’re in a time period right now, myself included, where people want to pay attention to Native art and Native stories, and there’s talk of inclusion and diversity. I think that they all just kept working, even though there was no money and no way of guaranteeing they would have careers. And the fact that they kept pushing and keep pushing to this day is just a testament to their endurance, but also their people’s endurance. I think that that’s what drives us: our people survived a lot of things, and our endurance in this art world is connected to that. More

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      National Film Registry Adds 25 New Films, Including 'Return of the Jedi'

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      Those movies, along with “Selena,” “Wall-E” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” are among 25 selected by the Librarian of Congress.It’s not just Gollum who thinks a certain ring is precious.The first in Peter Jackson’s epic trilogy of films based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels, “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” (2001), is among the motion pictures that have been chosen for preservation this year on the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. Also being added are the final installment in another beloved trilogy, “Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi,” and the disarmingly sweet Pixar comedy “Wall-E.”On Tuesday, the library plans to make its annual announcement that 25 more films, dating from 1902 to 2008, will be honored for their historical and cultural significance and added to the registry, helping to preserve them for future generations.The selection of “Return of the Jedi” (1983) is the culmination of a yearslong campaign by “Star Wars” fans to add the film to the registry. Hispanic lawmakers and experts earlier this year had also pushed for the inclusion of “Selena,” Gregory Nava’s 1997 biopic of the Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez that starred Jennifer Lopez in her first major film role. Supporters hoped that choosing it could serve as an example that would help open more doors for Latinos in movies and television.A group of notable films are also among the selections: “Sounder,” Martin Ritt’s 1972 drama about a family of Black sharecroppers in 1930s Louisiana that earned Cicely Tyson an Oscar nomination for best actress; “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” Wes Craven’s 1984 horror classic that starred Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger; and “Wall-E,” Andrew Stanton’s 2008 Pixar sci-fi film about the last robot left on Earth, which won an Oscar for best animated feature.This year’s class also includes a pair of cult favorites: “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,” Robert Aldrich’s 1962 thriller about an aging child star (Bette Davis) left to care for her sister (Joan Crawford), and “Pink Flamingos,” John Waters’s 1972 underground comedy starring Divine.The library noted that the lineup includes a number of films by influential directors of color, among them “The Watermelon Woman” (1996), the first feature by Cheryl Dunye, who also starred as a young Black lesbian struggling to make a documentary about a beautiful actress; “Cooley High” (1975), Michael Schultz’s comedy about Black high school seniors in 1960s Chicago; and “Chicana” (1979), Sylvia Morales’s 22-minute documentary tracing the history of Chicana and Mexican women.Three documentaries that address racially motivated violence against people of color have also been selected: “The Murder of Fred Hampton” (1971), Howard Alk and Mike Gray’s look at the leader of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party (Hampton was also the subject of a studio drama this year, “Judas and the Black Messiah”); “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” (1987), Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña’s examination of the fatal beating of a young Chinese American engineer by two white men in Detroit; and “Requiem-29” (1970), David Garcia’s chronicle of a brutal police attack on Chicano protesters in Los Angeles in 1970 that left the journalist Ruben Salazar dead.The lineup also honors several silent films that challenged stereotypes, including the oldest film in this year’s class, “Ringling Brothers Parade Film” (1902), a three-minute recording of a circus parade in Indianapolis that also shows a prosperous northern Black community. “The Flying Ace” (1926) is an aviation romance with an all-Black cast, and “Hellbound Train” (1930), made by the Black evangelical couple James and Eloyce Gist, was played in churches to scare sinners straight.The Library of Congress said in a statement that these additions bring the total number of titles on its registry to 825, chosen “because of their cultural, historic or aesthetic importance to preserve the nation’s film heritage.” Movies must be at least 10 years old to be eligible, and are picked by Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, after consulting with members of the National Film Preservation Board and other specialists. The library also allows the public to submit nominations at its website. More than 6,100 films were nominated this year, with the highest number of votes going to “Return of the Jedi.”A television special, featuring several of these films and a conversation between Hayden and the film historian Jacqueline Stewart, will be shown Friday on TCM.Here is the complete list of the 25 movies chosen for the National Film Registry:1. “Ringling Brothers Parade Film” (1902)2. “Jubilo” (1919)3. “The Flying Ace” (1926)4. “Hellbound Train” (1930)5. “Flowers and Trees” (1932)6. “Strangers on a Train” (1951)7. “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” (1962)8. “Evergreen” (1965)9. “Requiem-29” (1970)10. “The Murder of Fred Hampton” (1971)11. “Pink Flamingos” (1972)12. “Sounder” (1972)13. “The Long Goodbye” (1973)14. “Cooley High” (1975)15. “Richard Pryor: Live in Concert” (1979)16. “Chicana” (1979)17. “The Wobblies” (1979)18. “Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi” (1983)19. “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (1984)20. “Stop Making Sense” (1984)21. “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” (1987)22. “The Watermelon Woman” (1996)23. “Selena” (1997)24. “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” (2001)25. “Wall-E” (2008) More

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      Suzette Winter, Who Documented Hollywood’s Golden Age, Dies at 90

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      She and her husband produced more than 30 rosy biographical films for television about the era’s biggest stars.Suzette Winter Feldman, who wrote and produced a series of more than 30 documentaries chronicling the life of Hollywood’s biggest stars, often rendering them in the golden light of Hollywood’s heyday, died on Dec. 1 at her home in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. She was 90.Her daughter Zara Janson said the cause was aspiration pneumonia.Ms. Winter, who used her birth name professionally, worked with her husband, Gene Feldman, to create rosy film portraits of Grace Kelly, Gregory Peck, Shirley Temple and many others under the rubric the “Hollywood Collection.”As a team — she as a co-writer and co-producer while he also directed — they earned an Emmy nomination in 1994 for “Audrey Hepburn Remembered” (1993). “She’s projected as a three-dimensional personality — a person, in fact — under the cover girl face,” The Boston Globe wrote of the film’s portrayal of Ms. Hepburn.The documentaries used archival footage, interviews with co-stars and, if possible, conversations with the subjects themselves. Hollywood actors and actresses often narrated them — Jessica Lange, for instance, in “Vivien Leigh: Scarlett and Beyond” (1990).Films from the Hollywood Collection aired on PBS and major cable networks, including Lifetime, TNT and HBO’s Cinemax.The couple made no bones about the laudatory nature of their work. “Our main interest is not to do a biography but rather to look at the achievement of that person and give insight into the magic of that person,” Mr. Feldman told The Journal-News of White Plains, N.Y., in 1987. The couple befriended some of their subjects, Liza Minnelli and Gregory Peck among them.Their documentary treatment extended even to canine stars. “The Story of Lassie” (1994) explored the legacy of television and film’s favorite — and most consistently profitable — collie.The New York Times critic John J. O’Connor called the Lassie film “a fond tribute to the movie and television character that, arguably, projected most consistently the mistily hallowed virtues of purity and innocence, the triumph of good and courage rewarded.”Ms. Winter and her husband with Audrey Hepburn, the subject of one of their documentaries. “She’s projected as a three-dimensional personality — a person, in fact — under the cover girl face,” The Boston Globe wrote of the film’s portrayal of Ms. Hepburn.via Steve JansonSuzette St. John Winter was born on Jan. 19, 1931, in London to Ralph and Marguerite (St. John) Winter. Her father was an electrician, her mother a postal worker.As a child during the Blitz of London in World War II, she and her three siblings were evacuated under Operation Pied Piper, which removed millions of children from the city to the English countryside. She went to live with a great-aunt on a farm in Surrey and was separated from her parents for the better part of six years.After returning to London, she attended art school for a year, worked in Paris as an au pair and worked odd jobs after returning to London.She married Leo Grimpel, an architecture student whom she had met in London, in 1952. They had two daughters, Zara and Stephanie. With Mr. Grimpel, she moved to Australia, then Hong Kong. They divorced in 1966.Returning to Australia with her daughters after the divorce, Ms. Winter met Mr. Feldman there; he had been making educational documentaries and was filming one about the Maori people of New Zealand at the time. They married in 1967 and moved to the United States.In 1977, they released “Danny,” a feature film about a girl and her horse. Ms. Winter wrote the script and later a novelization of the film. They began the Hollywood series in 1982 with “Hollywood’s Children,” a history of child actors, and ended it in 1999.The couple lived in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., and later moved to Manhattan. After Mr. Feldman’s death in 2006, Ms. Winter moved to a retirement community in Sleepy Hollow.She attended Mercy College, in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1973. In 1976, she earned a master’s degree from Manhattanville College, in Westchester County, studying humanities.The Hollywood Collection documentaries are still in circulation, with commercial distribution rights owned by Janson Media, an entertainment company run by Ms. Winter’s daughter Zara and her husband, Stephen Janson. In addition to Ms. Janson, she is survived by her other daughter, Stephanie Edelstein; a stepdaughter, Lynne Feldman; six grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren. More