Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      In a New Take on ‘Gaslight,’ a Heroine Finds Her Own Way

      by

      NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ontario — Nobody is coming to rescue Bella Manningham. And that’s a good thing.Bella, the damsel in seemingly self-inflicted distress at the center of “Gaslight,” has been a source of pity among theater and film audiences for more than 80 years. But when Johnna Wright and Patty Jamieson dusted off the 1938 Patrick Hamilton melodrama, set in 1880, for this year’s Shaw Festival, they envisioned a very different fate for their heroine.“We didn’t want to change the rules of Victorian society and how they affected women,” Wright said. “Our question was: Is there a way for her to play by these rules and win?”And so they embarked on an ambitious reboot of the play, keeping the spooky setting (a Victorian sitting room) and the basic premise (is Bella losing her mind?), but jettisoning one major character. Gone is Detective Rough, the canny inspector who sets everything straight and explains it all to poor, poor Bella. The result is a total overhaul, complete with a nifty Act I curtain that forces audiences to spill into the lobby, sputtering, “What should she do now?”Ingrid Bergman as a wife pushed to the verge of madness, with Joseph Cotten as the London detective who solves the case, in George Cukor’s 1944 film version of “Gaslight.”Warner Bros. Those smothering rules weren’t confined to the action onstage, said the “Gaslight” director Kelli Fox. “I think the play was originally written for an audience who still expected that demure version of womanhood,” she said. “They wanted a story about a male hero coming to the rescue.”To some degree, current events have made “Gaslight” more topical but also more predictable. Its very title gives an indication of just how much trust the audience should put in Jack, Bella’s ever-solicitous husband. In fact, the term “gaslighting” — psychologically manipulating people into questioning their own sanity — draws its origins from the play, in which the household’s gas lights flicker and dim on the evenings when Bella is alone, causing her to question her own sanity.The concept lived on in psychological circles for decades but only burbled into mainstream society in recent years, to the point where the American Dialect Society honored the word as “most useful/likely to succeed” in 2016.“The weird thing,” Wright said, “is that we started writing this before ‘gaslighting’ became a big thing in the news. Maybe we sensed it was coming.”In her review of the play for The Toronto Star, Karen Fricker called it “a very satisfying piece of theatrical reinvention,” suggesting that theatergoers “bring a smart friend to this show to share the fun afterwards of combing through what happened, picking up cues and evidence in retrospect.”“Gaslight” is one of a handful of plays at the Shaw Festival, held in this bucolic town 20 miles north of Niagara Falls in honor of the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, to grapple with the idea of gender and femininity this year.Also at the Royal George Theater is Rabindranath Tagore’s one-act “Chitra,” based on a tale from the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, about a warrior princess who temporarily sheds her “manly” tendencies to attract a world-renowned archer. And the festival will expand to its full 11-show repertory next month to include one of August Wilson’s century cycle plays, “Gem of the Ocean,” which features the matriarch to end all matriarchs: the 285-year-old Aunt Ester Tyler. All three works will then run through early October.For Kimberley Rampersad, who both directed and choreographed “Chitra,” the 1892 play (translated into English from the original Sanskrit in 1913) was a natural fit for the festival: “Shaw and Tagore were both polymaths, and you can feel their politics coursing through their words,” she said. But it is also a reminder that such fits can be found outside the Western canon. “I picked this not to be disrespectful but to prove a point,” she said.Chitra’s gender fluidity had resonated with Rampersad since she was a young girl: “My parents call me their ‘boy child’ — I know, I know — and my father told me, ‘There is a play about you.’” (In the sort of dizzying cross-casting that is common at the Shaw Festival, Rampersad is also playing the decidedly and eternally feminine Lola in “Damn Yankees,” which also features Jamieson, the “Gaslight” co-writer, in its cast.)Gabriella Sundar Singh, center, as Chitra, with members of the corps in “Chitra.”David CooperFor “Gaslight,” Jamieson and Wright said they had originally planned to simply diverge from Hamilton’s play here and there, but soon realized that a gut renovation was needed to tell the story they wanted to tell. “I don’t know if there’s any original dialogue left in our version,” Wright said.Another modification involved adding some shadings of good and evil among the play’s female characters. One of the day-to-day stresses that Bella faces is a “new girl,” a housekeeper who is at the very least impertinent and lazy — and possibly a good bit worse.“It’s pretty boring to make this just a battle of the sexes,” Wright said.That battle was central to several works by Shaw, who is considered the first major playwright to depict what became known as the New Woman. (Rampersad said her initial exposure to his works came from reading “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” which takes a sympathetic view toward sex work. She remembers thinking, “A man wrote this?”)Much has been made of the Shaw Festival’s evolving “mandate,” which originally confined its repertory to Shaw and works written during his (usefully long) lifetime. The mandate then expanded to newer works set during Shaw’s life, then grew again to include essentially any play that Shaw might have liked.As it happens, “Chitra” and “Gaslight” both qualified under the original parameters. (Shaw died in 1950.) But Fox, who spent many years in the Shaw Festival acting ensemble before shifting her focus to directing, remembers feeling hamstrung by many of the roles she was offered here and elsewhere. “There was a time in my mid-30s when I said, ‘I would like to stop playing a naïve child now. Can I be a woman?’”As it happens, one such part was out there. It just hadn’t been rewritten yet. More

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Beta Test,’ ‘Closet Monster’ and More Streaming Gems

      by

      Put this selection of off-the-radar movies in your queue.​​This month’s off-the-grid recommendations at your subscription streaming services run the gamut from a tender coming-of-age story to a pair of pitch-black comedies to an unexpectedly affectionate action picture, plus three documentaries concerning influential artistes of fashion, music and sleaze.‘The Beta Test’ (2021)Stream it on Hulu.The writer, director and actor Jim Cummings established his onscreen persona (a fumbling, insecure but ultimately big-hearted Everyman) in his breakthrough film “Thunder Road,” and moved the character into genre territory in “The Wolf of Snow Hollow.” For this third feature — working this time with PJ McCabe, his co-writer and co-director — Cummings takes that character into a decidedly darker direction, playing a hotshot Hollywood agent whose career (and impending nuptials) are put into jeopardy when someone makes him a sexual offer he can’t refuse. Cummings and McCabe slip into darker corners than you might expect, yet the comic and thriller aspects commingle with ease, and the results are thrillingly unpredictable.‘Closet Monster’ (2016)Stream it on Netflix.This Canadian coming-of-age drama about the perils of growing up gay was released around the same time as “Moonlight,” and was certainly overshadowed in comparison. But “Closet Monster” is firmly its own thing — an earnest, lived-in portrait of the very real stigmas and fears of being a queer kid, and the kinds of adolescent insecurities that manifest as a result. Connor Jessup is quietly affecting as Oscar, a teenager trying desperately to shake the psychic scars inflicted by his homophobic dad (a chilling Aaron Abrams) after his parents’ divorce. The writer-director Stephen Dunn was only 26 when the film had its debut, and his proximity to youth is a real virtue. This is a filmmaker who remembers the electricity of a first kiss, the fumbling of a first sexual encounter and the satisfaction of breaking free from toxic influences.‘Thoroughbreds’ (2018)Stream it on HBO Max.Before “The Queen’s Gambit” made her a star, Anya Taylor-Joy fronted this delectably dark comedy from the writer and director Cory Finley (who would follow it up with the similarly merciless “Bad Education”). Taylor-Joy and Olivia Cooke (“Sound of Metal”) play childhood friends, reunited in young adulthood, whose wistful, wishful conversations about murdering one’s stepfather veer into non-hypothetical territory. Taylor-Joy and Cooke are a delight to watch, their two-scenes a cascade of dry wit and deadpan underplaying, and Finley’s stylish direction pinpoints the right combination of dry humor and to-the-rafters theatrics.‘Hysteria’ (2012)Stream it on Hulu.You’ve seen plenty of Victorian-era serio-comic dramas, many featuring much of this prestige cast, which includes Hugh Dancy, Rupert Everett, Felicity Jones, Gemma Jones and Jonathan Pryce. But this is no starchy tale of class conflict or simmering romance — no, this is the story of how Dr. Mortimer Granville (Dancy), while pursuing treatments for “hysteria” (the female orgasm), invented the vibrator. The director Tanya Wexler and her stiff-upper-lip cast clearly get a kick out of their randy subject matter and adjust their playing accordingly, while Maggie Gyllenhaal delights as a proto-feminist who seizes on this development and the power it contains.‘Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning’ (2012)Stream it on HBO Max.The first-person-POV dramatization of a brutal home invasion that opens this bruising action picture is so visceral and upsetting, it feels more like the kickoff to a Gaspar Noé button-pusher than the third sequel to a ’90s shoot-‘em-up. From there, the director John Hyams rarely lets up; he’s less interested in cheap thrills or fan service than in nightmare imagery and haunting portraiture of overwhelming grief. Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, series regulars, are on hand, but the focus is on a new protagonist (played by the direct-to-video action favorite Scott Adkins), whom Hyams follows on a neon-soaked, strobe-lit plunge into death and despair. The fight scenes deliver a no-punches-pulled intensity, with a darkness that borders on nihilism, turning this would-be throwaway into an interrogation of what we want — and expect — from action movies.‘The Gospel According to André’ (2018)Stream it on Amazon and Hulu.When the journalist and stylist André Leon Talley died this year, accolades poured in from some of the most influential figures in the fashion world. Those not quite in the know couldn’t ask for a better summary of his life and achievements than this energetic and entertaining documentary from the director Kate Novack. Talley’s story is a fascinating one, of a poor kid from the segregated South who used fashion magazines as a form of fantasy and escape, and went on to fill those pages with his distinctive words and inimitable style. The archival footage is delightful and the interviews with his contemporaries are insightful, but Talley’s own commentary is the real draw — he is, as he always was, trenchant, funny and fabulous.‘Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World’ (2017)Stream it on Netflix.The genealogy of rock music has always been of keen interest to historians and performers, who’ve tended to agree on the influence of gospel, blues, soul and country styles on the formative early recordings of the 1950s. This documentary by Catherine Bainbridge and Alfonso Maiorana shines a light on a less-acknowledged source: North American Indigenous musicians. Exploring both the music itself and the trials and triumphs of several of its practitioners, “Rumble” is a welcome round of archaeology and an overdue bit of credit — and the music is, unsurprisingly, wonderful.‘Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie’ (2013)Stream it on Amazon.When it aired in the late 1980s — for only two seasons — “The Morton Downey Jr. Show” was condemned in all corners as lowest common denominator television, a “talk show” that used its “Oprah”-style panel format primarily to provoke, and to provide fodder for its trash-talking, chain-smoking host. This thoughtful and well-assembled documentary snapshot of that host, and of the pop culture ubiquity he briefly enjoyed, was released at a time when the show’s influence on subsequent “end of civilization” fare like “The Jerry Springer Show” and “Maury” was clear; from our vantage point, we can also see how it both affected and represented the slowly turning tides of confrontational political discourse. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘A Dark, Dark Man’ Review: Murder and Corruption in Kazakhstan

      by

      This exceptionally grim police procedural recalls films like Bong Joon Ho’s “Memories of Murder” and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.”“A Dark, Dark Man” is set in a stretch of Kazakhstan where few people seem to live, yet corruption pervades every corner.When this police procedural, directed by Adilkhan Yerzhanov (“Yellow Cat”), premiered in 2019, it was a regular feature film. Its distributor has carved it into three episodes for streaming purposes. That’s unfortunate, because its pacing and visual style — much of the action unfolds in long shot — are clearly designed for big-screen immersion.Its methods and themes also recall such acclaimed art-house titles as Bruno Dumont’s “Humanité,” Bong Joon Ho’s “Memories of Murder” and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia,” even if it stands in those pictures’ shadows.For its first third, “A Dark, Dark Man” issues grim revelations with breathtaking rapidity. Poukuar (Teoman Khos), a gullible local, is coerced by a mysterious man into providing evidence that will be used to frame him for the rape and murder of an orphan boy. (We later learn that the boy is the fourth such victim.) Bekzat (Daniyar Alshinov), the detective antihero, arrives at the scene to investigate what now looks like an open-and-shut case.In this district, suspects have a tendency to be found dead before trials. Bekzat can’t stage Poukuar’s suicide so easily, though, after a journalist, Ariana (Dinara Baktybayeva), turns up to accompany Bekzat on the investigation. She might even push him to pursue the lurking serial killer in earnest.The mystery aspect is handled obliquely. The film is more of a mood piece, and much of its pitch-black humor derives from the contrast between the barren landscape and the sheer number of horrors it contains. (When Bekzat and Ariana arrive in a village, an old woman greets him: “You killed my son. Two years ago. During questioning.”) Only the closing moments seem less nervy.A Dark, Dark ManNot rated. In Kazakh and Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. Watch on MHz Choice. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Aftershock’ Review: A Moving Ode to the Black Family

      by

      Black mothers are dying from childbirth at alarming rates. A new documentary explains why.There’s no getting around just how terribly sad it feels watching “Aftershock,” the new documentary from the directors Paula Eiselt (“93Queen”) and Tonya Lewis Lee. After all, it spotlights the tragic deaths of two Black mothers in New York City who died from childbirth-related complications — Shamony Gibson, in 2019, and Amber Isaac, in 2020 — leaving behind young children, partners, families and communities gutted by grief.But alongside the despair, there is also light in this documentary. Gibson’s partner, Omari Maynard, and her mother, Shawnee Benton Gibson, a medical social worker with a background in reproductive justice activism, had been mourning their loss for a year and a half when Maynard reached out to the newly bereaved partner of Isaac, Bruce McIntyre. The two men soon banded together with Benton Gibson and others to organize for change.Eiselt and Lee successfully put a human face on the now widely reported crisis of Black maternal deaths, which allows them to unpack the underlying factors that have led to the crisis without bogging down the narrative in a deluge of statistics. Yet scenes with the main subjects sometimes feel more staged than vérité, and the audience walks away wishing we knew them better as people.Still, the images of Maynard and McIntyre parenting their children in the midst of grief and outrage, and expressing vulnerability as well as strength, act as a powerful counternarrative to pervasive stereotypes about absentee Black fathers. “Aftershock” is a moving ode to Black families in a society where too many forces work to tear them apart.AftershockNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Day the Music Died’ Review: ‘American Pie,’ the Life of a Hit

      by

      Don McLean tries to clear up some misapprehensions about the eight-an-a-half-minute song that took on a life of its own, in this documentary.Even those who don’t like Don McLean’s song “American Pie” have to admit that it’s a distinctive pop culture achievement. A nearly eight-and-a-half minute allegory that goes from mournful to infectious to mournful again, the monster 1971 radio hit is seemingly known to all generations and still sung at bar-closing times the world over.That last fact is according to this reverent documentary about the song. Directed by Mark Moormann, the movie travels all over America to bring home the idea that “American Pie” says something profound about the country. It interweaves McLean’s biography with an account of the last days of the ’50s rockers Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, creating a compelling narrative about the effect the plane crash that took their lives in 1959 had not just on young McLean, but American music itself. The movie then alternates with a history of McLean’s professional career (including his mentoring by the folk legend Pete Seeger) and scenes in which stars including Garth Brooks rhapsodize about the song.Back in the day, kids analyzing the lyrics surmised that the bits about “the devil” expressed McLean’s moral and aesthetic disapproval of Mick Jagger. But to many of the interviewees here, including Brooks (who brought McLean onstage to sing it with him at his giant Central Park concert in 1997) and the Cuban-born musical artist Rudy Pérez, the song is “about freedom.”The movie really comes alive when it is recreating the recording session for the song, showing how the ace studio keyboardist Paul Griffin transformed the tune with his energetic gospel-style piano.McLean, who has frequently been portrayed as a prickly figure, and worse, puts on his most ingratiating mien here. And why not. Few musicians are given such generous opportunities to be docent to their legacies.The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

    • 75 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      The Unraveling of an Award-Winning Documentary

      by

      The director of “Sabaya,” about Yazidi women who had been sexually enslaved by ISIS, says that he wasn’t present for a key scene and that he substituted footage.BAGHDAD — In a pivotal scene of the 2021 documentary “Sabaya,” two men rescue a young woman named Leila from a Syrian detention camp for the families of ISIS fighters, bundling her into a car and driving her to safety as shots are fired behind them.In interviews with BBC Radio and others, the film’s Iraqi-Swedish director, Hogir Hirori, recounted the tension of the rescue and the terror of the ride as they raced from Al Hol detention camp with the young woman, one of thousands of women and girls from Iraq’s Yazidi religious minority who had been sexually enslaved by ISIS.The dramatic scene helped the Swedish-government-funded film garner glowing reviews and awards, including best director for a foreign documentary at the Sundance Film Festival last year. But following an investigation by a Swedish magazine, Kvartal, Hirori has admitted that he was not there when Leila was freed, that he substituted another woman instead and that he lied to a BBC interviewer.The admissions follow findings by The New York Times last year that many of the traumatized women either did not initially consent to be in the film or refused but were included anyway. The director’s admissions have also renewed accusations that the documentary played down the coerced separation of mothers from their young children, born during enslavement by ISIS — and turned the very men responsible for that separation into heroes for rescuing them.While Yazidi women sexually enslaved by ISIS were welcomed back by their communities after ISIS was defeated, the children were not. Some women did not want the children, but for most, the forced separations have had serious repercussions, including suicide attempts.In a statement issued after the Kvartal investigation, Hirori acknowledged that he had depicted Leila’s escape “using a rescue scene of another woman which I participated in.” He said the woman who was presented as Leila, the main character, did not want to be filmed after the rescue and so he did not mention her in the documentary.Speaking in Swedish through an interpreter, he told BBC Radio last year, “It was important for me to film it as it was happening because that was the reality.” In the interview, one of several in which he expressed the same sentiment, he also spoke of the Yazidi women: “They aren’t just numbers, they are people just like you and me.”The BBC has removed the lengthy interview from its website after press queries. A BBC spokesperson said it was being reviewed. Hirori said in his statement that he regretted not telling the BBC the truth about the rescue scene.A timeline by Kvartal also showed that in three scenes that included news reports about the battle against ISIS and a Turkish invasion, audio was inserted from events that had occurred several months earlier or weeks later. In at least one of the scenes, the film’s hero reacts to news from the car radio that he could not have been hearing.Hirori and the film’s producer, Antonio Russo Merenda, a former Swedish Film Institute commissioner who has said he was heavily involved in the film’s editing, did not respond to requests for comment by The Times.In his statement following the Kvartal investigation, Hirori said that the film was not intended to be journalism and that Swedish documentary tradition allowed filmmakers “to express their own unique view of events.”Kristina Eriksson, a communications officer at the Swedish Film Institute, said, “We follow the debate about the role of documentaries and welcome the discussion, but nothing has emerged so far that gives us reason to act in relation to the film.” She declined to clarify whether the institute had procedures governing the veracity of documentary films it funded.The issue of forced separations is the single most contentious one among Yazidis. While the Yazidi Home Center featured in “Sabaya” was responsible for finding and caring for hundreds of Iraqi Yazidis freed from ISIS captivity, the organization, acting on instructions from Yazidi elders in Iraq, also arranged for the children to be taken from their mothers. Most were sent to an orphanage in northeastern Syria that the women were not allowed to visit once they returned to Iraq.Almost all the women were told that to go home after being rescued from Al Hol camp, they would have to give up their children. The women were also told, falsely, as was one of the woman in “Sabaya,” that the separation would be temporary.Hirori has said he did not have space in the film to address the issue. “My focus was in trying to document how these women and girls were saved and not to go into the whole giving up the children,” he said in an interview with The Times last year.Sherizaan Minwalla, a human rights lawyer based in Erbil, Iraq, who has worked extensively with Yazidi genocide survivors, said, “The film portrayed a false narrative of women with children being rescued when in fact they were hiding with their children to avoid being forcibly separated before returning to their families in Iraq.” Some of the women were so afraid they would be separated from their children that they chose to stay in the Syrian detention camp rather than be rescued.A limited number of freed Yazidi women have been reunited with their children. Because those mothers and their children face threats from the Yazidi community in Iraq, almost all have been relocated to other countries.“The director doesn’t need to show situations that are wholly invented falsehoods in the film to have it be a false portrayal,” said Jennifer Crystal Chien, director of Re-Present Media, a San Francisco nonprofit that advocates for storytelling from underrepresented communities. Omitting key information means the viewer can “draw the wrong conclusions,” she said.The documentary was rejected by the Human Rights Watch Film Festival last year because of concerns over consent by traumatized ISIS survivors, but it was shown at the Sundance Film Festival.Months after the release of “Sabaya,” the filmmakers obtained written consents but in languages most of the women do not understand. The agreements entitled the filmmakers to use their names, stories and all footage for any project, in perpetuity.“There are certain types of things that seem in some way exciting or dramatic or have a kind of heroic outcome,” Chien said. “These kind of things are very appealing to people who are making decisions about funding and programing even though they may not know anything about the actual situation in the region or whether the footage that’s being gotten could possibly be gotten with informed consent at all.”Sangar Khaleel More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Netflix, Still Reeling, Bets Big on ‘The Gray Man’

      by

      Anthony and Joe Russo like to go big.In 2018’s “Avengers: Infinity War,” the directing brothers shocked fans when they erased half the global population and allowed their Marvel superheroes to fail. The next year, they raised the stakes with the three-hour “Avengers: Endgame,” a film that made $2.79 billion at the global box office, the second-highest figure ever to that point.And now there is “The Gray Man,” a Netflix film that they wrote, directed and produced. The streaming service gave them close to $200 million to trot around the world and have Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans portray shadow employees of the C.I.A. who are trying to kill each other.“It almost killed us,” Joe Russo said of filming.One action sequence took a month to produce. It involved large guns, a tram car barreling through Prague’s Old Town quarter and Mr. Gosling fighting off an army of assassins while handcuffed to a stone bench. It’s one of those showstoppers that get audiences cheering. The moment cost roughly $40 million to make.“It’s a movie within a movie,” Anthony Russo said.“The Gray Man,” which opened in select theaters this weekend and will be available on Netflix on Friday, is the streaming service’s most expensive film and perhaps its biggest gamble as it tries to create a spy franchise in the mold of James Bond or “Mission Impossible.” Should it work, the Russos have plans for expanding the “Gray Man” universe with additional films and television series, as Disney has done with its Marvel and Star Wars franchises.Ryan Gosling stars in “The Gray Man,” which Netflix will start streaming on Friday.NetflixBut those franchises, while turbocharged by streaming and integral to the ambitions of Disney+, are first and foremost theatrical enterprises. “The Gray Man” is coming out in 450 theaters. That’s a far cry from the 2,000 or so that a typical big-budget release would appear in on its opening weekend. And the film’s nearly simultaneous availability on Netflix ensures that most viewers will watch it on the service. Films that Netflix releases in theaters typically leave them much faster than movies from traditional studios.“If you’re trying to build a franchise, why would you start it on a streaming service?” asked Anthony Palomba, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business who studies media and entertainment trends, specifically how consumers’ habits change.The film comes at a critical time for Netflix, which will announce its second-quarter earnings on Tuesday. Many in the industry expect the results to be even grimmer than the loss of two million subscribers that the company forecast in April. The company’s first-quarter earnings led to a precipitous drop in its stock price, and it has since laid off hundreds of employees, announced that it will create a less expensive subscription tier featuring commercials and said it plans to crack down on password sharing between friends and family.Despite the current rough patch, Netflix’s deep pockets and hands-off approach to creative decisions made it the only studio that was able to match the Russos’ ambitions and their quest for autonomy.“It would have been a dramatically different film,” Joe Russo said, referring to the possibility of making “The Gray Man” at another studio, like Sony, where it was originally set to be produced. The brothers said going elsewhere would have required them to shave off a third of their budget and downgrade the action of the film.One person with knowledge of the Sony deal said the studio had been willing to pay $70 million to make the movie. Instead, the Russos sold it to Netflix in an agreement that allowed Sony to recoup its development costs and receive a fee for its time producing it. Sony declined to comment.The movie includes nine significant action sequences, including a midair fight involving emergency flares, fire extinguishers and Mr. Gosling’s grappling with a parachuted enemy as both tumble out of a bombed-out plane, Anthony Russo said.“Ambition is expensive,” Joe Russo said. “And it’s risky.”Netflix, even in this humbling moment, can pay more upfront when it isn’t saddled with the costs that accompany much bigger theatrical releases. And for Scott Stuber, Netflix’s head of global film, who greenlighted the “Bourne Identity” franchise when he was at Universal Pictures, movies like “The Gray Man” are what he has been striving to make since he joined the company five years ago.“We haven’t really been in this genre yet,” Mr. Stuber said in an interview. “If you’re going to do it, you want to deal with filmmakers who over the last decade have created some of the biggest franchises and the biggest action movies in our business.”“We’re not crazily reducing our spend, but we’re reducing volume,” Scott Stuber, the head of global film for Netflix, said.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesThe Russos are also producing the sequel to “Extraction” with Chris Hemsworth for Netflix and just announced that Netflix would finance and release their next directing venture, a $200 million sci-fi action film, “The Electric State,” with Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt.Mr. Stuber pointed to the “Extraction” sequel and a spy film starring Gal Gadot, “Heart of Stone,” both set for release next year, as proof that the company is still taking big swings despite its struggles. He did acknowledge, however, that the recent business realities have forced the company to think harder about the projects it selects.“We’re not crazily reducing our spend, but we’re reducing volume,” he said. “We’re trying to be more thoughtful.”He added: “We were a business that was, for a long time, a volume business. And now we’re being very specific about targeting.”Niija Kuykendall was hired from Warner Bros. late last year to oversee a new division that will focus on making midbudget movies, in the range of $40 million to $50 million, which the traditional studios have all but abandoned because their box office potential is less certain. And Mr. Stuber pointed to two upcoming films — “Pain Hustlers,” a $50 million thriller starring Emily Blunt, and an untitled romantic comedy with Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron — as examples of the company’s commitment to films of that size.In recent months, Netflix has also been criticized by some in the industry for how much — or how little — it spends to market individual films. Its marketing budget has essentially stayed the same for three years, despite a significant rise in competition from services like Disney+ and HBO Max. Creators often wonder whether they are going to get the full Netflix marketing muscle or simply a couple of billboards on Sunset Boulevard.For “The Gray Man,” Netflix has sent the Russos and their cast to Berlin, London and Mumbai, India. Other promotional efforts have included national television ads during National Basketball Association games and the Indianapolis 500 and 3-D billboards in disparate locations like Las Vegas and Krakow, Poland.“It’s very large scale,” Joe Russo said of Netflix’s promotion of “The Gray Man.” “We’re doing a world tour to promote it. The actors are going with us. It feels a lot like the work we did to promote the Marvel films.”Netflix released “The Gray Man,” which also stars Chris Evans, in theaters the week before it becomes available for streaming.NetflixFor the smaller-scale theatrical release, Netflix will put “The Gray Man” at some of the handful of theaters it owns — like the Paris Theater in New York and the Bay Theater in Los Angeles — and with chains like Cinemark and Marcus Theaters. And even though Joe Russo calls “The Gray Man” “a forget-to-eat-your-popcorn kind of film,” Netflix will not disclose its box office numbers.The theatrical side of the movie business is a conundrum for Netflix. The studio’s appetite for risk is often greater than that of traditional studios because it doesn’t spend as much money putting films in theaters and doesn’t have to worry about box office numbers. On the flip side, the lack of large-scale theatrical releases has long been a sticking point with filmmakers looking to display their creativity on as big a screen as possible and hoping to build buzz with audiences.And the strength of the box office in recent months for films as different as “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Minions: The Rise of Gru” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (which the Russos produced) has prompted many to rethink the influence of movie theaters, which the pandemic severely hobbled.Mr. Stuber acknowledged that a greater theatrical presence was a goal, but one that requires a consistent supply of movies that can connect with a global audience.“That’s what we’re trying to get to: Do we have enough of those films across the board consistently where we can be in that market?” he said.It would also require Netflix to reckon with how long to let its movies play exclusively in theaters before appearing on its service. While the theatrical window for the “The Gray Man” is very short, the Russos hope the film will show that Netflix can be a home for the type of big-budget crowd pleasers the brothers are known for.“Knowing that you have, ultimately, a distribution platform which can pull in 100 million viewers like it did on ‘Extraction,’ but also the potential for a large theatrical window with a commensurate promotional campaign behind it,” Joe Russo said, “you have a very powerful studio.” More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      The Middle Eastern Party Scene Thriving in Brooklyn

      by

      Several New York City parties offer spaces where anyone and everyone can let loose, come together and find comfort in Middle Eastern and North African music.Just before midnight on a Friday in June, a short line formed outside Elsewhere, a music venue and nightclub in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Saphe Shamoun, one of the D.J.s performing that night, gingerly approached two women in the queue.“Are you here for Laylit?” he asked. They nodded, and Mr. Shamoun directed them toward another entrance — and a much longer line — further up the block.Laylit, or “the night of” in Arabic, is a party based in New York and Montreal that spotlights music from the Middle East and North Africa and its diaspora.It has had a residency at Elsewhere since October, but this night was special: The event had become so popular that for the first time, it was being held not in the venue’s smaller rooms but in its cavernous hall, where over 800 people would soon dance under a shimmering disco ball and hypnotic light show.On the bill: a performance by Anya Kneez, a Lebanese drag queen, and D.J. sets highlighting Arabic pop, hip-hop, folk and electronic music.A decade ago, it was practically unheard-of for a major New York club to regularly host a Middle Eastern-themed party. But now, Laylit is part of a thriving scene in Brooklyn that puts Middle Eastern and North African music front and center.The events vary in style, but they all celebrate cultures that the promoters say have been overlooked in the West. And they offer many New Yorkers a sense of comfort in a teeming city that can nonetheless feel isolating, especially after more than two years of a pandemic.“It’s so, so beautiful to see the community coming together,” said Felukah, a hip-hop artist who moved to New York from Egypt in 2018 and is a regular at Laylit and other parties like it. “The sounds remind me of home.”For some partygoers, nostalgia is the main attraction. Yet each event also looks toward the future, be it through challenging stereotypical notions of Middle Eastern culture or by championing inclusivity and progressive ideals.Laylit, for one, has created a shared space for Arabs who hold those values, said Mr. Shamoun, a Syrian D.J. and Ph.D. candidate who founded the party in 2018 with Wake Island, a Montreal-based music duo made up of Philippe Manasseh and Nadim Maghzal.Ironically, it wasn’t until the two left their native Lebanon that they embraced its sounds.“It wasn’t cool when I was growing up to play Arabic music,” Mr. Maghzal said.“It was actually uncool,” Mr. Manasseh added.And after emigrating to Montreal in the early 2000s, they actively separated themselves from their culture, fearing discrimination and feeling a sense of duty to assimilate, Mr. Manasseh said.But now, they use Laylit as an outlet to rediscover their roots. In September, they’ll be celebrating the party’s fourth anniversary with another show at Elsewhere, and a tour across Montreal, Detroit and Washington, D.C.Ana Masreya, an Egyptian drag queen, getting ready before a drag show at Littlefield, in Brooklyn.Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesDisco Tehran, a dance party and performance project that channels the international music culture of 1970s Iran, was also born out of the immigrant experience. The organizers, Arya Ghavamian and Mani Nilchiani, said it took years to get it off the ground.Nearly a decade ago, Mr. Ghavamian, an Iranian filmmaker who had moved to the United States a few years earlier, approached an organization about throwing a party to celebrate Nowruz, a holiday that marks the beginning of the Persian New Year and is observed in several countries across Central and West Asia. “It was a ‘no,’” Mr. Ghavamian said.A few years later, he began hosting get-togethers in his apartment where he would cook Persian cuisine and invite musicians to play. By early 2018, his apartment could no longer accommodate the crowds, so he and Mr. Nilchiani hosted their first public Disco Tehran event: the long-shelved Nowruz celebration.The party has since expanded and evolved, and it now includes a film project and community outreach efforts. It celebrated its fourth anniversary last month at the Sultan Room, a nightclub and eatery in Bushwick, with an eclectic playlist and performances by Alsarah and the Nubatones, an East African retro pop band, and Epilogio, a Puerto Rican indie-funk band.Disco Tehran, Mr. Ghavamian said, “is about a collection of different cultures who may not have anything to do with each other on a given day, but they come together.”And the project is on its third European tour, which gives the organizers the sense that they “have a place wherever we are in the world,” Mr. Ghavamian said. Its next New York event is Aug. 13, at the Knockdown Center in Queens.Yalla! Party Project also grew out of intimate apartment gatherings, hosting its first public event in the spring of 2018. (“Yalla” translates to “let’s go” or “come on” in Arabic.) Its founder yearned for a queer party that featured Southwest Asian and North African music.Over the years, Yalla! has expanded into an arts collective and community-building exercise. It is starting a professional directory to help people find jobs and it runs a market that supports small businesses run by women, people of color and queer people.Its parties reflect New York’s cultural diversity. At a May show at the Sultan Room, an Eritrean henna artist drew intricate patterns on a man’s palm while partygoers danced to R&B and Lebanese pop. Yalla! also ramped up programming during Pride month, with four events spread across venues in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx.Hanan Selim, center, dances with her husband and friends during a Haza party in Bushwick, Brooklyn.Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesOnce word of Yalla! got around, similar events followed. It was at an early Yalla! show where Mr. Maghzal, of Laylit, first spun Arabic music. A year later, a drag queen named Ana Masreya — her name means “I’m an Egyptian woman” in Arabic — organized a Middle Eastern and North African cabaret called Nefertitties, a play on the name of the ancient Egyptian queen.Ana celebrated her show’s third anniversary in May with an event at Littlefield, in Gowanus, and visited Washington, D.C., for a cabaret in late June. For her grand entrance at the anniversary show, she was carried in on a makeshift sedan chair, shrouded by a gold mesh sheet, which she later removed to reveal a gold crown modeled after that of Nefertiti.Onstage, Ana spoke about her experience being a publicly known L.G.B.T.Q. person from the Middle East, a region where homosexuality is largely taboo and can, in some nations, lead to persecution. “It’s mad scary sometimes,” Ana said.The night featured drag performances by Rifi Royalty, who is Egyptian American, and Meh Mooni, who is Iranian American; a set by Felukah; and a belly-dancing contest set to an Egyptian song that is a staple at Arab parties: “Shik Shak Shok.”The following week, the song would be played again at the Sultan Room’s rooftop during Haza, a dance party and radio show that began in 2019 and spotlights artists from the Middle East and African diasporas and beyond.One of its founders, an Egyptian American D.J. and creative writing consultant who performs under the name Myyuh, grew up in a predominantly white town in Connecticut, where she said she was largely detached from Egyptian culture. She felt embarrassed when her mother would blast Arabic music at home, she said.But at Haza, she turned to it for comfort — and blasted it on a pulsating dance floor while fellow Arabs ululated in celebration under the Bushwick sky. (Haza will return to the Sultan Room for its next show on July 29.)“We’re creating a totally different experience with these songs,” Myyuh said.Her co-founder, an Egyptian D.J. and audio engineer who performs under the name Carmen Sandiego, likened the experience to a hug.“It’s everything that you know and love,” she said. “And it’s not just you, but the person next to you is singing the same thing because they understand why this is so meaningful.”For Mr. Shamoun, of Laylit, that experience is particularly important for those who have fled the Middle East amid war, uprisings and refugee crises.“We’ve been robbed of a present and a future in the Arab world,” he said.When he’s behind the decks at his shows, he often spots recent immigrants and hopes the songs he plays transport them back home, if only for a few minutes.As the events continue to generate buzz, few of the promoters appear to be in competition — in fact, most of them collaborate with each other.Ana Masreya performed at a Laylit party earlier this month, drawing cheers from the crowd, while Myyuh was in the D.J. lineup.Mr. Manasseh believes the scene grew out of what he calls an “affirm yourself on the dance floor” movement that took hold after the aughts and grew stronger when Donald J. Trump became president.Rock was suddenly out, dance and electronic music were in, and more people of color and L.G.B.T.Q. people were creating spaces where they felt seen and heard.Even though Laylit is seemingly rooted in faraway cultures, Mr. Manasseh credits its existence to a single city.“All this was inspired and enabled by New York,” he said. More