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      ‘12 Mighty Orphans’ Review: A Team Effort

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      Based on a true story of Texas high school football in the Great Depression, this film treats viewers like children.Inspired by a true story of parentless teenagers whose tenacity on the gridiron raised spirits in the late 1930s, “12 Mighty Orphans” is a plodding football drama in which the characters talk to one another like folksy social workers. The condescending tone extends to a voice-over from Martin Sheen, who plays an orphanage physician. He brings viewers up to speed on American history (“It’s hard to remember which came first, the Dust Bowl, or the Great Depression”) and the movie’s message. The team’s coach, Sheen’s character narrates, “knew that football would inevitably bring self-respect to these boys.”That coach, new to the Fort Worth, Texas, orphanage, is Rusty Russell (Luke Wilson), who bears the scars of World War I and of having grown up an orphan himself. Here, with the help of a sketch his daughter draws, he will pioneer the spread offense. His players will develop into a swift and strategic team, with Hardy Brown (Jake Austin Walker) becoming the most fearsome among them. Hardy also delivers one of the purplest halftime pep talks in memory.If the film’s version of events can be believed, F.D.R. himself (Larry Pine) intervened to help the team. But any hope that the movie, directed by Ty Roberts, might leave room for nuance is dashed by two cartoonish villains — a scheming rival coach (Lane Garrison, also one of the screenwriters) and an authority figure (Wayne Knight) who embezzles money and hits the students with a paddle. “12 Mighty Orphans” displays a similar lack of restraint when manipulating its audience.12 Mighty OrphansRated PG-13. Football violence and corporal punishment. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Lizzie Borden’s ‘Working Girls’ Is About Capitalism, Not Sex

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      While the 1987 drama takes place in a Manhattan brothel, its true concern is labor. (And it’s is definitely not to be confused with Mike Nichols’s rom-com.)A fictional day in the life of a Manhattan boutique bordello, Lizzie Borden’s “Working Girls” is as witty, gimlet-eyed and discomfiting as when it won a special award at the 1987 Sundance Film Festival.The movie, not to be confused with Mike Nichols’s 1988 rom-com “Working Girl,” has been digitally restored and, in advance of a Blu-ray release, is having a theatrical run at the IFC Center in Manhattan.“Working Girls” opens with Molly (Louise Smith) waking at 7 a.m. in an East Village tenement, making breakfast for her partner’s young daughter and bicycling uptown to her place of employment. Her first order of business is inserting a diaphragm — the matter-of-factness provides the movie’s first jolt.Borden’s previous film, “Born in Flames,” (1983) is a vision of urban insurrection led by a largely Black and lesbian army now considered a classic of revolutionary cinema, militant feminism and Afro-futurism. “Working Girls” is no less political. Sex is almost incidental; the movie’s true concern is labor, much of which consists in massaging the egos of the brothel’s clients.While offering a smorgasbord of mildly kinky tastes, “Working Girls” is far from prurient. When, midway through, Molly makes a drugstore run to replenish the supply closet, the movie suggests a Pop Art composition of brand-name packages: Listerine, Kleenex and Trojans. The New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby noted that, although fiction, “Working Girls” “sounds as authentic as might a documentary about coal miners.”Coal miners with ambition, that is: Molly, who has two degrees from Yale, is an aspiring photographer. Dawn (Amanda Goodwin) is a volatile working-class kid putting herself through college. Gina (Marusia Zach) is saving to open her own business. The women, who have amusingly little difficulty handling their generally well-behaved johns, are in control but only up to point. Midway through, their boss Lucy (Ellen McElduff) sweeps in, and as a gushingly saccharine steel magnolia, she is far more exploitative, not to mention manipulative, than any of the customers.Borden belongs to a group of filmmakers, including Kathryn Bigelow and Jim Jarmusch, who emerged from the downtown post-punk art-music scene of the late 1970s. Back then, “Born in Flames” and “Working Girls” seemed like professionalized versions of the incendiary work produced by scrappy Super-8 filmmakers like Vivienne Dick and the team of Scott B and Beth B. Revisited decades later, “Working Girls” appears closer to Chantal Akerman’s epochal “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.”The similarity between the films is not so much subject (Akerman’s eponymous protagonist is a housewife prostitute) as attitude. “Working Girl” is notable for its measured structure, analytical camera placement and straightforward cool. Borden only tips her hand once, when she allows Molly — who has been sweet-talked into working a double shift — to ask Lucy if she’s ever heard of “surplus value.”“Working Girls” is an anticapitalist critique that has scarcely dated, save for one bit of hip social realism I neglected to note when I reviewed it in 1987 for a downtown weekly. Asked how she heard about the job, a new recruit reveals that she answered a want ad for “hostesses” in The Village Voice.Working GirlsOpening June 18 at the IFC Center in Manhattan; ifccenter.com. More

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      Lin-Manuel Miranda responde a las críticas sobre el elenco de ‘In the Heights’

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      La película generó malestar por presentar actores latinos de piel clara en los papeles principales, a pesar de la prevalencia de latinos de piel oscura en el barrio donde se rodó.Lin-Manuel Miranda reconoció las críticas de que la adaptación cinematográfica de su musical In the Heights no había representado adecuadamente a la población afrolatina de piel oscura de Washington Heights, el barrio del Alto Manhattan en el que está ambientado, y también se ha disculpado por quedarse corto al “intentar pintar un mosaico de esta comunidad”.La película, adaptación del musical de Broadway, ganador de un Tony por mejor guion, sobre el propietario de una bodega que sueña con volver a República Dominicana, se estrenó en los cines y en HBO Max la semana pasada, obteniendo críticas positivas y elogios por todo lo alto.Sin embargo, la película también suscitó críticas en internet por la decisión de los cineastas de seleccionar actores latinos de piel clara para los papeles principales, a pesar de la prevalencia de latinos de piel oscura en el barrio donde se rodó la película.Miranda, que formó parte del equipo creativo de la película, dijo en su declaración que estaba prestando atención a las opiniones en línea, incluidas las muestras de pesar y frustración por el colorismo y por “sentirse aún invisibles” en la película.“Empecé a escribir In the Heights porque no me sentía visto”, escribió Miranda en un comunicado publicado en Twitter el lunes por la noche. “Y durante los últimos 20 años todo lo que quería era que nosotros —TODOS nosotros— nos sintiéramos vistos”.“He oído que sin suficiente representación de afrolatinos de piel oscura”, continuó, “la obra se siente explotadora de la comunidad que tanto queríamos representar con orgullo y alegría”.“En los comentarios puedo escuchar el pesar y la frustración por el colorismo, por sentirse aún invisibles”, dijo en el comunicado.La película, un proyecto que tardó una década y que tuvo un presupuesto de 55 millones de dólares, fue protagonizada por Anthony Ramos como el dueño de la bodega, Melissa Barrera como una aspirante a diseñadora de moda y Leslie Grace como Nina, una estudiante de Stanford en dificultades.En una entrevista reciente, la guionista de la película, Quiara Alegría Hudes, habló de la decisión de hacer de Nina un personaje afrolatino en la versión cinematográfica. “Quería hacer conscientemente que Nina fuera afrolatina en esta versión de In the Heights. Desde que estrenamos el espectáculo en Broadway, se ha producido esta conversación nacional en torno a las microagresiones y cosas realmente interesantes que siento que serían aplicables a la situación de Nina”.Corey Hawkins, que interpreta al interés amoroso de Nina y empleado del servicio de taxis de su padre, es negro, pero no latino (algunos también criticaron a los realizadores por eliminar un punto de la trama, que había existido en el musical, en el que el personaje de Hawkins dice que el padre de Nina no cree que sea lo suficientemente bueno para ella). More

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      They Fought to Make ‘In the Heights’ Both Dreamlike and Authentic

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      The creative team of Lin-Manuel Miranda, Quiara Alegría Hudes and Jon M. Chu explain what it took to create a euphoric spectacle that stayed true to its cultural roots.Lin-Manuel Miranda still believes it was a miracle that “In the Heights,” the musical homage to Latino culture through the lens of the Washington Heights neighborhood, made it to Broadway. Back in 2008, before striving for inclusion became the entertainment industry standard, he and the playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes were unknowns peddling a joyful narrative about unseen people.Their exuberant show inspired by their families and neighbors finally reaches the big screen (and HBO Max) this week after stumbling through multiple studios. Warner Bros. and the director Jon M. Chu (“Crazy Rich Asians”) were ultimately entrusted with the project.In retrospect, Miranda said, it was naïve to think that getting the show from the stage to the multiplex would be easy. It took more than a decade.“Some of the hurdles were about Hollywood’s unwillingness to take chances on new talent and invest in that,” Miranda said. “When you watch this movie that Jon has so beautifully directed, you see a screen full of movie stars, but some of them you may not have heard of before. They were movie stars without the roles they needed to become movie stars.” More

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      Nine Ned Beatty Movies and Shows to Stream

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      This prolific actor may not have been the star of these pictures but he brought a depth that made his time onscreen count.Ned Beatty, who died on Sunday at 83, was the quintessential character actor. He looked like a regular guy, not a movie star, so he didn’t play leading roles — he played supporting characters, best friends, background figures and bureaucrats. He did so in 165 films and television shows before retiring quietly in 2013, and he always understood the assignment; some projects were great, others less so, but Beatty always shone Here are a few of his highlights, and where you can watch them. More

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      Hollywood Take on Christchurch Massacre Provokes Anger in New Zealand

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      Members of the Muslim community denounced as “white saviorism” the director’s decision to focus on the response by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.AUCKLAND, New Zealand — A planned Hollywood film about the Christchurch mosque massacre has drawn a sharp backlash in New Zealand, with Muslims denouncing the director’s decision to focus not on the community’s pain and resilience, but instead on the response by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.More than 60,000 people have signed a petition calling for the movie to be shut down. Ms. Ardern released a statement distancing herself from the film, which she said she had not been consulted on. The mayor of Christchurch said that the movie’s crews would not be welcome in her city, and one New Zealand producer dropped out of the production on Monday.Some Muslims said the film, as proposed, would exploit their trauma and engage in “white saviorism” by making Ms. Ardern the central character.“It’s really intensely hurtful,” said Guled Mire, a Fulbright scholar at Cornell University who is a member of New Zealand’s Muslim community. He added that he and others had learned of the movie only through social media. “The grief is still very raw for a lot of the victims, their families and for the community as a whole.”The film, announced on Thursday, is called “They Are Us,” taking its title from Ms. Ardern’s comments about the Muslim community after the 2019 shootings at two mosques, in which more than 50 people died. It would star the Australian actress Rose Byrne as a grieving Ms. Ardern.The film’s director, the New Zealand screenwriter Andrew Niccol, told Deadline that “the film addresses our common humanity, which is why I think it will speak to people around the world.” He added, “It is an example of how we should respond when there’s an attack on our fellow human beings.”While Ms. Ardern has been praised globally for her compassionate response to the massacre, Muslims in New Zealand said the movie’s focus on her was part of a long pattern in Hollywood of marginalizing minority populations.“It was quite shocking to see that, in 2021, we are still making these films which you would probably see in the 1920s or ’30s in Hollywood, where white saviors go into the desert,” said Ghazaleh Golbakhsh, an Iranian-New Zealand writer, academic and filmmaker. “It all kind of harks back to this kind of colonialist and Orientalist fantasy.”Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand, released a statement distancing herself from the movie.Nick Perry/Associated PressThough reports in the American news media suggested that the Muslim community had consulted on the film, multiple members said that they did not know of anyone who had been involved in the project.“The issue is that the film is about Jacinda Ardern, but it’s not her story to tell,” said Adibah Khan, a spokeswoman for New Zealand’s National Islamic Youth Association, which organized the petition. “It’s the story of the victims and their victim community, and the truth is, they haven’t been consulted at all.”Mohamed Mostafa, whose father was killed in the attacks, said he felt taken advantage of by the film project. “Someone’s trying to exploit my pain and agony and suffering — and for what benefit?” he said.He added that white saviorism was a false narrative. “There’s no saviors here, because we have 51 victims in the story,” he said. “If we had a savior, we wouldn’t have any victims.”Ms. Golbakhsh compared the proposed movie to “Green Book,” the Oscar-winning film that was dismissed by its detractors as a “racial reconciliation fantasy.”“It is kind of encouraging the idea that anyone nonwhite is either too weak, or not as interesting, and therefore just kind of pushes them to the background, as not a three-dimensional character,” she said.A report from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative released last week found that Muslims, who make up nearly a quarter of the global population, represented less than 2 percent of speaking characters in top-grossing films made between 2017 and 2019. Nearly 20 percent of the Muslim characters who did appear were killed by the end of the film, often in a violent death.“I sincerely hope that this project gets canceled and we don’t ever hear about it ever again,” Mr. Mostafa said. “When we’re ready to tell the story, we might do it, one day. And it’s going to be our story to tell.” More

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      Ned Beatty, Actor Known for ‘Network’ and ‘Deliverance,’ Dies at 83

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      Mr. Beatty’s career spanned more than four decades and more than 150 roles in movies such as “Superman,” “All the President’s Men,” “Rudy” and “Back to School.”Ned Beatty, who during a prolific acting career that spanned more than four decades earned an Oscar nomination for his role in “Network” and gave a cringe-inducing performance as a weekend outdoorsman assaulted by backwoods brutes in “Deliverance,” died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 83.His death was confirmed by Deborah Miller, Mr. Beatty’s manager, who did not immediately provide details on the cause. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Beatty appeared in more than 150 movies and television projects over the course of his career, frequently cast in supporting roles. While the beefy actor was not known as a leading man of the screen, he became associated with some of Hollywood’s most enduring films.His credits include “All the President’s Men” (1976), “Superman” (1978), “Rudy” (1993) and “Back to School” (1986).On television, Mr. Beatty played Stanley Bolander, the detective known as “Big Man,” on “Homicide: Life on the Street,” appearing on the television series from 1993 to 1995. He also played Ed Conner, the father of John Goodman’s character Dan Conner, on “Roseanne.”In 1976, Mr. Beatty was cast by Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky in “Network,” the critically acclaimed satire about a television network’s struggling ratings and a tube-obsessed nation. His character, Arthur Jensen, gave a memorable monologue in the movie, earning Mr. Beatty an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.In the scene, Mr. Beatty, playing the mustachioed network boss, summons the character Howard Beale, the anchorman played by Peter Finch, into the corporate boardroom and draws the curtains. With the camera trained on Mr. Beatty, who was standing at the opposite end of a conference table lined with banker lamps, he unleashed a ferocious soliloquy. Mr. Beale had a lot to learn about the ways of the corporate world, Mr. Beatty’s character sermonized.“And you have meddled with the primeval forces of nature, Mr. Beale,” Mr. Beatty said, his voice roaring. “And you will atone.”Mr. Beatty then modulated his delivery.“Am I getting through to you?” he said in a normal speaking voice.In “Mad as Hell: The Making of ‘Network’ and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies,” a 2014 book written by Dave Itzkoff, a culture reporter for The New York Times, Mr. Beatty said that he had been intimidated by the length of the speech, but excited by the character and the film.To get the filmmakers to commit to giving him the role, Mr. Beatty said, he told them that he had another movie offer for more money.“I was lying like a snake,” Mr. Beatty said. “I think they liked the fact that I was at least trying to be sly. I was doing something that maybe might be in their lexicon.”Mr. Beatty made his film debut in “Deliverance,” the 1972 big screen adaptation of James Dickey’s novel about four friends whose canoeing trip in rural Georgia turns calamitous. Stripped down to white underpants, his character, Bobby, is forced to “squeal like a pig” by a hillbilly before he is raped.The line would go down in movie infamy.“‘Squeal like a pig.’ How many times has that been shouted, said or whispered to me, since then?” Mr. Beatty wrote in a 1989 opinion piece for The New York Times.Mr. Beatty did not distance himself from the scene.“I suppose when someone (invariably a man) shouts this at me I am supposed to duck my head and look embarrassed at being recognized as the actor who suffered this ignominy,” he wrote. “But I feel only pride about being a part of this story, which the director John Boorman turned into a film classic. I think Bill McKinney (who portrayed the attacker) and I played the ‘rape’ scene about as well as it could be played.”Ned Beatty and Jon Voight in “Deliverance” (1972), in which Mr. Beatty made his feature film debut.Warner Bros., via PhotofestBorn on July 6, 1937, in Louisville, Ky., Mr. Beatty spent much of the early part of his acting career in regional theater, including eight years at the Arena Stage in Washington. In a 2003 interview, he told The Times that he averaged 13 to 15 shows per year onstage at the start of his career and spent as many as 300 days performing.In 2003, Mr. Beatty starred as Big Daddy in the Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” appearing with Jason Patric and Ashley Judd. He was reprising his performance in the role of the Southern plantation owner, for which he had been nominated for an Olivier Award as part of the revival’s original London production.Candidly assessing his co-stars, Mr. Beatty said that Broadway had come to rely too heavily on celebrities, thrusting them into challenging roles they did not have the acting chops to handle.“In theater you want to go from here to there, you want it to be about something,” Mr. Beatty said. “Stage actors learn how to do that. Film actors often don’t even think about it. They do what the director wants them to do, and they never inform their performance with — call it what you wish — through-line, objective.”In “Superman” in 1978, Mr. Beatty played Otis, the bumbling toady of the villain Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman), a role that he reprised in “Superman II” in 1980.In 1986, he was cast in a comedic role as the gushing and unscrupulous Dean Martin of the fictional Grand Lakes University in “Back to School,” offering admission to Thornton Melon, the big and tall clothing tycoon (Rodney Dangerfield), in exchange for donating a building. The head of the business school in the film objected to the quid pro quo.“But I’d just like to say, in all fairness to Mr. Melon here, it was a really big check,” Mr. Beatty’s character retorted.Mr. Beatty delivered another memorable performance in a small role as Daniel Ruettiger, the blue-collar father in “Rudy,” the 1993 movie about a University of Notre Dame walk-on football player who makes the team. As the father enters the stadium for the first time, he is overcome by the moment.“This is the most beautiful sight these eyes have ever seen,” Mr. Beatty said. More

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      Milton Moses Ginsberg, Unconventional Filmmaker, Dies at 85

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      His movies about a psychiatrist’s disintegration and a werewolf working in the White House bombed. But they both drew favorable attention many years later.Milton Moses Ginsberg, who directed two ambitious but eccentric films before falling into obscurity, one about the meltdown of a psychiatrist and the other about a press aide in a Nixon-like administration who becomes a murderous werewolf, died on May 23 in his apartment in Manhattan. He was 85.The cause was cancer, said his wife, Nina Ginsberg.Mr. Ginsberg, a film editor determined to make his own movies, wrote and directed “Coming Apart” (1969), a raw black-and-white film that used a single, almost entirely static camera to document the loveless trysts and psychological disintegration of a psychiatrist, played by Rip Torn, who surreptitiously records his encounters with a camera inside a mirrored box.“Coming Apart” received mixed reviews, at best. But the one that devastated Mr. Ginsberg was from The Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris, who wrote that “if everybody in the cast had refused to strip for action or inaction, ‘Coming Apart’ would have crumbled commercially into a half-baked amateur movie incapable of selling enough tickets to fill a phone booth.”Mr. Ginsberg blamed that review for the film’s box-office failure.“That was it,” he told The New York Times in 1998, adding: “I had done everything I wanted to do. And nothing happened.”Rip Torn in Mr. Ginsberg’s “Coming Apart.” The film received mixed reviews at best and failed at the box office when it was released in 1969. Mr. Ginsberg’s disappointment was eased somewhat when the Museum of Modern Art screened “Coming Apart” in 1998. Kino InternationalHe followed “Coming Apart” in 1973 with another low-budget film: “The Werewolf of Washington,” a campy political parody inspired by the classic horror film “The Wolf Man” (1941), which terrified Mr. Ginsberg as a boy, and by President Richard M. Nixon, who terrified him as a man.In Mr. Ginsberg’s film, released more than a year into the Watergate scandal, Dean Stockwell plays an assistant press secretary who turns into a werewolf at inopportune moments, like when he’s bowling with the president, and murders characters based on Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, and Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of Attorney General John N. Mitchell.“The film isn’t advertised as a documentary,” the syndicated columnist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote, “but when you think about what’s been going on around this town, you couldn’t tell it from the plot.”In 1975, after Mr. Ginsberg received a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, he fell into a depression that lifted only after he met and married Nina Posnansky, a painter, in 1983. She and his brother, Arthur, survive him.After the commercial failure of his feature films, Mr. Ginsberg returned to film editing. He worked on various projects, including the Oscar-winning documentaries “Down and Out in America” (1986), about unemployed and homeless people left behind in the economy, which was directed by the actress Lee Grant, and “The Personals” (1998), about a group of older people in a theater group.He was in limbo, he wrote in Film Comment in 1999, for having made “Coming Apart,” which he wryly called “murder on an audience.”“So if oblivion is what you crave, for both yourself and your movie, follow me!” he added.Mr. Ginsberg never made another feature, but in recent years he finished several short video essays, among them “Kron: Along the Avenue of Time” (2011), a phantasmagorical exploration of his life taken through a microscopic journey into intricate watch movements.Mr. Ginsberg in his Manhattan apartment in 1998. “If oblivion is what you crave, for both yourself and your movie,” he wrote in the magazine Film Comment in 1999, “follow me!” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMilton Moses Ginsberg was born on Sept. 22, 1935, in the Bronx. His father, Elias, was a cutter in the garment district, and his mother, Fannie (Weis) Ginsberg, was a homemaker.After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, Mr. Ginsberg received a bachelor’s degree in literature from Columbia University. Italian films like Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” (1960) inspired him to make movies, but in the 1960s he worked instead as a film editor at NBC News, held a production job with the documentarians Albert and David Maysles, and was an assistant at “Candid Camera,” the popular television series that used concealed cameras to capture people in various situations, which he said influenced the furtive recording of the psychiatrist’s guests in “Coming Apart.”Mr. Ginsberg’s disappointment at the response to his features was eased somewhat when the Museum of Modern Art screened “Coming Apart” in 1998. But he was too pained by its reception nearly 30 years before to watch it; he did not enter the theater until it ended, when he spoke to the audience. MoMA has shown it a few times since.“It was like nothing I’d ever seen,” Laurence Kardish, the former longtime senior curator of MoMA’s film department, who had seen “Coming Apart” during its original release, said by phone. “It was very explicit and very raw and struck me as an essential New York film, showing a New Yorker’s enthusiasm for self-examination.”When “Coming Apart” was released on video in 2000, an article in The Chicago Tribune called it “stylistically audacious.” And in 2011, the Brooklyn Academy of Music screened both of Mr. Ginsberg’s films. After its associate curator, Jacob Perlin, moved to Metrograph, the repertory theater on the Lower East Side, where he is now the artistic and programming director, he held a 50th-anniversary screening of “Coming Apart” in 2019. Restorations of both of Mr. Ginsberg’s movies have been completed by the film company Kino Lorber.The belated acceptance of his films offered some redemption to Mr. Ginsberg.“In 2011, Milton said that he’s had two afterlives,” Mr. Perlin, who became friends with Mr. Ginsberg, said by phone. “When MoMA showed ‘Coming Apart,’ and 2011, when I showed both his films.” More