Movies

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Jean-Laurent Cochet was the most renowned acting teacher in France, and one of the strictest.“If a student arrived five minutes late to class, they didn’t get into the course,” Maxime d’Aboville, a former student, said in an email. “If we coughed in class,” he added, “we were sent out.”But Mr. Cochet’s demanding nature — some have said it bordered on masochism — led to success. His former students included Gérard Depardieu, Isabelle Huppert and a host of French television, movie and stage stars.“The Americans had Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio,” said Pierre Delavène, director of the Cochet-Delavène School, which Mr. Cochet founded in 1965. “The French had Jean-Laurent Cochet.”Mr. Cochet died on Monday at 85 in a hospital in Paris, a spokeswoman for his agents said. The cause was complications of the coronavirus.Mr. Cochet “asked the impossible,” Mr. Delavène said by email, so that his students could dedicate themselves fully to the craft of acting. If he thought a student wasn’t passionate enough, Mr. Delavène added, he would encourage the student to quit acting entirely.Ms. Huppert once said she was “fascinated” by his teaching, adding, “In his class, I was more spectator than actress,” the French newspaper Libération quoted her as saying.On Twitter, Franck Riester, France’s culture minister, called Mr. Cochet “a monument of theater.”Jean-Laurent Cochet was born on Jan. 28, 1935, in Romainville, a suburb of Paris, and wanted to be an actor from a young age, the newspaper Le Monde reported. His teachers made him focus on classics of French drama by the likes of Victor Hugo and Molière, and he would later insist that his own students do the same.He would start classes by teaching his students how to recite a fable by the 17th-century poet Jean de La Fontaine. “His teaching didn’t age a bit,” Mr. Delavène said. “It is only by mastery of the great classical repertoire that one finally comes closest to the modern repertoire.”Mr. Cochet joined the Comédie-Française, France’s oldest theater troupe, in 1959, when he was 24. He went on to perform with the company in numerous plays before deciding to start his own theater school in the 1960s. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Richard Berry, a prominent French actor, said in a phone interview that Mr. Cochet’s classes would focus on technique, so that students would realize that the body was an instrument.“Most actors, they act a text as they feel it — it’s inspiration,” Mr. Berry said, “but he showed me there is more.”To Mr. Berry, accounts of Mr. Cochet’s difficult manner missed how kind and encouraging he was. When he began attending Mr. Cochet’s classes, Mr. Berry said, he was too poor to afford the fee, but Mr. Cochet waved him away when he tried to pay.“He always said, ‘It’s OK, keep it for yourself,’” Mr. Berry said.Mr. d’Aboville said he expected that Mr. Cochet’s students, some of whom have become teachers themselves, would continue to impart Mr. Cochet’s methods.“He gave the theater almost a religious dimension,” he said.[embedded content] More

“LA Originals” is part reminiscence and part reclamation. The documentary, streaming on Netflix, finds the filmmaker and photographer Estevan Oriol, who directed, revisiting his career and the career of his friend and collaborator Mark Machado, a tattoo artist to the stars who goes by the names Cartoon or Mr. Cartoon.Both became instrumental figures in the Los Angeles hip-hop scene starting in the late 1980s and early ’90s, doing work that fused the mainstream (album covers, music videos) with the city’s Chicano art traditions, and also captured violence, poverty and addiction in parts of Los Angeles that in recent years have gentrified.Although the film unfolds from an insider’s perspective (with an irritating tendency to drop one name after another), it is also a good introduction to the two artists. We learn how Cartoon, already recognized for his graffiti murals, turned to skin, and how Oriol, who shot tour footage of the rap groups Cypress Hill and House of Pain, came to know Cartoon and bring him customers. The pair worked together for years in the shadow of Los Angeles’s Skid Row. Oriol would film and photograph the many celebrities who visited the studio for inking.[embedded content]Mark Hoppus of Blink-182 likens getting a Cartoon tattoo to being part of an exclusive club. Such was Cartoon’s reach that Kobe Bryant, who died in January, recalls encountering a hotel worker in Beijing who recognized the artist’s handiwork. For his part, Oriol, in this film’s telling, popularized a much-imitated finger-miming of the letters “L” and “A,” and showed an ace eye for candid shots and music videos.Despite the access and gushing testimonials (Snoop Dogg says that Cartoon is the only person he lets do “my tattoos and my kids’ tattoos”), “LA Originals” is less interesting as a celebrity gabfest than as a record of changing urban and cultural landscapes. Oriol talks about the iconographic significance of a viaduct that was closed to be replaced. Cartoon and Oriol befriended Skid Row residents during their years working alongside them.A man identified as an ex-gang member and drug user at the time lovingly recalls an incident in which he was passed out near the studio, and got sprayed with water as a wake-up call before clients arrived. (The movie has footage of that, too.) Another man, identified as Pepper, the mayor of Skid Row, suggests that the two artists were part of a family that never gave up on him.Way too much of “LA Originals” has that overly chummy vibe, but the shambling, yearbook quality of the film is also its reason for being. Oriol says at the start that his 25 years’ worth of footage and photographs inspired him to make the documentary. That archival material is a major asset.LA OriginalsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. More

Pass the champagne — out of reach of the ill-fated newlyweds Hayley (Eleanor Tomlinson) and Roberto (Tiziano Caputo) in the comedy “Love Wedding Repeat,” streaming on Netflix. The couple’s reception at an Italian villa becomes a drunken, disastrous lab experiment carried out by an unseen oracle (Penny Ryder) who wants to prove that happily-ever-after is merely a game of chance.Table four is where the bride (a charming redhead with a wide smile that shifts from phony to petrified) has quarantined her English-speaking friends: one shiftless male maid-of-honor, two vengeful exes and three lovelorn fools. One of those includes Hayley’s brother Jack (Sam Claflin), haplessly mooning over his dream girl (Olivia Munn), an American war journalist who gets a few muttered zingers, but is otherwise stuck acting, well, dreamy. This volatile cocktail is given one more ingredient — a glass of bubbly spiked with tranquilizers — and a twist. Devilish children have randomly rearranged the seating cards so the poisoner, Jack, isn’t sure who has the sleeping potion until they’ve passed out on their plate.[embedded content]Naturally, the nuptials climax in blood and tears. Unnaturally, however, the film rewinds to test whether the evening might improve if a different guzzler became the Sleeping Bungler. It’s a clever conceit based on the 2012 French film “Plan de Table,” here reduced to a hasty montage of possibilities and one other story line played out in full, accompanied by a stately classical score to balance the mayhem.With a few more slammed doors, the action-packed script could be a passable British farce. Alas, the director and screenwriter Dean Craig instead favors British chagrin plus an overdose of noblesse disdain, which is well-executed by the groom’s silent, suffering grandmother (Giusi Merli). Freida Pinto, however, playing Jack’s loathsome ex, appears to have been instructed to recoil until her head is a foot behind her shoulders.Craig’s comic delivery belabors gags that should run light on their feet. Rather than serving up a variety of zingers, the movie settles for one joke per character, repeated endlessly. A case in point: the jealous boyfriend (Allan Mustafa) who’s fixated on that male measurement. Instead, the best bits of comedy come from physical slapstick. Jack Farthing, playing a coked-out schoolyard crush hellbent on sabotaging Hayley’s marriage, stumbles into the movie like a marionette missing most of his strings, while Joel Fry, as her wastrel best friend, is somehow able to suck his eyeballs into his skull. Cheers to that.Love Wedding RepeatNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

Opening in 1950s Taiwan, during the rule of the Kuomintang (the Chinese Nationalist Party), “Tigertail” introduces us to a young boy named Pin-Jui. He lives with his grandparents in the countryside while his mother looks for a job.The film, streaming on Netflix, soon jumps to the present day: Pin-Jui, now an old man (Tzi Ma), lives in the United States and clearly has a fraught relationship with his grown-up daughter (Christine Ko); it’s not hard to discern that from the awkward silences. Spanning more than half a century, “Tigertail” goes back and forth in time, tracing the events that allowed Pin-Jui to achieve his American dream yet made him so aloof to his loved ones. It does this to mixed results.The writer and director Alan Yang (co-creator of “Master of None”) was inspired by the story of his own father, who immigrated to the United States from Taiwan. Hong-Chi Lee portrays Pin-Jui as a young man, who finds work in a factory alongside his mother, just like Yang’s father had; they make just enough to scrape by.[embedded content]These penniless years are the film’s most romantic, shot with rose-colored nostalgia. Pin-Jui starts dating his childhood crush, Yuan, and their shared scenes pulsate with longing. When he takes her out to a fancy restaurant — an all-red banquet hall with a glamorous chanteuse serenading patrons — one might think of Wong Kar-wai, the master of amorous atmosphere. Unable to foot the bill, the two lovebirds grab hands and make a dash for the exit in slow motion, set to a heart-racing string score.These moments of ecstasy dwindle when Pin-Jui chases his American dream, leaving behind Yuan. He accepts an arranged marriage with his boss’s daughter and moves to New York. Of course, America isn’t what he expected it to be. He continues to live a routine, impoverished life and is still unable to afford to eat out.It’s easy to see how disappointment would wear Pin-Jui down, yet the callousness he develops toward his wife feels abrupt and unwarranted. The film is especially heavy-handed in the present-day scenes with his daughter, who says she was neglected. Their painfully expository conversations reveal the weakness of Yang’s script. Those scenes left this viewer missing the sensory experience of the earlier parts of the film: the rustling among rice fields, the scarlet glow of dimly lit bars, the soft current of the river accompanying the sweet voice of Yuan as she sings Otis Redding under the blue hue of a moonlit night.TigertailRated PG. In English, Mandarin and Taiwanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. More

The intrigue of the WWE, where wrestlers wear gimmicky costumes while tussling, captures a child’s imagination in the amiable Netflix movie “The Main Event.” Sweet-natured Leo (Seth Carr) is an 11-year-old pipsqueak and pro wrestling enthusiast who’s picked on by bigger boys. Escaping his bullies one day, he stumbles into an estate sale where he finds a mysterious wrestling mask that, once donned, imbues him with superhuman strength. In a note of silliness, the magic fabric also stinks of body odor.Armed with this disguise, Leo becomes a superhero of sorts. Most of the day, he’s a nervous kid with a few friends. But in the mask, he transforms into a smooth-talking strongman who can topple a tree with a karate kick, or turn the charm on with his school crush (Momona Tamada). The mask fulfills a juvenile fantasy of limitless power, and Leo puts it to the test when, with the blessing of his kooky grandma (Tichina Arnold), he enters a pro wrestling competition under the moniker Kid Chaos.[embedded content]The movie, helmed by the TV comedy director Jay Karas, blends in real elements of the sport. The WWE stars Mike “The Miz” Mizanin and Kofi Kingston play themselves in cameos, and Babatunde Aiyegbusi (a.k.a. Samson) appears as a hulking, nonverbal adversary. The wrestling matches themselves, though, are flamboyantly embellished: During one, an opponent passes gas strongly enough to blast Kid Chaos across the ring.“The Main Event” is a light comedy that takes the joys of a real WWE match — the escapism, the performance — and gives them a kid-centric spin. Karas balances the movie’s clowning with a human story, while showing empathy for childhood growing pains. Although a subplot concerning Leo’s sulky father (Adam Pally) ends up undercooked, it’s of little concern. The kids are who matter most here, and the rapport among Leo’s group of friends sparkles with sly energy.The Main EventNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. More