More stories

  • in

    Emerald Fennell’s Dark, Jaded, Funny, Furious Fables of Female Revenge

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeHoliday TVBest Netflix DocumentariesCredit…Alexandra Von Fuerst for The New York TimesSkip to contentSkip to site indexEmerald Fennell’s Dark, Jaded, Funny, Furious Fables of Female RevengeA brilliant young show runner from “Killing Eve” unveils her first film, “Promising Young Woman,” bringing macabre feminist wit to experiences that no one wants to talk about.Credit…Alexandra Von Fuerst for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyDec. 17, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETThe germ of the idea for “Promising Young Woman” first lodged itself in Emerald Fennell’s mind six or seven years ago, at a dinner party she and her roommates were throwing for some old college friends in London. Everyone was sitting around the kitchen table, eating pasta, when one woman happened to mention a creepy encounter she’d had with a guy on the tube on her way over. The men at the table were shocked. The women were shocked that the men were shocked. What world did they live in? Apparently not one filled with creeps who followed you home, or groped you on public transport, or catcalled you and turned nasty when you ignored them.In other words, the usual. But the men at this party might as well have been walking through a wardrobe into a land of perpetual winter. As women regaled the table with one gruesome story after another, gleefully besting one another’s floridly crappy experiences, they were shocked by the relentlessness of it all, and by the gallows humor and resignation in the women’s response. “They were just staggered,” Fennell told me when I met with her last winter. “And these were just the milder things.” One man said he grew up thinking everything was fine, and was just now realizing it was only fine for him.The experience was an eye-opener for Fennell as well. “Their surprise was so interesting,” she said. She suspected men would not be so unaware of women’s experiences if women weren’t culturally shamed into “laughing off” or “being cool with” their trauma — helping to create a fairy tale in which everything really was mostly fine, and bad things only happened occasionally, to girls who probably did something to deserve it. What made this striking was not the actual events the women were describing, which were too quotidian to be horrifying; it was seeing how readily the culture enabled and normalized this stuff, making women feel uncomfortable or embarrassed for talking about it honestly.The film that emerged from this realization, “Promising Young Woman,” is Fennell’s debut as a feature director — a ruthless, pitch-black story of revenge set in an off-kilter, fairy-tale world. Carey Mulligan plays Cassie, a young woman who dropped out of medical school after a traumatic incident the film does not initially reveal. At 30, Cassie still lives with her parents and works as a barista in a coffee shop. But her real mission in life, which she pursues with singular dedication, is to confront people who think of themselves as blameless with the truth about their behavior. Every week she dresses up for a night out — sometimes in business attire, other times in more revealing outfits. She goes to bars and pretends to be blackout drunk. Invariably, a man comes to her rescue. Invariably, he takes her home and tries to have sex with her. Then things take an unexpected turn.Fennell started writing after thinking over all the conversations she’d participated in about alcohol and consent — all the rollicking stories guys told about hitting on drunken girls, or getting them drunk to “loosen them up.” None of this was taboo when she was younger: “It was all completely normalized by all the American ‘raunch era’ films and TV that everyone watched,” she told me. “Drinking was part of seduction culture — and if people couldn’t remember things, it was often met with an eye roll.” Fennell questioned that logic. If having sex with a girl who was blackout drunk was nothing to feel bad about, then a man wouldn’t feel guilty if she turned out not to be drunk, would he? It made her wonder. “What if I went to a nightclub and pretended to be really, really drunk, and somebody took me home, and then just as they were removing my pants, I revealed I wasn’t drunk?” An image formed in her mind of a woman sitting up in bed, suddenly sober, and asking, “What are you doing?” She later described this very scenario to a producer. “I said, ‘And then she sits up, and she’s not drunk!’ And he went, ‘Holy [expletive], she’s a psycho!’”This was the reaction she’d hoped for. “The reason it feels so uncomfortable is because the person who’s doing it knows it’s wrong,” she said. “That’s why they freak out. Everybody thinks of themselves as a good person — so what happens when someone comes along and shows you that you’re not?”With her long, wavy blond hair and flouncy dresses, Cassie looks like a romantic-comedy heroine, or like the good girl in a film noir, but she radiates white-hot rage, and not even the stifling artificiality of her parents’ house, with its pink wall-to-wall carpeting and passive-aggressive suburban rococo furniture, can smother it. From the film’s opening image — a hilarious, slow-motion sequence of paunchy, khaki-clad office dudes on a dance floor, gyrating and slapping their own butts — “Promising Young Woman” subtly skewers gender conventions and double standards, and as the movie progresses we start to piece together what is happening: Cassie is trying to redress an injustice that was swept under the rug, by not allowing anyone to forget.Fennell has been scrupulous about crafting the mechanics of Cassie’s revenge: “She doesn’t entrap anyone. She never says yes, she never says no. She just exists. She says, ‘I’ve lost my phone,’ and then they do all the talking.” What you see, Fennell said, “is a man thinking he’s got a rapport with a woman, which I think happens a lot. It’s just that he hasn’t noticed that she’s not said a word.” The moment Cassie reveals that she is conscious of what is happening is, for that person, the ultimate threat: She forces them to confront themselves. “Isn’t that the worst thing?” Fennell laughed. While pitching the movie, she would joke that most people would rather be shot in the knee than be shown who they really are. “That’s our worst nightmare,” she said. “It’s what makes Cassie frightening — much more frightening than a knife-wielding maniac. Much more devastating, really.”I met Fennell for tea last February, in the library of the Soho Hotel in London — a cozy, faux-bookish setting where, moments before she joined me, a man at a nearby table loudly and graphically debriefed two others on some torture instruments he’d recently had the chance to inspect. Fennell arrived two minutes late, in jeans and an oversize, fuzzy, bright pink sweater, apologizing profusely. She looked as if she could have stepped directly off the set of her movie, in which she has a cameo as a video blogger giving a “Blow Job Lips Makeup Tutorial.” Fennell herself is compulsively, hilariously self-effacing — a trait she attributes partly to being female and partly to being English — but her good friend Phoebe Waller-Bridge, of “Fleabag” fame, whom she first met on the set of the film “Albert Nobbs,” calls her “the most stylish person I’ve ever met. Not just in her work and her appearance, but in her spirit, how she speaks, how she carries herself.”Fennell is highly attuned to presentation. When I commented on the brilliance of Nancy Steiner’s costume design for her film, which makes everyone look like a character in a Hallmark movie of the damned, she spoke about the ways women know how to use clothes, hair, makeup and voice to hide their anger and trauma. “There are lots of people who hide it by putting on really accessible, really sweet, really unthreatening — oh … ” She stopped. “I just realized I’m wearing an enormous jumper.”Tonally, there is a similar tension at play in Fennell’s movie. Her work tends to feel, in general, like an enormous, fuzzy pink jumper wrapped around a dagger. As one of the film’s producers told me, “Emerald would describe this as ‘poison popcorn,’ which I think is a great term for it.”“Everybody thinks of themselves as a good person — so what happens when someone comes along and shows you that you’re not?”Credit…Alexandra Von Fuerst for The New York TimesFennell may be better known as an actor and writer than as a director — especially given her role on “The Crown,” a huge hit whose latest season included the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer. As Camilla Parker Bowles, Fennell plays a character with an upbringing she’s familiar with — “I’m basically playing a chain-smoking posho standing in a corner making cutting remarks,” she said. “So it’s not a stretch” — who finds herself cast as the villain in a fairy tale, which, in reality, was anything but. “I was drawn to Camilla because she struck me as a normal person sucked into a completely extraordinary circumstance,” Fennell said. This comes across in her performance, which hovers between amusement and disbelief.The time period covered in this season of “The Crown” roughly corresponds to the years just before Fennell was born, in 1985. She grew up in Chelsea, in a flat that was eventually joined to another to form a house. Her father is the celebrity jeweler Theo Fennell, known for his intricate, often dark and funny one-of-a-kind pieces, like “opening rings” that hinge back to reveal magical, fairy-tale worlds (a Mole and Toad piece inspired by “The Wind in the Willows,” a Colosseum with a dead gladiator in it). Her mother, Louise, worked in fashion and as a photographers’ agent before writing, in her mid-50s, her first book, a satire of celebrity called “Dead Rich.” Emerald’s sister, Coco, is a fashion designer. Elton John and Andrew Lloyd Webber, at whose offices we would meet for a second time, are friends of the family.Fennell was educated at Marlborough College (the boarding school that the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, also attended) and studied English at Oxford, where she performed in plays and was spotted by an agent. She auditioned for what she thought would be a one-episode role in the BBC drama “Call the Midwife,” but her character, Nurse Patsy — a redheaded lesbian with a blunt demeanor and a traumatic past — remained on the show for three seasons. In between those seasons, Fennell wrote books, one for each hiatus: two children’s stories set at a creepy boarding school, and one adult novel, “Monsters,” a black comedy about two kids who are delighted to find a dead body on the beach.She works, says Waller-Bridge, “like a bloody Trojan. She’s been working on about 10 projects at once since the day I met her.” She has been known to work on writing projects even after 14-hour days on television sets as an actress. She shot “Promising Young Woman” over 23 days in Los Angeles, while seven months pregnant. After Waller-Bridge’s departure as the showrunner of “Killing Eve,” Fennell joined the writing staff for Season 2 and, after a few months, was promoted to head writer and co-showrunner, eventually winning Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for her work.This prodigious output would be remarkable even if she weren’t just 35 (or 34 when we first met). At the time, she was on a short break from shooting “The Crown.” She was also promoting her movie and writing the book for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s upcoming musical “Cinderella,” expected to have its premiere in 2021. When Lloyd-Webber first approached her about collaborating, she thought: “ ‘Cinderella’ — there’s not really much one can do.” Then she thought: What if Cinderella were a normal person who was forced to live in a fairy-tale world? We’re used to the story of the girl who gets made over and rescued, but what if, instead of the transformation being the best thing that ever happened to her, it was the worst? She pictured a woman who didn’t mind being who she was — “and then, suddenly, they’ve been made to mind.” Her “Cinderella” is the story of a real girl in a fairy-tale world that expects her to annihilate herself to meet its demands.Fennell grew up reading stories of beautiful cheerleaders, of gorgeous, glowing, unconscious girls. But her real loves were Nancy Drew books, Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, Daphne du Maurier and the Brontës. (“The Brontës! The greatest!” she wrote to me later. “All of them — except Branwell, obviously.”) “All the stuff that I love — all the Victorian female novelists, the perverted domestic, the madwoman in the attic — all that stuff, in a way, is what I would love to be able to do,” she says. Recently she’s been reading Hilary Mantel, whose work she finds can be “very visceral and very feminine, horrifying in a way I’ve never ever experienced.” Literature, she says, is full of fascinating, frightening women, “but when it comes to television and film — I suppose because our preoccupation with the women in that media is still based on the way they look — we don’t see those characters so much. These kind of weird old ladies or pervs or voyeurs. We don’t see female losers at all.”One day in the early 2000s, when Fennell was a teenager, she was at a cash machine, wearing a crop-top that exposed her pierced navel, and noticed an elegant, well-dressed woman hovering uncomfortably nearby. Finally the woman spoke to her: “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know whether to tell you or not, but you’re going to die of stomach cancer before you’re 30.” “I said, ‘What?’” Fennell remembers. “And she said, ‘I just thought you should know.’ Then she walked away.” Fennell was stunned, but the casual savagery of the gesture — the subtle, underhanded violence of it — impressed her. To this day, she thinks of it every time she has a stomachache. “Isn’t it so clever to pretend to be a kindly citizen?” she laughs. “I just thought, That’s it. That’s what it’s like. That’s what it’s like to be an angry, frightened, mean woman.” Years later, she included it in a short film, “Careful How You Go,” which consists of three vignettes depicting three moments of psychological violence and recreational sadism. “I guess she’s my muse,” Fennell said. “That cruel, cruel woman.”In the past five years or so, after decades of seeing women subsumed into highly regulated, rigidly prescribed roles, we’ve seen an explosion of dark, uncontained, shockingly human female characters. There’s a sense, Fennell told me, that the types of stories she wants to tell are “new” or of-the-moment in film and television, but she believes they have always existed. They’ve just been walled in, closed off, “like those anchorites” — medieval ascetics — “who used to build themselves into the walls of churches and see insane, terrifying visions and write about them.” What is fresh is that they are appearing in films and on television. Waller-Bridge’s “Fleabag,” Michaela Coel’s “I May Destroy You,” Aisling Bea’s “This Way Up,” Pamela Adlon’s “Better Things,” Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer’s “Broad City” and, more recently, Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle’s “PEN15” and Lucy Prebble and Billie Piper’s “I Hate Suzie” — this is an emergent mini-canon of tales from the other side, from behind the veil of decorum. “We’re only just getting to the stage, some of us, to tell them,” Fennell said. “I feel like there’s a backlog of stuff.” They aren’t new stories so much as alternate ones — subversions of the official story, secret histories, gnostic texts. “They’re the underworld,” she said.Fennell has been encouraged, recently, to see shades of this underworld — works marked by senselessness, chaos, the ease with which savagery can be cloaked in banality, all the repressed darkness and gallows humor that women use to cope — all around her: in Alice Lowe’s slasher film “Prevenge,” in Julia Davis’s filthy, Victorian-themed black comedy “Hunderby” or her hugely successful, also hugely filthy, podcast with Vicki Pepperdine, “Joan and Jericha,” in which they dispense advice as “two women for whom nothing is too disgusting. In fact, everything should be more disgusting. But also women are always wrong — so every woman who emails in, whatever the email, no matter how terrible or vile her partner, it’s always the woman’s fault.”Fennell told me a story about visiting the White Cube gallery in London, where she became enraptured by “a very weird sculpture of a woman having sex with a huge tentacled creature, or being murdered by it, or something.” She remarked to a gallery assistant how much she liked it. He told her there had been mixed reactions to it — “But do you know who loves it? Women.” Considering how women have embraced the surge in dark, realistic portrayals of contemporary female life, this is not surprising.There is something about the way the world relates to women that is bound to breed darkness — even if that darkness is sub rosa, hidden under blond curls and pretty dresses. This unvarnished darkness should not be confused with earlier, often studio-driven attempts at girl-themed “raunch culture.” It is coming from inside the house, reflecting a certain kind of smart, sensitive, reflexively caustic woman’s view of a culture that seems to insist on keeping her hidden from view, and subbing a compliant fembot in her place. As Fennell observes, it’s much more comfortable to imagine women are sweet and happy than face the fear they might want to hurt you. Cinema is full of stoic, gun-toting, “empowered” female avengers, but “that’s not how it works when women are angry and upset and traumatized,” she said. Cassie’s refusal to forget is more threatening: a constant, unendurable rebuke to those around her. “It was important that there was another path for her,” Fennell said. “And that we see how smooth and soft and well-lit that path is, versus the other one, which is so bleak.” Nothing threatens a culture of complicity more than self-sacrifice.After watching “Promising Young Woman,” Fennell told me, she noticed that a male friend of hers looked upset. “I said, ‘Are you all right?’ And he said, ‘You’ve been watching everyone.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah.’ I don’t want to be cruel. I want to be honest.” She paused. “Let’s talk about it.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

  • in

    George Clooney Believes Tom Cruise Is 'Absolutely Right' for COVID-19 Rant on 'M:I7' Set

    WENN/Nicky Nelson/Mario Mitsis

    While defending the ‘Mission: Impossible’ star’s tirade caused by violation of coronavirus guidelines, ‘The Midnight Sky’ star and director claims he would not ‘have done it quite that personally.’

    Dec 17, 2020
    AceShowbiz – George Clooney has come to Tom Cruise’s defense. Shortly after the “Mission: Impossible VII” star made headlines with a leaked audio of him going on a tirade at crew members who allegedly broke COVID-19 guidelines, his fellow Hollywood heavyweight offered his opinion on the situation and stated that the actor/producer was “absolutely right.”
    Speaking on Howard Stern’s SiriusXM radio show on Wednesday, December 16, Clooney first pointed out, “He didn’t overreact because it is a problem.” He went on to share, “I have a friend who’s an AD on another TV show who just had the almost exact same thing happen with not quite as far out a response.”
    Although he defended Cruise for admonishing the crew who stood too close to one another, Clooney did note during the remote interview that he might not go as far. “I wouldn’t have done it that big,” he said. “I wouldn’t have, you know, pulled people out. You’re in a position of power and it’s tricky, right? You do have a responsibility for everybody else and he’s absolutely right about that.”
    The star and director of “The Midnight Sky” then explained why he believes Cruise made the right move. “And, you know, if the production goes down, a lot of people lose their jobs. People have to understand that and have to be responsible,” he pressed on. Still, he added, “It’s just not my style to, you know, to take everybody to task that way.”

      See also…

    “I think it doesn’t help necessarily to point to specific people in that way and do it that…but, you know, everybody has their own style,” Clooney elaborated. “The people who were on that shoot will tell us more about it. I understand why he did it. He’s not wrong at all about that. You know, I just, I don’t know that I would have done it quite that personally, but I don’t know all the circumstances so maybe he had it 10 or 15 times before.”
    The leaked audio of Cruise’s on-set rant heard him yelling, “We are creating thousands of jobs, you motherf**kers.” Venting his frustration, he warned the crew, “I don’t ever want to see it again. Ever! And if you don’t do it, you’re fired, and I see you do it again you’re f**king gone. And if anyone in this crew does it… And you, don’t you ever f**king do it again. That’s it. No apologies.”
    “You can tell it to the people who are losing their f**king homes because our industry is shut down. It’s not going to put food on their table or pay for their college education,” he explained why he’s so strict with the rules. “That’s what I sleep with every night – the future of this f**king industry!”
    The seventh installment of “Mission: Impossible” is slated to be released on November 19, 2021. Directed by Christopher McQuarrie, its production has been met with delays due to the COVID-19 pandemics. Back in October, filming got suspended for a week after people on the set in Italy tested positive for the virus.

    You can share this post!

    Next article
    Kobe Bryant’s Widow Vanessa ‘Disappointed’ by Mom’s Lawsuit Trying to Gain ‘Financial Windfall’

    Related Posts More

  • in

    ‘The Art of Political Murder’ Review: Behind a Bishop’s Assassination

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘The Art of Political Murder’ Review: Behind a Bishop’s AssassinationThis documentary from Paul Taylor explores the killing of Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera in Guatemala in 1998.Protesters marching after the killing of Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera.Credit…HBODec. 16, 2020The Art of Political MurderDirected by Paul W. TaylorDocumentary, Crime1h 29mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.The murder in “The Art of the Political Murder,” a documentary based on the book of the same title by Francisco Goldman, is the killing of Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera in Guatemala in 1998. Suspiciously, his death came two days after he had presented a report on human rights abuses during the country’s decades-long civil war, which had ended in 1996.A possible political motive for Gerardi’s assassination was obvious; a high-profile death might frighten victims who would otherwise come forward for atrocities trials. But for a time, a prosecutor pursued a theory that Gerardi had been killed by a German shepherd. Arturo Aguilar, who was part of an independent investigation run by the human rights office that Gerardi had directed, emphasizes the importance of following evidence and disregarding conjecture.[embedded content]Others featured at length include Ronalth Ochaeta, who had worked with Gerardi on the human rights report and pursued the killers until he felt that his family was under threat; the journalist Claudia Méndez Arriaza, whom Goldman, in the movie, describes as the only reporter he knew tenacious enough to stick around through the most tedious stretches of the trial; and Goldman himself, who explains how the case became a test of Guatemala’s justice system.The director, Paul Taylor, who uses re-enactments to visualize the night of the crime, clearly faced certain limitations of material, and the film has dry stretches as the interviewees relate a complicated history better-suited to a book. But the movie succeeds at weaving a web in which justice appears impossibly elusive — which gives the ending all the more punch.The Art of Political MurderNot rated. In Spanish and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on HBO Max.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

  • in

    ‘Goodbye, Dragon Inn’: The Last Picture Show in Taipei

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRewind‘Goodbye, Dragon Inn’: The Last Picture Show in TaipeiTsai Ming-liang’s 2003 movie watches moviegoers as they watch a martial-arts classic inside a cavernous theater.Lee Kang-sheng in “Goodbye, Dragon Inn.”Credit…Metrograph PicturesDec. 16, 2020, 3:34 p.m. ETA sparse audience attends the last show in a cavernous movie house. Now all the more poignant for being streamed, Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 “Goodbye, Dragon Inn,” newly restored, is a love letter to cinema and also cinemas.The movie is set almost entirely inside the no-frills Fu-Ho Grand Theater in central Taipei. The Fu-Ho, which looks as though it can hold a thousand people, is a dramatic space, but the space on the screen, where King Hu’s 1967 wuxia classic “Dragon Inn” is projected, feels infinite.At once a martial-arts spectacle and an intricate chamber drama, “Dragon Inn” is a landmark of Taiwanese cinema. Although it would be years before Hu’s movie would be shown beyond America’s Chinatowns, The New York Times reported on its international success: “The popularity of the film, which depicts feats that appear fantastic to the Western viewer has brought a wave of action films.” Tsai would have been around 10 years old when “Dragon Inn” arrived in Taiwan. For him, it is not just a movie but the movies.The movies are also the places they inhabit. A sort of simultaneous double bill, “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” is predicated on the interplay of the projected “Dragon Inn” and the life of the Fun-Ho spectators. Patrons eat, sleep, cruise, hunt for fallen objects and wander out to the washroom.The theater manager, a young woman with a pronounced limp, climbs upstairs to the projection booth and down to the basement, searching for a persistent leak. (Torrential rain is one of Tsai’s trademarks, as is the presence of Lee Kang-sheng, revealed to be the protagonist just as the movie ends.) These various activities constitute a ballet of daily life, reminiscent to Jacques Tati’s subtle slapstick or Robert Wilson’s glacially paced operas.While “Dragon Inn” is highly kinetic, Tsai’s camera almost never moves. His “rigorous minimalism expresses a sensibility that is both tartly comic and mournfully romantic,” A.O. Scott wrote in The Times when “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” was shown at the 2003 New York Film Festival. “It’s an action movie that stands perfectly still.”Most of the dialogue and music in “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” emanates from “Dragon Inn.” And the movie within the movie is glimpsed at from a variety of angles, its shifting light patterns cast on the faces of spectators. (At one point, Tsai creates a montage in which the theater manager and the “Dragon Inn” star Hsu Feng appear to exchange glances.) “Did you know this theater is haunted?” an audience member asks another halfway through. The theater is haunted, both by the specters on the screen and the spectators in the seats, some of whom turn out to be in both movies.Tsai adds one more disembodied voice for the closing credits. The 1950s vocalist Yao Lee croons a wistful Chinese pop song about the presence of the past. She too is the spirit of the movies, a playback singer heard but not seen in countless films of Tsai’s youth and more recently “Rich Crazy Asians.”Goodbye, Dragon InnAvailable for streaming at Metrograph.com, starting Dec. 18.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

  • in

    The Small Irish Animation Studio That Keeps Getting Oscars’ Attention

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Small Irish Animation Studio That Keeps Getting Oscars’ AttentionWith “Wolfwalkers,” Cartoon Saloon completes a hand-drawn trilogy based on Celtic mythology. The film epitomizes everything the studio stands for.Tomm Moore next to drawings from “Wolfwalkers” being exhibited at the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny, Ireland.Credit…Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesDec. 16, 2020, 3:29 p.m. ETWhen Tomm Moore and 11 friends in the small city of Kilkenny, Ireland, set out to make an animated movie in 1999 based on Celtic mythology, they could hardly imagine their labor of love would become a studio that would revolutionize the animation industry in Ireland, revitalize interest in folklore at home and connect with a global audience.Nor could they envision that their studio, Cartoon Saloon, would go on to earn an Oscar nomination with every feature release, an impressive accomplishment for a relatively young outfit. And yet now, with their fourth feature, “Wolfwalkers,” directed by Moore and Ross Stewart, chances are the Oscars will howl at them once more.Taking its influences from Celtic ornamental art, the studio is known for rousing stories told from the perspective of children taking their first steps into adulthood, often with a subtext about respect for nature. Visually, the films feature intricate designs, as if they were Celtic patterns (spirals, knots, triskeles) brought to life through hand-drawn motion.A scene from the Cartoon Saloon production “Wolfwalkers,” directed by Moore and Ross Stewart.Credit…Apple TV+As a child, Moore first got the idea that animation could be a career path when he discovered international artists were working in Ireland. “I remember seeing stuff on TV about Don Bluth’s studio in Dublin and the Jimmy Murakami studio making the ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,’ I was conscious of that,” the director told me by phone. Later, as a teenager, he joined Young Irish Filmmakers, a Kilkenny organization that introduced him to like-minded artists and offered access to equipment.But while the seed for what would become Cartoon Saloon was planted there, it grew when he studied animation at Ballyfermot College in Dublin. There, he met Paul Young and Nora Twomey, the studio’s co-founders and two of its major creative forces. Originally, the group’s plan was to get hired at Sullivan Bluth Studios (“The Land Before Time”), but when that company left Ireland for the United States, the future became unclear. The only option was smaller animation companies, but none were making features at the time.Broke but resourceful, Moore took on freelance work, and, together with Young, came up with the name Cartoon Saloon. By then, Moore and his friend Aidan Harte had an early idea for a film inspired by the ancient Book of Kells. Celtic mythology had interested Moore since childhood when he would consume books by Jim Fitzpatrick that recounted Irish legends as if they were superhero epics, and later the comic book Sláine, about a Celtic warrior.“The Secret of Kells” was the first in the studio’s trilogy based on Celtic mythology.Credit…GkidsIn 1999, Moore and Harte’s concept won a grant from Young Irish Filmmakers, which also let them set up a studio in an old orphanage that served as the group’s premises. With nearly a dozen friends, they left Dublin for Kilkenny to begin production on a trailer for what would become their first feature-length project, “The Secret of Kells” (directed by Moore andTwomey), the first in a trilogy about Irish myths. But it would take a few years — and include detours into commercials to keep the business afloat — before backers signed on.“When we started Cartoon Saloon, the plan wasn’t to do it forever,” Moore said. “We thought at a certain point we’d get ‘real jobs’ in another studio, but it just kept on going.” He added that the friends figured they could make “The Secret of Kells” in a year or two. Instead, production didn’t start until 2005, the same time the studio started working on “Skunk Fu!,” a series created by Harte. (By then the staff had grown to around 80 artists. Today, between Cartoon Saloon and Lighthouse Studios, a joint venture with the Canadian film company Mercury Filmworks, there are more than 300 animation professionals in Kilkenny.)With “Kells,” the bulk of the work was still being done on paper, not only because the amount of infrastructure required for 3-D animation was unfeasible, but also because traditional methods best suited their sensibilities. “We knew we could make a little bit of money look like a lot of love and care if we did it by hand,” Twomey said. Now, the artists draw by hand on digital devices to streamline production, as they did with Twomey’s 2017 solo directorial debut “The Breadwinner,” another Oscar-nominated project, this one set in Afghanistan.“The Breadwinner,” directed by Nora Twomey, was another Cartoon Saloon production to be nominated for an Oscar.Credit…GkidsBut when “The Secret of Kells” was released, Cartoon Saloon was struggling. Although the film garnered festival awards worldwide, it was a flop at home. The studio was hit by the late 2000s financial crisis and, with nothing in development, was at risk of going under. That’s when the film received an unexpected Oscar nomination for best animated feature in 2010. “I thought it might just end up a footnote in history books saying there was an animated feature based on Irish history but I didn’t think it would make such a mark,” Moore said.The accolade probably saved the studio. “I think we might have fallen apart without it,” Moore said, though the Pixar film “Up” would go on to win the Oscar. Moore added that the nod “made us recommit to making features. It was an endorsement from the other artists in the industry saying they wanted to see more of what we were doing.”For that life-changing nomination, the director credits GKids, the New York-based distributor of independent animation, which has released all of the studio’s films stateside (including “Wolfwalkers” theatrically). “If it wasn’t for GKids picking it up, we would never have gotten the Oscar nomination.”The new “Wolfwalkers” concludes the Cartoon Saloon trilogy.Credit…Apple TV+Then an infant company born out of the New York International Children’s Film Festival, GKids set up an Oscar-qualifying theatrical run and carried its first awards campaign on behalf of the movie.With renewed interest in Cartoon Saloon and extra support from Screen Ireland (formerly the Irish Film Board), Moore embarked on “Song of the Sea,” his second movie in the trilogy. This time shape-shifting selkies were the focus. It was during this process that Moore made it his goal to keep the spotlight on his country’s heritage. “Song of the Sea” earned him and the Cartoon Saloon team a second Oscar nomination.“We’re part of the rediscovery of Irish culture,” Moore explained. “We have had a strange relationship with how Ireland gets represented onscreen in other countries, and so we wanted to speak for our own culture for the next generation.”Moore’s wife is a teacher at an Irish language school, so preserving their nation’s native tongue was also a priority for him. All of Cartoon Saloon’s movies and shows have Irish-language versions.With “Wolfwalkers,” the final installment in the trilogy, the studio made a conscious decision to create a larger action adventure. Set in 17th-century Kilkenny, the film plays as historical revisionism wrapped in a fantastical tale where humans, while sleeping, can turn into wolves. Artistically and narratively, it’s their most ambitious undertaking yet. Initially, Cartoon Saloon shopped the project to Netflix, but when the streaming goliath passed, Apple stepped in.Released by GKids on 500 screens across the United States last month and on Apple TV+ Dec. 11, the movie has received glowing reviews and has been the subject of loud awards chatter.For now, Moore is ready for an inspiration-replenishing sabbatical. Up next for Cartoon Saloon is “My Father’s Dragon,” which Twomey is directing and which is scheduled to premiere on Netflix in 2021. Based on a 1948 children’s novel by Ruth Stiles Gannett, the fable follows a young boy searching for a dragon on a magical island.For Cartoon Saloon, a venture born out of the friendship and a shared love of drawing among Irish kids crafting wondrous worlds, the journey so far had been grand.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

  • in

    ‘Heat’ and the TV Movie That Paved Its Way to Becoming a Classic

    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Notebook‘Heat’ and the TV Movie That Paved Its Way to Becoming a ClassicWhat if you could shoot a complete prototype for a movie? That’s essentially what Michael Mann did with “L.A. Takedown” on NBC.Al Pacino, left, and Robert De Niro in “Heat,” which was a kind of remake of “L.A. Takedown.”Credit…Warner Bros. PicturesPublished More

  • in

    Whitney Houston Biopic Casts Naomi Ackie in Lead Role After 'Exhaustive Search'

    WENN/FayesVision/Avalon

    In announcing the ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ star’s casting as the late singing legend, director Stella Meghie praises ‘her ability to capture the stage presence of a global icon.’

    Dec 16, 2020
    AceShowbiz – Whitney Houston biopic has found its lead star. BAFTA winner and “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” actress Naomi Ackie has landed the role of the late R&B diva in the project titled “I Wanna Dance with Somebody”.
    Stella Meghie, who is on board to serve as director, issued a statement on Tuesday, December 15 to announce Ackie’s casting. “We spent the better part of the last year in an exhaustive search for an actress who could embody Whitney Houston,” she said.
    The filmmaker cited the actress’ impressive skills when explaining why she was eventually chosen for the part. “Naomi Ackie impressed us at every stage of the process,” she gushed. “I was moved by her ability to capture the stage presence of a global icon while bringing humanity to her interior life.”
    Meghie, who is known for her works behind the lens on feature films such as “Jean of the Joneses” (2016), “Everything, Everything” (2017), “The Weekend” (2018) and “The Photograph” (2020), will direct the biopic based on a script written by “Bohemian Rhapsody” scribe Anthony McCarten.

      See also…

    Pat Houston will produce the movie on behalf of the Whitney Houston estate, along with music producer Clive Davis, McCarten via his Muse of Fire Productions and Larry Mestel for Primary Wave Music, which is a partner of the Whitney Houston estate. Denis O’Sullivan and Jeff Kalligheri will produce and finance for Compelling Pictures, while Nicole Brown, Shary Shirazi and Brittany Morrissey will oversee the project for TriStar Pictures.
    Davis, who was Houston’s longtime mentor, has also spoken up on Ackie’s casting for the biopic. Echoing Meghie’s sentiment, he said in a statement released via The Hollywood Reporter, “Naomi Ackie’s screen test was so powerful, it sent shivers up my spine. Although Whitney’s incomparable vocals are used for all the songs, Naomi’s extraordinary acting range enables her to masterfully capture Whitney’s unique charm, star power, and, of course, her personal struggles. Naomi is the real deal and I can’t imagine a better choice for this iconic role.”
    The Houston estate added, “All Whitney fans have an appetite for perfection when it comes to Whitney and her legacy. To transform someone into a matchless icon is virtually impossible. But with careful consideration, Naomi Ackie was selected based on her quality performances and her deep commitment to emerging into the woman that we all loved. We look forward to taking this journey with her.”
    With the consent of the Houston estate, “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” will be able to use Houston’s catalog, including her vocals. A 2014 Lifetime TV movie about the late superstar, “Whitney”, directed by Angela Bassett, wasn’t approved by the Houston estate and thus was not able to reproduce all the hit singles in the singer’s canon.
    The upcoming feature film has been billed as a “joyous, emotional and heart-breaking celebration of the life and music of the greatest female R&B pop vocalist of all time, tracking her journey from obscurity to musical superstardom.”

    You can share this post!

    Next article
    Taylor Swift Reacts to Rainn Wilson’s Joke at Her Expense

    Related Posts More