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      in Movies

      Scarlett Johansson Makes Her Debut as Director of ‘Eleanor the Great’

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      Few movie stars today win over critics and convey Old Hollywood glamour as effortlessly as Scarlett Johansson does, all while seemingly impervious to the industry’s convulsions.Now 40, she has been famous most of her life. She turned 10 the year her first movie, “North,” opened in 1994; four years later, she was upstaging Robert Redford in “The Horse Whisperer.” In the decades since, she starred in cult films and blockbusters, made a record with Pete Yorn and earned a couple of Oscar nominations. In between hits and misses, she also married three times (most recently to Colin Jost) and had two children.The kind of diverse professional portfolio that Johansson has cultivated can make life more interesting, of course, but it’s also evidence of shrewd, career-sustaining choices. In 2010, she made her critically celebrated Broadway debut in a revival of Arthur Miller’s tragedy “A View From the Bridge.” (She went on to win a Tony.) That same year, she slipped on a bodysuit to play the lethal Russian superspy Black Widow in Marvel’s “Iron Man 2,” a role that propelled her into global celebrity.On Tuesday, Johansson publicly took on another role when she presented her feature directing debut, “Eleanor the Great,” at the Cannes Film Festival. Playing outside the main lineup, it is the kind of intimately scaled, performance-driven movie that’s ideal for a novice director.June Squibb stars as the 94-year-old Eleanor, who, soon after the story opens, moves into her daughter’s New York apartment. Life gets complicated when Eleanor inadvertently ends up in a support group for Holocaust survivors. It gets even trickier when a journalism student insists on writing about Eleanor. A friendship is born, salted with laughter and tears.I met with Johansson the day after the premiere of “Eleanor the Great.” She first walked the festival red carpet in 2005 for “Match Point,” returning last year with “Asteroid City.” (She’s also in “The Phoenician Scheme,” which is here, too.) It had rained hard the day of her premiere, but the sky was blue when she stepped onto a hotel terrace overlooking the Mediterranean. Seated in a quiet corner shaded by a large umbrella, Johansson was friendly, pleasant and a touch reserved. Wearing the largest diamond that I’ve seen outside of a Tiffany window, she kept her sunglasses on as we talked, the consummate picture of movie stardom.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Jeff Goldblum Says Jeff Goldblum Is ‘Not a Performance’

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      Listen to and Follow PopcastApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeAt 72, Jeff Goldblum has not lost a step. He may, in fact, be picking up the pace.An unmistakable screen presence since the mid-1970s, when he stole scenes in “Death Wish,” “Nashville” and “Annie Hall,” Goldblum has recently hammed it up as the Wizard of Oz, in last year’s “Wicked” (and this year’s sequel), and Zeus himself, in Netflix’s “Kaos.”Beyond film and television — where he’s also popped up in recent years on “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and the millennial-skewering “Search Party” — Goldblum has become a fixture in the worlds of fashion (attending two consecutive Met Galas), music (having recently released “Still Blooming,” his fourth jazz album) and the internet variety show circuit (gamely eating hot wings and shopping for sneakers).To each role, fiction and non-, Goldblum brings a contagious enthusiasm and plenty of Jeff Goldblum, working his amiably offbeat public persona, born from defining roles in “The Big Chill,” “Jurassic Park” and “Independence Day,” into everything he does. To watch him move through the world is to witness that immutable movie-star magic incarnate as he kisses hands, asks questions and makes the days of strangers with solicitous eye contact and effusive approachability, seemingly without ever flagging. (Goldblum is also the father of two children under 10, who are being raised by Goldblum and his wife, Emilie, a former Olympic rhythmic gymnast, in Florence, Italy.)Jeff Goldblum at The New York Times’s office in Manhattan. “It’s not a performance, and I don’t feel like it’s inauthentic,” he said of his public persona. “I feel like my interest in people is real.”It can all seem exhausting — and that’s before learning that Goldblum found the time to personally sign thousands of copies of his new album, which features appearances by his “Wicked” co-stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. Yet in a recent interview on Popcast, the actor and musician insisted that the perpetual Goldblum experience — influenced by his study of the Meisner technique — is not an act, but his lifeblood.“It’s not a performance, and I don’t feel like it’s inauthentic,” he said. “I feel like my interest in people is real and I’m thrilled to be here, when I have an opportunity to let that run free and express itself. That feels wholesome to me, and nourishing.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      George Wendt, Who Played Norm on ‘Cheers,’ Dies at 76

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      A burly, easygoing Chicago native, he became a staple of living rooms across the country for more than a decade as one of America’s favorite barflies.George Wendt, who earned six consecutive Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his role as the bearish, beer-quaffing Everyman Norm Peterson on the enduring sitcom “Cheers,” died on Tuesday morning at home in Studio City, Calif. He was 76.His death was confirmed by his manager, Geoff Cheddy, who did not specify a cause.Over more than four decades, Mr. Wendt racked up about 170 film and television credits. But he was best known for “Cheers.” He appeared on every episode of the sitcom during its 11-year run on NBC, which began in 1982. His streak of Emmy nominations for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series began in 1984.Mr. Wendt, a native of the South Side of Chicago, started his entertainment career in inglorious fashion, sweeping the floors at the Second City, the famed improvisational comedy club in his hometown that helped launch the careers of generations of stars, including John Belushi, Mike Myers, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.In 1974, he became part of the Second City’s touring production and resident company. “I had no acting experience in my background,” he said in a 2013 interview with The Democrat and Chronicle newspaper of Rochester, N.Y., “but something just clicked.” He remained with the company until 1980.With his easy charm and lunch-pail demeanor, Mr. Wendt headed for Hollywood to appear in the pilot for an NBC show called “Nothing but Comedy․” He later popped up on popular television shows like “Taxi,” “Alice” and “Hart to Hart” before becoming one of America’s favorite barflies on “Cheers.”He later said that his pronounced girth was key to the role, making Norm the relatable guy that viewers would feel like sidling up next to at their neighborhood bar.“One nice thing about being fat for a living is that you don’t worry about losing weight or dieting,” Mr. Wendt once said. “I don’t know how much I’d have to lose before it was noticeable. Anyhow, if I lost 100 pounds people would say, ‘Oh, no, not another fat comedian wanting to be a leading man!’”While the Norm character felt natural to who he was, he said, there were definitely differences between fiction and reality.“The Norm you see in ‘Cheers’ has been years in the making,” he said. “I have some characteristics in common with him besides our fondness for beer. But I think I’m a lot happier than Norm.”He added: “I was a beer drinker long before ‘Cheers.’ When I put a couple of six packs on top of my grocery shopping cart, people are pleased. I tell ’em I’m taking them home to rehearse.”A complete obituary will be published soon.Ash Wu More

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      in Movies

      Greg Cannom, Who Made Brad Pitt Old and Marlon Wayans White, Dies at 73

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      He won five Oscars as a makeup artist on movies in which characters transformed, like “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “White Chicks” and many more.Greg Cannom, an Oscar-winning movie makeup artist responsible for some of the most striking acts of movie magic in recent decades — including the transformation of Christian Bale into Dick Cheney in “Vice,” the creation of a giant expressive green head for Jim Carrey in “The Mask,” and the reverse aging of Brad Pitt in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” — died on May 3. He was 73.His death was announced by Rick Baker, a frequent collaborator and another of Hollywood’s most admired movie makeup artists, as well as by the IATSE Local 706 Make-Up Artists & Hair Stylists Guild. Neither source provided further details.An online fund-raising drive for Mr. Cannom posted two years ago listed a series of health challenges, including severe shingles, a staph infection, sepsis and heart failure.Mr. Cannom won Oscars for best makeup for his work on “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992), “Mrs. Doubtfire” (1993), “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (2008) and “Vice” (2018).In 2005, he won a “technical achievement” Oscar for the development of a modified silicone that could be used to apply fantastical changes to an actor’s face while retaining the appearance of skin and flesh.Robin Williams in “Mrs. Doubtfire.” Mr. Cannom won an Oscar for his work on the film.Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Kristen Stewart’s ‘The Chronology of Water’ Wins Praise, But She’s Ready for Battle

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      Her directorial debut, “The Chronology of Water,” has earned good notices, but after fighting to get it made, the filmmaker wouldn’t mind a battle with reviewers.On Saturday afternoon, when I met up with Kristen Stewart on a balcony at the Cannes Film Festival, she had a confession to make: She was midway through the happiest day of her life.The night before, her directorial debut, “The Chronology of Water,” had made its premiere here, the culmination of a very long effort to make her first feature. “I’ve had this movie in my head for years,” she said. And after so many false starts, financing issues and radical creative re-imaginings, she could barely believe that she had pulled it off.“I just thought it was potentially dying every day,” she said. “It was like a shipwreck, we had to put that boat back together. It was shocking.”Adapted from Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of the same name, “The Chronology of Water” stars Imogen Poots as a competitive swimmer struggling to outrace a traumatic childhood marked by sexual abuse. Stewart tells the story elliptically, skipping through time as her lead struggles to make sense of a difficult life and channel her pain into an affinity for writing.The film has been well reviewed, which Stewart was pleasantly surprised by. “I’m totally willing for people to come for it,” she said. “I’m almost wanting it.” Maybe Stewart, with her avid gaze and punky ombre hair, craves that conflict because she’s used to it: “The Chronology of Water” took eight years of fighting to make. Now, she’s curious about what her career as an actress and director will look like.“I don’t think it’ll ever be this hard, and when I say ‘hard’ I put it in air quotes because I’ve never been happier in my entire life,” she said. “But when you really care about something, the weight of dropping it every day is like you’re dropping it on your toes and screaming.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares166 Views

      in Movies

      Jennifer Lawrence Gets Her First Cannes Premiere. (It’s a Risky One.)

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      In “Die My Love” with Robert Pattinson, she plays a mother with postpartum depression. She was four months pregnant then and the hormones helped a lot.Years ago, at the peak of the “Hunger Games” phenomenon, Lionsgate spent heavily on lavish parties to promote the franchise at the Cannes Film Festival. Private villas were rented and transformed into extravagant replicas of the movies’ opulent Capitol, complete with servers in eccentric wigs, chocolate fountains that flowed for hours and enough colorful macarons to feed a small city.Though the organizers had clearly missed the film’s critique of capitalist excess, the “Hunger Games” villa parties were still a decadent good time. But what’s surprising is that for years, those soirees were the only thing that ever lured the series’ star, Jennifer Lawrence, to Cannes. Despite being the kind of glamorous, Oscar-winning actress the festival loves to showcase, Lawrence has never starred in a film premiering at Cannes until now.At a Sunday news conference for the movie “Die My Love,” she seemed just as surprised. Turning to her director, Lynne Ramsay, Lawrence said, “I really cannot believe that I’m here with you and this happened.” But the film, which is already the subject of awards chatter for Lawrence’s no-holds-barred performance, is another indication that the 34-year-old actress is itching to push further into darker, riskier material.Adapted from a novel by Ariana Harwicz, the drama stars Lawrence and Robert Pattinson as Grace and Jackson, a young couple struggling with Grace’s postpartum depression. At first, she just appears a bit listless, muttering to herself and snapping at chatty cashiers who try to draw her into conversation. “Everybody gets a little loopy the first year,” advises her mother-in-law, played by Sissy Spacek. “You’ll come back.”But Grace doesn’t. As tension continues to build with Jackson, she begins acting out in increasingly upsetting ways — hurling herself through a glass door, stripping down to her underwear at a child’s party — just to feel anything that might snap her out of her stupor. Though the film is not an easy watch, Lawrence dives into her character’s descent with full commitment.At the news conference, the actress said she was four months pregnant with her second child when she began shooting the film. “I had great hormones,” she said, “which is really the only kind of way I would be able to dip into this sort of visceral emotion.” Still, she had to draw a strong line between herself and the character.“As a mother, it was really hard to separate what I would do as opposed to what she would do,” Lawrence said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      In ‘Sirens,’ Meghann Fahy Sounds the Alarm

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      “People underestimate melon,” the actress Meghann Fahy said. ”I don’t think they give it a chance.”Fahy was speaking on a drizzly morning in April, two weeks before her 35th birthday, in an Edible Arrangements outlet on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. In the first episode of “Sirens,” a Netflix limited series, Fahey’s character receives an arrangement, the deluxe Party Dipped Fruit Delight, which weighs as much as a toddler.“I dragged that arrangement around for weeks,” Fahy said. Now Fahy had come to make her own, a gesture that felt a little like homage, a little like revenge.With some help from the store’s owner, she set about crafting a more modest assemblage. She combined cut pineapple and melon balls to form daisies, then speared honeydew and cantaloupe onto plastic skewers above a kale base. “And that’s how she stabbed herself,” she said, narrating the activity. “Sad.”Meghann Fahy stars in “Sirens” as a protective sister with self-destructive tendencies and, in early scenes, an enormous fruit basket.Macall Polay/NetflixFahy knows what it’s like to be underestimated. She performed on Broadway as a teen in 2009 and then barely worked until 2016, when she landed a role on the go-getting Freeform show “The Bold Type,” the rare series that makes a career in journalism look fun. She didn’t properly break out until 2022, in an Emmy-nominated turn in the second season of HBO’s “The White Lotus.”This year, she has her first proper leads, as an imperiled single mother in the date-night thriller “Drop,” which premiered last month, and as a class-struggle chaos agent in “Sirens.” Created by Molly Smith Metzler (“Maid”), the series premieres on May 22.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 63 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Darren Criss Does the Robot

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      Darren Criss stood up, fast asleep, his head heavy. When he awoke, he reverse body rolled, slowly turned his head from side to side, then brushed his teeth, mechanically moving his toothbrush — left, right, left — like a cartoon character.But this was no cartoon come to life (that would be “Boop!,” playing a block away). This was a scene from the Broadway musical “Maybe Happy Ending” in which Criss and Helen J Shen play Oliver and Claire, android attendant robots called Helperbots.Playing a character onstage comes with its own process of world building. But playing a nonhuman character requires a different — or additional — calculation. Where is a robot’s center of gravity?As Claire, a Helperbot 5 with a defective battery (and heavy dose of sarcasm), Shen moves as a human would. As Oliver, a Helperbot 3, an earlier model, Criss moves stiffly, his reflexes stilted. He’s all elbows and knees and sharp lines. Her limbs move in bell curves. The challenge of playing an aging robot has been a field day for Criss, an opportunity to draw upon his formal training in physical theater.“In many ways I joke that Oliver is my excuse to overact for two hours,” Criss said, adding, “the joke being how beep boop bop are we going here without it feeling too, frankly, ridiculous.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More