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      in Movies

      “Poor Things,” the Weird Movie, Was “Poor Things” the Weird Novel, First

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      Hot air balloons soar above the Mediterranean. Aerial streetcars fly along ropes suspended above the alleys of a candy-colored Lisbon. Pastel green smoke billows into the night sky from the funnels of a cruise ship.This is the eye-poppingly surreal world that Bella Baxter, played by Emma Stone, thrills to in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Oscar-nominated film “Poor Things.”Bella, a 25-year-old woman who, after committing suicide, is reanimated with the brain of her unborn infant, is the daring and unusual creation of Alasdair Gray, whose 1992 novel was adapted for the movie.And it may not even be his most eccentric book. A prolific writer and visual artist who died at 85 in 2019, Gray wrote five other novels, two novellas, 89 short stories and a version of Dante’s Divine Comedy (“Decorated and Englished in Prosaic Verse”).In Scotland, Gray is something of a national treasure, his papers housed at the National Library of Scotland. (The cover flap for his illustrated autobiography, “A Life in Pictures,” described the lifelong Glaswegian as “Scotland’s best-known polymath.”)Outside Britain, however, he is not exactly a household name.“I would say he’s one of the very few writers from my lifetime that I’m in awe of,” said the English novelist Jonathan Coe, adding that Gray is “enormously respected” by writers and critics.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

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Book Review: ‘What Have We Here?,’ by Billy Dee Williams

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      His charming memoir “What Have We Here?” traces the path from a Harlem childhood to “Star Wars,” while lamenting the roles that never came his way.WHAT HAVE WE HERE? Portraits of a Life, by Billy Dee WilliamsMy first awareness of Billy Dee Williams was the stuff of hushed beauty parlor conversation I was too young to appreciate. “After all these years he’s still fine,” elders whispered in my periphery as they flipped through an interview in an Ebony magazine that was treated as an heirloom. His piercing gaze leaped out across time. “That’s our Billy!” another giggled.As he tells it in “What Have We Here?,” his effortlessly charming new memoir, the actor’s only ambition was to be everyone’s Billy — a star to cross color lines. Modeling his life on visions of old Hollywood glamour, he wanted to be heralded not just by Black women fantasizing about their chance to be with him, but by teens, men, children, and people of all colors and circumstances.Playing Lando Calrissian in the “Star Wars” trilogy — the debonair, cape-wearing and bravado-filled hero of interstellar proportions — eventually granted Williams his wish, catapulting him into the public stratosphere. “He wasn’t written Black or white,” Williams points out. “He was beyond that. Bigger than that. … He was a star.”Williams was born in 1937 at the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance, the artistic and cultural movement of the 1920s and ’30s when Black possibility bloomed. Nina Mae McKinney, believed to be the first Black actress with a Hollywood contract, and Hulan Jack, Manhattan’s first Black borough president, lived on his block on West 110th Street.He and his twin sister, nicknamed Lady, were welcomed into a world stitched together with love he would spend his life emulating. Their grandmother Annette Lewis Bodkin, the “Queen Dowager” of the home, laid down the rule of law. Loretta Bodkin, their mother, was a trained opera singer and friend of Lena Horne who dreamed of fame and toiled to ensure her children could do what she was unable to. Their father, William December Williams, was a laborer who worked long hours to support his family — and helped his son develop a sense of style.“He taught me how to put a hat on,” Williams writes, “using two fingers and a thumb, grasping the brim in a way that prevented my fingerprints from smearing the crown.”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

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Book Review: “Cocktails With George and Martha” by Philip Gefter

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      COCKTAILS WITH GEORGE AND MARTHA: Movies, Marriage and the Making of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ by Philip GefterWhat a document dump!The most delicious parts of “Cocktails With George and Martha,” Philip Gefter’s unapologetically obsessive new book about “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — the dark ’n’ stormy, oft-revived 1962 Broadway hit by Edward Albee that became a moneymaking movie and an eternal marriage meme — are diary excerpts from the screenwriter Ernest Lehman. (Gefter calls the diary “unpublished,” but at least some of it surfaced in the turn-of-the-millennium magazine Talk, now hard to find.)That Lehman is no longer a household name, if he ever was, is one of showbiz history’s many injustices. Before the thankless task of condensing Albee’s three-hour play for the big screen (on top of producing), he wrote the scripts for “North by Northwest” (1959), arguably Hitchcock’s greatest, and with some help, “Sweet Smell of Success” (1957). The latter was based on his experience copywriting for a press agent, which inspired a novelette in Cosmopolitan called “Tell Me About It Tomorrow!” (Will someone please bring back the novelette?)From beyond the grave, in a production journal titled “Fun and Games With George and Martha” housed at the Harry Ransom Center, Lehman dishes on working with Mike Nichols, the then-darling of New York intellectuals hired to direct his first Hollywood film, starring his famous, furiously canoodling friends Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.But first “Cocktails With George and Martha” fans out like a deck of cards the back story of the play, which initially featured Uta Hagen as Martha, the delulu grown daughter of a New England college president, and Arthur Hill as George, her husband, an associate history professor whose career has stalled. (Yes, they are named for the first first couple of America.) A younger married pair named Nick and Honey come over for the world’s longest and most hellacious nightcap.Steeped in alcohol and analysis themselves, sophisticated audiences thrilled to the play’s voyeurism and vulgar language, even as the Pulitzer Prize committee got prudish, suspending the drama prize the year “Woolf” was eligible.Gefter describes how another playwright, probably jealous of the box-office returns, accused Albee rather homophobically of “neuroticism” and “nihilism” in The New York Times. “If the theater must bring us only what we can immediately apprehend or comfortably relate to,” Albee responded in one of cultural journalism’s best mic drops, “let us stop going to the theater entirely. Let us play patty-cake with one another or sit in our rooms and contemplate our paunchy middles.”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

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      On Netflix’s ‘One Day,’ Emma and Dexter Meet Again

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      The hit novel became a movie, and now it’s a 14-episode Netflix series. More time let the screenwriter get deeper into the characters of Emma and Dexter.For the British author David Nicholls, the key to a good romantic story is avoiding the clichés. “The first kiss, the first night together, the wedding day. There are all these landmarks which are quite familiar and quite obvious,” he said recently.Instead, his 2009 novel “One Day” follows its two protagonists, Emma and Dexter, on the same day each year for two decades, as they weave in and out of each other’s lives as friends, partners and everything in between. What has happened on the previous 364 days is revealed slowly and indirectly, with many key moments left to the reader’s imagination.In 2011, the novel — which has been translated into 40 languages and sold millions of copies — was adapted into a film starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess, and the story has now found new life as a limited series, created by the Scottish screenwriter Nicole Taylor and available on Netflix.Emma, a hardworking student, and Dexter, a popular guy around campus, meet in the first episode on their last day of college. Ludovic Robert/NetflixWhile both adaptations closely follow the structure and plot of the novel, the show devotes the majority of its 14 half-hour-ish episodes to a different year in the pair’s lives. The film’s shorter run time meant significant cuts, so that it ultimately became a “little synopsis of the novel,” according to Nicholls. (In a Times review, the critic A.O. Scott wrote that the film “turns an episodic story into an anthology of feelings and associations.”)The show’s extended length allows more rounded characters to emerge for Emma (played by Ambika Mod, previously Shruti in “This Is Going to Hurt”) and Dexter (Leo Woodall, who was Jack in Season 2 of “The White Lotus”). We meet them in 1988, on their last night of college, where Emma has kept her head down and worked hard on a double major and Dexter has been a popular party guy, achieving below average grades in anthropology.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

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Poets React to Taylor Swift’s New ‘Tortured Poets Department’ Album

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      The title of Taylor Swift’s next album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” spurred strong responses from a typically quiet bunch.When Taylor Swift announced the title of her next album during an acceptance speech at the Grammy Awards on Sunday, she spurred a reaction from a typically quiet bunch: the poets.The album, slated to come out April 19, she said, is called “The Tortured Poets Department.” (Sans apostrophe.)As the name caught fire on social media, questions abounded. Who were these poets? Did Ms. Swift count herself among them? Was the pop singer stealing something precious from those who write verse?“As a tortured poet, I approve,” said Christian Wiman, the editor of Poetry magazine from 2003 to 2013. “Or is she making fun of us? I guess I kind of approve of that, too.”Immediately after the album announcement, a post on Ms. Swift’s Instagram and X accounts revealed what appeared to be the album’s Lord Byron-esque artwork: a gray-scale photo of Ms. Swift, spread across a bed in luxurious anguish.The title calls to mind the Robin Williams film “Dead Poets Society” — also sans apostrophe — said Adrienne Raphel, a poet and the author of “Our Dark Academia,” who noted that the film was released in 1989, Ms. Swift’s birth year.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 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Can You Match Up These Short Stories and Their Screen Adaptations?

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      This 1950 film, a psychological thriller about four differing eyewitness accounts concerning a pair of crimes, was directed by Akira Kurosawa and is considered a cinematic masterpiece. Most of the script was adapted from “In a Bamboo Grove,” a short story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, with elements of another Akutagawa story as well. What is the name of the film? More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      David J. Skal, Scholar Who Took Horror Seriously, Dies at 71

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      In books like “The Monster Show” and “Screams of Reason,” he examined the cultural significance of movies meant to scare the bejesus out of people.David J. Skal, a witty historian of horror entertainment who found in movies like “Dracula” and “Rosemary’s Baby” both a mirror of evolving societal fears and a pressure-release valve for those anxieties, died on Jan. 1 in a car accident in Los Angeles. He was 71.Mr. Skal was returning home after a movie and early dinner with his longtime partner, Robert Postawko, when an oncoming vehicle crossed a median and hit their car, said Malaga Baldi, Mr. Skal’s literary agent. Mr. Postawko was badly injured but survived the crash.Mr. Skal was an author with encyclopedic knowledge of a subject not always taken seriously — movies meant to scare the bejesus out of people — whose erudition, combined with a chatty writing style, made his books lively and entertaining.As an evangelist for horror, he was a regular guest on NPR, explicating frightful topics in a sonorous and friendly voice, and a consultant to Universal Studios for a theme park ride in Florida, “Halloween Horror Nights.” He also added commentary tracks to Universal’s DVD series of classic monster movies, from “Dracula” (1931) to “Creature From the Black Lagoon” (1954).“One of the major functions that monsters provide for us is they let us process our fears about the real world without having to look at them too directly,” he told The New York Times in 2014.He could riff in his writings on the cultural theories of Susan Sontag, Lionel Trilling and R.D. Laing. But his own critiques were never stuffy, grounded as they were in his personal fandom for a genre he first encountered as a boy living outside Cleveland. His first movie memory was watching “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man” on television.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?  More