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    ‘The Boys in the Boat’ Review: Taking Up Oars

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    George Clooney’s film covers a high water point when the University of Washington’s junior varsity crew padded all the way to the 1936 Olympics.“The Boys in the Boat,” directed by George Clooney, is an old-fashioned movie about old-fashioned moxie. Based on a section of Daniel James Brown’s 2013 nonfiction book of the same name, and set to a plucky score by Alexandre Desplat, it’s a handsome, forthright flashback to a high water point of the Depression Era when the University of Washington’s junior varsity crew padded all the way to the 1936 Olympics. Approximately 300 million radio listeners tuned in to hear live sporting news from Berlin, and the film cuts to what feels like all of them rooting on these tall, ruddy and heroic amateurs. I’ve never seen a movie with this much applause — the extras must have been as winded as the athletes.The United States eight-man rowing team had won every gold medal since 1920, but the screenwriter Mark L. Smith glides past that fact to emphasize that these particular boys were at a disadvantage. Unlike the prestigious Ivy League squads, the Huskies were mostly middle and working class landlubbers who’d only taken up oars to pay for school. Our lead, Joe Rance (Callum Turner), trudges to campus from a Hooverville; later, the coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton), pokes around his crew’s lockers to count the holes in their shoes. Before a pivotal regatta, a radio sportscaster (John Ammirati) bellows the obvious theme: “A clash of character! Old money versus no money at all! It’s a boat full of underdogs representing an underdog nation!”The script is as subtle as a bonk on the nose, and the editing repeats every beat twice-over in broad pantomime and meaningful looks. Despite some tender philosophizing from the racing shell designer George Pocock (Peter Guinness), we never quite get an insight into exactly how these eight undergrads melded into a winning team. The main oarsmen, Don Hume (Jack Mulhern) and Rance, rarely speak, and the others hardly register. Thank heavens for Luke Slattery as the coxswain Bobby Moch, who straps on a hands-free leather and metal megaphone — a contraption that, to modern eyes, looks like a torture device for mumblers — and instantly screams some life into the picture.With the female characters sidelined to one-note cheerleaders, Clooney puts his focus on the fantastic production design. The pennant budget alone must have cost a fair penny, but he even includes an assembly line scene of those pennants being made. Just as faithfully, Clooney acknowledges how little politics registered to these jocks. In Berlin, they become passingly acquainted with Jesse Owens (Jyuddah Jaymes), but when Adolf Hitler (Daniel Philpott) pops up in a Seattle newsreel, no one bothers to boo.So it’s for our sake that the film gives us the Führer pounding his fist in fury that the Yanks might one-up Germany in his moment of triumph — and for our kicks that the cinematographer Martin Ruhe bests a shot from Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary “Olympia,” a dynamic redo of Moch heaving in and out of the frame, his megaphone eclipsing everything but his hair and lips.The Boys in the BoatRated PG-13 for cursing and cigarettes. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Meet Radio Man, a ‘Bum’ Who Befriends Movie Stars and Sells Their Autographs

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      On a blustery February evening in Midtown Manhattan, opposite an unmarked side entrance to the Ed Sullivan Theater, a crowd of more than 60 people stood crushed against a row of steel barricades. They all knew that at any moment, Harrison Ford would arrive for an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” They elbowed and cursed one another, jockeying for position, each clutching a sheaf of photographs for Mr. Ford to sign.They weren’t fans — not most of them, anyway. They were “graphers,” who make a living by hounding celebrities for autographs and selling them to the highest bidder. For many of them, graphing is a full-time job. Some have been at it for decades. They can flip a single signature for anywhere from $25 to more than $1,000, depending on a star’s cachet and how frequently they sign. A Harrison Ford autograph, for example, retails for about $750.At 5:30 on the dot, a black Escalade pulled to a stop in front of the theater. The rear door swung open, and the pack of graphers across the street broke into a frenzy. “Harrison!” they hollered. “Harrison, please!”Slumped near a dumpster by the stage door, a disheveled man with a mane of gray hair and a wild beard let out a grunt. He clambered to his feet, reached into a grocery bag and pulled out an overstuffed FedEx mailer, inscribed in large, looping cursive with a note. “Thank you, Harrison,” it read. “Love, Radio Man.” He staggered past the theater’s security team and approached the Escalade.“Harrison!” the man called as Mr. Ford climbed out of the back seat. “How are ya?”Mr. Ford grinned. “Radio,” he said warmly. They shook hands. Fifty feet away, the graphers behind the barricades bellowed in a desperate chorus.Giovanni Arnold, who has been graphing in New York City since 1999, unrolling movie posters outside the Edison Ballroom. He waited outside for over three hours hoping to get Mr. Spielberg’s autograph as he entered the venue for the Writers Guild Awards.Jonah Rosenberg for The New York Times“Listen, I’ve got some photos for you,” the man said, handing Mr. Ford the package.“Sure, sure,” Mr. Ford said, accepting it. They made small talk. Mr. Ford asked after the man’s health, and the man asked after Helen Mirren, Mr. Ford’s co-star on the “Yellowstone” spinoff “1923.”“Good to see you, Radio,” Mr. Ford said. He slipped into the theater without acknowledging the graphers screaming his name. They would have to wait until he had finished his interview.There are at least 150 professional graphers in New York City, according to Justin Steffman, the founder of the autograph authentication company AutographCOA. And right now, they are working at full tilt. All winter long, celebrities have been flocking to New York to campaign for projects up for various film and television awards, culminating in the Oscars. For graphers, collecting signatures during awards season is like fishing at a trout farm.The rest of the year is by no means slow. Stars are always cycling in and out of Broadway theaters, concert venues, luxe hotels, film shoots and, most reliably, morning shows like “The View” and late-night shows like Mr. Colbert’s. Their constant presence has made New York the graphing capital of the United States, topping even Los Angeles, whose sprawl, closed sets and tight security make life more challenging for graphers. “It’s got to be a billion-dollar industry,” Mr. Steffman said. “It’s gotten bigger and bigger and bigger.”There are at least 500 full-time graphers around the world, Mr. Steffman said, and thousands more who graph on a regular basis.But none of them do it quite like Radio Man.Radio Man — legally known as Craig Castaldo, though no one ever calls him that — has been graphing in New York since the early 1990s. Over the years, he has managed to charm a small army of celebrities into accepting his hefty packages of photographs, which they sign and return to him. Where most graphers would be lucky to get more than one signature from a star at a time, Radio Man regularly nabs dozens, sometimes hundreds. He considers the A-listers who sign for him his personal friends.Craig Castaldo, known to all as Radio Man, outside the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York during a taping of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”Jonah Rosenberg for The New York TimesAfter his exchange with Mr. Ford, Radio Man made his way to the Park Hyatt to pick up a package that Sarah Michelle Gellar had left for him at reception. It was adorned with a heart in black Sharpie, along with a handwritten note: “Only for you, Radio.” Inside were 43 signed photographs of Ms. Gellar.“It’s amazing how they take to me, these actors,” Radio Man said. “A bum! I don’t understand it.”Radio Man, 72, lives just above the poverty line, in a basement apartment in Yonkers he rents for $900 a month. He commutes into the city each morning on his bicycle, a 13-mile journey that takes him about two hours. He said he survives exclusively on food he gathers from free pantries and movie sets.Though he could make a small fortune selling his autographs directly to collectors, his grasp of the necessary tools — photo databases, printers, the internet — is tenuous at best. Instead, like most graphers, he peddles his merchandise to a dealer, who in turn hawks it at a significant markup on eBay and other, more obscure autograph marketplaces.Leaning against a wall outside the Park Hyatt, Radio Man pulled out his phone and made a call. A few minutes later, a silver sedan pulled up to the hotel. A tall, middle-aged man with close-cropped hair and a manicured beard stepped out of the car and into the frigid night. Radio Man handed him the package of signed photographs from Ms. Gellar, and the man accepted them without a word. He hurried back to the warmth of his car, leaving Radio Man alone next to his bicycle.“Hey,” Radio Man called out to him. “You got six bucks so I could get a tea or something?”“I don’t have any cash on me,” the man said. He ducked into the car and drove away.The man, Radio Man’s de facto handler, supplies him with his FedEx mailers of photographs. Once Radio Man gets them signed, the handler sends them to a dealer based in Florida, who is rumored among graphers to be a millionaire. All told, the autographs Radio Man received from Ms. Gellar are worth approximately $6,000. He was paid about $300 for them.“Let them make all the money they want,” Radio Man said. “I don’t care. As long as I get to see my friends.”By “friends,” he meant the celebrities who have taken an unlikely shine to him since he stumbled into their world more than 30 years ago.As Radio Man tells it, he made his first famous friend when he was homeless. One winter day in 1990, he was walking through Central Park when he encountered a man dressed in rags, whom he took for “a bum like me,” he said. He offered the man a beer. “Do you know who I am?” the man asked.It was Robin Williams. He was shooting “The Fisher King,” Terry Gilliam’s 1991 film in which Mr. Williams plays a vagabond searching for the Holy Grail.The actress Riley Keough signed autographs from her S.U.V. after a taping of “The Late Show.” Graphers chased her car down the street, catching up to her at a red light.Jonah Rosenberg for The New York Times“You’re doing this all wrong,” Radio Man told him. “You’re not acting the way a bum should be.”He introduced the actor to life on the street, showing him “where to go and what to do.” Mr. Williams patterned his performance in “The Fisher King,” which earned him an Oscar nomination, after Radio Man. Or so Radio Man claims.In exchange for his guidance, the movie’s producers gave Radio Man $200 and a case of beer. They also cast him as an extra. From then on, he made a habit of hanging around film sets in New York, where he helped himself to food from craft-services stations and scored low-paying parts as a background actor. Graphing was an easy way to make money.“I’ve been getting movies ever since,” Radio Man said. “Here and there, playing my role: bum, homeless guy, guy on a bicycle with a radio.”But that’s just one version of the story Radio Man tells about his origins.Another version involves running a newspaper stand in the 1970s and being cast as an extra in “The In-Laws,” starring Peter Falk and Alan Arkin. Another involves sharing a beer with Bruce Willis on the set of “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” Yet another involves showing up to shoots with a boombox around his neck and playing it at full volume until someone paid him to leave, a racket that supposedly earned him his nickname. (“A cop was there and he said to me: ‘Hey, radio guy! Hey, radio person! Hey, radio man! Can you turn that down, please?’ And that’s how I became Radio Man.”)Whatever he may claim about his past, this much is true: Radio Man is a fixture on film sets in New York. He has appeared as an extra in dozens of movies, including “Ransom,” “Zoolander,” “The Departed” and “The Irishman.” He has a preternatural knowledge of actors’ whereabouts and shooting schedules. And he has forged something like a friendship with some of the biggest names in Hollywood.Radio Man biking through Midtown Manhattan after staking out the stage door to “The Late Show.” He was hoping to see Sarah Jessica Parker at a nearby filming location.Jonah Rosenberg for The New York TimesOn a January night in Chinatown, Radio Man sauntered around the set of “Wolves,” a forthcoming movie starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt, as if he were its executive producer. He weaved through packs of stagehands, chatting amiably with anyone who crossed his path. During a break in shooting, he shuffled over to Mr. Clooney, who was sitting in a director’s chair. “Clooney!” he shouted, followed by an expletive-laden insult.“There it is,” Mr. Clooney said.“You know where you’re going tomorrow?”“I don’t know where I’m going tomorrow,” Mr. Clooney said.“Under the Manhattan Bridge.”“See, this is what I’m talking about,” Mr. Clooney said, as the production crew standing around him laughed. “You don’t need a call sheet. Radio Man is the call sheet.”Mr. Clooney first met Radio Man in 1996, on the set of “One Fine Day” in Manhattan. The actor has “never not seen him” during a trip to New York since, he said.“Radio’s everywhere,” Mr. Clooney said. “Every hotel you show up at, Radio will be standing out in front of it going, ‘De Niro’s over at this, and Cate Blanchett’s over here staying at the Carlyle.’ He’s got all the intel.”Radio Man endeared himself to Mr. Clooney, the actor said, after rescuing his wife, Amal Clooney, from a throng of paparazzi that had swarmed her on Fifth Avenue. Radio Man blocked them with his bicycle, hailed a cab and steered Ms. Clooney inside, securing her escape.“He’s a great guy,” Mr. Clooney said. “He’s a lovable mess, which we all are.”About six years ago, Mr. Clooney got together with a few other actors and flew Radio Man out to L.A. They sent him to the Oscars. He wore a tuxedo. He walked the red carpet. He sat in the audience. He brought a date.A grapher outside the Ed Sullivan Theater with the tools of the trade. She was among a small crowd hoping to get signatures from Michelle Yeoh and Riley Keough.Jonah Rosenberg for The New York TimesA few nights after bumping into Radio Man in Chinatown, Mr. Clooney poked his head out of a white trailer parked on East Broadway and peered down the street. “Radio!” he yelled.Radio Man ambled over. Mr. Clooney strode toward him holding a large bag, trailed by a pack of photographers.“Here you go, Radio,” he said, dropping the bag on the sidewalk with a thunk. “This thing weighs a ton, by the way.”Radio Man reached inside and pulled out two bulging FedEx mailers. They contained 185 signed photographs of Mr. Clooney, worth approximately $18,000.Mr. Clooney said that Radio Man is the only grapher he will take a package from. But he signs for all of them.“Every one of these guys who come over for autographs, it’s a business for them,” he said. “You try to help them out when you can.”“My job baffles me,” said Mr. Arnold. “Personally, I wouldn’t buy an autograph. It would be of more sentimental value if I got the autograph myself, but if someone else got it, it’s just weird.”Jonah Rosenberg for The New York TimesThere is at least one other grapher in New York capable of exchanging packages with celebrities: Giovanni Arnold, 38, who has been graphing in the city since 1999. He calls himself “Black Radio Man.”“There isn’t really an elite group of graphers who are getting packages,” Mr. Steffman said. “There’s Gio, and there’s Radio Man.”On a Saturday afternoon in January, Mr. Arnold sat in a dark bar in the East Village indexing several large bags of autographed memorabilia he had just received from Daniel Radcliffe, who was starring in a production of “Merrily We Roll Along” at the New York Theater Workshop a few blocks away.He laid out his haul on a grimy, beer-stained table, examining each item — cheaply printed photos, plastic Harry Potter eyeglasses, Gryffindor neckties — for Mr. Radcliffe’s signature. He counted 95 autographs in all, whose total value he pegged at $10,000. “I’m hype right now,” he said. “He really blessed me.”Mr. Arnold celebrated with a Guinness. He took a sip from his pint glass and shook his head, pondering a question that has long puzzled him: Why would anyone pay for an autograph?“My job baffles me,” he said. “Personally, I wouldn’t buy an autograph. It would be of more sentimental value if I got the autograph myself, but if someone else got it, it’s just weird.”Mr. Arnold has taken a different approach to the business of graphing than most of his peers. He sells his own merchandise on eBay, as well as directly to private collectors, which has allowed him to accrue a level of wealth few graphers seem to enjoy.He documents his day-to-day life hunting for autographs on Instagram under the handle @gtvreality, where you might find him giving Lady Gaga a ride on his bicycle, holding hands with Ben Affleck or shouting his catchphrase — “Stay Black!” — at Bob Dylan. He hopes to turn GTV Reality into a full-fledged brand and to monetize his content, though at 5,000 followers, he hasn’t quite figured out how to do so.“I’m trying to move in a different direction,” he said. “Everyone and their mama’s an autograph-getter now.”Ultimately, Mr. Arnold wants to find a way out of the memorabilia industry. He doesn’t derive the same kind of joy that Radio Man does from chasing down celebrities, and he isn’t willing to dedicate his life to it.“I’m good at what I do,” Mr. Arnold said. “But he’s another level.”“Let them make all the money they want,” Radio Man said of the autograph middlemen. “I don’t care. As long as I get to see my friends.”Jonah Rosenberg for The New York TimesBack on the set of “Wolves,” Radio Man cruised the streets of Chinatown looking for the director, Jon Watts. He was hoping there might be a scene he could sneak into. But the cameras were already rolling, and Mr. Watts was occupied.Radio Man returned to his usual post outside Mr. Clooney’s trailer. It was closing in on midnight. He was standing near his bicycle and sipping a hot tea, killing time until the next break in filming, when he was approached by someone he didn’t recognize.“Radio,” the man said. He held up an 8-by-10-inch photograph, taped to a sheet of hardboard, of Radio Man. “Do you mind signing real quick?”“What do you want me to say?” Radio Man asked. “Just, Radio Man?”“Yeah,” the man said. “Radio Man.”Radio Man signed the photograph in big, sloppy cursive. The man thanked him and walked away. It was hard to say if he was a grapher or just a fan. More

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      How George Clooney and Julia Roberts Quietly Became the Tracy-Hepburn of Our Time

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      “Ticket to Paradise” and other team-ups take advantage of their onscreen glamour and stellar chemistry and their offscreen affection for one another.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.They don’t share the screen until 49 minutes into their first film together, and it’s not an amicable conversation. She’s expecting her boyfriend, but the hand on her shoulder belongs to her ex-husband, and her first words to him (“What are you doing here?”) are loaded with a mixture of shock and residual anger. The irritation quickly takes over; there’s fire in her eyes, enough to dampen the twinkle in his. “You’re not wearing your ring,” he notes.“I sold it,” she fires back. “I don’t have a husband, or didn’t you get the papers?”“My last day inside,” he replies.“I told you I’d write.”Julia Roberts and George Clooney’s first scene together, in Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 remake of “Ocean’s Eleven,” runs less than five minutes total, but they’re packed with barbs and pronouncements, insults and callbacks, relitigations of ancient arguments and (for him at least) flashes of longing. Tess (Roberts) is the reason Danny Ocean (Clooney) has assembled the titular crew to rob three high-profile Las Vegas casinos — all of which happen to be owned by Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia), Tess’s current beau. (When Danny meets Terry, he fidgets with his wedding ring absent-mindedly. Or perhaps deliberately.) The payday is huge, but it’s incidental to Danny; as he tells her during that strained first conversation, “I came here for you.” So Danny and Tess, and thus Clooney and Roberts, have to generate enough heat and chemistry underneath the snippy surface to justify everything else in the movie. It’s a tall order. They pull it off without breaking a sweat.“Our scenes are really fun,” Clooney explained at the time, “because they’re like an old Howard Hawks film where they’re both going at each other and nobody wins. Which is the way it should be.” Roberts concurred: “The dialogue is so sharp and exacting, it’s like a 1940s movie.”Danny Ocean (Clooney) fiddling with his ring during a run-in with his ex (Roberts) and her new love (Andy Garcia).Warner Bros., via AlamySuch callbacks to old Hollywood were no accident. For years now, Clooney has been described as one of the last movie stars of the old-school mold. As GQ’s Tom Carson put it in 2007, “He’s shrewd, he’s virile, he’s merry, and the camera loves him with the devotion of a headwaiter rushing over to light a billionaire’s cigar.”5 Movies Featuring the Clooney-Roberts DuoCard 1 of 5‘Ocean’s Eleven’ (2001). More

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      ‘Ticket to Paradise’ Review: Yes, They Like Piña Coladas

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      George Clooney and Julia Roberts take another dip into romantic comedy with this Bali-set film.“Ticket to Paradise,” the latest vacation romp from the filmmaker Ol Parker (who penned “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” and wrote and directed “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again”), is a screwball adventure that forgets to pack the laughs. Having made a mint off his picturesque travelogues of Jaipur and Greece, Parker — who never met a mosquito that wasn’t edited out in post — now concocts a fantasyland Bali where an American law school graduate named Lily (Kaitlyn Dever) falls in love with a dimpled kelp farmer (Maxime Bouttier) and agrees to marry him one month after he quite literally fishes her from the sea.The script by Parker and Daniel Pipski has scrubbed away any apprehensions concerning economics, education or class. (Lily’s intended, Gede, lives in a well-appointed beach hut filled with leather-bound books.) Nevertheless, Lily’s engagement proves to be the one thing able to unite her estranged parents David and Georgia (George Clooney and Julia Roberts), who hop on a plane to prevent the wedding. Any apprehensions the audience might have concerning the plot are confirmed during this flight sequence where the spiteful exes discover that not only are they stuck in the same seat row, but Georgia’s current boyfriend, a puppyish Frenchman (Lucas Bravo), is — surprise! — the pilot.Such contrivances (and the even more ludicrous ones to follow) could work if the comedy vibrated on the edge of mania, if Roberts had a jolt of Katharine Hepburn’s wackadoo electricity or if Clooney’s Clark Gable-esque grin allowed him to convincingly grab a spear and hunt a wild pig when he hasn’t eaten since lunch. But these stars are too aware that the film’s draw is simply seeing the two of them together. Roberts and Clooney wear their stature like sweatpants, rousing themselves to do little more than spit insults like competitive siblings. They’re selling their own comfortable rapport, not their characters’ romantic tension.When Parker needs to project that Roberts is steaming mad, he puts a clothes steamer in her hand so she can deliver her gripes between gusts of hot air. Dever, a major talent who will likely win her own Oscar someday, is too earnest to commit to inanity, while the marvelous Billie Lourd — the one cast member who can execute the tone — is squandered in a bit part where her sole personality trait is being drunk.Eventually, the film succumbs to the actors’ delusion that they’re in a sincere dramedy where people also conveniently get bitten by poisonous snakes. The score shifts from playful flutes to somber piano chords; the lighting remains golden, bathing the actors in an apricot glow at the expense of forcing half the movie to take place at sunrise or sunset.Locals know best whether Parker’s depiction of Balinese nuptials is accurate. (This critic is so far unable to confirm the rite where a bride taps her bare foot three times on a coconut.) The more authentic custom may be when David and Georgia resurrect their old college ritual: beer pong. It’s the film’s best scene as the soundtrack blasts House of Pain’s “Jump Around” at such a volume that there’s no emphasis on dialogue, only the visual delight of Julia Roberts and George Clooney goofing around.Ticket to ParadiseRated PG-13 for strong language and a mild suggestion of sexuality. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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      George Clooney and Julia Roberts on ‘Ticket to Paradise’

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      For their latest big-screen partnership, they play exes who take shots at each other. It’s not such a stretch to the fond insults they sling in real life.Julia Roberts began the interview with a question: “Is George causing problems already?”Her friend and frequent co-star George Clooney had preceded Roberts on our video call, dialing in from the Provence estate he shares with his wife, Amal. But the room he was sitting in was so streaked with sunlight that Clooney could barely be glimpsed amid all the lens flares, and as Roberts joined us, he was pulling patterned window curtains shut to no avail.“Are you trying to show how outer your inner radiance is with this flare?” Roberts said.Clooney peered at her Zoom thumbnail. “You’re one to talk with that soft lens,” he cracked.“I have a 25-year-old computer!” Roberts said.Rat-a-tat teasing is how Roberts and Clooney prefer to communicate: “It’s our natural rhythm of joyful noise,” she said. Their rapport has sustained a big-screen partnership spanning several films, from “Ocean’s Eleven” in 2001 to their newest entry, the romantic comedy “Ticket to Paradise” (Oct. 21), which casts them as warring exes who reunite to stop the surprise wedding of their daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) to a seaweed farmer (Maxime Bouttier) she met during a graduation trip to Bali. As her divorced parents team up, their old spark is rekindled; by the end of the movie, they’ve gone from exes to something like XO.When I spoke to Roberts and Clooney in late August, no light was streaming through Roberts’s bay windows at all: It was only 6 in the morning in San Francisco, where Roberts and her husband, Danny Moder, live with their three teenage children. Roberts had requested the early start so that she could send the kids off to school after the interview, and she noted that she was no stranger to early rising: For one sunrise scene in “Ticket to Paradise,” she had a 3 a.m. call time, the earliest she’s ever had to report to set in her career.“I had to get there at 1 a.m.,” Clooney joked, “because of the work they do on my face beforehand.”“All the taping and spackle,” Roberts said, letting loose her famous laugh.Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.When you read “Ticket to Paradise,” did you each have the other in mind?GEORGE CLOONEY They sent me the script, and it was clearly written for Julia and I. In fact, the characters’ names were originally Georgia and Julian. I hadn’t really done a romantic comedy since “One Fine Day” [1996] — I haven’t succeeded like Julia has in that forum — but I read it and thought, “Well, if Jules is up for it, I think this could be fun.”JULIA ROBERTS It somehow only made sense with George, just based on our chemistry. We have a friendship that people are aware of, and we’re going into it as this divorced couple. Half of America probably thinks we are divorced, so we have that going for us.CLOONEY We should be divorced because I’m married now, so that would be really bad. Just saying.ROBERTS Also, George and I felt a lot of happy responsibility in wanting to make a comedy together, to give people a holiday from life after the world had gone through a really hard time. It’s like when you’re walking down the sidewalk and it’s cold outside and you get to that nice patch of sun that touches your back and you go, “Oh, yeah. This is exactly what I needed to feel.”Clooney and Roberts in a scene from the film, which was essentially written for them. The characters were initially called Georgia and Julian.Vince Valitutti/Universal PicturesIs it true that the two of you had never met before “Ocean’s Eleven”?ROBERTS The funny thing about meeting George was that in the press, people had already pegged us as pals. I’d read about going to a party at George’s, and I thought, “Well, I have to meet this guy at some point because he sounds like a great time.”CLOONEY I’m fun, man!ROBERTS There’s some alchemy about us that you can sense from a distance, I think.CLOONEY I’ve always been drawn to Julia, for a lot of reasons. One of them is that she has forever been a proper movie star but she’s totally willing to not take herself seriously, and that makes such a difference in life because we’ve spent a lot of time together. She’s also a really gifted actress. She works really hard but you never see her sweat, and it’s the quality I appreciate most in my favorite actors, like Spencer Tracy.Julia, you’re an executive producer of the film alongside George, and you obviously have extensive experience in romantic comedies. What point of view do you bring as a veteran of the genre?ROBERTS This is a genre that I love to participate in and watch, and I think they are hard to get right. There is a really simple math to it, but how do you make it special? How do you keep people interested when you can kind of predict what is coming?Has Hollywood had trouble answering those questions? There are way fewer romantic comedies than there used to be, and you’ve said that “Ticket to Paradise” was the first rom-com script since “Notting Hill” (1999) and “My Best Friend’s Wedding” (1997) that you really sparked to.ROBERTS I think we didn’t appreciate the bumper crop of romantic comedies that we had then. You don’t see all the effort and puppet strings because it’s fun and sweet and people are laughing and kissing and being mischievous. Also, I think it’s different to be reading those scripts at 54 years old. I can’t read a story like “My Best Friend’s Wedding” where I’m falling off a chair and all these things because — —CLOONEY You’d break a hip.ROBERTS I’d break a hip! Oh, George. But it was nice to read something that was age-appropriate, where the jokes made sense, and I appreciated and understood what these people were going through. That’s what people want to see, your connection to a piece of work. They want to see the heart space that you have for it — not just, “Oh, do something funny because we love that.”But funny is still important. There’s a scene in “Ticket to Paradise” where your characters drunkenly dance to the song “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now),” embarrassing their daughter and her friends. Was that choreographed for maximum mortification, or did you just wing it?ROBERTS People always want to choreograph it, but you can’t put steps to it. You have to just open the box and let the magic fly.CLOONEY I remember early on in my career, I had to do a kissing scene with this girl and the director goes, “Not like that.” And I was like, “Dude, that’s my move! That’s what I do in real life!” It was sort of that same way here, because everyone had plans for how we should dance, and then we were like, “Well, actually we’ve got some really bad dance moves in real life.” Julia and I have done all those moves before, that’s the sickest part.ROBERTS Oh, all around the world.CLOONEY And Kaitlyn and Max were actually horrified, weren’t they?ROBERTS It was hysterical, they were speechless. If Danny and I were doing that in front of our kids, they would be like, “Yeah, dig me a hole, I’m out of here.”Billie Lourd, left, Kaitlyn Dever, Maxime Bouttier, Clooney and Roberts in the film.Vince Valitutti/Universal PicturesGeorge, I haven’t moved on from that anecdote of the director criticizing how you kiss. I don’t know how you ever recovered.CLOONEY And we kiss in this. But I don’t want give the whole shop away.It’s a romantic comedy. I think audiences are expecting a kiss.ROBERTS One kiss. And we did it for, like, six months.CLOONEY Yeah. I told my wife, “It took 80 takes.” She was like, “What the hell?”ROBERTS It took 79 takes of us laughing and then the one take of us kissing.CLOONEY Well, we had to get it right.You filmed the movie in Australia, right?CLOONEY We started in Hamilton Island, with all these wild birds, and Julia had the house down just below Amal and me and the kids. I would come out in the early mornings and be like, “Caa-caa,” and Julia would come out and be like, “Caa-caa.” And then we’d bring her down a cup of coffee. She was Aunt Juju to my kids.ROBERTS The Clooneys saved me from complete loneliness and despair. We were in a bubble, and it’s the longest I’ve ever been away from my family. I don’t think I’ve spent that much time by myself since I was 25.CLOONEY And also, when Danny and the kids did come visit, that meant they had to fly into Sydney and quarantine for two weeks by themselves before she could see them.ROBERTS So close and yet so far. When we first got to Australia and we were all quarantining, you kind of go a little bit cuckoo. I remember right around Day 11, I was like, “Who am I? Where am I? What is this room that I never leave?” It’s a funny thing. I hadn’t really anticipated all that.CLOONEY That’s why they invented alcohol.ROBERTS Or chocolate chip cookies.CLOONEY That too.Julia, this is your first movie role in four years. You’ve said that you consider yourself a homemaker, but your children are all teenaged now — do you think your work-life balance will change when they are grown and out of the house?ROBERTS I just take it all as it comes. I try to be super present and not plan, and I don’t have any upcoming acting jobs. Getting back to a routine feels really good. And I love being at home, I love being a mom. Being in Australia was really challenging because of all the Covid regulations, and I think it’s a real testament to friendship and to the creative environment we were in that it wasn’t even harder, because I’m not built to be one person anymore. It’s just not in my cellular data.George, you recently took several years off from movie acting, too. When you have that lengthy period of time between roles, is there any anxiety as you are about to start up again?CLOONEY If you don’t get that nervous feeling in your stomach every time you start work, then you’re way too confident for this job and it’ll show in your performance. The minute you think you’ve got it or you know what you’re doing, then you really shouldn’t be doing it anymore.One of the co-stars of “Ticket to Paradise” is Billie Lourd, daughter of the late Carrie Fisher. Her father, Bryan Lourd, has been your longtime agent, George, so I would imagine you’ve known Billie since — —CLOONEY Since she was born.Is it wild to share scenes with an actress you’ve known since she was a baby?ROBERTS Wilder still to be holding her baby while she’s on the set. How about that? Life just going right along.CLOONEY Yeah. Fun being 61, let me tell you. It comes fast, man.Sixty-one but still willing to do a shirtless scene — opposite an angry dolphin, no less.ROBERTS And looking fine, thank you very much!CLOONEY That was a pretty quick shot, I’ll tell you that. The dolphin looked better. More

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      ‘The Tender Bar’: A Tale of Drinking That Ducks Alcoholism

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      Though the memoir this film is based on confronts the issue of addiction to alcohol, the adaptation skirts the topic and its deeper implications.There’s a moment near the end of J.R. Moehringer’s 2005 memoir, “The Tender Bar,” when the author realizes he’s circling the drain. The owner of his favorite bar, Steve, has died an alcoholic’s death, overserving himself, falling, hitting his head and lapsing into a coma. Seeking solace, the young Moehringer, fresh out of Yale, turns to his most seductive companion: booze.“I no longer made any pretense of drinking to bond with the men, or to blunt the cares of the day, or to participate in male rituals,” Moehringer writes. “I drank to get drunk. I drank because I couldn’t think what else to do. I drank the way Steve drank at the end, to achieve oblivion.”“The Tender Bar,” which has been adapted as an Amazon Prime movie, directed by George Clooney, isn’t strictly about alcoholism. It’s about community and family and the void left by an absent (alcoholic) father. But Moehringer’s words would make for a standard drunkalogue at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, of which I’ve attended many. “Oblivion” is a popular word there, and a popular destination among alcoholics. This is one of the smartest things about Moehringer’s memoir: It deftly captures that moment when the party comes to an end, when it’s just not fun anymore and it’s time to sink or swim. (Moehringer quit drinking when he was 25.)But that moment never comes in the movie, mostly because J.R., played by Tye Sheridan, drinks without consequences, as does everyone else at the Long Island watering hole where his bartender uncle, Charlie (Ben Affleck), dispenses words of wisdom with his dry martinis. The closest the movie comes to acknowledging alcoholism is when J.R.’s ne’er-do-well father (Max Martini) enters the picture. A classic deadbeat dad, he disappears for years at a time, shows up to announce his sobriety, but explains that he can actually have the occasional cocktail because he’s not really an alcoholic. Then he beats up his girlfriend. He’s the movie’s designated alcoholic and also its villain.“He’s somebody who’s making a big deal of his sobriety, and it’s like, ‘I’ve decided I can allow myself a cocktail,’” the “Tender Bar” screenwriter William Monahan said by phone. “Then that cocktail is like 10 million of them, resulting in domestic violence.”Aside from J.R.’s dad, however, no one in the movie seems to have a drinking problem, despite spending all of their free time at a bar.“George Clooney didn’t hammer on it,” Monahan said. “But the J.R. character does definitely have a point where he realizes he’s got to straighten up.”Well, yes and no. In the movie, J.R. comes to Charlie concerned that he’ll end up like his old man. Charlie’s advice: Cut back on the drinking. And that’s that. We don’t see J.R. slam cocktails at Penn Station and pick up a few Budweiser tallboys for the ride to the bar, as he does in the book. Instead, his uncle tells him to cool it a little. Does he heed this advice? We never really find out.“Flight,” with Denzel Washington, illustrates the ease with which alcoholics lie to themselves. Paramount PicturesMoehringer, who has gone on to write novels (“Sutton”) and other books (“Open,” with Andre Agassi), sees drinking as an inherently difficult subject to depict in film.“It’s woven so tightly into the social fabric, and it’s such a central part of many rites and rituals, holidays and special occasions,” he told me via email. “Alcohol can be wonderful, enriching, spirit-enhancing, so it’s hard to think — unpleasant to think — that it can also be dangerous, and sometimes deadly. It doesn’t seem fair, this thing that makes us feel so good can also make us feel so bad. The paradox makes it hard to discuss.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘The Tender Bar’ Review: Where Everybody Knows His Name

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      Ben Affleck serves up whiskey and wisdom in George Clooney’s adaptation of the best-selling memoir by J.R. Moehringer.Every kid should have an Uncle Charlie. That’s the sentiment voiced by J.R. Maguire early in “The Tender Bar,” and it’s hard to disagree. By the end of the movie, directed by George Clooney and adapted from J.R. Moehringer’s 2005 memoir, it’s clear that what J.R. means, most simply, is that every child should have an adult who loves them unconditionally: someone who listens, gives good advice and answers hard questions as truthfully as possible.In movie terms, it doesn’t hurt if that person is also Ben Affleck. Uncle Charlie, a Long Island bartender who is loyal to his friends and family and devoted to his car (a beautiful blue-green Cadillac convertible), is like an older, 1980s-vintage version of Chuckie Sullivan, Affleck’s character in “Good Will Hunting.” He likes to drink, smoke, crack wise and philosophize, but his calling in life is to be there for a vulnerable, promising young man when no one else will.Affleck is very good at this. He doesn’t oversell either Charlie’s cool or his warmth, and doesn’t let the audience or J.R. in on all of Charlie’s secrets. We see him mostly through the boy’s eyes, as a heroic, benevolent, somewhat mysterious figure, but Affleck’s weary, stoical demeanor suggests dimensions beyond what a child might comprehend. (The young J.R. is played by Daniel Ranieri; grown-up, retrospective narration is provided by the voice of Ron Livingston.) The nuances of Affleck’s performance help ground the movie in small, specific emotions. Its understatement, though, can be a limitation as well as a virtue.The obvious thing to say about Charlie is that he’s a surrogate father. J.R.’s real dad (Max Martini) is an unreliable, largely absent, self-absorbed disc jockey. He sometimes calls, rarely shows up and lives mainly as a voice on the radio. (“The Voice” is his professional alias.) “The Tender Bar” begins when J.R. and his mother, Dorothy (Lily Rabe), move into her parents’ rambling house in Manhasset. Dorothy’s brother Charlie lives there too, as do a bunch of other cousins and siblings.We don’t learn too much about them. The focus is on J.R.’s relationships with Dorothy and Charlie, and on his search for The Voice. Grandpa, in the splendidly cranky person of Christopher Lloyd, shows up now and again to swear or break wind, and once in a while to show a little tenderness.J.R.’s second home is the bar, called the Dickens, where Charlie pours drinks for the regulars and dispenses what he calls “male science” to his nephew. In keeping with the joint’s literary name (there’s a fading likeness of Charles Dickens painted on the side of the building), Charlie keeps books as well as bottles on the shelves. He encourages J.R. to read, and then to write.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      In Australia, Hollywood Stars Have Found an Escape From the Virus. Who’s Jealous?

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyIn Australia, Hollywood Stars Have Found an Escape From the Virus. Who’s Jealous?Dozens of international film productions have been lured to the country, where cases of the coronavirus are few. In turn, actors have found almost paradise.Chris Hemsworth is filming “Thor: Love and Thunder” in Australia.Credit…Getty Images for The Critics Choice AssociationMarch 10, 2021Updated 4:52 a.m. ETMELBOURNE, Australia — In the photo posted to Instagram, the actors Chris Hemsworth, Idris Elba and Matt Damon, all wearing 1980s-style sweats, embrace. They are maskless. Touching. Happy, even. The caption reads: “A little 80s themed party never did any harm!”Their fans, indignant, peppered the post with comments. What of the pandemic? Social distancing? Masks? We are still, after all, suffering through a pandemic that has all but crippled the travel industry and blocked most people from casually taking off for vacation in paradise.But the Hollywood brigade was in Australia, a country that has effectively stamped out the coronavirus, allowing officials to ease restrictions for most gatherings, including parties (with dancing and finger food). As a result of the near-absence of the virus, plus generous subsidies from the Australian government, the country’s film industry has been humming along at an enviable pace for months compared to other locales.Australia has managed to lure several Hollywood directors and actors to continue film production. In effect, many celebrities, including Natalie Portman, Christian Bale and Melissa McCarthy, have found freedom from the pandemic there.As one person wrote on Mr. Hemsworth’s Instagram post: “Before you comment, remember that not everyone lives in America.”Though the quickened pace of vaccinations in the United States has raised hope of returning to some semblance of normalcy by the summer, the country still leads the world in the number of coronavirus cases and deaths. Movie theaters reopened only last week in New York City. Some fans are cautiously creeping back, while others are still wary of contracting the virus.But thousands of miles away, many stars who appear on the big screens can be seen frolicking, or filming, on location in Australia. (Mr. Hemsworth is himself a permanent fixture — he moved back to Australia in 2017 after several years of living in Los Angeles.) In the United States, where hundreds are still dying every day, some fans have looked on with envy.“These Hollywood stars have been transported to another world where the problems of this world aren’t,” said Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University in New York. He added that the temporary exodus from the United States revealed a further crumbling of the myth that Hollywood was the endgame for celebrities.Village Roadshow Studios in Gold Coast, Australia.Credit…Bradley Kanaris/Getty ImagesAustralia has become the “hip place” where “fabulous people want to go,” Professor Thompson said. “When you’re trying to be a star, you’ve got to go out to the West Coast to make your bones.” When you become “a really big star,” you buy property somewhere exotic, like Australia, he added.“It definitely feels like a time machine,” Ms. Portman, calling in from Sydney, told the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel in December. “It’s so different, all the animals are different, all the trees are different, I mean even the birds, like, there’s like multicolored parrots flying around like pigeons,” she added. “It’s wild.”A spokeswoman said the government had helped 22 international productions inject hundreds of millions into the local economy. Paul Fletcher, the federal minister for communications, said, “There’s no doubt it’s a very significant spike on previous levels of activity.”But even as celebrities preen and pose on social media, some Australians grumble that the country’s strategy for stamping out the virus has left tens of thousands of citizens stranded overseas. Several tennis players and 2021 Australian Open staff were allowed into the country for the tournament. And now, they say, Hollywood’s rich and famous are turning up during the pandemic, angering critics who see a clear bending of the rules for those with money and power.“Everyone knows there’s a separate set of rules, it seems, for everyone that’s a celebrity or has money,” said Daniel Tusia, an Australian who was stuck overseas with his family for several months last year. “There are still plenty of people who haven’t been able to get home, who don’t fall into that category, who are still stranded,” he added.In an emailed statement, the Australian Border Force said that travel exemptions for film and television productions were “considered where there is evidence of the economic benefit the production will bring to Australia and support from the relevant state authority.”A year ago, Tom Hanks, Hollywood’s everyman, made all-too-real the threat of the pandemic when he and his wife, Rita Wilson, tested positive for the coronavirus in Queensland, Australia, while he was filming an unnamed Elvis biopic. Their illness made personal a threat whose seriousness was only beginning to become crystallized at the time.The actors Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles last year. They tested positive for the coronavirus in Queensland, Australia, about a month later.Credit…Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut by May, Australia appeared to be on track to quashing the first wave of the virus, and the soap opera “Neighbors” became one of the world’s first scripted TV series to resume production. The federal government has committed more than $400 million to international productions, which, together with existing subsidies, provides film and television producers with a rebate of up to 30 percent to shoot in the country.More than 20 international productions, including “Thor: Love and Thunder,” a Marvel film starring Mr. Hemsworth, Mr. Damon, Ms. Portman, Taika Waititi, Tessa Thompson and Mr. Bale; “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” a fantasy romance starring Mr. Elba and Tilda Swinton; and “Joe Exotic,” a spinoff of the podcast made following the popular Netflix series “Tiger King,” starring the “Saturday Night Live” actress Kate McKinnon as the big-cat enthusiast Carole Baskin, are all either in production or set to be filmed in the coming year.Ron Howard is directing “Thirteen Lives,” a dramatization of the 2018 Thai rescue of a soccer team from a cave, in Queensland (the coast of Australia makes a good stand-in for the tropics). And later this year, Julia Roberts and George Clooney are set to arrive in the same state to shoot “Ticket to Paradise,” a romantic comedy.Though a number of American stars have landed in the country for temporary work, some like Ms. McCarthy, originally in Australia to work on “Nine Perfect Strangers,” have decided to stay on to shoot other projects, said those in the industry. “Oh, the birds!” she gushed in a YouTube video. “I love that I’ve seen a spider the size of my head.”Others, like Zac Efron, appear to have settled here permanently.Zac Efron has been spotted all over Australia.Credit…Lucy Nicholson/ReutersHis Instagram is flush with Australiana: Here he is in a hammock, in the red-earth desert, appearing to participate in an Indigenous ceremony or wearing the Australian cowboy hat, an Akubra. Last year, Mr. Efron even got what an Adelaide hairdresser described as a “mullet,” a much-maligned hairstyle popular in Australia.“Home sweet home,” he captioned one image of himself in front of a camper worth more than $100,000.Chances are the stars will keep showing up. They’ve been spotted camping under the stars, heading out to dinner sans masks, and partying (yes, like it’s 1989). Mr. Damon said in January that Australia was definitely a “lucky country.”But locals in Byron Bay — the seaside town that in recent years has been transformed from hippie to glittering — have complained that the influx of stars in the past year has irreparably changed the town.“The actors and the famous people are the tip of the iceberg,” said James McMillan, a local artist and the director of the Byron Bay Surf Festival. He added that the large cohort of production crew member from Melbourne and Sydney was pricing locals out of real estate.“It’s definitely changed more than I’ve ever seen it change in the past 12 months,” Mr. McMillan, who has lived in Byron Bay for two decades, added. “People have got stars in their eyes.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      We Live in Disastrous Times. Why Can’t Disaster Movies Evolve?

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyScreenlandWe Live in Disastrous Times. Why Can’t Disaster Movies Evolve?Credit…Photo illustration by Najeebah Al-GhadbanFeb. 4, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETEveryone on Earth is dead, or will be soon. We don’t know exactly what happened — fallout from a nuclear catastrophe? — but whatever it was, it’s still spreading, still killing people, not going away. Some survivors are hiding underground, but they can’t last long. There seem to be a few people left aboveground, near the planet’s poles, but it’s clear that whatever came for everyone else is also coming for them. We are doomed — all of us, that is, apart from the five astronauts aboard Aether, a spaceship en route back to Earth after scouting a potentially habitable moon of Jupiter.So begins “The Midnight Sky,” George Clooney’s latest outing as a director and a star — a worldwide Netflix hit and a telling artifact of our relationship with the idea of disaster. As Aether approaches Earth, the astronauts are faced with a choice. Those who board one of the ship’s landing crafts — in hopes, say, of rushing to the side of still-living loved ones — will be returning to Earth to die there. Those who stay in space will remain for the rest of their lives.In an emotionally climactic scene, one crew member follows another to an equipment locker to confess his decision. But the two don’t discuss what’s happening on Earth, or why, or what it would mean to strand themselves in space. Instead, they grow philosophical about life. “I’ve been thinking,” the crew member says, his eyes moistening. “Been thinking a lot about time, and how it gets used, and why. Why one person lives a lifetime and another only gets a few years.”[embedded content]At first, the vague catastrophe of “The Midnight Sky” feels like a neat tweak to the usual disaster-movie formulas, which lavish attention on the apocalypse itself: Either we follow its slow, terrible progress through the first act, or we see it parceled out in ominous flashbacks. These days, it seems, those mechanics can be skipped over. It’s already all too easy to imagine how the end of the world might work. Every day, news and government reports remind us that we are living through a planetary crisis, bringing new projections of worse pandemics, rolling climate shocks, mass migrations that shatter our political systems. “The Midnight Sky” takes advantage of our dread-saturated imagination to skip the disaster altogether and cut straight to the pressure it puts on individual characters.But as the equipment-locker scene makes clear, this movie is more traditional than it seems. The story, in the end, uses the same dramatic conceit as just about every other disaster movie: The decimation of Earth becomes a backdrop that lends weight to the choices of a few individuals, which are meant to point to bigger truths about humanity. Two work buddies speculating about time and mortality sounds like a Samuel Beckett play, but two space explorers talking about time and mortality after the apocalypse, plus a few action scenes, sounds like Netflix gold. Rushing past the disaster doesn’t change the equation so much as boil it down into a purer version of itself — and, in doing so, reveal its fundamental inadequacies.Most disaster movies aren’t much interested in disasters in and of themselves. The disaster sparks the action and makes its resolution feel momentous, but when it comes to considering where it came from — why it unfolds one way and not another — things tend to get hazy. We see, perhaps, a montage of news reports, or a beaker taking a sinister spill in a lab somewhere. The disaster always seems to be attributed not to any specific cause, but to something nebulous and universal: “human nature,” hubris, evil business moguls. We’re offered just enough explanation to stop us from asking questions.By opting for maximum disaster briskness, though, “The Midnight Sky” actually makes it harder than usual to ignore those pesky questions. What human history underpinned the mysterious Big Bad Thing that killed everyone? What collective arrangements, decisions and failures underpinned the apocalypse, and how did they dictate how it played out? I found myself dwelling on those underground shelters: Who was in them? Who was shut out? Why, exactly? There is one brief mention of a “colony flight” that may or may not have managed to launch, carrying settlers into space. If it did, who was on board, and who watched it soar away?Once upon a time these details might have felt like distracting trivialities. But questions of this sort are among the most pressing facing humanity today. We are not living through a Big Bad Apocalyptic Thing; we are staring down a whole planetary patchwork of bad stuff that threatens death and suffering on a sweeping scale. It’s possible that the very idea of the discrete, one-shot “apocalypse” should be retired; it risks fixing our imagination on a definitive break that will never come, instead of the tangled moral drama of what needs to happen now. How are we preparing, as a species and a planet, for the hardships of the future? Will these preparations do more for some people than others? What hope do we have of modifying them for the better?[embedded content]By starting with Earth’s fate already settled, “The Midnight Sky” gives itself a pass on this line of inquiry, and an excuse to dwell instead in the pathos of small moments of loss and acceptance. It reminded me, discomfitingly, of figures like Elon Musk, who often seem more interested in triumphant dreams of life in space than in any effort to help address the earthbound problems that would send us there in the first place. Colonizing space feels exciting: a new life under a new sky, free from the entanglements of the past. Dealing with Earth’s problems involves something we’re not accustomed to seeing as romantic: accounting for other people’s basic needs on a global scale.If our planetary crises were the same as conflicts negotiated between small groups of individuals, they would be much more straightforward to resolve. But they’re not. Could we start telling disaster stories that reflect this fact, and grapple with it? The most powerful recent example comes not from film but from literature: Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel “The Ministry for the Future,” which cuts between — to give just a partial list — scenes of climate disaster, government and financial bureaucracy, geoengineering experiments, street protests, refugee camps and eco-terrorism. Each strand takes meaning not just from the experiences of its characters but also from the reader’s awareness of their deep interconnections.Until we have more disaster tales like this, the genre will only ever function as a smudged, distorted mirror for humanity. “The Midnight Sky” is suffused from the start with a distinctly current dread about our missteps, but it refuses to face the dilemmas those missteps now force upon us, even as the need to do so becomes more pressing by the day.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More