Curtis, Jamie Lee

Subterms

    Latest story

    138 Shares119 Views

    ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Is Big Winner at the Oscars

    by

    In the late 1960s, young cineastes shook up a moribund film industry by delivering idiosyncratic, startlingly original work. The moment became known as New Hollywood.When film historians look back at the 95th Academy Awards, they may mark it as the start of a new New Hollywood. Voters honored A24’s head-twisting, sex toy-brandishing, TikTok-era “Everything Everywhere All at Once” with the Oscar for best picture — along with six other awards — while naming Netflix’s German-language war epic “All Quiet on the Western Front” the winner in four categories, including best international film.The Daniels, the young filmmaking duo behind the racially diverse “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” won Oscars for their original screenplay and directing. (The Daniels is an oh-so-cool sobriquet for Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. They are both 35.) The film, which received a field-leading 11 nominations, also won Oscars for film editing, best actress and best supporting actor and actress, with Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis honored for their performances.“Ladies, don’t let anybody ever tell you that you are ever past your prime,” Yeoh, 60, said when accepting the best actress Oscar. “Never give up.” She was the first Asian woman to receive the award.Clip Courtesy A.M.P.A.S.© 2023Quan’s win provided the Academy Awards with a hall-of-fame comeback story: After early success in movies like “The Goonies” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” his acting career grew so cold that he turned to stunt work. “Dreams are something you have to believe in,” Quan said as tears streamed down his face and A-list attendees gave him a standing ovation. “I almost gave up on mine. To everyone out there, please keep your dreams alive.”Curtis was also in tears by the time she reached the fiery conclusion of her acceptance speech. “To all of the people who have supported the genre movies that I have made for all these years,” she said, “the thousands and hundreds of thousands of people, we just won an Oscar together!”Clip Courtesy A.M.P.A.S.© 2023The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences spread nominations remarkably far and wide this year. Two blockbuster sequels, “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Top Gun: Maverick,” made the best picture cut. So did the little-seen art films “Triangle of Sadness,” “Women Talking” and “Tár.” Voters also made room for a musical (“Elvis”) and a memory piece (“The Fabelmans”). In some ways, spreading nominations widely reflected the jumbled state of Hollywood. No one in the movie capital seems to know which end is up, with streaming services like Netflix hot then not, and studios unsure about how many films to release in theaters and whether anything but superheroes, sequels and horror stories can succeed. Over the weekend, “Scream VI” was the top movie at the North American box office, with an estimated $44.5 million in ticket sales.First-time nominees filled 16 of the 20 acting slots, with new stars like Austin Butler (“Elvis”), Barry Keoghan (“The Banshees of Inisherin”), Brian Tyree Henry (“Causeway”), Paul Mescal (“Aftersun”) and Stephanie Hsu (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) honored for breakthrough roles.But first-time acting nominations also went to Hollywood stalwarts like Curtis, Yeoh and Brendan Fraser. To some degree, the inclusion of Quan, Curtis, Fraser and Yeoh was seen as redemption for Hollywood: All had somehow been cast to the side at some point over their careers.An overcome Fraser, who won the Oscar for best actor for his performance as an obese professor in “The Whale,” thanked Darren Aronofsky, the film’s director, “for throwing me a creative lifeline.”Clip Courtesy A.M.P.A.S.© 2023The academy was also trying to balance old and new in the Oscars ceremony itself. The academy’s chief executive had promised a return to the polished, glamorous Oscar ceremonies of the past to recover from last year’s chaotic telecast, when an angry Will Smith walked onstage and slapped Chris Rock. In a change from last year, when eight categories were scuttled to a nontelevised portion, all 23 Oscars were handed out live on air.As host, Jimmy Kimmel arrived on the Oscars stage by parachute, moments after a pair of “Top Gun”-style fighter jets flew over the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles at 345 miles per hour. He then breezed through a self-assured monologue that left the A-listers seated before him cheering in support. He teased Steven Spielberg — gently — for his lack of recreational drug use and Fraser and Quan for once appearing together in “Encino Man.” It was the kind of affable ribbing that once made Billy Crystal the king of the Oscar M.C.’s.The host Jimmy Kimmel arrived on the stage via parachute and breezed through his monologue.Todd Heisler/The New York Times“And if any of you get offended by a joke and decide you want to come up here and get jiggy with it? It’s not going to be easy,” Kimmel said, addressing last year’s slap without directly mentioning Smith. He then joked that people like Michael B. Jordan, the “Creed” star, and Pedro Pascal, who plays the title role in “The Mandalorian,” were prepared to intervene.“Seriously, the academy has a crisis team in place,” Kimmel said. “If anything unpredictable or violent happens during the ceremony, just do what you did last year — nothing. Maybe even give the assailant a hug.”As expected, “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” received the Oscar for best animated feature, and “Navalny” was honored as best documentary. Less anticipated was Ruth Carter’s win for her “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” costume design. (Most awards handicappers had predicted victory for the “Elvis” costume designer Catherine Martin. Carter also won for “Black Panther” in 2019.)The #OscarsSoWhite outcries from 2015 and 2016, prompted by all-white slates of acting nominees, continue to reverberate at the academy, which has been trying to diversify its membership by race, gender and nationality. Nearly 50 percent of the academy’s most recent class of new members came from overseas. About 25 percent of the academy’s total membership of 10,000 now comes from outside the United States.But the academy was criticized this year for not nominating any women in the best director category. For decades, women and people of color were almost entirely excluded from the directing race. In 2021, for the first time, two women were nominated: Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland”) and Emerald Fennell (“Promising Young Woman”), with Zhao winning. Last year, Jane Campion (“The Power of the Dog”) won the Oscar for directing.This year, Sarah Polley (“Women Talking”) was left out even though her film was nominated for best picture. (Polley won for her adapted screenplay.) “I give up,” Patty Jenkins, whose directing credits include “Wonder Woman” and “Monster,” told Variety on Saturday about women being shut out of the category. “It’s still going to take a long ways to go. It’s going to take a lot more to really see truly more diverse awards.”The internationalization of the academy was on display among this year’s directing nominees. The Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund (“Triangle of Sadness”) and the British-born Martin McDonagh (“The Banshees of Inisherin”) were honored. Joining them were Todd Field (Tár) and the Daniels. Filling out the best director category was Spielberg — a director who was once part of that New Hollywood crew and is now a Hollywood elder statesman with nine total nominations for directing, this one for “The Fabelmans.”The academy emphasized that the ceremony would feel modern — part of an urgent effort to make the telecast more relevant to young people. The 2022 show drew 16.6 million viewers, the second-worst turnout on record after the pandemic-affected 2021 telecast. If the Nielsen ratings do not improve, the academy faces a financial precipice: Most of its revenue comes from the sale of broadcasting rights to the show. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake. (The most-viewed Oscars telecast was in 1998, when 57.2 million people watched “Titanic” win the trophy for best picture.)Rihanna performed her nominated song from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”Todd Heisler/The New York TimesBig musical stars, including Rihanna and Lady Gaga, sang their nominated songs; Lenny Kravitz performed during the “In Memoriam” segment. The best song Oscar went to “Naatu Naatu” from the Indian film “RRR.” The nominee pool for best picture had never before included more than one billion-dollar ticket seller, according to box office databases, and this year there were two. “Top Gun: Maverick” collected $1.5 billion, and “Avatar: The Way of Water” took in $2.3 billion. (Viewership tends to increase when popular films are nominated.)In another change, the red carpet was not red: Stars walked a champagne-colored rug, breaking with a 62-year tradition. The choice was made as part of an overhaul of the preshow spectacle, which, for the first time, was managed by members of the Met Gala’s creative team. In the days leading up to the Oscars, another in a series of rainstorms soaked Los Angeles, so much so that the academy sent an alert to the news media on Wednesday warning that it may “need to clear the carpet at a moment’s notice.” In the end, the weather cooperated, and it was a sunny 63 degrees. More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Jamie Lee Curtis Wins First Oscar for Best Supporting Actress

      by

      After a tight three-way race, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” co-star Jamie Lee Curtis won the supporting actress Oscar at the 95th Academy Awards on Sunday night, pulling ahead of Angela Bassett (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”) and Kerry Condon (“The Banshees of Inisherin”).The three women have traded wins all season. Bassett initially seemed to be the favored pick after victories at the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards, but Condon then picked up a win from the British voting body BAFTA, while Curtis triumphed at the Screen Actors Guild Awards.In her acceptance speech on Sunday, she noted all the many people who helped in her career, and shouted, “We. Just. Won. An. Oscar. Together!”Curtis got her start in Hollywood as a scream queen in the “Halloween” franchise before segueing to bombshell roles in “Trading Places” and “True Lies.” But she played well against type in “Everything Everywhere” as a grumpy, frumpy tax auditor.The 64-year-old is the daughter of the actors Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, who were both nominated for Oscars but never won. “To be connected through this legacy of their work and my work,” she told The Times last month, “it’s very powerful.”On Sunday, she asked the very enthusiastic audience to settle down, so she could deliver her speech without being played off. “Stop!” she told the crowd, and added, referring to the academy president: “I have 45 seconds, and I promised Janet Yang I wouldn’t do it well, because I’m a good girl.”Here’s the full text of her acceptance speech:I know it looks like I’m standing up here by myself, but I am not. I am hundreds of people. I’m hundreds of people. I am the — where are the Daniels? — Daniels [the “Everything Everywhere” directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert], Jonathan [Wang], Ley Line Entertainment, the entire crew, my bae Michelle [Yeoh], Ke [Huy Quan], Steph [Hsu], the entire group of artists who made this movie. We just won an Oscar!To my dream team: my agent Rick Kurtzman, Alan Wertheimer, Heidi Schaeffer, Sean James, Grace Ahn, Jane Ross. We just won an Oscar!To my family, my beautiful husband, Christopher Guest; our daughters, Annie and Ruby; my sister Kelly. We just won an Oscar! To all of the people who have supported the genre movies that I have made for all these years, the thousands and hundreds of thousands of people, we just won an Oscar together.And my mother and my father were both nominated for Oscars in different categories. I just won an Oscar. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      Acting Awards Without Gender Categories? Here’s Where Celebrities Stand

      by

      Nominees at the Screen Actors Guild Awards in Los Angeles on Sunday were split on combining award show categories for best actor and best actress.LOS ANGELES — On the red carpet before the Screen Actors Guild Awards at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles on Sunday, stars answered the usual questions. Were they excited to be here? Yes. How did it feel to be recognized? Amazing. What TV show would they want to guest star in? “The White Lotus.”But one question we posed made nearly every person stop, ponder for several seconds and then deliver a thinking-aloud answer, often with a caveat or a pivot in the middle:“Should major award shows eliminate separate acting categories for men and women?” we asked.The ongoing debate over gender-neutral acting prizes, which could also mean fewer nominations for everyone, is part of the conversation again this awards season. In 2021, the Gotham Awards, which honor independent films, nixed separate acting categories for men and women. Last year, the Brit Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Grammys, merged its categories for best male and best female artist of the year into one gender-neutral top prize. And this year, the event faced backlash for not nominating any women for the award. The Grammy Awards eliminated many gendered categories beginning with the 2012 ceremony.Nonbinary actors such as Emma Corrin, who are often forced to choose a category in which to be considered, have called for gender-neutral award categories. The trans nonbinary performer Justin David Sullivan from the Broadway musical “& Juliet” withdrew their name from consideration when the Tony Awards eligibility rulings were announced earlier this month, putting public pressure on the awards. (Both the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which hands out Oscars, and the Television Academy, which handles the Emmy Awards, are looking into nongendered categories, according to The Los Angeles Times. Nominees are already able to request gender-neutral wording on their awards at both events.)The immediate response of many attendees at the SAG Awards was a desire for awards to be more inclusive.“I think it’s a positive thing,” said Will Sharpe, who plays Ethan Spiller, the workaholic tech nerd married to Harper on Season 2 of “The White Lotus,” which won the top TV award for a drama series on Sunday night, noting he believed it would “level out the playing field.”Will Sharpe from Season 2 of “The White Lotus” at the SAG Awards. Aude Guerrucci/Reuters“Why not?” said Michael Imperioli, who plays the womanizing Hollywood producer Dominic Di Grasso on “The White Lotus,” on combining the acting categories. “It’s all one big acting soup.”Other nominees addressed the potential benefit for nonbinary actors.“There are people who don’t want to be defined by gender, and I want to help make awards more inclusive for them,” said Rhea Seehorn, who plays the lawyer Kim Wexler in “Better Call Saul,” which was nominated for outstanding performance by an ensemble in a drama series for its final season.But then she paused.“At the same time,” she added, until women and nonbinary performers are afforded “as much screen time as the men, it’s not very fair to compare the performances.”Top awards often go to the actors who spend the most time onscreen, and a recent study found that, in 2021, in the top 100 grossing films, male characters outnumbered female ones by almost two to one.Jamie Lee Curtis, who won the supporting-actress statuette for her role in “Everything Everywhere All at Once” over the Golden Globe winner Angela Bassett (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”) and the BAFTA winner Kerry Condon (“The Banshees of Inisherin”), echoed Ms. Seehorn’s indecision.Jamie Lee Curtis won a SAG Award for outstanding performance by a female actor in a supporting role for her part in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”Frazer Harrison/Getty Images“I’m all for inclusion, which is the most important thing,” she said, “but, at the same time, I want to make sure that the most opportunities are available to people. I know a lot of people believe in same-sex education. There are a lot of young women who get very quiet when the boys get really loud.”Female nominees in particular expressed concern that the idea of a single prize would put men at a distinct advantage because of the richer and more numerous roles available to them.“There’s still a lot of male parts,” said Patricia Arquette, who plays Harmony Cobel, Mark’s domineering boss, in “Severance,” which was nominated for outstanding ensemble performance in a drama series. “I don’t know if that would be fair.”Patricia Arquette plays Harmony Cobel in “Severance,” which was nominated for outstanding performance by an ensemble in a drama series.Jordan Strauss/Invision, via Associated Press“Until there’s a 50-50 opportunity, then we still need to have our own categories,” said Olivia Williams, who plays Camilla Parker Bowles in Season 5 of “The Crown,” which was also nominated for best ensemble performance in a drama series.Sarah Polley, the writer and director of the female-focused film “Women Talking,” which examines sexual assault in a religious community, said the potential for parity in consideration had to be weighed against the realities of the film and television industries.“What none of us want to see is a general acting category where it ends up being all-male nominees,” she said, “Which I think is the fear — and that’s a genuine fear.”But, she added, there were also important considerations to weigh that extend beyond fairness to the issue of fundamental identity.“We have a nonbinary actor in our cast,” she said, referring to August Winter, who plays Melvin, a character who lives as an openly trans man in a patriarchal society. “And there would have had to be a choice made between male and female, neither of which was accurate.”Members of the cast of “Women Talking” from left, Liv McNeil, August Winter, Kate Hallett, Michelle McLeod, Sheila McCarthy, Sarah Polley, Rooney Mara, Claire Foy and Jessie Buckley.Jordan Strauss/Invision, via Associated Press“I’m not sure what the solution is,” she added, “but it certainly can’t stay the way it is, because it is excluding people from being recognized.”Mx. Winter, who uses the pronouns they and them, said they supported gender-neutral categories because they “honor the person who is making the art.”“Right now, you need to choose,” they said, referring to awards that separate categories for men and women. “And I don’t think people should be put in that position.”Other nominees noted, however, that they were concerned that combined categories would lead to fewer performances being recognized.Ms. Bassett said that collapsing the categories could lead to fewer chances for recognition. “I don’t like it,” she said. “Not enough opportunity.”Angela Bassett was nominated for a SAG award for outstanding performance by an actress in a supporting role for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”Jordan Strauss/Invision, via Associated PressJon Gries, who plays Greg Hunt, the scheming husband of Jennifer Coolidge’s character, Tanya, in “The White Lotus,” echoed that concern. “When you have best actor, best actress, you have more awards,” he said. (“We like more awards,” said Sabrina Impacciatore, who plays the series’s uptight hotel manager, as she strolled up and put a hand on his shoulder.)Sally Field, who received a lifetime achievement award for her nearly six-decade TV and film career on Sunday night, expressed a general frustration with the competitive nature of awards. “It’s hard to compare actors, whether they be male or female, because the roles are so different,” she said. So the idea of a rule change that would recognize even fewer performances was befuddling to her.“Why would you do that?” she said, looking as though someone had just suggested she go roll through the mud in her ball gown. “I mean, you already can’t even compare Cate Blanchett and Viola Davis. They’re both beyond belief.”Quick Question is a collection of dispatches from red carpets, gala dinners and other events that coax celebrities out of hiding. More

    • 175 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      SAG Awards 2023: Complete List of Winners, Led by ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’

      by

      The film took the top prize, as well as lead actress and two supporting trophies. “Abbott Elementary” and “The White Lotus” were named the top TV shows.The Screen Actors Guild handed its top award for outstanding cast on Sunday night to “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” the hit sci-fi comedy that recently dominated the Directors and Producers Guild Awards and now appears to be a strong best picture front-runner at the Oscars. Three of the four individual acting trophies went to “Everything Everywhere” cast members, too.But will they also prevail with Oscar?The safest bet to repeat is “Everything Everywhere” comeback kid Ke Huy Quan, who won the supporting-actor trophy from SAG and has been collecting statuettes in that category all season. During Sunday’s show, which aired live on YouTube and will stream exclusively on Netflix next year, the 51-year-old Quan delivered his most touching speech yet.After rising to fame as a child actor in popular films like “The Goonies” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” Quan found few roles available for Asian actors and moved behind the camera, working in stunt choreography. Still, he paid his SAG dues every year, hoping and biding his time for the resurgence he’s finally experiencing.“To all those at home who are watching, who are struggling and waiting to be seen,” Quan said, “please keep on going because the spotlight will one day find you.”In an upset victory, Quan’s co-star Jamie Lee Curtis won the supporting-actress statuette over Golden Globe winner Angela Bassett (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”) and BAFTA winner Kerry Condon (“The Banshees of Inisherin”), suggesting that this may be the season’s most fluid acting race.“I know you look at me and think nepo baby, and I totally get it,” said a thrilled Curtis. “But the truth of the matter is I’m 64 years old and this is just amazing!”Later in the night, “Everything Everywhere” leading lady Michelle Yeoh won a crucial best-actress prize over “Tár” star Cate Blanchett, whom she acknowledged as a titan from the stage.“Thank you for giving me a seat at the table because so many of us need this,” Yeoh told the crowd. “We want to be seen and we want to be heard, and tonight you have shown us that it is possible.”Though the SAGs have honored Asian performers from TV shows, Yeoh was the first Asian woman to win best actress in a movie category, and Quan was the first Asian male actor to win for movies as well.The only film actor to win who didn’t hail from “Everything Everywhere” was Brendan Fraser, who mounted a best-actor comeback with his transformational performance in “The Whale.” Though “Elvis” star Austin Butler earned best-actor prizes at BAFTA and the Golden Globes, Fraser wasn’t expected to win at the latter show, since he had publicly accused the former Globes head Philip Berk of groping him in 2003 and had said he wouldn’t attend the ceremony. (Berk denied the accusation.)Like many of the night’s winners, Fraser spoke about the ups and downs of a Hollywood career: “I’ve rode that wave lately, and it’s been powerful and good,” he said, “and I’ve also had that wave smash me right down to the ocean floor.”SAG’s track record with the Oscars is suggestive but spotty. Last year, all four SAG winners triumphed at the Oscars and Jessica Chastain’s SAG win for “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” helped her vault to the front of a wide-open best-actress category. But the year before that, only two of the four SAG winners repeated at the Oscars.But the strongest takeaway from this year’s SAG ceremony is that “Everything Everywhere,” which cost only $14.3 million and took in more than $100 million worldwide, is almost certainly headed for a best-picture victory: Of the films that earned top honors at the DGAs, the PGAs and the SAGs — that is, all three major guilds — only Ron Howard’s “Apollo 13” (1995) failed to go the distance with Oscar.When the season began, the “Everything Everywhere” directors Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan were surprised that their quirky film was generating awards chatter. But with two weeks left until Hollywood’s biggest night, the real surprise would be if anything but “Everything Everywhere” becomes the Oscars’ ultimate victor.Here’s the complete list of SAG winners:FilmOutstanding Cast“Everything Everywhere All at Once”Actor in a Leading RoleBrendan Fraser, “The Whale”Actress in a Leading RoleMichelle Yeoh, “Everything Everywhere All at Once”Actor in a Supporting RoleKe Huy Quan, “Everything Everywhere All at Once”Actress in a Supporting RoleJamie Lee Curtis, “Everything Everywhere All at Once”Stunt Ensemble in a Movie“Top Gun: Maverick”TelevisionEnsemble in a Comedy Series“Abbott Elementary”Ensemble in a Drama Series“The White Lotus”Actor in a Comedy SeriesJeremy Allen White, “The Bear”Actress in a Comedy SeriesJean Smart, “Hacks”Actor in a Drama SeriesJason Bateman, “Ozark”Actress in a Drama SeriesJennifer Coolidge, “The White Lotus”Actor in a TV Movie or Limited SeriesSam Elliott, “1883”Actress in a TV Movie or Limited SeriesJessica Chastain, “George & Tammy”Stunt Ensemble in a TV Series“Stranger Things”SAG Life Achievement AwardSally Field More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      2023 Oscar Nominees Luncheon: Tom Cruise’s Arrival Causes a Stir

      by

      The “Top Gun: Maverick” star and producer is mobbed as Austin Butler, Angela Bassett, Ke Huy Quan and others angle to chat with him.The “Elvis” star Austin Butler finally got an audience with Tom Cruise.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesFor the privileged few embarking on an Oscar campaign, the path to a nomination asks you to hobnob with so many of the same people that over the course of many months, your competitors can begin to feel like classmates.But on Monday afternoon, at a luncheon held in Beverly Hills for this year’s Oscar nominees, the arrival of a new student caused quite a stir.That would be Tom Cruise, nominated this year as a producer of the megahit best-picture contender “Top Gun: Maverick.” He was among the first notable names to walk into the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton. The 60-year-old star had sat out both the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice Awards this season, so many of his fellow nominees were encountering him for the first time. Before long, the ballroom had turned into a massive meet-and-greet.Together in the ballroom crush: from left, Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, Steven Spielberg, Jamie Lee Curtis and Cruise. Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times“The Fabelmans” castmates Judd Hirsch and Michelle Williams shared a moment.Roger Kisby for The New York Times“I love you, I love you, oh my God!” said the “Everything Everywhere All at Once” star Ke Huy Quan, who hopped in place, exclaiming, “I want a picture with this man!” before seizing a selfie with Cruise. Director Guillermo del Toro went over for an embrace, as did the nominated actors Brendan Fraser, Angela Bassett and Michelle Williams. Cruise even posed for pictures with Steven Spielberg, a once-frequent collaborator whom the star has not been publicly photographed with in over a decade.The nominees luncheon is supposed to be an egalitarian affair where big stars and behind-the-scenes technicians are on equal footing, but there was no mistaking Cruise as the ballroom’s top dog: He had the gravitational pull of the sun and its burnt-orange countenance, too. Any of the nominees who might have pulled focus from Cruise had declined to attend: Original-song contenders Lady Gaga and Rihanna were busy with other obligations (including, for the latter, a just-concluded Super Bowl stint), and even surprise best-actress nominee Andrea Riseborough was missing in action.A caterer bringing out appetizers.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesJerzy Skolimowski, the director of “EO,” taking a break.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesStill, simply making it to Cruise took some time: In the schmoozy hour before lunch was served, he was so mobbed by his fellow nominees that he was hardly able to move more than a few feet. I watched for a while as “Elvis” star Austin Butler drifted with slow, inexorable determination toward Cruise, who finally pulled the younger man toward him by clamping a hand on his shoulder like a stapler. For several minutes, they were locked in such a tight bro-embrace that it was impossible to discern what they were talking about (or, more important, whether Butler was still speaking in his “Elvis” drawl).What would Lydia Tár think? Cate Blanchett at the event.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesSo instead, I made my way to “Top Gun: Maverick” producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who observed the scene serenely just a few feet away. “It’s my first time at the luncheon,” said the newly nominated producer, who’s better known for making explosive action movies than Oscar fare. “After 50 years in the business, I finally get here.”Malala Yousafzai, there on behalf of a documentary short, speaking with “The Whale” star Brendan Fraser.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesA supporting actress nominee in the house: Stephanie Hsu of “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesIt was not the first time at the luncheon for songwriter Diane Warren, who has been nominated for an Oscar 13 times before and is back in contention this year for the song “Applause,” from the film “Tell It Like a Woman.”“It’s my favorite day,” Warren said. “No one’s a loser yet, everybody’s a winner.” I noted that Warren had received an honorary Oscar in November, and asked whether it had dimmed her desire to win a competitive statuette. “No, I still want to win,” she said, grinning. “He wants a friend!”Angela Bassett (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”) got time with Cruise while the “Top Gun: Maverick” screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie and Butler chatted. Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesAs the nominees and their guests took their seats to nosh on mushroom risotto, the academy president, Janet Yang, came to the stage and addressed the fallout from the organization’s handling of the Will Smith slap at last year’s ceremony.“It was inadequate,” Yang said. “We learned from this that the academy must be fully transparent and accountable in our actions, and particularly in times of crisis, we must act swiftly, compassionately and decisively.”One unrelated tweak has already been made: Unlike last year, when eight below-the-line Oscars were presented just before the telecast began, Yang promised that each category would be aired live during the March 12 telecast. Because of that, Yang pleaded with the nominees to keep their speeches short: “We need to be sensitive to our running time,” she said. “This is live television, after all.”Nominees from “Everything Everywhere All at Once” included, from left, Jamie Lee Curtis, directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, and producer Jonathan Wang.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesSpielberg and Ke Huy Quan, who as a child starred in the director’s “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesWith that settled, the nominees were called one by one to the front of the stage, where they would pose together for one massive “class photo.” The first name announced was Jamie Lee Curtis, who had earned her first Oscar nomination this year for “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”“I’ve been acting since I was 19 and I’m 64 — do the math,” Curtis told me. “That’s many years of watching this photograph being taken.” Her late parents, the actors Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, had both been Oscar nominees. “To be connected through this legacy of their work and my work and now being included here, it’s very powerful,” she said.Michelle Yeoh (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) and Brendan Gleeson (“The Banshees of Inisherin”) posed for photographers.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesBrian Tyree Henry (“Causeway”) made his way into the ballroom.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesEventually, with all the nominees assembled,  the producer and academy governor DeVon Franklin counted down to a flashbulb — pop! — then counted down again as the academy photographer took another picture. “All right, three more,” Franklin said.“I’ve got one more expression,” shouted best-actor nominee Colin Farrell (“The Banshees of Inisherin”).Moments earlier, Farrell had been in an animated conversation with Warren, who was standing on the riser behind him. When the pictures were finished and the attendees started to make their way out of the ballroom, I asked Warren what they had discussed.“We talked about how we both did very badly at school,” she said, “and now here we are, at the coolest graduation picture ever.”Spielberg with Cruise, a longtime star of his.Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Halloween Ends’ Review: It Probably Doesn’t

      by

      David Gordon Green wraps up his reboot trilogy for a horror franchise that never stays dead for long.Can we imagine future Halloweens without a new “Halloween”? We might have to, if David Gordon Green’s “Halloween Ends,” the wrap-up film of the reboot trilogy he began in 2018, plants a full stop on a 44-year-old franchise. Savvy viewers, though, will intuit the title’s missing question mark, understanding that Michael Myers, one of cinema’s fustiest boogeymen, is unlikely to remain interred for long.And for a spell in “Halloween Ends” it seems as if Green might be offering a creative hand to his possible successors, only to withdraw it in favor of business as usual. Four years have passed since the events of “Halloween Kills,” and Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has given up the gunslinging-granny look and doomsday prepping in favor of a cottage-core aesthetic and memoir writing. She and her granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak), have inexplicably remained in Haddonfield, Ill., where the townsfolk still blame Laurie for inciting Myers’s last stabbing spree and, presumably, for their plummeting property values.Also shunned by the locals is Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), a geeky lad whose disastrous babysitting exploits three years earlier resulted in a dead child, a murder trial and an acquittal. Clearly, he’s perfect boyfriend material, and after saving him from the town bullies, Laurie introduces him to Allyson. Things go swimmingly until Corey encounters Myers one night in a dank cave beneath an underpass and learns there might be more to life than enduring insults and suffocating shame.At first, Corey’s involvement with the visibly declining Myers (again played by James Jude Courtney) is strangely ill-defined, a cross between caretaker and understudy. But as proximity to evil causes Corey to change — being an acolyte apparently does wonders for the libido — his too-rapid transformation constitutes a missed opportunity for the franchise. By pumping up Corey’s psychological damage, Green could have made a passing-the-torch movie, giving Corey a clear framework for his capitulation to the allure of slaughter. This also would have meshed perfectly with Laurie’s declaration that evil doesn’t die, it just changes shape.Changing shape, though, is something that exhausted movie properties struggle to do, and Green and his three co-writers soon revert to the comforting beats of the body count. This time, the townspeople — after virtually hijacking the previous installment — have dwindled to a few familiar faces, and there’s a touching reunion between Laurie and a flirty Officer Frank Hawkins (nice to see you, Will Patton, however briefly). He doesn’t know she’s already taken.The twisted bond between hunter and hunted that’s common to many serial-killer narratives (though rarely more overtly and eloquently than in Bryan Fuller’s terrific TV show “Hannibal”) has always been this franchise’s backbone. As if attempting to honor that, Green has made a movie that’s less frantic and more intimate than its predecessor, one that unfolds with a mourning finality. For me, its most evocative image is of a severed tongue circling lazily on a record turntable — maybe Green’s way of letting us know that he, at least, has nothing more to say.Halloween EndsRated R. Don’t pretend you don’t know why. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters and available to watch on Peacock. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Where Did Those Hot Dog Fingers Come From? Daniels Explain

      by

      The directors of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” have found the reaction to their film “humbling and inspiring and confusing.”When “Everything Everywhere All at Once” opened in March in a handful of theaters, its creators, the directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, weren’t sure what to expect. The film had stars — “I thought we could bill it as ‘Michelle Yeoh fights Jamie Lee Curtis,’” Scheinert said — but was otherwise tough to pigeonhole. It was a multiverse picture, sure, but instead of superheroes and spaceships, there were fights with fanny packs, cinematic shout-outs to Wong Kar-wai and Stanley Kubrick, and a singing raccoon. And then there was the pandemic, and who knew what that might do to box office numbers? “I went in with very low expectations, because there were a lot of unknowns,” Kwan said.Instead, the movie became one of the sleeper hits of the summer, expanding from 10 screens in three American cities to 2,200 theaters worldwide, becoming A24’s highest-grossing release in the process. Strong reviews helped: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film was rated 95 percent fresh, while The Times called it “an exuberant swirl of genre anarchy” and praised its “sincere and generous heart.” The film also benefited from exuberant word of mouth, which included viewers posting photos and videos of themselves on social media having a good cry or three. “It’s been very humbling and inspiring and confusing,” Scheinert said.In the film, Yeoh stars as a laundromat owner who must call upon various alter egos in parallel worlds to battle a mysterious power out to destroy the multiverse. On a recent morning, Kwan and Scheinert, known professionally as Daniels, spoke — via video call from their separate homes in Los Angeles — about the film’s slow-burn, still-burning success; how Yeoh and Curtis ended up with wieners for fingers; and why, with a movie about infinite possibilities, they wouldn’t change a thing.The film had a pretty small first weekend release. What was it like watching audiences discover the film?DANIEL SCHEINERT I’m grateful that it’s been slow, because I think it allowed us to process how people were reacting. At those early screenings, people would stay after to talk with us, and a good number of them would cry while talking about it.Inside the World of ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’In this mind-expanding, idiosyncratic take on the superhero film, a laundromat owner is the focus of a grand, multiversal showdown.Review: Our film critic called “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an exuberant swirl of genre anarchy.The Protagonist: Over the years, Michelle Yeoh has built her image as a combat expert. For this movie, she drew on her emotional reserves.A Lovelorn Romantic: A child star in the 1980s, Ke Huy Quan returns to acting as the husband of Yeoh’s character, a role blending action and drama.The Costume Designer: Shirley Kurata, whose work defined the look of the movie, has a signature style that mixes vintage, high-end designers and an intense color wheel.DANIEL KWAN That first month was very emotional. It became this version of group therapy for certain people, especially at college campuses. For a lot of younger Asian American kids, especially children of immigrants, they’d come up to me, and they wouldn’t even be asking about the movie past a certain point. They’d be asking about their own life, like, so what do I do? How do I talk to my parents? And like, I’m not a therapist. My relationship with my parents is good, but it’s good for an Asian American immigrant relationship.Michelle Yeoh in a scene from the film, which Daniel Kwan described as “it’s like if my mom was in ‘The Matrix.’”A24“Everything” is hard to describe. How would you describe it?SCHEINERT Michelle Yeoh stars in an action-adventure movie, but it’s in the multiverse. So we get to interrupt that movie with a family drama and then interrupt that with a romance and then interrupt that with an absurdist comedy. And all of that is a fun way to play with how overwhelming life is these days. But at the end of the day, it’s a story about a family.KWAN And then the really dumb pitch is: It’s like if my mom was in “The Matrix.”In one universe, Michelle Yeoh (as Evelyn Wang, an embattled Chinese American laundromat owner) and Jamie Lee Curtis (as Deirdre Beaubeirdra, her I.R.S. auditor and nemesis) have hot dogs for fingers. How did that come about?SCHEINERT We were just high and hungry. No, that’s not true. When we were writing this, we were engineering that particular universe to be the one that pushes Michelle the furthest out of her comfort zone. It was like, how do we make Evelyn hate the multiverse? And so it was like, oh, well, you’re in love with your auditor, and you have floppy useless hot dogs for fingers.KWAN They’re just dumb ideas. The hot dog fingers idea is something a 5 year old would come up with. The only difference between us and a 5 year old is that we are adults with budgets to actually execute the ideas. A lot of these ideas are really dumb. They’re the kind of thing that anyone could come up with.You have an extended and weird shout-out to “Ratatouille,” which is already a really weird movie. Instead of a rat under a chef’s toque, controlling his every move, you have a singing raccoon riding atop Harry Shum Jr.KWAN There’s a phrase that we picked up from working with comedians. When a joke stacks on a joke and stacks on a joke, it’s called a hat on a hat. It’s a problem. It’s like, don’t put a hat on a hat. You’re messing up the purity of the joke and it’s not funny anymore. But we do the opposite. We love to put a hat on a hat on a hat on a hat.SCHEINERT The hope is that the tiny hat on top of the other hats is the one that makes you cry. It’s not good comedy writing, but it’s fun to play with.KWAN I think you saying that “Ratatouille” is already a really weird movie is probably why we love that movie, because it is weird. A rat controlling a man by his hair is hilarious and strange. And so that already feels like a hat on a hat. Or maybe a rat on a hat.SCHEINERT A rat under a hat.The famous hot dog fingers, which Daniel Scheinert said were devised in response to the question, “How do we make Evelyn hate the universe?”A24“Everything” deals with alternate realities and what one might do differently if you had a second shot at life. Is there anything you might do differently if you had a second shot at this film?SCHEINERT Not really. I think our takeaway from the whole exercise of making a movie about alternate lives is that it made me reflect on all the little forks in my life that got me here. How precarious and miraculous the good stuff in my life is. I feel like just one really charming [expletive] friend in high school and my life would just be garbage right now. Just one persuasive butthead who convinces me to join a cult or be a misogynist, and I wouldn’t be here.KWAN It was the same thing with this film. There were so many moments where we thought the movie was going to fall apart, and those moments ended up making the film better. So it’s like, I don’t want to touch it. It’s not a perfect movie. It’s very strange and messy. But I have no regrets.What’s coming up for you?KWAN We might try to make something really small. Just the opposite of this movie, you know, to disappoint all of our new fans. [Laughs] We think a lot about the way the Coen brothers work. Right after they did “No Country for Old Men,” which won the Oscar and is probably one of the best films of the past 50 years, they followed up with “Burn After Reading.” I love “Burn After Reading,” but it’s like a farcical, nihilistic, stupid joke about bureaucracy. I think they’ve been able to build a long career because they’re constantly playing with expectations, and just kind of doing whatever they want to do. I wish, I hope, that we can have that kind of bravery. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      The ‘Halloween’ Franchise and the Problem With Its Sequels

      by

      The follow-ups took the wrong lessons from the 1978 film. But we keep giving the franchise second chances, in hopes a new one will live up to the original.The astonishing opening-weekend grosses for “Halloween Kills,” the 12th film in the durable “Halloween” franchise, may have surprised some observers — after all, audiences are still hesitant to visit theaters, and reviews for this installment were not kind.And they’re not wrong: it’s truly a mess, a whiplash-inducing attempt to fuse straight horror, sideways comedy and socially relevant themes. But just as you can’t kill Michael Myers, the knife-wielding psychopath at its center, you can’t kill “Halloween,” which has outlasted other horror franchises from the same era like “Friday the 13th” (dormant since 2009) and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (since 2010).So what is it about this series that has proved so durable? What keeps fans — and I count myself among them — coming back, forever granting the series second chances at greatness, fully aware of the inevitability of disappointment? A look back at the first five films in the series (available in new Blu-ray collector’s editions from Shout Factory but also streaming on major platforms) provides some answers.It’s impossible to overstate the impact of John Carpenter’s 1978 “Halloween,” a film now treated as a sacred text among horror aficionados — and for good reason. The thriller was innovative, quite literally from the first frame: it opens with a lengthy sequence in which we see a brutal murder through the killer’s eyes. It’s easy to understand what the film’s imitators lifted from this: the heavy-breathing point-of-view framing, the gratuitous nudity, the prurient moralizing (the victim is killed after a casual sexual encounter). Few bothered to replicate Carpenter’s technical wizardry — that four-minute introductory shot, clearly inspired by the opening of Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil,” plays out as an unbroken take — or use it as ingeniously as “Halloween” does: to delay, for as long as possible, the moment of shock when Carpenter finally reveals that the murderer is the 6-year-old Michael Myers, who has slain his own sister.In stark contrast to the slasher movies it spawned, and even to its own sequels, barely a drop of blood is shed in “Halloween.” Carpenter and his co-writer and producer, Debra Hill, spend much of the film’s first hour crafting distinct, memorable characters, particularly Myers’s final would-be victim, the bookworm babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), and his psychiatrist and antagonist, Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence).So rather than reveling in guts and gore, the original film’s emphasis is on suspense, terror and mood. Carpenter’s elegant direction makes inventive use of negative space and darkness (particularly when moving Michael’s ghostly white mask in and out of the cinematographer Dean Cundey’s inky night spaces), and of foregrounds and backgrounds, which frequently reveal the killer’s presence to the viewer before he is seen by his potential victims. Carpenter also masterfully manipulates the pace, which rises and falls in waves through the first and second acts, casually accumulating dread and fear, before moving into the relentlessly scary closing scenes.“Halloween” was a commercial sensation, grossing roughly $47 million on a budget of $325,000. That tremendous return on investment prompted a slew of quick, cheap imitations — after all, the logic went, you didn’t need stars or production values, just some attractive young unknowns and a guy with a knife. None of the successors was more transparent, or more successful, than the “Friday the 13th” series. Its makers couldn’t replicate Carpenter’s stylistic flair, so they invested in elaborate, intricate killing scenes and blood by the bucket.“Friday” and its first follow-up had already come and gone by the time “Halloween II” hit theaters, in October 1981, but that series’s influence is keenly felt in this sequel. Though Carpenter and Hill wrote and produced again (with directorial duties handed off to Rick Rosenthal), the violence is much more extreme and the body count is higher, as is the volume of jump scares, a sure sign that the filmmakers didn’t believe their audience had the patience for the slow builds of the initial installment.But “Halloween II” still has moments of visceral terror that rival the first film, and compositions that are breathtaking in their ingenuity. At their best, these films can tap into a primal fear: of being chased, of running for our lives, of realizing too late that we don’t have a way out. It’s why the scene of Laurie seemingly trapped in a closet in the first film has lodged itself so firmly in our collective memories; it’s why the sequel’s basement chase is so similarly effective. Throughout the series, characters and dialogue return to the idea of “the boogeyman,” a relentless force of evil whom you, of course, cannot kill; “Halloween” works on our subconscious, to a great extent, because it is rooted in childhood fears. (The fears of “Friday the 13th” are teenage concerns: getting caught, either having sex or doing drugs or both.)“Halloween III: The Season of the Witch” was closer to science fiction than horror.Universal PicturesThe “Halloween” movies’ willingness to take risks, at least early on, is more pronounced in the next installment. The first sequel ends, perhaps hopefully, with the death of Michael Myers; the next year, Carpenter and Hill produced “Halloween III: Season of the Witch,” an effort to rebrand the series as a horror anthology, telling a completely different story in a completely different style. This tale of an evil plan to murder kids en masse via killer Halloween masks is closer to 1950s science fiction (or, at the very least, ’70s riffs on the genre like the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” remake) than anything that was happening in horror in the 1980s — and, perhaps as a result, audiences rejected the attempt to rethink “Halloween.”That was, in retrospect, the last time the series tried to break new ground rather than follow current trends. But that’s probably the other explanation for the longevity of “Halloween”: its malleability. When the producer Moustapha Akkad resurrected the series in 1988 with “Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers,” he gave the fans what they wanted — more of the same — though that film, and its quickie follow-up a year later, “Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers,” felt more like “Friday the 13th” sequels than anything Carpenter and Hill had made. Both films have moments of genuine fright and a handful of affecting performances, but they feel like the series reacting to trends rather than setting them, a pattern that continued through the next entries: the winking, “Scream”-influenced “Halloween H20: 20 Years Later” (1998); the extreme horror of Rob Zombie’s 2007 mash-up of remake and origin story; and the gestures of social relevance in the current iterations.These efforts to rethink, rebrand and reboot that original, comparatively simple exercise in suspense have failed and succeeded in roughly equal measure. Yet we’ll plunk down our ticket money, no matter how sour the word of mouth, no matter how dire the reviews, because we’ve grown up with these movies.Part of it is sheer nostalgia, plain and simple: “Halloween” movies remind us of sneaking contraband videotapes into sleepovers and scaring each other silly late at night, after the parents were asleep. The series will probably never scale those heights again, and we know it. But we’ll keep showing up, like die-hard fans of a baseball team that hasn’t nabbed a pennant in years, but can still win a big game every now and then. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Halloween Kills’ Review: There Will Be (Copious Amounts of) Blood

      by

      The newest installment of the “Halloween” franchise, starring Jamie Lee Curtis, is a murderous mess that substitutes corpses for characters.After a dozen movies — and a 13th on the horizon — the once-monstrous Michael Myers shuffles into theaters this weekend as exhausted as the 43-year-old franchise that indulges his blood lust. “Halloween Kills,” the middle film of a reboot trilogy started in 2018 by the director David Gordon Green, is an indolent, narratively impoverished mess that substitutes corpses for characters and slogans for dialogue.What Green appears to be killing here is time. While his previous installment cannily reimagined Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), the plucky babysitter who bested Myers in John Carpenter’s original film, as a trauma-toughened grandmother, this latest exhumation turns her into a virtual bystander. We find her, mere minutes after the ending of the last chapter, bleeding profusely in the back of a truck, barreling away from her burning home and believing her nemesis vanquished once and for all.“Let it burn!” she screams at the firefighters, perhaps aware that the body count of emergency workers is about to soar. Thereafter, she will mostly languish in a hospital bed in the hapless burgh of Haddonfield, Ill., while her daughter and granddaughter (Judy Greer and Andi Matichak) are left to hold the bag — or, in this case, pitchfork — when Myers, inevitably, returns.Plagued by idiotic pronouncements (“He is an apex predator!”) and moronic behavior (doors are left unlocked, an unloaded gun is brandished), “Halloween Kills” plays at times like an exceptionally gory comedy routine. (I dare you not to laugh out loud when one character bemoans the rising number of slayings by declaring, “This was a safe place and now it’s not anymore!”) And if Haddonfield seems significantly more diverse this time out, it’s to no apparent purpose other than to vary the appearances and sexual orientations of its victims. That’s a shame, because the only characters I missed when the picture was over were the gay partners planning a pleasant evening with Mary Jane and “Minnie and Moskowitz” (1971). I hope they already knew the ending.Clumsy flashbacks to the original plot soothe the uninitiated, and characters we barely remember are reintroduced to take their chances among those being creatively killed off. Leading these is Anthony Michael Hall as a grown-up Tommy Doyle, the child Laurie was babysitting on Halloween, 1978, now running a support group for survivors of that night’s mayhem. In mere minutes, Tommy harangues his group into an angry posse, rounding up nondescript townspeople to hunt Myers down. As the mob congregates — mystifyingly — at the hospital, Laurie is prompted to stumble briefly out of bed, stab herself with a painkiller-filled syringe and yowl like a banshee. Contract fulfilled, Ms. Curtis!As for possibly our most resurrected cinematic psycho (played once again by James Jude Courtney), he seems a little sadder behind his rapidly decomposing mask. The success of any “Halloween” retread depends fundamentally on its ability to telegraph the mad magnetism between Myers and Laurie — a tether that’s trampled by this picture’s amorphous gang of vigilantes, repeatedly yelling “Evil dies tonight!” In light of the coming attractions, I can reliably predict that it does not.Halloween KillsRated R. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters and on Peacock. More