Duchovny, David

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    ‘Reverse the Curse’ Review: Baseball Is Life

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    The writer-director David Duchovny plays a long-suffering Red Sox fan with cancer who may yet live to see the team defeat the Yankees.David Duchovny is hardly the first American novelist to find literary profundity in baseball — Bernard Malamud and Don DeLillo spring quickly to mind. Not just baseball as a thing itself — a very American thing, better still — but baseball as a metaphor for Life Itself.But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. While Duchovny is the author of several novels, he is better known as an actor and director. His new movie, “Reverse the Curse,” is an adaptation of his 2016 novel — now with a more newspaper-friendly title.This tale of father-and-son reconciliation is set against the backdrop of the long rivalry between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. The year is 1978 and Ted (Logan Marshall-Green) is a struggling novelist who makes his living as a stadium peanut vendor; Marty (Duchovny) is his father, once a low-level ad man stuck in the suburbs, now dying of cancer.The movie struggles with period detail from the beginning. Green’s stringy wig and mutton chops make him look like Steve Guttenberg in the ’90s comedy “Don’t Tell Her It’s Me” if Guttenberg’s character had been a werewolf. And Duchovny’s haircut is pretty Beverly Hills, despite many of the movie’s scenes taking place in a regular-guy barbershop.Ted and Marty’s interactions are alternately earthy and highfalutin. On a road trip, they have a flatulence competition, and then one rhapsodizes over a woman whose smile makes “a rip in the fabric of time.” After Ted introduces Marty to weed, Marty is seen reading Walter Benjamin’s “On Hashish.”Duchovny’s smarts are commendable, theoretically, but the movie falls short of compelling. And for all the novelistic details that he packs in, “Reverse the Curse” moves at the pace of a self-defeating snail.Reverse the CurseNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      in Television

      ‘The Sympathizer’ Opens a Counteroffensive on Vietnam War Movies

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      HBO’s series is not just a good story. It’s a sharp piece of film criticism.HBO has long defined itself in contrast to mainstream television — “It’s not TV,” as the slogan goes — but in many ways its history is one of revising and responding to the movies. “The Sopranos” updated the mafia movie (and its characters quoted, and were influenced by, films like “The Godfather”). “Game of Thrones” dirtied up the high-fantasy genre; “Deadwood” the Western; “Watchmen” the superhero story.But the network has never given us its longform version of, or rebuttal to, one Hollywood staple: the Vietnam War movie (unless one counts the alternative history aspects of “Watchmen”). Until now, with “The Sympathizer,” Park Chan-wook’s kinetic and darkly hilarious adaptation (with the co-showrunner Don McKellar) of the novel by the Vietnamese American author Viet Thanh Nguyen.The seven-episode series is many things. It’s an exploration of dual identity: The protagonist, known only as the Captain (Hoa Xuande), is a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist double agent planted as an aide to the General (Toan Le), a leader of the South Vietnamese secret police. It’s a spy thriller, a satire of colonialism and its many faces — many of them Robert Downey Jr.’s — and an exploration of the complications of love and memory.But it’s also an intense dialogue and argument with the movies. It is simultaneously its own Vietnam War movie, bold, inventive and sometimes bloody, as well as a pointed, detailed work of movie criticism.In “The Sympathizer,” which began airing in April, the movies are a continuation of war by other means. Its fixation on film begins early. Retelling his story in a postwar re-education camp — the framing device for the series — the Captain recalls watching the vicious interrogation of a communist agent on the stage of a movie theater, where the marquee sign for “Emmanuelle” is coming down, and the one for Charles Bronson’s “Death Wish” is hoisted into place. Even in Hollywood’s dream vision, beauty gives way to an American pointing an oversized gun.“Hollywood” is a metonym for America in “The Sympathizer”; it is the country’s front door, its export and its weapon. The Captain’s C.I.A. contact, Claude (Downey), lectures his “protégé” (who he is unaware is a communist) about American pop culture, expounding to him about the Isley Brothers and the Herbie Hancock score for “Death Wish.” Later, Claude tells him about the C.I.A.’s interest in keeping tabs on film directors: “As long as we can keep them within the nebulous bounds of humanism but with no actionable political ideology, they’re completely harmless.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      ‘What Happens Later’ Review: Meg Ryan Revisits the Meet-Cute

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      The rom-com queen directs and stars opposite David Duchovny in this two-hander about former lovers who reconnect after 25 years.Few can compete with Meg Ryan’s rom-com résumé. As the star of three classics penned by Nora Ephron — “When Harry Met Sally,” “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail” — she may as well be the mascot of the genre’s late 1980s and ’90s golden era. “What Happens Later,” which she both directs and stars in, is an appropriate homecoming for a seasoned pro.Ryan and her co-star, David Duchovny, portray Willa and Bill, former lovers who stumble across each other at a tiny regional airport while the two are waiting out a snowstorm. (They share the name “W. Davis,” and the identity confusion is part of what leads to their reunion meet-cute.) With their connecting flights delayed indefinitely, the exes quickly catch up on what’s happened in the 25 years since they last crossed paths. Bill has a steady job and a family in Boston; Willa is a massage therapist and chakra healer in Austin. Clashing personalities lead to petty bickering and some harsh words, but their banter confirms the chemistry is still there.“What Happens Later,” which Ryan wrote with Kirk Lynn and Steven Dietz (based on Dietz’s play “Shooting Star”), feels purposely lost in time. Its story is bottled within the liminal space of the airport — its exact location remains a mystery — which puts the focus on the two leads trying to reconcile their pasts with their present. Ryan adds a dash of magical realism, turning the airport intercom into a cheeky voice-over that responds to Willa and Bill. These fantasy elements are mostly played for laughs, but the dreaminess and isolation of the darkened airport offer an excuse for Willa and Bill to open up to each other and consider whether their reunion really was determined by fate.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      in Movies

      Meg Ryan on Her New Rom-Com, ‘What Happens Later’

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      Meg Ryan was hurting.Not metaphorically. The actress and one-time rom-com queen was actively sore, having spent the morning, one of many, unpacking and moving herself into a home she’d long been renovating in Montecito, Calif. Persevering through the painful twinge, making order out of the past — really, finding comfort in the present — are the sneaky subcurrents of Ryan’s new movie, “What Happens Later,” a wily rom-com that she co-wrote, stars in and directed. A two-hander opposite David Duchovny, it distills moviedom conventions and plays with a different emotional palette; Ryan grappling with her own cinematic brand. It is only her second foray behind the camera and the first time she has appeared onscreen in seven years.She hasn’t missed the spotlight. “I feel like I had the ride, the Hollywood ride,” she said over a restorative soup lunch on a foggy day. “I kind of went to the moon already. So I don’t have giant ambitions to be back in that.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

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      in Movies

      Tribeca Festival Unveils 2023 Lineup With Chelsea Peretti, Michael Shannon and More

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      Chelsea Peretti, Michael Shannon and Randall Park, among others, are making their directorial debuts at the annual New York event, set for June.Films directed by performers like Chelsea Peretti, Michael Shannon and Randall Park will be a focus of the 2023 Tribeca Festival, organizers said Tuesday as they announced the event lineup. Also on the schedule will be the premiere of a Marvel documentary about the iconic comic book writer Stan Lee.This year’s festival, which will run in Lower Manhattan from June 7 to 18, will include 109 feature films from 127 filmmakers across 36 countries. Among those filmmakers will be 43 first-timers.“The Tribeca Festival is a celebratory event that honors artists and uplifts attendees, and this year is no exception,” the festival’s co-founder, Jane Rosenthal, said in a statement, adding that the event will offer “storytelling as a powerful tool of democracy, activism and social awareness.”Peretti, an actor perhaps best known for her work on “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” will bring to Tribeca the world premiere of “First Time Female Director,” a comedy she also wrote about a woman filmmaker struggling to fill the shoes of her male predecessor.Shannon went behind the camera for “Eric LaRue,” a world-premiere drama in which parents grappling with the fallout of their son’s shocking crime seek solace in rival religious congregations.And Park, whose acting career took off after he landed a starring role in the television sitcom “Fresh Off the Boat,” will take “Shortcomings” to Tribeca after it screened earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival.Also in the lineup will be the world premieres of “Maggie Moore(s)” by John Slattery; “Fresh Kills” by Jennifer Esposito; and the North American premiere of “The Listener” by Steve Buscemi.The Marvel documentary “Stan Lee,” from the director David Gelb, will be among the 53 nonfiction features at the festival.The festival is known for its live events and several are scheduled for the 2023 edition. Sara Bareilles will perform after the world premiere of “Waitress, the Musical — Live on Broadway!,” which features her music and lyrics. Gloria Gaynor will perform following the world premiere of the documentary “Gloria Gaynor: “I Will Survive.” And a conversation with Dan Rather and the director Frank Marshall will take place after the world premiere of the film “Rather.” More