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    ‘The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat’ Review: Hungry for Drama

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    You’ll want to pass the ketchup, and the hankies, for this buffet of tear-jerking deep-fried decadence.“The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat” is a melodrama sampler platter of adultery, alcoholism, cancer, teen pregnancy, derailed careers, heckled memorial services and accidental electrocution, plus a phony psychic, a heartbroken ornithologist and a double helping of murder. This wisecracking, tear-jerking, deep-fried decadence is plenty satisfying if you’re in the mood to indulge.Directed by Tina Mabry and set between 1950 and 1999, it’s the rousing saga of three friends. Clarice (Uzo Aduba) is the image-conscious pushover; Barbara Jean, (Sanaa Lathan) the fragile beauty; and Odette (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) the bigmouth who narrates the film and ignites most of the confrontations. As girls, they’re played by Abigail Achiri, Tati Gabrielle and Kyanna Simone, who do a fine job establishing the tone. In a movie crowded with faces (including Mekhi Phifer, Russell Hornsby and Vondie Curtis-Hall) and more plot twists than a plate of curly fries, Simone and Ellis-Taylor make a feast of the flashiest role. Young Odette impulsively strips off her dress to throw a punch at a slimeball. Later, when her adult incarnation announces she’s going to finally speak her mind, both the audience and her fellow characters are agape. What else has she been doing for two hours?The script, adapted by Mabry and Cee Marcellus from Edward Kelsey Moore’s novel of the same name, takes a few liberties, tweaking the titular hangout into a retro-chic diner, blurring the location to Anytown, America and scrapping a cameo from Eleanor Roosevelt’s ghost. No one seems to believe this is Michelin star cuisine — the score is clatteringly whimsical, the scene transitions teeter toward the absurd — but it’s a treat to watch these believable pals hoist each other back up, taking the occasional breather to clink milkshakes in slow motion.The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-EatRated PG-13 for adult themes, as well as strong language including racial slurs. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      Cold Plunges and Cuddling With Cats: Photographing the ‘Great Performers’

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      What do celebrities do in their downtime? A new project by The New York Times Magazine captures the awards season’s buzziest actors in their element.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.The photographer James Nachtwey showed up at Bradley Cooper’s farmhouse in Pennsylvania one freezing morning in January, armed with a coat and a camera.“Let’s take a walk,” an affable Mr. Cooper suggested, leading Mr. Nachtwey through his 33-acre property until they arrived at an ice-crusted stream.After sharing that he practiced mindfulness by taking cold plunges — immersing himself in freezing water for minutes at a time — Mr. Cooper proceeded to strip down to his black briefs and dive in, flipping over onto his back and closing his eyes.“I thought I’d have 30 seconds to take the picture,” Mr. Nachtwey said in a recent phone conversation from his home in New Hampshire. “But he stayed in for at least 10 minutes.”The resulting photo of Mr. Cooper, which appears on the cover of this month’s Great Performers issue of The New York Times Magazine, is one of 12 portraits of this award season’s buzziest actors. Mr. Nachtwey captured the images over a three-week period in January in Los Angeles, New York, Pennsylvania and Atlanta.Among them: Mark Ruffalo training his own camera on street pigeons, Paul Giamatti curled up on a couch with cats at his favorite used bookstore and Emma Stone wandering through steamy Manhattan streets.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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      Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Ava DuVernay on the Emotional Journey of ‘Origin’

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      Ava DuVernay and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor were in the middle of shooting their new drama, “Origin,” when Ellis-Taylor gave the writer-director some last-minute homework.The two were hours away from filming a scene in which the actress’s character, Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent,” gets into an argument with her husband, Brett (Jon Bernthal), after a party. Ellis-Taylor felt the scene required a few extra beats of dialogue and asked DuVernay to write some.“She said, ‘I think we need something here,’” recalled DuVernay, who agreed to write the new material during her lunch break. “I trusted that she, inside the character, knew what she was talking about.”That level of trust, amid the daily high wire act of a modestly budgeted production — filmed at a brisk pace across three continents — was typical of a collaboration that DuVernay called her deepest with an actor since working with David Oyelowo on “Selma,” her breakout film released nearly 10 years ago.Jon Bernthal with Ellis-Taylor in a scene from “Origin.”NeonIn Ellis-Taylor, DuVernay saw an actor of “outsized power,” capable of giving her imaginative take on the making of Wilkerson’s book a vital emotional anchor. Ellis-Taylor, nominated for an Oscar in 2022 for “King Richard,” saw in DuVernay a “director of consequence,” perhaps the only person who could successfully adapt “Caste” — a best-selling, Big Idea book that links systems of oppression in the United States, Nazi Germany and India.“She is a freedom fighter,” Ellis-Taylor said. “There are consequences and repercussions because of the work that she does, and that separates her, I believe, from most artists.”In a joint interview last month in Manhattan, the actor and filmmaker discussed finding the heartbeat of the critically acclaimed drama in personal material not included in the book, the transformative influence of shooting in Berlin and Delhi and the importance of Bernthal’s swagger. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Ava, one of the fascinating things about this film is that it’s not a typical adaptation. It’s part adaptation and part bio-drama, tracking a harrowing period of Wilkerson’s life while she was researching and writing “Caste.” What led you to make that decision?AVA DUVERNAY I needed a character who could personalize the concepts — the psychology and the history and the legacy of caste. I didn’t know [Wilkerson], but I watched interviews with her and thought that she could be the one to take us on this journey. When I pitched her, I told her I would need to hear the stories that are behind the book, none of which are in the book, and she very generously shared them with me. As a writer, I think she instinctively knew that I would need freedom to interpret the story. And she gave me that.With DuVernay’s films, “There are consequences and repercussions because of the work that she does, and that separates her, I believe, from most artists,” Ellis-Taylor said.Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesAunjanue, you didn’t meet Wilkerson before filming. What did you draw on to create your performance?AUNJANUE ELLIS-TAYLOR I watched her famous TED Talk about “The Warmth of Other Suns” [her award-winning 2010 book about the Great Migration] and her interviews with Bryan Stevenson and Michael Eric Dyson. But [“Caste”] was my bible. Her writing is so intimate and personal — you can feel her blood coursing through every sentence. Often, she’ll be talking about a subject, and she’ll say, “This happened to me, too.” I felt like I knew where she was coming from just by reading her words.The film is inventive in the way it turns the book’s ideas into visual entertainment. Scenes of Wilkerson honing her thesis with friends, family and colleagues alternate with dreamlike, historical re-enactments of some of the central stories she is citing. How did you figure out what was enough and what was too much when it came to unpacking the concepts and the history?DUVERNAY One thing that was really important was just to have people to talk about it with. I had a handful of people who were living inside the book with me and who were fluent in its ideas. Aunjanue; my producing partner, Paul Garnes; my cinematographer, Matt Lloyd; and my friend Guillermo del Toro. David Oyelowo read the script and was really helpful, too. They helped me figure out how to turn the book into a springboard to conversations about these things.Wilkerson’s husband, Brett, is mentioned only briefly in the book’s epigraph and acknowledgments, but he is central to the movie’s emotional arc. What made you think of Bernthal?DUVERNAY As soon as Aunjanue said yes, we had the challenge of who could hold the frame with her. Jon not only believed in the project, he was very interested in working with Aunjanue, specifically. [The two co-starred in “King Richard.”] He flew out to Savannah, where I was working, just to meet with me, on his own dime, which is something that doesn’t happen to me very often. Plus he had the appropriate swagger — that was important. I had to be able to look at this guy and think, “He can pull her.”ELLIS-TAYLOR He is just a lovely and generous human being. He supported me in a way that our performances felt lived in — they didn’t feel performed.Did filming on location — in Berlin and Delhi — influence the way you told the story, or even your understanding of the text?ELLIS-TAYLOR In every way. Because Isabel going to India, smelling things that she had never smelled before, learning things that she had only heard about, all of that stuff was happening to Aunjanue, to me personally. I’m not a scholar, but I was able to get a sense of what that experience was like. I’m so grateful to Ava for insisting that we go to these places.When Ellis-Taylor asked for a scene rewritten, “I trusted that she, inside the character, knew what she was talking about,” DuVernay said.Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesDUVERNAY Paul Garnes and I, we always knew that, even though we were on this very finite independent budget, we needed to get to the real places. We needed to be in the real square of Bebelplatz [in Berlin], where the books were burned. [In 1933, a Nazi group and supporters burned more than 20,000 blacklisted books in the square.]Could I have found a square in Georgia to do it and enjoyed the tax credit? Probably. Would it have felt as emotionally resonant as it was for everyone when we were actually standing there in the place where it happened? Certainly not. Or to go to Delhi, in a country that is closely associated with caste, and to be there as an African American and just fall into a sea of beautiful Brown people. To understand that even as I look at them all and see them as one, they don’t see each other that way? That these divisions have been ingrained in their faith, culture and society?For me, coming from a society where it’s all about skin color, it helped me understand that we as human beings will always figure out how to bifurcate and categorize and create hierarchy. That’s the core of so many of our problems. If you don’t know that, then you’re treating the symptoms and not the disease.Ava, there’s a way in which this movie feels like a synthesis of all the work you’ve made since your narrative feature debut more than a decade ago. There’s a meditation on grief à la “I Will Follow,” an intimate love story like in “Middle of Nowhere,” and historical figures involved in the struggle for racial justice as in “Selma” and “13TH.” Were you conscious of that while you were making it?DUVERNAY I wasn’t. But my editor, Spencer Averick, who I’ve worked with since my first movie, said that to me at one point. I feel like everything I’ve done before, even shooting internationally for “A Wrinkle in Time,” which is a whole different discipline, prepared me for this film. I felt really in the pocket. There was nothing on set that was like, “I don’t know how to do this scene,” or, “I don’t know what’s next.” It was, “I got this,” which was an overwhelmingly fulfilling experience.I felt like, if tomorrow I decided I just was going to be a painter or, I don’t know, go back to being a publicist, I could, because making this movie was so satisfying. In the past, I would finish a movie and feel like, “I hope they like it!” But this time was different. I think a lot of that feeling comes from using their money — the Hollywood machine. This was made outside of the machine, and it felt very free and very liberating. More

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      ‘Origin’ Review: Ava DuVernay’s Film Explores the Roots of Our Racism

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      Ava DuVernay’s new feature film, adapted from the Isabel Wilkerson book “Caste,” turns the journalist into a character who examines oppression.Ava DuVernay’s “Origin” is as audacious as it is ambitious. At its core, it concerns an intellectual argument about history and hierarchies of power, but it’s also about the fraught process of making this argument. It’s a daunting conceit that DuVernay has shaped into an eventful narrative that is, by turns, specific and far-ranging, diagnostic and aspirational. It is a great big swing about taking a great big swing, and while the film is more persuasive as a drama than the argument it relays, few American movies this year reach so high so boldly.The inspiration for “Origin,” which DuVernay both wrote and directed, is Isabel Wilkerson’s acclaimed, best-selling 2020 book “Caste.” In it, Wilkerson argues that to fully understand the United States and its divisive history, you need to look past race and grasp the role played by caste, which she sees as an artificial and static structural “ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups.” Caste, she writes, separates people — including into racially ranked groups — and keeps them divided. These separations, as the subtitle puts it, are “The Origins of Our Discontents.”For the film, DuVernay has turned Wilkerson into a dramatic, at times melodramatic character of the same name — a moving Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor — who develops her thesis while traversing history and continents on a journey from inspiration to publication. The movie also includes segments of varying effectiveness that dramatize Wilkerson’s understanding of specific caste systems: One is set in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, another in Depression-era Mississippi and a third in India over different time periods. This last interlude focuses on Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar (Gaurav J. Pathania), who helped draft India’s Constitution and championed the rights of Dalits, people once deemed “untouchables.”Isabel’s intellectual quest is bold, sweeping and determinedly personal — a handful of close relatives have decisive roles — and DuVernay’s version of that venture is equally expansive. She gives it tension, tears, visual poetry, shocks of tragedy, moments of grace and many interlocking parts. “Origin” opens in 2012 with a re-enactment of the last night in the life of Trayvon Martin (Myles Frost), the unarmed 17-year-old who was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer. The killing becomes the catalyst for her thesis about caste because, the more she considers it, the more she believes that racism alone can’t explain it. Racism, she says at one point, has become “the default” explanation.Isabel’s process unfolds rapidly and is framed by her resistance to the default. Her resistance surfaces in a discussion that she has with her husband, Brett (a sympathetic Jon Bernthal), and mother, Ruby (Emily Yancy), as they watch President Obama address Martin’s death on TV. It also informs Isabel’s talks with an acquaintance (Blair Underwood), who early on urges her to write about the case, pushing her to listen to the 911 calls that were made the night Martin was killed. (Wilkerson is a former bureau chief for The New York Times; her first book is “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.”)Isabel does listen to the 911 calls one quiet evening at home. Steeling herself, she begins the recordings, at which point the scene shifts to the night of the killing; it’s as if she had hit play on a grotesque movie. As DuVernay cuts back and forth between Isabel and that night, you hear George Zimmerman, a largely offscreen presence, talking to a dispatcher as he follows the worried teenager in his car. (“He’s running.”) You also watch as a terrified Martin struggles for his life. DuVernay’s staging here is blunt, visceral and harrowingly intimate. Isabel is shaken and so are you, in part because the 911 calls in the re-enactment are real.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More