Subterms
Alice McDermott, 70, writer There are three kinds of novels I’ve never taken to heart: science fiction, murder mysteries and novels about novelists. So I’ve decided to try my hand at each. If I fail, they’re probably not books I’d want to read anyway. Thurston Moore, 65, musician and author I’m putting the final touches […] More
Raised by a McCarthy-era rebel, the producer and journalist Hannah Weinstein, she followed her mother’s path into movies and television, advocacy and action.Paula Weinstein, a movie producer, studio executive and political activist who became a fierce advocate for women in her industry, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 78.Her sister Lisa Weinstein confirmed the death. She said the cause was not yet known.In the boy’s club of Hollywood, Ms. Weinstein was the rare female top executive: Over her long career, she was president of United Artists, a vice president of Warner Bros. and an executive vice president at 20th Century Fox. She was just 33 when she was hired at Fox in 1978, and when she was promoted to vice president a year later, The Los Angeles Times called her “the highest-ranking woman in the motion picture industry.”“A man can be mediocre in almost everything, but a women’s got to be perfect,” she told Life magazine that year, when she was included in an article about Hollywood’s “Young Tycoons.”But Ms. Weinstein, who colleagues said possessed a wicked sense of humor — her sister described her laugh as an infectious cackle — and a steely commitment to social justice, was unusual in Hollywood beyond her gender. As Ken Sunshine, the veteran public relations consultant and longtime Democratic activist, put it in a phone interview: “Unlike so many, she didn’t play at politics. To her, social and political change was paramount. She was the antithesis of a phony Hollywood activist looking for good P.R. or a career boost. She was unique in a sea of pretenders.”Ms. Weinstein accepted the Emmy Award for the HBO movie “Recount” in 2008. She was an executive producer on the film, which was based on the 2000 presidential election.Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesActivism was the family business: Her mother, Hannah Weinstein, was a journalist and speechwriter who in 1950 took her three young daughters to live in Paris and then London, fleeing the grim and punitive politics of the country’s McCarthy era. In Britain, where the family lived for more than a decade, Hannah Weinstein produced movies and television series using blacklisted actors and writers like Ring Lardner Jr. and Ian McLellan Hunter. She repeatedly told her daughters, as Lisa recalled, “If you believe in something, you have to be willing to get up off your ass and do something, and if you don’t get up off your ass, you really didn’t believe in it.”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
Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda team up in an awkward comedy about two women contemplating the murder of a predatory man.Let me say right up front that I would happily watch Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda in anything — except for maybe that one about the football player. Their comic partnership, inaugurated back in 1980 with “Nine To Five” and honed during the seasons of “Grace and Frankie,” is one of the blessings of modern pop culture. It is certainly the main pleasure of “Moving On,” an otherwise thin and muddled new film directed by Paul Weitz.Weitz, who directed Tomlin in the sublime “Grandma” and the misguided “Admission” — the high points of his up-and-down filmography are still “About a Boy” and “In Good Company” — has a style that’s by turns genial and prickly. He embeds laughter in the possibility and sometimes the fact of real pain, and extends even his most wayward characters the benefit of the doubt.Tomlin and Fonda hardly need that. They play Evelyn and Claire, two college pals whose paths cross at the funeral of another old friend. Claire (Fonda), devoted to her pet corgi and a bit chillier with her daughter and grandson, travels from Ohio to Southern California with a sinister plan. She is going to murder the bereaved husband, Howard (Malcolm McDowell). Claire announces this to anyone who will listen, including Howard himself and Evelyn (Tomlin), who signs up as an accomplice.Howard seems like a generally unpleasant guy, but the reason for Claire’s grudge is grimly specific. It becomes clear fairly early on that “Moving On” is operating in strange and risky genre territory. If the phrase “rape-revenge comedy” sounds like an oxymoron, this movie won’t convince you otherwise. And even though you can’t help but root for the would-be killers to deliver a much-deserved comeuppance, this vengeance is oversweetened and served lukewarm.Fonda’s wary melancholy effectively communicates the persistence of trauma and Claire’s long-suppressed rage at the man who inflicted it. Tomlin, in the familiar role of bohemian sidekick — Evelyn is a retired cellist — is less flaky than Frankie, and not quite as steely as Elle in “Grandma.” “People think I’m being funny when I’m just talking,” Evelyn observes, which is a pretty good summary of Tomlin’s own comic genius.But Weitz’s script doesn’t give her that much to say, and wavers between silliness and social consciousness without making room for its story. There are reminiscences about the past, but no sense of the weight of lived experience. A few tender encounters — notably Claire’s romantic reconnection with her first husband, Ralph (Richard Roundtree) and Evelyn’s friendship with the gender-nonconforming grandson of a neighbor — gesture toward an emotional complexity that never fully blossoms.Something else is missing here — a farcical energy or satirical audacity that might shock the premise to unsettling life, or else a deeper, darker core of feeling. “Moving On” takes refuge in pleasantness, and in the easy charm of its stars. Who are, as I’ve said, consistently enjoyable to watch. Which might be the problem.Moving OnRated R. “Rape-revenge comedy.” Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More
This stubbornly charming romp starring Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Sally Field and Rita Moreno is inspired by the story of a real group of female friends with a love for Tom Brady and the New England Patriots.Tom Brady, the oldest starting quarterback in N.F.L. history, has said he is retiring “for good” at the age of 45. But at a combined age of 335, Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Sally Field and Rita Moreno muscle “80 for Brady,” a comedy about a fan club’s frenetic Super Bowl weekend, over the goal line. The setup is that Lou (Tomlin), who is living with cancer, is adamant that she and her besties will attend a Super Bowl before she returns an urgent message from her oncologist. Betty (Field), a math professor, calculates that they have a .0013% chance of winning a call-in contest to see the 2017 showdown between Brady’s New England Patriots and the Atlanta Falcons. But wish fulfillment is in their favor, as is the director Kyle Marvin’s choice to treat obstacles like breakaway paper banners to be torn through by its winning team.This stubbornly charming romp is, quite literally, fan fiction inspired by a group of female friends from North Attleborough, Mass., one of whom had a grandson with the Hollywood connections to pitch their story to Tom Brady’s film production company. Brady serves as one of the movie’s producers, as well as its motivational mascot. In times of need, he pops up as a talking bobblehead who whispers advice, while flashbacks to the game itself hail that year’s victory as one of football’s most memorable comebacks.Predictability doesn’t scare the screenwriters Sarah Haskins and Emily Halpern, who collaborated previously as writers of “Booksmart.” Their script is a barrage of quirky one-liners that punch up familiar set pieces like an accidental drug bender, a hot wings-eating contest, and a high-stakes card game. It gambles, correctly, that the veteran cast can convince the audience to play along with outlandish contrivances — including an assurance that four seniors in loudly bedazzled jerseys can, when needed, sneak around like ninjas.The benefit of leads with decades of personal chemistry, plus the classic studio ingénue training to hoof it through corny material, is that Marvin is freed up to lavish attention on his bit players. Even brief parts like a book store clerk or an underpaid worker at a carnival game earn solid snickers from just a sentence or two of dialogue. The only thankless role goes to Sara Gilbert as the daughter tasked to nag Tomlin’s character about her health; Gilbert’s stuck in reality while everyone else is doing jazz hands with Gugu (Billy Porter), the halftime choreographer.Instead, the more absurd the gag, the better it works. As Trish, a lovelorn author of Rob Gronkowski erotica (sample title: “Between a Gronk and a Hard Place”), Fonda finds herself selecting the perfect Barbarella blonde wig for a romance with a debonair jock played by Harry Hamlin. Moreno’s Maura, a widow with a flair for bold jackets, stumbles into a room steeling herself for an orgy only to find a poker table of Guy Fieri clones, a mesmerizing image destined to be painted on velvet and mounted over a plate of nachos. We’re so pleasantly pummeled by silliness that the film comes to feel like a massage. As soon as I roused myself to wonder if the friends would wind up on a Jumbotron, there they were, grinning for the camera. I grinned back.80 for BradyRated PG-13 for drug use and suggestive references to Rob Gronkowski. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More
AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRewind‘F.T.A.’: When Jane Fonda Rocked the U.S. ArmyA newly exhumed documentary delves into the actress’s anti-Vietnam vaudeville tour of American military bases in 1972.Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda in the 1972 documentary “F.T.A.,” which stood for something ruder than Free the Army.Credit…Kino LorberMarch 4, 2021, 11:52 a.m. ET“F.T.A.,” an agitprop rockumentary that ran for a week in July 1972, reappears as an exhumed relic, recording the joyfully scurrilous anti-Vietnam War vaudeville led by Jane Fonda that toured the towns outside American military bases in Hawaii, the Philippines and Japan.The movie, directed by Francine Parker, who produced it along with Fonda and Donald Sutherland, opened the same day that Fonda’s trip to North Vietnam made news. The film, greeted with outrage and consigned to oblivion, has been restored by IndieCollect, and is enjoying a belated second (virtual) run.The F.T.A. show was conceived as an alternative to Bob Hope’s gung-ho, blithely sexist U.S.O. tours; its initials stood for something ruder than “Free the Army.” The skits, evocative of the guerrilla street theater, ridiculed generals, mocked male chauvinism and celebrated insubordination. The show was hardly subtle, but, as documented in the movie, opinions expressed by various servicemen were no less blunt.In interviews, Black marines characterized Vietnam as “a racist and genocidal war of aggression” and even white soldiers criticized the “imperialistic American government.” Half a century after it appeared, “F.T.A.” is a reminder of how deeply unpopular the Vietnam War was and how important disillusioned GIs were to the antiwar movement. “I was ‘silent majority’ until tonight,” one tells the camera after a performance.Fonda may be the designated spokeswoman, but the show was largely devoid of star-ism. A shaggy-looking Sutherland, who had recently appeared with her in “Klute,” gets at least as much screen time. Two relative unknowns, the singer Rita Martinson and the poet (and proto-rapper) Pamela Donegan, have memorable solos performing their own material.The hardest working individual was the Greenwich Village folk singer and civil rights activist Len Chandler, who assumed the Pete Seeger role of prompting the audience to sing along with compositions like “My Ass is Mine” and “I Will Not Bow Down to Genocide.” A younger folkie, Holly Near, was also on hand, hamming along with Fonda in a parody of “Carolina Morning” that began, “Nothing could be finer than to be in Indochina …”Context is crucial. Vivian Gornick, who covered the tour for the Village Voice, reported that “the F.T.A. was surrounded, wherever it went, by agents of the C.I.D., the O.S.I., the C.I.A., the local police.” After military authorities became frightened, “‘riot conditions’ were declared.” Indeed, “F.T.A.” documents antiwar demonstrations staged by civilians in Okinawa and at Subic Bay in the Philippines. The latter was singled out in the New York Times critic Roger Greenspun’s review as the movie’s high point.Greenspun thought “F.T.A.” failed to capture the spirit of the stage shows. Perhaps, but however chaotic and self-righteous, the movie is a genuine, powerful and even stirring expression of the antipathy engendered by a war that — as the author Thomas Powers recently wrote — “refused to be won, or lost, or understood” and scarred the psyches of those who lived through it.F.T.A.Opens in virtual cinemas through Kino Marquee starting March 5.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
Golden Globes: The Projectionist’s TakeawaysSacha Baron Cohen with his wife, Isla Fisher.Christopher Polk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWant a catch-up on last night’s Golden Globes? It was a weird one — and considering how weird a typical Globes ceremony is, that’s saying something.Watch the standout moments → More
#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Awards SeasonGolden Globes: What HappenedMoments and AnalysisGlobes WinnersGolden Globes ReviewAdvertisementContinue reading the main story‘Nomadland,’ ‘Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’ and ‘The Crown’ Led a Remote Golden GlobesTranscript: Jane Fonda calls for diversity in Golden Globe nominees and voters.Feb. 28, 2021, 10:54 p.m. ETFeb. 28, 2021, 10:54 p.m. ET“Art has always been not just in step with history, but has led the way,” Jane Fonda said while accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award. “So let’s be leaders, OK?”Credit…NBC More
