Materialists (Movie)

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    Watch Dakota Johnson and Pedro Pascal Spark in ‘Materialists’

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    The writer and director Celine Song narrates a sequence from her film, which also features Chris Evans.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.A meet-cute, an intriguing drink order and a stealth character in the background make for a clever scene in Celine Song’s latest film, “Materialists.” Narrating this sequence, the writer-director said she chose this particular scene to discuss for this series “because it’s the first scene that I wrote.”In it, Harry, played by Pedro Pascal, is at the reception following his brother’s wedding. He rearranges his name card so he can sit next to Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a matchmaker he quickly starts to hit on.Discussing the scene, Song said she wanted the camera to settle on a long two-shot, in which Lucy and Harry have a thoughtful conversation.“This really reflects how incredible my actors are,” she said, “because we’re really treating them like they’re theater actors having to have a whole conversation while sitting in this two-shot.”During that discussion, Song adds to the narrative with a background moment, a quick introduction of the film’s third lead, John (Chris Evans), who walks through the frame while the two are talking.“I really did want the sound design and the way that he walks by to be something that is maybe not easy to spot in the first watch, but it’s a bit of a secret.”That moment pays off when Lucy tells Harry her drink order toward the end of the scene.Read the “Materialists” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      Celine Song’s New Rom-Com ‘Materialists’ Takes a Deep Look at Love and Value

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      In her 20s, long before she wrote and directed the Oscar-nominated “Past Lives,” Celine Song spent six months working as a matchmaker in New York. By day, she’d meet with single women rattling off requirements for a potential mate, from appearance and height to income. By night, over beers with her artist friends, she couldn’t help but notice a disconnect: Many of her favorite people would be instantly rejected based on those criteria.“I’d be like, ‘You guys would be not good mates for any of my clients,’” she said. “I spent all day listening to these women describe them as worthless people they do not want to meet, even though I ascribe so much worth to them because they are creative and brilliant and amazing.”That tension lies at the heart of Song’s new rom-com, “Materialists,” which stars Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a New York City matchmaker with an enviable track record of steering single women toward successful men. But when Lucy meets the handsome and rich Harry (Pedro Pascal), who’d prefer to woo Lucy instead of her clients, she must decide if the material things he can offer are more valuable than the deeper connection she feels with John (Chris Evans), her broke ex-boyfriend.Before making movies, Song worked as a matchmaker. Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesSong wrote the screenplay for “Materialists” in 2022 as she awaited the release of “Past Lives,” about a South Korean immigrant reunited with the childhood friend who still carries a torch for her. When I met Song last month over drinks at a West Hollywood hotel, she spoke candidly about love and longing as a creative through line in her work.“When I talk to people who are really, really smart, who seem to know everything, if you start asking them about their romantic life, everything falls apart,” she said. “They’ll just admit that they don’t know things about love, or they’ll be like, ‘I don’t know, she makes me feel like a kid.’ They’ll say things that are not becoming of the put-together, intelligent people they are, because love is a mystery.”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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      ‘Materialists’ Review: When Dakota Met Pedro (and Chris)

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      The director Celine Song follows up her “Past Lives” with a side-eyeing update on the rom-com, starring Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans.Is heterosexual romance doomed, is the romantic comedy? Those questions swirl with light, teasing provocation in Celine Song’s “Materialists,” a seductive, smartly refreshed addition to an impossibly, perhaps irredeemably old-fashioned genre that was once a Hollywood staple. Set in the New York of today, it stars Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a professional matchmaker who’s all business until her personal life takes a surprising turn — if more to her than to you — when she’s swept into a romance with two different men. One is a broke dreamboat (Chris Evans as John), the other is more of a superyacht (Pedro Pascal as Harry).Theirs is a sexy, sleek triangle, one that starts taking flight during a wedding after-party where Harry and Lucy have been chatting at the singles’ table. A matchmaker, she introduced the bride and the groom, and now is eyeing up Harry as a prospective client, a so-called unicorn (wealthy, full head of hair, tall). Harry, who’s the groom’s brother, is more interested in her. With sly smiles, they playfully wink and coo, lunge and parry. Just as their flirting begins heating up, John — a waiter and, ta-da, her ex — loudly plunks down bottles of Lucy’s favorite drink order: a Coke and a beer. The lines of attack have been established, and it’s on.Romantic comedies are often described as battles of the sexes, a metaphor that suggests that love affairs are effectively wars. Feelings get badly bruised in “Materialists,” and there’s a sobering shock of violence that’s unusual in screen comedies or romances. But for Lucy and her clients, dating isn’t about winners and losers; it’s transactional, a market for buyers and sellers, and a matter of exchange value. Lucy’s clients yearn, have familiar swoony hopes and dreams, but they’re also consumers with shopping lists that include a prospect’s height, weight, hair (or lack thereof) and age. “She’s 40 and fat,” one disgruntled male client tells Lucy early on about a match. “I would never swipe right on a woman like that.”Blunt and effective, that line is as realistic as it is gasp-out-loud ugly. It also an example of how Song can distill an entire ethos into a single, bracingly unsentimental line. (This is her second feature; her first was the wistful “Past Lives.”) What makes the moment land, though, is how Song uses the contempt in the guy’s voice — it stops Lucy in her tracks — to signal that Song isn’t interested in making just another dopey romance. He sounds insulted, angry, and not just at Lucy or his date (Zoë Winters as Sophie). It makes you wonder what he thinks about women, which introduces a shiver of menace that lingers even after Song shifts tones and focus to settle on Lucy’s budding romance with Harry and her feelings for John.That affair and those feelings are warm, true (or true enough) and, at times, delightful; there are, romance fans know, few movie pleasures as agreeable as watching good-looking, talented actors playact love. It’s especially nice to see Johnson in a lead role that makes the most of her gifts. A consistently surprising actress, she is a supremely, sometimes fascinatingly languorous screen presence, one suggestive of Malibu beaches and excellent weed. She’s been in the spotlight since childhood (her parents are Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson) and seems invitingly comfortable in her own skin, without a trace of that detached quality that can encase some beautiful, famous people like a protective membrane. If anything, Johnson seems lightly amused to be the center of attraction, and entirely aware of why she is.It’s instructive then that the first image of Lucy is a reflection of her face in a mirror. She’s doing her makeup and getting ready for work, and looks attentive yet unreadable. Lucy is soon on the move, her ponytail swinging, easing through New York with a purposefulness that dovetails with Song’s filmmaking. In crisp, breezy scenes, with lilting music and some great sound work, Song introduces the matchmaking company where Lucy is a star employee, her killer, off-kilter sales pitch — “you’re looking for a nursing-home partner and a grave buddy” — and the outwardly independent women who flock to her, women who are edging toward 40 (or older) and are as much in Song’s sightlines as Lucy and her romantic foils are.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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      A24 Promotes ‘Materialists’ by Rating New York’s Single Men on Stock Exchange

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      To promote its new film “Materialists,” A24 worked with the New York Stock Exchange to sort participants by attributes like income, height and homeownership.Last week, for roughly 30 minutes, something unusual flicked across the tickers at the New York Stock Exchange. It wasn’t the rally of a newly public company or a market in turmoil. It was the rising and falling value of single men in the city.Or at least it was the purported value of single men, as determined by the movie studio A24. To promote its buzzy film “Materialists,” which is being released this weekend, the studio created a website that invited single men to input their physical and personal attributes, like height, income, age, whether they owned or rented, whether they had hair on their heads, their turn-ons and their icks.All that data was fed into an algorithm to create each user’s “romantic value” and then streamed in real time onto the ticker, rating the men in the middle of the mecca of finance. Over the course of this week, the ticker will also be displayed on a mobile billboard that is being parked around the city, making stops at the Wall Street bull, in Central Park, close to the Washington Square Park arch and near Rockefeller Center.How genuine the entries are — or how inflated the income and height — is unclear, with one user listed as “Donald G.” having a reported income of $50 million. And unfortunately for anyone interested in the listed men, there isn’t a way to get in touch; their names — or pseudonyms — flash onto the screen in green or red for a second before disappearing.In perhaps the greatest reflection of the current economy, very few of the men on the ticker report owning their living quarters. A24 did not share how many men had signed up to be listed, but the ticker seemed to display hundreds.In “Materalists,” Dakota Johnson plays Lucy, a relationship expert who is struggling to decide if her boyfriend, Harry, played by Pedro Pascal, is the right fit for her.A24We 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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      From ‘The Materialists’ to ‘The Bear,’ Pop Culture Takes Up Smoking Again

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      From movies and TV shows to music, the habit is no longer taboo. It’s even being celebrated for the way it makes characters look cool or powerful.In the new romantic dramedy “Materialists,” about 21st-century dating, Dakota Johnson loves cigarettes.Playing Lucy, a New York matchmaker, she’s puffing when she gossips with a pal during a work party. Later, she holds a lighted cigarette near her face while flirting with an ex. There’s no hand-wringing over her smoking. She’s just a smoker. And she’s wildly on trend. That’s because, at least in the world of entertainment, cigarettes are once again cool.“Materialists” is just the tip of the ash. The musicians Addison Rae and Lorde both mention smoking in recent singles. The stars of “The Bear” are smokers on- and offscreen. The “Housewives” count many among their ranks. Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd smoke in the big-screen comedy “Friendship,” while the chic Seema (Sarita Choudhury) on the series “And Just Like That” does as well. In the kitschy video for her track “Manchild” Sabrina Carpenter uses a fork as a cigarette holder. Even Beyoncé has lit up onstage during her Cowboy Carter Tour. In one instance, she throws the cigarette on a piano, which artfully ignites as she performs “Ya Ya.” If Beyoncé is doing it, you know it’s reached the upper echelon of culture.And these smokers are largely celebrated. The overwhelming sentiment is: Sure, cigarettes are bad for you, but they make you look good — as evidenced by Lucy, who keeps her smokes in an elegant silver case, perhaps to emphasize how sleek the habit is, and brandishes them to show just how effortlessly hot she can look bringing one to her lips.In a still from her music video for “Aquamarine,” Addison Rae wields not one but two cigarettes.Jared Oviatt, the man behind the Instagram account @Cigfluencers, which features photos of celebrities glamorously smoking, told me he had noticed an upswing in material recently. When he started the account in 2021 he had to look harder to find content.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