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    ‘I.S.S.’ Review: Ariana DeBose’s Turn as a Space Warrior

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    The actress stars in this low-wattage thriller about Russian and American astronauts facing off aboard the International Space Station.Three Americans, three Russians and one exceedingly cramped office hovering 250 miles above Earth — what could possibly go wrong? Given the typical genre coordinates, the 95 minute running time and historic hostilities between Russia and the United States, the more relevant questions here are when and how quickly and entertainingly things will go kablooey in “I.S.S.,” an enjoyable, low-wattage thriller set on the International Space Station.There are nothing but bilateral hugs and smiles when the space newbie Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose) arrives on the station, having been shot into the story on a Russian Soyuz rocket. She and another American astronaut, a smiley family man, Christian (John Gallagher Jr.), have caught a ride to the station, where she’ll be studying mice or “my little guys,” as she cooingly calls them. Like a character’s early reference to the station’s life-support system (if it stops humming, uh-oh), these helpless creatures — soon seen floating tails-up in a container — are early warning signs that something will be disturbing the relative peace very soon.The movie — written by Nick Shafir and directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite — flashes its wailing red alarms early and often. The space station itself — a cluttered warren with tangles of wires, claustrophobic chambers and eerily weightless bodies — makes a convincing pressure cooker. And Cowperthwaite, who’s worked in nonfiction and fiction (she’s best known for her doc “Blackfish”), clearly maps the tight quarters straightaway, which adds to the ominous atmosphere. By the time a Russian colleague, Alexey (Pilou Asbaek), gruffly tells Kira that “it does not end well,” all this foreshadowing has certainly piqued expectations.What follows is consistently watchable and sometimes tense but, despite some twists, largely unsurprising. After the introductions — Chris Messina plays the third American, Gordon — and the assorted personalities and relationships have been sketched in, the movie gets down to genre business with some worrisome red-orange flashes on Earth. Communication failures ensue, as do the progressively more fretful faces and soundtrack music. The two crews close ranks, with the Americans retreating to one corner to sneak worried looks at the similarly alarmed Russians, who include Weronika (Masha Mashkova) and Nicholai (Costa Ronin).As things go bad and then seriously bad, Cowperthwaite keeps the pieces efficiently shuffling to and fro. She plays with constricted spaces, adds surveillance imagery to amp the disquiet and routinely folds in shots of both outer space and of the orbiting station. This reminds you of the setting’s exoticism and complements the slow-boiling sense of peril, including the obvious unease building in the characters’ head space. (The cosmic imagery also reminds you of how routine persuasive digital special effects are now.) Even so, despite the far-out milieu, the unfolding drama could have easily been set in a submarine — or any other constrained place in which characters have been assembled to prove the best and worst about humanity.DeBose, who’s best known for her powerhouse turn as Anita in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” makes a convincing narrative axis. The performer’s warmth and charisma nicely offset Kira’s guardedness and outsider status, and that combination makes the character seem more complicated than the bit of back story she’s been given. It’s clear from the get go, from all the close-ups and hovering camerawork, that Kira is the hero of this adventure. In the end, the biggest mystery here is precisely what type of space warrior — a Sigourney Weaver in “Alien” or a Sandra Bullock in “Gravity” — she must become in order to get the job done.I.S.S.Rated R for violence. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Television

      ‘Based on a True Story’: The Vogue of Killer Content

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      A new Peacock satire puts the ethics of America’s true-crime obsession on trial by making a serial killer more than just a subject. He’s also the star.In a September 2022 episode of “You’re Wrong About,” a history podcast, the writer Michael Hobbes noted that the number of serial killers might be diminishing, which could be a problem, he said — for true-crime fanatics, anyway.“Step it up out there, serial killers,” he said. “You got to produce good content.”Hobbes was joking, but serial killers and the podcasts devoted to them feed an ever growing true-crime industry worth millions of dollars. Now the eight-episode Peacock satire “Based on a True Story,” which arrived in full last week, poses a troubling question: What if serial killers weren’t only the subjects but also the hosts, or even the producers, of a true-crime podcast?The idea isn’t entirely far-fetched. The true-crime world is saturated with podcasts that have been criticized as being ethically compromised and flawed, accused of offenses including plagiarism, racial insensitivity and pro-police bias. True-crime TV series have likewise been criticized: the docu-series “The Jinx,” for edits of a killer’s confession; “Making a Murderer,” for its presentation and omission of details; and the scripted drama “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” for humanizing its subject at the expense of Dahmer’s victims.“Based on a True Story,” created by Craig Rosenberg (“The Boys”), is a dark, comic sendup of true crime and its conventions, clichés and moral compromises. Matt (played by Tom Bateman) is a friendly plumber by day and the feared West Side Ripper by night. When a married couple in desperate need of excitement and cash (the pregnant Ava, played by an also-pregnant Kaley Cuoco, and Nathan, played by Chris Messina) discover his identity, they blackmail him into embarking on a scheme to create a podcast from the killer’s point-of-view.“Finally, some good luck!” Ava says. “A serial killer has fallen into our laps.”One central challenge, however, was how — and whether — the creators and cast of “Based on a True Story” could avoid committing the same crimes as the genre it claims to critique. It is, after all, still a comedy about some particularly gruesome murders.For Cuoco and Messina, it was important to keep the actions of their own characters in proper perspective.“Every day, I would turn to Kaley and say, ‘Is this supposed to be funny or serious here?’” Chris Messina (with Kaley Cuoco) said about trying to nail the tone of the satire.Peacock“In my opinion, Ava and Nathan are just as bad as the killer,” Cuoco, who is also an executive producer, said in a recent phone interview. “I know Ava is trying to believe, Well, this is us stopping him. It’s wrong and it’s funny at the same time.”Messina said, in a separate interview, that figuring out the tone had been a persistent struggle.“Every day, I would turn to Kaley and say, ‘Is this supposed to be funny or serious here?’” he said. “Obviously, with people being murdered, it’s no laughing matter. But there is a screwball comedy and terror along with a big heart.“Like, in the Coen Brothers’ ‘Fargo,’ when they are putting someone in a woodchipper. Why am I laughing one minute and horrified the next?”As the story gets underway, the absurdities quickly mount. In the beginning, Matt is supposed to be merely the interview subject, his voice disguised. But as the plot progresses, he emerges as a de facto showrunner.He upgrades the locations and equipment. He provides a new edit, changing the beginning, the ending and the music. He rejects every note about the narrative and the brand.“These seem like completely ridiculous conversations given that you are talking about people who have been murdered,” Bateman said. “And the funny thing is, he’s getting more and more artistically involved because it’s the first time in his life he’s ever felt seen.”Michael Costigan, an executive producer, said he thought the podcasters’ artistic squabbles also spoke to a common error in the true-crime world: losing track of the reality of the crimes.“Kaley’s character is pitching her ideas and forgetting something: ‘I’m sitting across from the perpetrator,’” he said. “We thought, This is absolutely talking about a metaphor for how millions of people get lost in stories as escapism. But what are they escaping into? What are they forgetting about?”Jason Bateman, another executive producer (no relation to Tom), said he had thought a lot about the show’s tone, and wanted to make sure it wasn’t too “silly” or “camp,” grounding character actions in reality. It was, he acknowledged, a difficult line to walk.Partly as a mirror of their own internal debates, the writers and producers created a character, played by Ever Carradine, who is the mother of a West Side Ripper victim. Her participation in a true-crime panel raises questions of whether she is honoring or exploiting her daughter.The show takes Nathan and Ava (Messina and Cuoco) to a true-crime convention, where all sorts of horrific crimes and killers are monetized. Elizabeth Morris/Peacock“We wondered in those scenes, what is the line?” Costigan said. “This is her wanting to talk about her daughter but then also participating in this world, too. We’re really hoping that the audience can have their cake and eat it, too — that you see the duality, see the world from both lenses.”Critics have pointed to recent studies in suggesting that fans of the genre, a large percentage of whom are women, can suffer from a kind of true-crime brain, a sense of heightened fear that is out-of-sync with the overall decline in violent crime of recent decades. It has also, as the advent of the web sleuth attests, created a lot of self-appointed experts. Ava’s wine-and-crime club of true-crime obsessives are fans of a podcast called “Sisters in Crime,” which leads her to believe she has mastered the genre.“Ava says things like ‘DB’ for dead body,” said Cuoco, who admitted that she is a huge “Dateline” fan. “She talks like she’s actually on one of those shows.”The same delusion that allows Cuoco’s Ava to figure out that Matt is the West Side Ripper also, unfortunately, leads her to believe she can control a serial killer — and to lose sight of the victims. In the original script, Ava and Nathan were to be the parents of teenagers, but when Cuoco became pregnant, she suggested that Ava be pregnant as well. It helped raise the stakes and address why Ava would be so blinded by her need to make money.“Her life is chaotic,” Cuoco said. “This is a distraction.”To find a potential fan base, the characters take an exploratory trip to CrimeCon, a series of real-life conventions for true crime aficionados, held in cities like Las Vegas, New Orleans and Orlando. As the actors and other producers explained, Rosenberg, himself a true-crime fan, had started thinking more about how criminals become celebrities after attending one such event. (A Peacock spokesman said Rosenberg was unavailable to comment because of the continuing writers’ strike.)“Craig said he heard people there discussing who their favorite serial killers were, as if they were football players,” Tom Bateman said. His character, walking around the convention floor, observes merchandise being sold in his name, as it is for other serial killers. But he isn’t ranking as highly as he thinks he should be.Cuoco said she had enjoyed making a humorous examination of the genre. But there were some sobering issues about true-crime, she acknowledged, that even this satire couldn’t fully address — including the future of the genre, which she said was “already at an extreme.”“There is a fine line,” she added. “I do not condone a serial killer doing a podcast in real life. But I feel like I would be one of those people who say, ‘This should be illegal,’ and then probably go in my car and listen to it. We can’t help ourselves.” More

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      in Movies

      How Chris Messina Forced Matt Damon to Up His Game in ‘Air’

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      The “actor’s actor” ad-libbed so many funny threats that the movie star couldn’t keep a straight face and resorted to improvisation to keep up.Chris Messina has a hard time admitting that he’s funny.Even after his hilarious turn as a silver-tongued sports agent in “Air” and six seasons as a drolly charming doctor on the sitcom “The Mindy Project,” he is surprisingly self-critical when it comes to his comic abilities.“Comedy is so hard,” he said in a recent video call from his home in Los Angeles, adding an expletive for emphasis. “It’s hard to land a joke. So I still struggle with that. I’m best when I either don’t know it’s a comedy or don’t play it as a comedy — then you might find me funny.”This is difficult to believe if you’ve seen “Air.” As Michael Jordan’s outrageous, surly representative David Falk in the story of the creation of the Air Jordan sneaker, Messina is uproarious, screaming and swearing his way through fever-pitch negotiations with voluble panache. In the most memorable exchange, Messina calls the Nike scout and marketer Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) to lambaste him for secretly visiting the Jordan family. Messina goes utterly ballistic, hurtling around his office as he barks threats and insults involving various bits of bodily anatomy. The Ringer described him as the film’s “foul-mouthed” M.V.P.“Phone calls are usually just a bore,” Messina said thoughtfully, displaying an open and eager friendliness, pleased to be discussing the details of a craft he clearly loves. “There’s no one on the other line — sometimes there’s a script supervisor reading the lines off-camera.”Messina in “Air.” His scene partner, Matt Damon, was laughing so much that there were no usable takes of the character straight-faced in that sequence.Ana Carballosa/Amazon StudiosBut for “Air,” the director Ben Affleck had the idea to shoot both sides of the conversation simultaneously. He set up Damon and Messina in offices down the hall from each other, and had two sets of cameras rolling at the same time. “It felt more alive,” Messina said. “Matt and I could talk over each other, then we could improvise, then we could come together and say, ‘How about we change this to this?’ And then go back to our offices and keep going.”As Affleck told me in a recent phone interview, “All of the great lines in that scene are Chris’s improvisation.” And those improvisations, he said, had a particularly strong impact on Damon. “Matt could not keep a straight face. I had to use Matt laughing because there wasn’t a take of him playing it straight. He tried to play it straight, and he just couldn’t.”Damon explained that “it was already really funny on the page.” But when Messina came up with threats, “it dictated how I had to play the scene,” Damon said. “I had to start ad-libbing. I started talking to the background artists next to me, going, ‘It’s David Falk on the phone, sorry,’ and I just started laughing.”“Air” is Messina’s third appearance in an Affleck-directed film, after the Oscar-winning drama “Argo” and the period crime tale “Live by Night.” Affleck said, “I always look for work for Chris because he’s always so good. Every time he’s had the opportunity, he’s always done more than I envisioned or imagined.”Though “Live by Night” was not a commercial success, Affleck said he was “particularly proud” of Messina’s performance, for which he gained 40 pounds. “I said he could wear a body suit. He said no, it wouldn’t be the same,” Affleck said. “I can’t say enough good things about him.”Damon echoed the sentiment, describing his co-star as an actor’s actor, the kind “all the other actors always talk about. Did you see him in this? Or, he’s in that, that’ll be good.”Messina’s career started on the stage. A “tried and true New York theater actor” from Long Island, as he put it, he plied his trade “mostly Off Broadway, and Off Off Broadway, and sometimes Off Off Off Broadway, in the Bronx and in Queens and on the Lower East Side.” He speaks of those scrappy early days with a nostalgic air, reminiscing about plays “where the actors outnumbered the audience, or where, when it rained, it would leak on the stage,” he said. In short, he loved it.For a long time, Messina yearned to find glory the romantic way. “I really thought, stupidly, that Mike Nichols would discover me in a play and put me in ‘The Graduate 2,’ you know? I had read about Dustin Hoffman. But that never happened.”Instead, Messina transitioned to the screen. After a couple of small, forgettable parts in films like “Rounders” (with Damon) and “The Siege,” he landed his breakout role, on the final season of the funeral-home drama “Six Feet Under,” playing the amiable, strait-laced lawyer Ted Fairwell, the love interest of Lauren Ambrose’s Claire. On the strength of his work on that HBO drama, he began landing high-profile films, including Sam Mendes’s “Away We Go” and Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” as well as recurring parts on the cable dramas “Damages” and “The Newsroom.”Matt Damon said Messina was the kind of actor “all the other actors always talk about. Did you see him in this? Or, he’s in that, that’ll be good.”Amanda Hakan for The New York TimesMost viewers, though, probably know Messina best for his work on “The Mindy Project,” starring as the sometimes ill-tempered, sometimes charismatic Danny Castellano opposite the series creator, Mindy Kaling. When casting began in 2011, Kaling was specifically seeking actors she “hadn’t seen do a lot of comedy” or, if they were experienced, “weren’t the usual suspects they always send you,” she said in a recent interview.She knew he was perfect straight away. Describing him as one of the most comical actors she’s worked with, she said Messina was “so rooted in the truth of his character that he can’t help but be funny.”She attributes that expressly to the fact that he is not a traditional comedian. “Your average sitcom actor wants to hit their moments, make the day, and go home. Chris isn’t like that,” she said. “It’s almost exhausting, the level of honesty and truth he brings to every scene. He was really listening to my character and reacting if the character did something funny or absurd. He made me a better actor. I was listening better when I was with Chris, because he set the bar so high.”Although Messina proved well suited for the role, he originally didn’t even want to do it, turning down the part multiple times before relenting. (“Mindy wouldn’t take no for an answer,” he explained.) He was, he said, “very worried about every aspect of it,” including the commitment to a network comedy with 20-plus episodes per season, potentially for many years — perhaps making it more difficult for him to do the kind of serious work he dreamed of as a performer.“I wanted to do ‘Dog Day Afternoon.’ I wanted to do ‘Midnight Cowboy,’” he said. Though he liked the role and Kaling, “I was afraid of it running forever.” And, of course, he was afraid of something else: the genre. “I was afraid of not being able to keep up with them comedically,” he said. “I am afraid of jokes.”On the other hand, being afraid is what Messina wants. “Being scared of a role, of an opportunity, being challenged, that’s what I’m looking for. Maybe it’s corny or too actorly, but I do like finding closed doors inside of me.” More