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    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Shawshank’ in China, as You’ve Never Seen It Before

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      A stage adaptation of the film featured an all-Western cast, was performed in Chinese and raised questions about translation, both linguistic and cultural.When a stage production of “The Shawshank Redemption” opened recently in China, it was cast entirely with Western actors speaking fluent Mandarin Chinese. But that may have been the least surprising part of the show.That the show — an adaptation of the Stephen King novella that became one of the most beloved movies of all time — was staged at all seemingly flew in the face of several trends in China’s cultural sphere.Chinese audiences’ interest in Hollywood films is fading, with moviegoers turning to homegrown productions. China’s authoritarian government has stoked nationalism and cast Western influence as a political pollutant. Censorship of the arts has tightened.Yet the production reflects how some artists are trying to navigate the changing landscape of both what is permissible and what is marketable in China. And its success shows the appetite that many Chinese still have for cultural exchange.A scene from the play.Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times“The Shawshank Redemption” — the story of a man wrongfully convicted of murder who defies prison officials’ tyranny and eventually pulls off a daring escape — has been a target for Chinese censors before. Mentions of it were briefly censored online in 2012, after a prominent Chinese dissident escaped house arrest and fled to the American Embassy. In general, the Chinese authorities have shown little tolerance for calls, artistic or otherwise, for freedom and resistance to injustice.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

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      What Exactly Is Jennifer Lopez’s “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story?”

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      Yes, Ben Affleck is in it, as are many of J. Lo’s famous friends. Here’s what to know about “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story.”At one point during “This is Me … Now: A Love Story,” a character observes that watching Jennifer Lopez’s love life is like bingeing “Vanderpump Rules” — eventually you stop judging the people you’re seeing and start judging yourself. But in the case of this self-financed multimedia project, you might also question what exactly it is that you have watched. Is it a movie, a collection of music videos, a simple vanity project? Is it a therapy session, or a new genre entirely — the therapy musical? Lopez, who co-wrote and produced this 65-minute spectacle, which is now available on Amazon Prime Video, tries to keep you guessing. You might have a few questions. We have some answers.Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck embrace, mostly, at the premier of “This Is Me … Now.”Mario Anzuoni/ReutersHow much of Ben Affleck is in there?Ben Affleck flits in and out of this like a little-seen hummingbird.He bookends the story as a lost love, a character called the Biker, but he’s a barely glimpsed mystery. Could that be his jawline? Is that his chest? It’s definitely his voice we hear telling a sleeping Lopez, “You know how much I love you?” Going incognito to play cable-news pundit Rex Stone, Affleck dons a bad blonde wig, a prosthetic nose and a Trumpian spray tan. He also adopts a folksy accent that recalls Gary Busey, and a delivery that’s part Tucker Carlson and part Keith Olbermann (a man Affleck once memorably mocked on “Saturday Night Live”). But instead of ranting about politics, ol’ Rexy is concerned with the state of love and connection in the world — a topic of great interest to Lopez’s character, who is simply called the Artist. He’s the anchor of her love, but she’s barely tuning in.It might have served the project better to have less of Affleck on the screen and more of him on the page. After all, this is the guy who co-wrote “Good Will Hunting” — one of the best of all therapy movies. Did the real-life Affleck try to encourage his wife to open up, the way Robin Williams’s therapist, Sean, wanted his patient to do? Did he urge her to think a little more deeply about love and vulnerability? It’s hard to guess from his mid-credits monologue.Can we play Name That Ex?Yes, we can.Marriage might be a sacred union that should only be entered into with the utmost care, as Jane Fonda’s character told Lopez’s in “Monster-in-Law,” but that didn’t stop either Fonda in that film or Lopez in real life from giving it a try four times.In the past, Lopez has used her position as a movie producer to comment on her own marital history. In 2002’s “Marry Me,” for instance, she played an artist who had been married three times. In this new project, she has a whirlwind rom-com sequence, set to the song “Can’t Get Enough,” in which she cycles through three weddings with three interchangeable husbands (played by Tony Bellissimo, Derek Hough and Trevor Jackson). Could this game of musical grooms be a commentary on her past marriages to Ojani Noa (1997-1998), Cris Judd (2001-2003) and Marc Anthony (2004-2014)?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

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Which Oscar Snubs Still Make You Mad? We Want to Know.

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      Greta Gerwig wasn’t the first omission to tick us off. Are you still stewing over “Pulp Fiction” losing to “Forrest Gump” or Marilyn Monroe never getting a nod? Tell us more.As the film editor overseeing movies coverage for The New York Times, I follow Oscar races for a living, so I knew that Greta Gerwig wasn’t a shoo-in for a best director nomination for “Barbie.” Still, when she was snubbed, I was surprised, then somewhat miffed, then truly annoyed as I thought more about it. She brought vision, artistry and both humor and gravitas to what could have been a forgettable summer confection. How could the academy not see this?Of course, as it turned out, I wasn’t alone in my outrage; thank you, Hillary Clinton. If the reaction seemed especially outsized, so has everything about “Barbie,” from the box office haul to the number of think pieces (guilty). And when you throw the Oscars, essentially the Super Bowl of Culture, into the mix, the response is bound to be big.But the truth is that this is only partly about “Barbie.” Most of us have strong opinions about what performances and films are and are not worthy of an Academy Award. We love to get mad when the Oscars mess up. And looking back on movie history, I know they have messed up. So. Many. Times.That got me to wondering: What snubs are you still mad about? It could be a performance, film, director, song, score — you get the idea — that wasn’t nominated. It could be one that was nominated but lost on the big night. Fill out the form below, and we may feature your response in an upcoming story. We will not publish or share your contact information outside the Times newsroom, and we will not publish any part of your submission without contacting you first. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Martin Scorsese Narrates a Scene From ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

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      The director narrates a “circular ballet” sequence where Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Ernest Burkhart, is taken in for questioning.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.To tell the sweeping story of the Osage murders of the 1920s in “Killers of the Flower Moon” (nominated for 10 Oscars, including best picture), the director Martin Scorsese opted mostly not to sweep the camera along with the narrative.“Dealing with the landscape and the period, I tended to have more stable images,” he said during a video interview, “images that were almost like old photographs in a way.”But one key moment called for a change. As investigators go to Oklahoma to look into the Osage murders and disappearances, they drill down to a group of individuals they think are involved. And in this scene, the lawmen converge to arrest one person they believe they can get information from, Ernest Burkhart, played by Leonardo DiCaprio.As Ernest sits in a pool hall/barbershop, investigators descend on the space to surround him.“Since the characters are all circling around each other in the movie, and since the circle gets tighter and tighter, my drawing for the shot was simply a circle with an arrow. That was it,” Scorsese said.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

    • 75 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      How Kingsley Ben-Adir Became Bob Marley

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      Despite little outward resemblance, the actor worked for months to get the look, sound and movement right for the new film “Bob Marley: One Love.”Bob Marley, the beloved and singular reggae luminary, was a dreadlocked Rastafarian from Jamaica who sang and played guitar. Kingsley Ben-Adir is a Brit with close-cropped hair who doesn’t sing or play guitar, and stands seven inches taller than Marley did. Despite the lack of external similarities, Ben-Adir was cast as Marley in a new Hollywood biopic, the culmination of a yearlong search for the right actor.“We tried to find someone from Jamaica who could speak the dialect we needed,” said Ziggy Marley, Bob Marley’s oldest son as well as a Grammy-winning musician, and a producer on “Bob Marley: One Love,” which opened in theaters on Feb. 14. But physical verisimilitude, he decided, wasn’t the key to portraying his father: “Kingsley brought an emotional depth that nobody else brought to the auditions, and a magnetism,” he added.The choice of Ben-Adir has been denounced by many Jamaicans, who point out that at least since 1990s films like “Cool Runnings” and “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” Hollywood has been using non-Jamaican actors with diluted accents. “We were not meant to have agency over our narratives,” Danae Peart wrote in RiddimStyle Magazine, which covers culture in the Black diaspora. She added that Hollywood executives are obsessed with “making everything palatable for the ‘white gaze.’”Reviews for “Bob Marley: One Love” have been almost uniformly negative, but even some of the harshest critics have praised Ben-Adir’s performance. “In a film that mostly sticks to reliable formula, he is one thing to love,” Olly Richards of Empire wrote. Recently, Ben-Adir explained in detail how he made the transformation, despite little outward resemblance to Marley.Landing the RoleZiggy Marley, left, with Ben-Adir on set. “Kingsley brought an emotional depth that nobody else brought to the auditions, and a magnetism,” Marley said.Chiabella James/Paramount Pictures“On the audition tape, I knew that my Jamaican patois was going to be basic and wrong,” Ben-Adir, a lean, alert 37-year-old dressed in a dark Adidas track suit, said during an interview in a Times Square conference room. He chose one scene from among three he’d been sent, and had only two days to prep his audition — not enough time to nail the accent. “Working actors don’t have the luxury of time and space.” He crammed by studying “Live at the Rainbow,” a Marley concert video shot in 1977.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

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Life Imitates Art as a ‘Master and Margarita’ Movie Stirs Russia

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      An American director’s adaptation of the beloved novel is resonating with moviegoers, who may recognize some similarities in its satire of authoritarian rule.By all appearances, the movie adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s cult favorite novel “The Master and Margarita,” in Russian theaters this winter, shouldn’t be thriving in President Vladimir Putin’s wartime Russia.The director is American. One of the stars is German. The celebrated Stalin-era satire, unpublished in its time, is partly a subversive sendup of state tyranny and censorship — forces bedeviling Russia once again today.But the film was on its way to the box office long before Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine and imposed a level of repression on Russia unseen since Soviet times. The state had invested millions in the movie, which had already been shot. Banning a production of Russia’s most famous literary paean to artistic freedom was perhaps too big an irony for even the Kremlin to bear.Its release — after many months of delay — has been one of the most dramatic and charged Russian film debuts in recent memory. The movie refashions the novel as a revenge tragedy about a writer’s struggle under censorship, borrowing from the story of Bulgakov’s own life. The emphasis, for many Russians, has hit close to home. And, for some defenders of Putin, too close.“I had an internal belief that the movie would have to come out somehow,” the director, Michael Lockshin, said in a video interview from his home in California. “I still thought it was a miracle when it did come out. As for the response, it’s hard to expect a response like this.”Michael Lockshin, right, the movie’s director, with Tsyganov during the production of the movie.Mars MediaWe 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

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Monolith’ Review: Friend of the Pod People

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      Lily Sullivan plays a podcaster investigating a supernatural mystery in this thriller from Matt Vesely.In “Monolith,” a single-setting thriller from the Australian director Matt Vesely, a recently disgraced investigative journalist attempts to salvage her career by accepting an ignoble and humiliating task: starting a podcast. She calls it “Beyond Believable,” and it’s a sort of spooky true-crime show about stranger-than-fiction mysteries — or rather, as she confesses in a moment of frustration, a “clickbait podcast” for listeners with “I.Q. levels below a lobotomized monkey.”It’s a far cry from her broadsheet glory days, but the juicy intrigue of a big scoop proves seductive. When she lands on a story that involves mass hallucinations, bizarre artifacts and (possibly) alien body snatchers, she and her audience become obsessed. How far she will go to pursue that obsession is the driving force of the film.Lily Sullivan plays this unnamed reporter with cagey, harried intensity, and she is more than capable of carrying this one-woman show. (The only other characters are voices on the phone.) Vesely makes good use of the single location — a large, sparely furnished modernist house in the Adelaide Hills of Australia — and he derives much tension from mundane things, such as a murky bathtub and slow-moving automatic curtains. The film is most effective when at its most granular, as Sullivan’s character carefully splices snippets of audio recordings and pores over research materials, scenes strongly reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” and Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out.”But “Monolith” becomes harder to take seriously as the drama escalates, especially when Sullivan, finding herself in danger, charges on with an impassioned plea: “I have to continue this podcast!”MonolithRated R for strong language, frightening situations and some disturbing podcasting. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More