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      ‘The Great Seduction,’ ‘Vicenta’ and More International Movies to Stream

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      This month’s picks include an Argentine documentary about reproductive justice, an uproarious Tamil riff on superhero movies, a visual essay about Ireland and Britain, and more.‘Vicenta’Stream it on Ovid.In 2006, Vicenta, a poor and illiterate domestic worker in Buenos Aires, discovered that her 19-year-old daughter, Laura, who had a developmental disability, was pregnant; she had been raped by her uncle. Darío Doria’s gutting movie relates the Kafkaesque torment that followed as the family tried to get Laura an abortion. A network of doctors, lawyers, social workers and judges became embroiled in a case that surfaced the misogyny and ableism in Argentina’s legal and medical system. As Vicenta and Laura navigated this bureaucratic labyrinth — which went all the way from the local police office to Argentina’s Supreme Court to, eventually, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights — the clock ticked on, making it harder for Laura to terminate her pregnancy safely.Rather than relay this tale as a traditional documentary, Doria employs an ingenious formal conceit. The entire film is visualized using Plasticine models, with a poetic voice-over that dramatizes Vicenta’s inner monologue. The figurines and sets are crafted with beautiful, painstaking detail, but they’re immobile; Doria creates the impression of movement through the use of light, sound and camera tricks, and embeds archival news footage within Plasticine TV sets to offer framing context. The result is an incredibly expressive yet unsentimental film that vividly captures the terrible process of a woman’s dehumanization.‘Maaveeran’Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.This ironic Tamil riff on superhero movies is the kind of genre film that’s rare in Hollywood these days: a populist picture about people power. Madonne Ashwin’s superbly inventive caper revolves around a cartoonist, Sathya (Sivakarthikeyan), who lives in a slum in Chennai, in South India, with his mother and sister. He is the ghostwriter of a comic strip about a brave warrior, “Maaveeran,” that runs in the local newspaper, though his own personality is in marked contrast to his creations. When a local politician razes Sathya’s slum and moves all its dwellers into dangerously shoddy high-rises, our protagonist, to his feisty mother’s great chagrin, prefers to make do meekly than fight back.All that changes when Sathya suffers an injury and begins to hear a voice that narrates his life and controls his actions — except the narrator makes him out to be a courageous hero rather than the coward he is. Reluctantly but helplessly, Sathya begins to battle the corrupt overlords. What ensues is an uproarious film, brimming with action, laughs and foot-tapping music, that doubles as a whip-smart inquiry into the very nature of heroism. As Sathya discovers, it is often those with nothing to sacrifice but themselves who are burdened with changing the world for the better.‘The Great Seduction’Stream it on Netflix.Celso R. García’s sun-drenched comedy is more of an extended April Fools’ gag than a movie, yet it just may leave you grinning from ear to ear. The fable-like story takes place on a small Mexican island called Santa Maria, which over the years has become abandoned and isolated. Industrial developments in neighboring areas have wrecked Santa Maria’s ancestral fishing economy, forcing its residents to live off monthly dole checks or emigrate in search of work. But Germán (Guillermo Villegas), who has resided in the town his whole life, refuses to lose hope. When he hears that a fish-packing company might be enticed to set up shop if Santa Maria manages to employ a doctor, Germán enlists his whole community in a crazy plan.Enter Mateo (Pierre Louis), a city doctor who is banished to Santa Maria for a month as punishment for some drunk vandalism at his hospital. Led by Germán, the townspeople orchestrate a farce to convince Mateo that Santa Maria is the destination of his dreams. They pretend to play American football, learn how to make chicken tikka masala and even tolerate rock music. These high jinks may be simple and contrived, but they’re performed by a fantastic cast (including Yalitza Aparicio of “Roma” fame) that tenderly conveys the desperation of a forgotten town struggling to preserve its legacy as it is battered by the winds of change.‘The Future Tense’Stream it on Mubi.A border is never just a line in the sand — it is a rift through history, memory, even psychology, fundamentally shaping how we see and place ourselves in the world. This idea animates Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor’s dense, thrilling essay-documentary about the relationship between Ireland, where they are from, and Britain, where they’ve lived since the 1980s and raised their teenage daughter. Two journeys undertaken by the couple frame the film: a flight from London to Dublin, and a road trip through Ireland to scout locations for a film about Rose Dugdale, an English debutante who became an I.R.A. volunteer. Facing the camera, Christine and Joe read out ruminations about family and country triggered by these journeys, while archival footage, home video, interviews and more illustrate their monologues.Their narration is perfectly poised between droll and erudite, personal and political. Joe’s affecting recollection of his troubled mother’s life in the United States, Britain and Ireland is punctuated by ironic asides; at one point, he wonders facetiously whether the gap in his teeth had something to do with his family’s migrations across geographic and political chasms, as a pair of dentures slowly oozes out of his mouth. Elsewhere, the directors imagine a conversation between the mannequins of Queen Elizabeth I and the 16th-century Irish pirate Grace O’Malley at the Famine Museum in Louisburgh. Confronting a future that threatens to replicate a fraught past, the couple craft something that feels like a stand-up bit, an elegy and a wishful dream all at once.‘Magoado’Stream it on Tubi.There’s something strangely alluring about this skeletal Brazilian drama. Maybe it’s the incongruous combination of a flimsy narrative and gorgeous, intricate cinematography; or perhaps it’s the staging of soapy performances within a stylish, boxy frame that recalls silent films. We meet Peio (Diego Álvarez), a drunk, good-for-nothing fisherman in Santa Catarina in Brazil, as he lies passed out on the sand, lapped by ocean waves. He is a sorry sight, but the scene looks like a painting, dappled by sunlight and streaked with red and blue tints.Rubén Sainz’s feature mounts a simple, even trite tale: Peio is forced to take charge of his life when his estranged adolescent son is suddenly, mysteriously sent back to him. But this familiar narrative feels fresh and startling onscreen, rendered as it is with an extraordinary visual sensitivity. As the film unfolds, Peio’s miserable existence and cantankerous demeanor contrast with the serenity of the setting — until, by the end, our protagonist finally seems to see in his life the beauty that the camera sees throughout. More

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      Emma Thompson Is Right: The Word ‘Content’ Is Rude

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      The term may be popular in an age of blurring lines between platforms, but the Hollywood strikes have shown how the phrase can devalue creative work.Over the past couple of years, I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of time thinking about a scene from the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield vehicle “Back to School.” He stars as Thornton Melon, a self-made millionaire entrepreneur who, per the title, returns to finish his university education alongside his freshman son. On the first day of his intro to business course, Professor Philip Barbay (Paxton Whitehead) explains that they’ll spend the semester creating and running a fictional manufacturing company. “What’s the product?” asks the pragmatic Melon, who won’t let the point drop.“Let’s just say they’re widgets,” snaps the professor.“What’s a widget?” asks Melon.“It’s a fictional product,” Barbay replies. “It doesn’t matter.”At some point a few years back, an unholy union of like-minded tech bros, studio suits, media water-carriers and social media personalities settled on their own “widget,” a catchall phrase that would both encompass and minimize the various forms of entertainment they touch: “content.” And when news broke on Sunday night that the monthslong Writers Guild of America strike was coming to an end, Variety, the industry bible, gave this term its most skin-crawling deployment to date, noting that the W.G.A. strike had taken “a heavy toll across the content industry.”“No, absolutely not,” tweeted the TV writer and comedian Mike Drucker. “We’re not calling it ‘the content industry’ now, you psychopaths.”In fact, Variety itself had run, just a few days earlier, a pointed rebuke to the term from no less an authority than the Oscar-winning actor and screenwriter Emma Thompson. “To hear people talk about ‘content’ makes me feel like the stuffing inside a sofa cushion,” she said at the Royal Television Society conference in Britain last week.“It’s just a rude word for creative people,” she added. “I know there are students in the audience: You don’t want to hear your stories described as ‘content’ or your acting or your producing described as ‘content.’ That’s just like coffee grounds in the sink or something.”Thompson’s not only right about the implications of the phrasing. She’s right about the real-world impact of what is, make no mistake, a devaluing of the creative process. Those who defend its use will insist that we need some kind of catchall phrase for the things we watch, as previously crisp lines have blurred between movies and television, between home and theatrical exhibition and between legacy and social media.But these paradigm shifts require more clarity in our language, not less. A phrase like “streaming movie” or “theatrical release” or “documentary podcast” communicates what, where and why with far more precision than gibberish like “content,” and if you want to put everything under one tent, “entertainment” is right there. But studio and streaming executives, who are perhaps the primary users and abusers of the term, love to talk about “content” because it’s so wildly diminutive. It’s a quick and easy way to minimize what writers, directors and actors do, to act as though entertainment (or, dare I say it, art) is simply churned out — and could be churned out by anyone, sentient or not. It’s just content, it’s just widgets, it’s all grist for the mill. Talking about “entertainment” is dangerous because it takes talent to entertain; no such demands are made of “content,” and the industry’s increasing interest in the possibilities of writing via artificial intelligence (one of the sticking points of the writers’ strike) makes that crystal clear.Perhaps the finest example of this school of thought can be seen at Warner Bros. Discovery, where David Zaslav ascended to the throne of chief executive by overseeing the Discovery Channel’s transition from nature documentaries to reality swill. The “content”-ization of that conglomerate’s holdings is the only reasonable explanation for the decision to rename HBO Max as simply Max — removing the prestigious legacy media brand that most clearheaded, marginally intelligent people would presume to be an asset. It lost 1.8 million subscribers in the process, but that’s merely the battle; it won the war, because when you visit Max now, the front-page carousel is a combination of scripted series, HBO documentaries, true crime and reality competition shows. It’s all on equal footing; it’s all content. But “Casablanca,” “Succession” and “Dr. Pimple Popper” are not the same thing — and the programmers of a service that pretends otherwise are abdicating their responsibility as curators.The service also showed its hand with the baffling decision (later corrected, following threats from the writers’ and directors’ unions) to lump together all of a production’s writers, producers and directors under the single classification of “creators” — terminology that similarly attempts to simplify and minimize the hard work of writing and directing, while simultaneously elevating the wildly divergent efforts of social media personalities and Instagram influencers who will breathlessly brand themselves “content creators.” You’ll hear tech “geniuses” and “innovative” chief executives referring to showrunners and filmmakers with the same terminology, and it’s nonsensical. Martin Scorsese and Logan Paul are not in the same line of work. In practical terms, “content creator” neatly accomplishes two things at once: It lets people who make garbage think they’re making art, and tells people who make art that they’re making garbage.Perhaps this is all just semantics, an old man yelling at clouds about a shift in thinking and classification. But the ubiquity of “content” is no organic evolution; this is more complicated, and frankly more depressing, than that. Language matters. The way we talk about things affects how we think and feel about them. So when journalists regurgitate purposefully reductive language, and when their viewers and readers consume and parrot it, they’re not adopting some zippy buzzword. They’re doing the bidding of people in power, and diminishing the work that they claim to love. More

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      ‘Stan & Ollie,’ ‘Resurrection’ and More Streaming Gems

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      Wildly original comedy-dramas, hair-raising horror and modest examinations of male tenderness are among the highlights of this month’s off-the-grid streaming recommendations.‘Stan & Ollie’ (2018)Stream it on Max.It’s no surprise that a biopic of the classic comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy didn’t exactly set the box office on fire eight decades after their heyday; their work has been all but forgotten in this what’s-new-and-is-it-streaming era. But the director Jon S. Baird — focusing on the pair’s tour of English music halls in the twilight of their careers — presents a compelling (if somewhat fictionalized) portrait of their affection, resentments and codependence, while Steve Coogan as Laurel and John C. Reilly as Hardy engagingly recreate the comedians’ old routines and characterizations. They’re fun to watch (and to watch together), and the pathos at the picture’s end is genuine, and earned.‘Welcome to Me’ (2015)Stream it on Peacock.Kristen Wiig is at the center of this peculiar and risky character study as Alice Klieg, a perpetually luckless unemployed woman with borderline personality disorder who wins the California lottery and uses her newfound financial windfall to fund her own bizarre daytime talk show. The director Shira Piven and the screenwriter Eliot Laurence could have easily told this story as a broad comedy or a depressing chamber piece. They pull off something trickier, positioning the picture as a serious-minded but frequently uproarious tragicomedy, and it mostly works — thanks in no small part to Wiig, whose characterization is equal parts keenly observed, deeply disturbed and breezily funny.‘Cold Pursuit’ (2019)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.You might assume this is yet another of Liam Neeson’s late-career thrillers, considering it concerns an ordinary man out to avenge the death of his son. But there’s a grim joylessness to this man and his mission, and “Cold Pursuit” gradually reveals itself as a deconstruction of these movies, willing to grapple with the bleakness of death and revenge. Neeson’s snowplow driver just keeps pounding these guys for names, then moves up to the next one, methodically searching for the responsible party. It gets broader (and more obviously “Fargo”-influenced) as it goes, which is unfortunate. But the subtext is fascinating, and Neeson seems to revel in the opportunity to do some honest-to-goodness acting in one of these things.‘Cry Macho’ (2021)Stream it on Netflix.Clint Eastwood had just entered his ninth decade on earth when he directed and starred in this adaptation of N. Richard Nash’s novel, and he looks every day of it onscreen; this isn’t the robust Clint of “In the Line of Fire” or even “Million Dollar Baby,” but a fragile, aged man with a croak of a voice. Yet Eastwood the director has always known how to play up the strengths of Eastwood the actor, and the many miles of road behind him give extra gravitas to the wisdom his character, a onetime rodeo rider, imparts on the young man (Eduardo Minett) he’s been sent to Mexico to retrieve.‘Resurrection’ (2022)Stream it on Hulu.Rebecca Hall crafts an astonishing portrait of a woman in the grip of unceasing trauma in this horror-tinged drama from the writer and director Andrew Semans. Hall is the very picture of fierce independence as Margaret, a driven career woman whose carefully calculated life starts careening out of her grasp when a mysterious figure from her past (a devilish Tim Roth) reappears. The genre affectations are effective — particularly the jaw-dropping finale — but the real draw here is Hall’s showcase monologue, an emotionally devastating explanation of exactly who Roth is, and what he did to her.‘Strawberry Mansion’ (2022)Stream it on Mubi.Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney wrote, directed and edited this delightfully demented comic fantasy — a true indie with a look, sound and feel quite unlike anything else on this or any other list. Audley is also the deadpan leading man, a government auditor in a not too distant future, where citizens are taxed for the extravagancies of their dreams. It’s a digital process, so he meets a considerable challenge in the form of the batty Bella (Penny Fuller), whose dreams are still analog, leaving him with thousands of videotapes to watch and log. And that’s when things start getting really weird. Audley and Birney’s wild screenplay adroitly captures the touch-and-go intricacies of dream logic, the special effects are impressively D.I.Y. and the humor is deliriously cockeyed throughout.‘Love Is Strange’ (2014)Stream it on Max.The youthful subjects and ratings-busting sexuality of the recent cause célèbre “Passages” make it feel like the work of a newbie hotshot, but its co-writer and director, Ira Sachs, has been making thoughtful, poignant indies for years. This is one of the best, the tender and sometimes tense story of Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina), who have loved each other and lived together for decades, only to find that finally making their marriage legal turns their entire lives upside down. Sachs’s portrayal of the frustrations of Manhattan real estate rings loud and true, and his entire cast is sturdy. But the real draws here are Lithgow and Molina, who invest their onscreen relationship with a lived-in authenticity.‘It’s Quieter in the Twilight’ (2023)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.NASA launched the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecrafts in 1977, with the goal of gathering data from the orbits of the four outermost planets before continuing beyond our solar system. More than 1,000 people were involved in the project; when the director Billy Miossi shot this documentary about the mission between 2019 and 2021, that number had dwindled down to about a dozen lifers, many of them postponing retirement or declining other opportunities to instead stay with the Voyagers. Miossi’s film is modest, especially considering the grand ambitions of the mission, yet it’s a captivating portrait of these dedicated professionals, their inspiring work and the challenges of aging technology. More

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      Wes Anderson on Roald Dahl and ‘The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar’

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      For years, the director puzzled over an adaptation of “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.” Then he let the characters say things they weren’t meant to.Fifteen years ago, while the director Wes Anderson was adapting Roald Dahl’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” into a stop-motion animated film, the author’s widow, Felicity, asked whether he saw cinematic potential in any of Dahl’s other tales. One came immediately to Anderson’s mind: “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” a short Dahl published in 1977 about a wealthy gambler who learns a secret meditation technique that allows him to see through playing cards.Many filmmakers had inquired about adapting “Henry Sugar” over the years, but Dahl’s family was happy to set it aside for Anderson. There was just one problem.“I never knew how to do it,” he said.The 54-year-old filmmaker typically works at a prodigious pace, putting out distinctive comedies like the recent “Asteroid City” and “The French Dispatch” (2021) every two or three years. But he has spent nearly half his career trying to crack “Henry Sugar.” The breakthrough finally came when Anderson decided to use more than just Dahl’s dialogue and plotting: He would also lift the author’s descriptive prose and put it in the mouths of the characters, allowing them to narrate their own actions into the camera as they happen.“I just didn’t see a way for me to do it that isn’t in his personal voice,” Anderson explained. “The way he tells the story is part of what I like about it.”The result is a 40-minute short starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley and Richard Ayoade, with a delicious assist from Ralph Fiennes as Dahl. After premiering at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month, “Henry Sugar” will be released Wednesday on Netflix, followed by three more Anderson-helmed Dahl shorts — “The Swan,” “The Rat Catcher” and “Poison” — that employ the same actors and meta conceit of using Dahl’s prose in dialogue.(That prose has been under a microscope of late because of a plan by Dahl’s publisher to edit out language that was deemed offensive, some of which reflected the author’s racist views. “I don’t want even the artist to modify their work,” Anderson said when asked about it at a Venice news conference. “I understand the motivation for it, but I sort of am in the school where when the piece of work is done and the audience participates in it, I sort of think what’s done is done. And certainly, no one besides the author should be modifying the work — he’s dead.”)I spoke to Anderson about his Dahl projects in Venice. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.When you read Dahl as a child, you feel like he’s telling you things another adult wouldn’t. While watching your characters say Dahl’s prose directly into the camera, I felt that same conspiratorial connection again.Oh, that’s good. And yeah, every kid who experiences it has that same thing. There’s mischief in every Dahl story, and the voice of the writer is very strong. Also, there was always a picture of him in these books, so I was very aware of him and the list of all his children: He lives in a place called Gipsy House, and he’s got Ophelia and Lucy and Theo. Do you know about his writing hut?I didn’t until I watched “Henry Sugar,” but it looks like you recreated part of Dahl’s house for the scenes in which Ralph Fiennes plays him.When I made “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and I was working on the script, we stayed at the house for some time. In those days, that writing hut was still filled with his things and left the way he had it. [Dahl died in 1990.] There was a table with all these sort of talismans, little items laid out, which I think he just liked to have next to him when he was writing. He had this ball that looks like a shot put, made of the foil wrappers of these chocolates he would eat every day. He’d had a hip replacement, and one of the talismans was his original hip bone. And there was a hole cut in the back of his armchair because he had a bad back. It is odd to have somebody write in a way that’s sort of cinematic.You grew up imagining Dahl and the place he lived. How did it feel to stay there?It was a dazzling thing. It’s the house of somebody who has a very strong sense of how he wants things to be.Something I’m sure you can’t relate to it all as a director.No. [Laughs] I remember the dinner table, a great big table with normal chairs, but at the end of it is an armchair — not a normal thing at a dinner table — with a telephone, a little cart with pencils and notebooks, some stacked books. Essentially, “You can all eat here, and this is where I sit and have everything I want.” Also, he bought art and he had a good eye. I remember there’s a portrait of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon next to a portrait of Francis Bacon by Lucian Freud. The place is filled with interesting things to look at.It sounds like the kind of set I might expect to see in a Wes Anderson film, filled with these totems and details.Things that are about a character. Yeah, and he’s quite a character.As you thought about adapting “Henry Sugar” over the last decade and a half, did that give you time to figure out why you were so drawn to it?I always loved the nested aspect of it. I do these nested things in my movies starting with “Grand Budapest,” but I think it possibly comes from “Henry Sugar.”Another thing that you carry over from recent works is the idea of theatrical artifice: You want the viewer to see how this story is put together, and even the walls of the set are wheeled in and pulled apart. What draws you to that approach?When you watch a movie, generally you’re seeing someone try to create an illusion of something happening, because in fact right off the frame is a light and a guy with a microphone. But for me, the theatrical devices really happen. So I think to some degree, I like the authenticity that a theatrical approach can bring. It’s a way to tell the story where there’s a little sliver of the documentary in it, even though most of what we’re doing is the exact opposite of a documentary.And the viewer feels along for the ride, especially in some of the long takes that have a lot of choreography.On the set there’s so much to wrangle, but when it all starts to happen, it is quite a great thing to sit down and say, “Wow, look at that, 90 seconds of the movie is happening right in front of us right now.” Every time with complicated shots that have tricky staging and lots of things for actors to do, there’s usually the feeling that this may not work, that what needs to happen here may never occur. So it’s always this great relief as you see it evolve and say, “No, we’re getting there and they’re going to do it.”When they nail one of those tricky long shots, what feeling do you have?“Next!” That’s usually what it is.You don’t allow yourself even a moment to exult in the perfect take?There’s a little moment of, “Ooh, that was a good one.” Then, “OK, so do we do lunch? Or we could set up [the next shot] and then eat.” That sort of thing.In your recent movies, you’ve had very large ensemble casts. Why did you decide to tackle all these Dahl stories with such a small troupe?I thought we’ll do just English actors, and I had people in mind who I already knew and some people who I wanted to work with, so it’s not an unfamiliar group. But the idea of doing it as a little theater company, in the writing part of it I started thinking, “Maybe we’ll do the thing they do on the stage sometimes, where someone’s playing this role, but also this and this.”You’ve said that you tried to work with Dev Patel in the past, and this is the first time he said yes. What had you offered him before?Well, I don’t like to say, because then the actor who was in it says, “Oh, I wasn’t the first choice?” But I love Dev, and in this thing, Dev is the youngest of them, so he has an advantage when it comes to paragraphs or pages of text. If you work with people at different ages and you’re giving them a lot to do, you can see how it really is so much easier when you’re young: On “Moonrise Kingdom,” we had a lot of people who were 12 and they knew every word of the whole script. It was like we had 11 script supervisors on set.As a precocious American kid reading Dahl, you might wonder what it would be like to live overseas. Now that you’re based in Paris, have you become the person that you imagined in your mind’s eye?My experience is you stay yourself and you realize, “Oh, I guess I will always be a foreigner.” Which is not a bad thing, but I can’t say I’ve ever felt like now I pass. I am a Texan. Even if I’m living in New York or in Los Angeles, where I’m from is Houston. It’s built into my identity. I think if you’re from a city where you might want to live, or near it, then you have a different thing: Like Noah Baumbach, he has a deep life in New York that goes back all the way to the beginning of his life and generations of family connections and all that stuff. For me, New York is just the friends I made.Growing up within a small perimeter is probably quite different from growing up with a big, big view of the world. I hadn’t really spent much time outside of my little territory until I was in my 20s.Is it gratifying to have your perimeter so much larger now?Yes. It’s an adventure to be able to say, “Well, I’m going to have breakfast in the cafe over here that I just know from movies up until a certain age.” That is fun. It’s definitely entertaining to live abroad, even if it is a bit isolating. More

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      Pearl Bowser, Expert in Early Black Filmmakers, Dies at 92

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      She aided in the rediscovery of Oscar Micheaux and others who were telling stories for Black audiences early in the last century.Pearl Bowser, a film historian, curator and collector who was instrumental in preserving and bringing to light the works of Black filmmakers from early in the last century, especially those of Oscar Micheaux, whom one writer described as “the Jackie Robinson of American film,” died on Sept. 14 in Brooklyn. She was 92.Her daughter Gillian Bowser confirmed the death.Ms. Bowser developed an interest in the forgotten works of early Black filmmakers in the 1960s when, while working as a researcher on a colleague’s idea for a book about Micheaux, she traveled to California from New York to interview aging actors who had been in movies made by Micheaux decades earlier.She began hunting down and collecting movies by Micheaux and other Black filmmakers from the early decades of the 1900s — works that were, for that period, triumphs of independent filmmaking, since they were generally made on shoestring budgets and sometimes dealt with topics that mainstream movies would not touch. Micheaux’s “The Symbol of the Unconquered” (1920), for instance, was an indictment of the Ku Klux Klan.In addition to being a student of film, Ms. Bowser made a few films herself.Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and CultureThose films also serve as historical documents, depicting Black communities in ways not seen in mainstream movies of the time.“Oscar Micheaux’s early films are full of ordinary settings of community: the church, the house, the apartment,” Ms. Bowser told USA Today in 1998. “You see the way people lived in that period.”By the early 1970s, Ms. Bowser was curating film series, taking the works she had discovered by Micheaux and others into theaters and classrooms. She continued to do that for decades.“They were telling stories that were not being shown on the screen, Black stories,” she told students at Fort Lee High School in New Jersey in 2004 before showing them “The Symbol of the Unconquered” (a film that, like others of Micheaux’s, was shot in Fort Lee). “And by showing the Black experience, we’re telling the American story in its totality.”Donald Bogle, the noted film historian, said Ms. Bowser’s work on Micheaux was pivotal.“Not much was known or acknowledged about Micheaux for too long a time,” he said by email. “But Pearl made it her mission to bring his work and career to light. Over the years, she devotedly dug for information on him, and I can remember those occasions when she excitedly told me about new things she was unearthing.”Among the places her search took her, she said in newspaper interviews, were the national archives of Spain and Belgium, where she found silent classics by Micheaux with the title cards written in the languages of those countries, which she then had to have translated back into English.In 2000, she and Louise Spence published “Writing Himself Into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films and His Audiences.”“Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence’s scholarly examination of Micheaux serves a dual purpose,” Renée Graham wrote in a review in The Boston Globe. “Through six essays, they analyze Micheaux’s work, how it was received by both Blacks and whites, and how his films encouraged fresh discussions about race. But Bowser and Spence’s book also rescues the filmmaker’s accomplishments from decades of obscurity.”Ms. Bowser’s expertise, though, encompassed much more than Micheaux-era films. Her lectures and film series covered a wide range — for instance, she presented “Films of Africa and the Caribbean” at the Brooklyn Museum in 1986. And the collection of hundreds of films, videotapes and audiotapes she donated in 2012 to the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution is rich in material related to Black filmmakers in the 1960s and ’70s.“Pearl didn’t just revive Micheaux’s legacy; she helped preserve and shape the narrative of independent Black film,” Ina Archer, media conservation and digitization specialist at the museum, said by email. “Across her five-decade career she wove a continuous thread through a century of Black film that is only just now beginning to come into focus.”Pearl Johnson was born on June 25, 1931, in Harlem, where she grew up. According to a Smithsonian Institution biography, her mother, also named Pearl, was a domestic worker, and young Pearl would often accompany her to work at apartments in Lower Manhattan, helping to fold handkerchiefs in exchange for an allowance.As a child she came to know Ellsworth (Bumpy) Johnson, a Harlem underworld figure who was also well known in the borough for giving out food baskets and encouraging children to borrow books from his vast library.“I remember one time I mentioned to Bumpy that I wanted to grow up to be a philosopher,” Ms. Bowser told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1997, “and he said, ‘I’ve got a book you might be interested in.’”He gave her something by Friedrich Nietzsche. She was about 15 and didn’t understand a word.“It taught me to think before I spoke to Bumpy,” she said. “because even though I was young, he took me and my dreams quite seriously.”Later, according to the Smithsonian biography, she worked in one of his numbers joints. She also studied for a time at Brooklyn College before dropping out and taking a job at CBS, where she worked on a team that analyzed television ratings.In 1955 she married LeRoy Bowser, who would later become a regional vice president of the National Urban League. He died in 1986. Her daughter Gillian survives her. Another daughter, Joralemon Bowser, died in 1978.Ms. Bowser made a few films herself, including “Midnight Ramble,” a documentary she made with Bestor Cram for the PBS series “The American Experience” about “race movies,” as films made by Micheaux and others for Black audiences were called.In the late 1960s Ms. Bowser also wrote a newspaper cooking column. In 1970, with Joan Eckstein, she published her best recipes in a book, “A Pinch of Soul.”“The authors,” one reviewer said, “provide a complete array of soul food cookery to fit the needs of today’s elegant hostess.” More

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      Hollywood Gala Will Welcome Striking Stars, but Not Studio Bosses

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      How will the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures put on its star-studded fund-raiser this year, amid the polarizing strike? Very carefully.Meryl Streep, who was chosen to be honored at the gala next month for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, was initially under the impression that the Hollywood actors’ strike would prevent her from attending.The strike, after all, had already forced the Academy to delay one gala in November, where Angela Bassett and Mel Brooks were to receive honorary Oscars. In the case of the fund-raising event planned for Oct. 14, it was unclear at first if SAG-AFTRA, the union representing TV and movie actors, would allow striking members to attend, and, if it did, whether any would want to go.Would it be OK to appear at such a celebratory event while the industry is on the ropes? Should actors sit at tables (costing $250,000 to $500,000) that in some cases are paid for by the studios they are striking against? And what about the potential for vitriol and tension, or at least deep social awkwardness?But after negotiations and quiet diplomacy that determined who could attend and what kinds of work could be honored, the gala — which typically attracts Hollywood’s A-listers and moguls and raises more than $10 million for the popular museum — will proceed. The biggest change: Executives from the studios being struck, some of which are among the museum’s biggest sponsors, will not be there.Streep will be, though, since she has approval from her union. “I have been assured that SAG-AFTRA has encouraged members to attend the gala — that the museum deeply depends on this event for its educational and community outreach, and that no industry executives from struck companies will be in attendance,” she said in an email. “So I am steaming my dress and heading West.”Meryl Streep, armed with permission from the actors’ union to attend the gala where she is being honored, said, “I am steaming my dress and heading West.” Arturo Holmes/Getty ImagesStreep’s initial confusion is emblematic of the fraught territory that the industry finds itself in as it tries to navigate the dos and don’ts of the strike — from awards shows and fund-raisers to social events, films and television shows.It can be confusing: Some talk show hosts have stumbled in trying to do decide whether to return to the air, and the writers’ union picketed “Dancing With the Stars” although its cast had received a green light from SAG-AFTRA to work. The tentative deal reached Sunday by the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers was a hopeful sign, but the actors remain on strike, and securing their union’s blessing was crucial for the Academy gala.“The basic guidance we’ve given people is, so long as it is not focused on a particular project or a particular struck company, it’s OK for our members to participate in those events and to acknowledge someone’s body of work,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the national executive director and chief negotiator of the actors’ union, said in an interview. “There will be members who choose not to participate in these things who don’t feel it’s the right thing to do at this point, since it is a serious time for people who work in the industry. I imagine our members will make judgments for themselves.”The gala is vital for the nascent museum, in an effort to raise millions of dollars and the institution’s profile. The event’s knack for drawing bold-faced names has led some to think of it as a West Coast Met Gala. The question this year is whether the lack of studio executives, and qualms on the part of striking actors, could make this year’s party less buoyant or its red carpet less buzzy.But assuming the honorees show up as planned, there will be guaranteed star power present: In addition to Streep, the Academy will honor Oprah Winfrey, Michael B. Jordan, and Sofia Coppola. The chairs of the gala, which is raising money for exhibitions, education and public programs, are the director Ava DuVernay, the actor Halle Berry, the producer Ryan Murphy and the producer Dr. Eric Esrailian, a physician and a trustee.Oprah Winfrey is being honored for her “exemplary leadership and support” of the museum. Roy Rochlin/Getty Images“This event is about raising vital funds to ensure that this work will go on in service to the public,” said Jacqueline Stewart, who last year became the museum’s director and president. “The work of the museum is a common ground despite the strikes.”Behind the scenes, union representatives have been in discussions with the museum to set certain ground rules: Individual actors can be honored, but not individual projects, and bodies of work can be highlighted, but not specific films, studios or streaming services. If the gala ventures out of bounds, Crabtree-Ireland said, members will be expected to get up and leave to avoid incurring disciplinary measures.Stewart said that no guests had declined invitations citing the strike as a reason. While some studios have contributed funds to the gala, she said, “given the particular circumstances this year, there will be no executives from struck companies in attendance.” The majority of table and ticket buyers are not from the studios, the museum said, but are a mix of corporate supporters, philanthropists, and museum trustees.Some union members hope that the museum gala can be an opportunity to highlight the labor dispute, which was prompted by concerns about pay, artificial intelligence and working conditions and which has halted virtually all production.“I get that the optics are bad when some of our members are walking the picket line and others are putting on black tie and jewels and walking the red carpet,” said Greg Cope White, who had to pause production on a Netflix adaptation of his memoir — for which he is also a screenwriter — “The Pink Marine,” about a gay 18-year-old who joins the U.S. Marine Corps.“The gala is an opportunity to get some attention to our cause,” White added. “Meryl Streep and Oprah are great speakers. Hopefully they’ll give passionate sound bites that will bring some light to us.”The Academy Museum opened in 2021, and has become a popular attraction. Tanveer Badal for The New York TimesEach honoree will receive a different award — Streep, for her “global cultural impact”; Jordan for “helping to contextualize and challenge dominant narratives around cinema”; Winfrey for her “exemplary leadership and support” of the museum; and Coppola for innovations that “have advanced the art of cinema.”After numerous delays, the Academy Museum finally opened in 2021, a seven-story, $484 million concrete-and-glass spherical building designed by the architect Renzo Piano that was widely welcomed as an example of the city’s cultural fertility. An exhibition dedicated to John Waters, the cult filmmaker who directed “Pink Flamingos,” “Polyester” and “Hairspray,” opened there on Sept. 17.Although the gala is approaching fast, some actors and writers remain hopeful that the strike will be resolved by the time the limousines start to roll down Wilshire Boulevard. “If I could open the envelope at the Oscars,” White said, “It would say, ‘Strike is over.’” More

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      Hollywood Turns to Actors’ Strike After Writers Agree to Deal

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      The studios and the actors’ union haven’t spoken for more than two months, but a deal is needed before the entertainment industry can fully return.Hollywood’s actors are back in the spotlight.With screenwriters reaching a tentative agreement with the major entertainment studios on a new labor deal on Sunday night, one big obstacle stands in the way of the film and TV industry roaring back to life: ending the strike with tens of thousands of actors.The two sides have not spoken in more than two months, and no talks are scheduled.Leaders of SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, have indicated a willingness to negotiate, but the studios made a strategic decision in early August to focus on reaching a détente with the writers first. A big reason was the rhetoric of Fran Drescher, the president of the actors’ union, who made one fiery speech after another following the strike, including one in which she denounced studio executives as “land barons of a medieval time.”“Eventually, the people break down the gates of Versailles,” Ms. Drescher said after the actors’ strike was called in July. “And then it’s over. We’re at that moment right now.”Ms. Drescher has been less vocal in recent weeks, however. Only a resolution with the actors will determine when tens of thousands of workers — including camera operators, makeup artists, prop makers, set dressers, lighting technicians, hairstylists, cinematographers — return to work.The actors’ union offered congratulations to the Writers Guild of America, which represents more than 11,000 screenwriters, in a statement on Sunday night, adding that it was eager to review the tentative agreement with the studios. Still, it said it remained “committed to achieving the necessary terms for our members.”With a tentative deal in hand, the Writers Guild suspended picketing. But protests by actors will begin again on Tuesday, after a break for Yom Kippur on Monday. “We need everyone on the line Tuesday-Friday,” the actress Frances Fisher, a member of the SAG-AFTRA negotiating committee, said on Sunday on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “Show us your #Solidarity!”Dozens of Writers Guild members vowed to support the actors. “I know there’s a huge sign of relief reverberating through the town right now, but it’s not over for any of us until SAG-AFTRA gets their deal,” Amy Berg, a Writers Guild strike captain, wrote on X.Their support will go only so far, however. Writers Guild negotiators were unsuccessful in receiving the contractual right to honor other unions’ picket lines; writers will be required to return to work, perhaps before a ratification vote is final.It has been 74 days since the actors’ union and representatives of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of the studios, have talked. That will probably soon change given the high stakes of salvaging the 2024 theatrical box office, which will be in considerable jeopardy should Hollywood not be able to restart production within the next month. The TV production window for the remainder of the year is also closing, given the coming holidays.Restarting talks with the actors’ union is a bit more complicated than it sounds. For a start, SAG-AFTRA officials will need time to scrutinize the deal points achieved by the Writers Guild; those wins and compromises will inform a new bargaining strategy for the actors. Also, talks between studios and writers restarted only after leaders on both sides spent time back-channeling about the thorniest issues and seeing if there was a willingness to negotiate. Studios are likely to try the same strategy with the actors.The soonest that negotiations between actors and the studios could restart is next week, according to a person directly involved in the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the strike.Neither SAG-AFTRA nor the studio alliance commented on Monday.“There’s tremendous pressure on both sides to get this done,” said Bobby Schwartz, a partner at Quinn Emanuel and a longtime entertainment lawyer who has represented several of the major studios. “The deal that the Writers Guild and the studios struck economically could have been worked out in May, June. It didn’t need to go this long. I think the membership of SAG-AFTRA is going to say we’ve been out of work for months, we want to go back to work, we don’t want to be the ones that are keeping everybody else on the sidelines.”The dual strikes by the writers and the actors — the first time that has happened since 1960 — have effectively shut down TV and film production for months. The fallout has been significant, both inside and outside the industry. California’s economy alone has lost more than $5 billion, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom.Warner Bros. Discovery said this month that the impact from the labor disputes would reduce its adjusted earnings for the year by $300 million to $500 million. Additionally, share prices for other major media companies like Disney and Paramount have taken a hit in recent months.The industry took a meaningful step toward stabilization on Sunday night, though, with the tentative deal between the writers and studios all but ending a 146-day strike.The deal still needs to be approved by union leadership and ratified by rank-and-file screenwriters. “I’m waiting impatiently to see what the exact language is around A.I.,” said Joseph Vinciguerra, a Writers Guild member and a professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.The approval vote by union leadership is expected on Tuesday.Though the fine print of the terms has not been released, the agreement has much of what the writers had demanded, including increases in compensation for streaming content, concessions from studios on minimum staffing for television shows and guarantees that artificial intelligence technology will not encroach on writers’ credits and compensation.“We can say, with great pride, that this deal is exceptional — with meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership,” the Writers Guild’s negotiating committee said in an email to members.On Monday, President Biden released a statement applauding the deal, saying it would “allow writers to return to the important work of telling the stories of our nation, our world — and of all of us.”The prospective writers’ deal should provide a blueprint for the actors, since many of their demands are similar.Union leaders for the actors said their compensation levels, as well as their working conditions, were worsened by the rise of streaming. Like screenwriters, actors have been terrified by the prospects of artificial intelligence. They are worried that it could be used to create digital replicas of their likenesses — or that performances could be digitally altered — without payment or approval, and are seeking significant guardrails to protect against that.The actors, however, have had several demands that the studios balked at, including a revenue-sharing agreement for successful streaming shows. The actors have also asked for significant wage increases, including an 11 percent raise in the first year of a new contract. The studios last proposed a 5 percent raise.Though the entertainment industry had been bracing for a work stoppage by the writers going back to the beginning of the year, the actors’ uncharacteristic resolve this past summer caught studio executives off guard.The actors last went on strike in 1980. By comparison, the writers previously walked out in 2007 for 100 days.The first worrying sign came in June when more than 60,000 actors authorized a walkout with 98 percent of the vote — a margin that even eclipsed the writers’ strike authorization. Then, as bargaining began, the studios saw the actors’ list of demands. Union leaders handed over a list that totaled 48 pages, nearly triple the size of their asks during the last contract negotiations in 2020.While bargaining was going on, more than 1,000 actors, including Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence and Ben Stiller, signed a letter to guild leadership saying that “we are prepared to strike.” The union called for a strike a little more than two weeks later. More

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      Writers Guild and Studios Reach Deal to End Their Strike

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      The Writers Guild of America got most of what it wanted. With actors still on picket lines, however, much of Hollywood will remain shut down.Hollywood’s bitter, monthslong labor dispute has taken a big first step toward a resolution.The Writers Guild of America, which represents more than 11,000 screenwriters, reached a tentative deal on a new contract with entertainment companies on Sunday night, all but ending a 146-day strike that has contributed to a shutdown of television and film production.In the coming days, guild members will vote on whether to accept the deal, which has much of what they had demanded, including increases in compensation for streaming content, concessions from studios on minimum staffing for television shows, and guarantees that artificial intelligence technology will not encroach on writers’ credits and compensation.“We can say, with great pride, that this deal is exceptional — with meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership,” the Writers Guild’s negotiating committee said in an email to members.Conspicuously not doing a victory lap was the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of studios. “The W.G.A. and A.M.P.T.P. have reached a tentative agreement” was its only comment.For an industry upended by the streaming revolution, which the pandemic sped up, the tentative accord represents a meaningful step toward stabilization.But much of Hollywood will remain at a standstill: Tens of thousands of actors remain on strike, and no talks between the actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, and the studios were scheduled.The only productions that could restart in short order would be ones without actors, like the late-night shows hosted by Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert and daytime talk shows hosted by Drew Barrymore and Jennifer Hudson.The upshot: In addition to actors, more than 100,000 behind-the-scenes workers (directors, camera operators, publicists, makeup artists, prop makers, set dressers, lighting technicians, hairstylists, cinematographers) in Los Angeles and New York will continue to stand idle, many with mounting financial hardship. California’s economy alone has lost more than $5 billion from the Hollywood shutdown, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom.SAG-AFTRA has been on strike since July 14. Its demands exceed those of the Writers Guild and the studio alliance decided to prioritize talks with the Writers Guild, in part because of the hard line taken by Fran Drescher, the SAG-AFTRA’s leader. Among other things, the actors want 2 percent of the total revenue generated by streaming shows, something that studios have said is a nonstarter.Even so, the deal with the Writers Guild could speed up negotiations with the actors’ union. Some of SAG-AFTRA’s concerns are similar to ones raised by the Writers Guild. Actors, for instance, worry that A.I. could be used to create digital replicas of their likenesses (or that performances could be digitally altered) without payment or approval.The last sticking point between the Writers Guild and studios involved artificial intelligence. On Saturday, lawyers for the entertainment companies came up with language — a couple paragraphs inside a contract that runs hundreds of pages — that addressed a guild concern about A.I. and old scripts that studios own. The sides spent several hours on Sunday making additional tweaks.Talks between the writers and the studios began again this past week after a hiatus of nearly a month.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesThe tentative deal came after several senior company leaders joined the talks directly — among them Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive; Donna Langley, chair of the NBCUniversal Studio Group; Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-chief executive; and David Zaslav, who runs Warner Bros. Discovery. Typically, talks took place between union negotiators and Carol Lombardini, who leads the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, an organization that bargains on behalf of the eight biggest Hollywood content companies.Talks resumed on Wednesday after a hiatus of nearly a month, a period when each side insisted that the other was the one refusing to negotiate. Writers Guild leaders had come under intense pressure from some of its A-list members, including Ryan Murphy (“American Horror Story”), Kenya Barris (“black-ish”) and Noah Hawley (“Fargo”).Showrunners like Mr. Murphy did not push Writers Guild leaders to take what was already on the table. Rather, they agitated for an immediate return to negotiations, and cited as a reason the increasing financial hardship on idled Hollywood workers.Hollywood workers have taken more than $45 million in hardship withdrawals from the Motion Picture Industry Pension Plan since Sept. 1, according to a document compiled by plan administrators that was viewed by The New York Times. Mr. Murphy set up a financial assistance fund for idled workers on his shows and committed $500,000 as a starting amount. Within days, he had $10 million in requests.Studios have also been hurting. This month, Warner Bros. Discovery said that the dual strikes would reduce its adjusted earnings for the year by $300 million to $500 million. The stock prices for Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Global have taken a hit. Analysts have estimated that studios will forgo as much as $1.6 billion in global ticket sales for movies that were initially scheduled for release this fall but pushed to next year because of the actors’ strike.Negotiations between the studios and the writers began over six months ago. Union leaders repeatedly called the moment “existential,” arguing that the rise of streaming had worsened both compensation levels for writers as well as their working conditions.Over the last decade, the number of episodes for television series went down from the old broadcast network standard of more than 20 per season to as little as six or seven. Writers Guild officials said that fewer episodes often translated to lower income for writers, and left them scrambling to find multiple jobs in a year.The writers also took particular aim at so-called minirooms, a streaming-era innovation where fewer writers were hired to help conceive of a show, and they were frequently paid less.Putting guardrails around the use of artificial intelligence was an issue of some significance when negotiations began in late March, but it took on greater urgency to members as bargaining — and the strike — wore on.Prominent members of the Writers Guild had framed the strike as being about something loftier than Hollywood — they were taking a stand, they argued, against the evils of capitalism. Some of that sentiment peppered the reaction to the denouement. In a post late Sunday on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Billy Ray, whose credits include “Captain Phillips” and “Shattered Glass,” encouraged fellow writers to “stand with the actors” and workers everywhere. “That’s how we’ll save America.”The strike was one of the longest in the history of the Writers Guild. The last time writers and actors were both on strike at the same time was in 1960.With a tentative deal in hand, the Writers Guild suspended picketing. The union, however, encouraged members to join the striking actors’ picket lines, which will begin again on Tuesday. More