Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Cassandro’ Review: Gael García Bernal as the Luchador Saúl Armendáriz

      by

      Gael García Bernal plays a flamboyant figure taking the world of Mexican professional wrestling by storm in this underdog drama directed by Roger Ross Williams.When Barton Fink, the neurotic screenwriter cooked up by the Coen brothers, scrambles to write a wrestling picture, his peers prescribe the basics. Tell us the man’s ambitions. Entangle him in a romance. You know the drill. Not even in Barton’s most delirious dreams could he have envisioned “Cassandro,” about a flamboyant, sequin-clad luchador who takes his ring name from a telenovela. But I bet Barton could have drafted the film’s outline, which uses the same squelchy gym bag of tricks as many underdog sports dramas.Based on a real star of Mexican professional wrestling, or lucha libre, Saúl Armendáriz (Gael García Bernal) is a profoundly unusual athlete wedged into a biopic that sometimes feels like passable stage fighting: elegantly executed but drained of danger.Directed by Roger Ross Williams (“Life, Animated”), the movie depicts the decisive, late-1980s period when Saúl ascended out of obscurity and into the big time, braving countless training montages and a few private miseries on his way to the top.We meet the striver in Texas in early adulthood, when he is assisting his mother, Yocasta (Perla De La Rosa), with her laundry business and wrestling at a nearby club. Using the name El Topo (The Mole), he tumbles into the ring masked and petite, a pipsqueak doomed to act as a punching bag opposite giants. “Let me guess. You’re always cast as the runt?” challenges Sabrina (Roberta Colindrez), a local lucha hotshot and trainer. She spies potential in Saúl, and offers to coach him pro bono.Colindrez, like many of the actors in this movie, is a superlative performer. Her character is granted little interiority — she serves by turns as Saúl’s fierce advocate and his shoulder to cry on — but alongside Bernal she radiates a cool glow fit for a film less shackled by the ebbs and flows of established convention. In conversations with Sabrina, Saúl toggles between English and Spanish, reserving the latter for colloquialisms or teasing, and the mixture gives their dialogue an organic rhythm. He uses the same blend of languages with his lover, Gerardo (Raúl Castillo), a married luchador with kids whom Saúl sees in secret.Saúl’s sexuality is at once a major plot point and somewhat underexplored. With gentle nudging from Sabrina, Saúl, who came out as a teen and is supported by his mother, soon reinvents his ring persona as the campy Cassandro, an “exótico,” or luchador who plays with femininity. The character initially attracts slurs and heckling, but quickly (and perhaps too effortlessly) starts winning matches and becomes a fan favorite. This is an era when H.I.V. and AIDS panic was at its shrillest, and although the real-life Cassandro was sometimes rebuffed by homophobic opponents, the movie never mentions the epidemic. (Williams wrote the screenplay with David Teague.)“Cassandro” is at its strongest when it zeros in on the relationship between Saúl and Gerardo, who share a physical intimacy that both echoes their fighting careers and acts as an escape from them. Alone, safe from onlookers, the pair tussle in bed. “Don’t you think he’s sexy?” Saúl says, referring to Cassandro as if he were a third person who might join them.Williams, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, is an expert orchestrator of naturalism. The trouble is that lucha libre, built on glitz, is anything but naturalistic. The self-assured freedom Saúl channels in bed never makes its way into scenes in the ring, which tend to tire when they should dazzle.CassandroRated R for drugs and slugs. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Robert Klane, Writer of ‘Weekend at Bernie’s,’ Dies at 81

      by

      He also adapted his best-known novel, “Where’s Poppa?,” into the script for a raw Carl Reiner comedy and directed the disco movie “Thank God It’s Friday.”Robert Klane, a comic novelist, screenwriter and filmmaker with a taste for gleeful vulgarity who wrote the screenplay for “Weekend at Bernie’s,” the 1989 cult film about two young insurance company employees who create the illusion that their murdered boss is still alive, died on Aug. 29 at his home in Woodland Hills, Calif. He was 81.His son Jon said the cause was kidney failure.Mr. Klane wrote “Weekend at Bernie’s” more than two decades into a career that began with the publication of two humorous novels: “The Horse Is Dead: A Tasteless Novel” (1968) and “Where’s Poppa?” (1970). He adapted “Where’s Poppa?” into the screenplay for a twisted comedy about a single lawyer (played by George Segal) who dreams of scaring to death or institutionalizing his aged, maddening mother (Ruth Gordon).Ted Kotcheff, who directed “Weekend at Bernie’s,” wrote in his 2017 memoir, “Director’s Cut: My Life in Film,” that Mr. Klane had been inspired to write it by his time as an advertising copywriter in the 1960s, when the top executives at one of the agencies where he worked invited employees to their beach houses on Long Island.Mr. Klane with Donna Summer on the set of the 1978 disco film “Thank God It’s Friday,” which he directed. Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images“But he always wondered what would happen if the underlings got a house all to themselves — inmates taking over the asylum,” Mr. Kotcheff wrote.In “Bernie’s,” the young workers (Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman) discover a $2 million fraud but don’t know that their boss, Bernie (Terry Kiser), is the culprit. Bernie invites them to his beach house, ostensibly as a reward, and asks his mobster partner to kill them. But the mobster tells the hit man to kill Bernie instead for sleeping with his girlfriend.The employees — fearful that they might be next on the hit list — frantically make Bernie seem alive by, among other ruses, putting sunglasses on him, rolling him out to his sun deck and rigging a device that raises his arm so he appears to be waving to people.The film, which grossed a modest $30 million (a little less than $75 million in today’s money), gained fans long after its release through home video and cable-TV viewing. People magazine wrote in 2014 that the movie “has managed to age into something close to respectability.”Mr. Klane believed that the Bernie character was too dead to revive cinematically. But a sequel was made — because Victor Drai, one of the original film’s producers, raised the money from its Italian distributor, Mr. Drai recalled in a phone interview.Mr. Klane was the director as well as the writer of “Weekend at Bernie’s II” (1993), which involves the discovery of Bernie’s offshore bank account, containing the embezzled money, and a voodoo ceremony to try reanimating him.The reviews were roundly negative.“If ever there was a career-ending movie,” the Miami Herald critic Rene Rodriguez wrote, “‘Weekend at Bernie’s II’ is it.”But for Mr. Klane, it wasn’t. He kept working.Robert Klane was born on Oct. 17, 1941, in Port Jefferson, N.Y., on Long Island, and grew up in nearby Patchogue and Bayport. His father, Edward, was a physician. His mother, Adele (Blum) Klane, was a homemaker.After graduating from the University of North Carolina in 1963 with a bachelor’s degree in English, Mr. Klane returned to New York and found work in advertising.Over the next few years he was a commercial copywriter at two agencies, Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (now BBDO) and McCann Erickson (now McCann). In 1967 he went to work at Filmex, a production house, where he directed commercials.In his spare time he wrote “The Horse Is Dead,” about a camp counselor who hates his campers. The book was labeled “filth and smut simply for the sake of smut” by a self-appointed decent literature committee that wanted it removed from a library in Bel Air, Md., in 1968. But commissioners in Harford County, Md., refused to ban it.On the other hand, Jack Benny sent Mr. Klane a fan letter telling him that it was the funniest book he had ever read.Two years later, Mr. Klane published “Where’s Poppa?,” and that same year Carl Reiner directed the film version, with a script by Mr. Klane. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that the film did not have “much more on its mind than a desperate desire to provoke shock and laughter” — which, he said, it did successfully.Jon Klane recalled going to a theater to see the film with his father, who stayed in the lobby. “I came out to get candy, and he was watching a matronly woman demand a refund,” he said by phone. “I went up to him, and he said, ‘This is exactly the kind of person I want to offend.’”Over the next three decades, Mr. Klane stayed busy in television and film. He wrote six episodes of the sitcom “M*A*S*H”; the 1985 film “National Lampoon’s European Vacation,” with John Hughes; “The Man With One Red Shoe,” a 1985 remake of the French comedy “The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe,” which starred Tom Hanks; and, in 1997, 11 episodes of Tracey Ullman’s sketch comedy series “Tracey Takes On …,” for which he and several others received an Emmy Award for outstanding variety, music or comedy series.His directing work included “Thank God It’s Friday” (1978), set entirely in a disco, which won the Academy Award for best original song, “Last Dance,” sung by the disco diva Donna Summer, one of its stars; and “The Odd Couple: Together Again,” a 1993 TV movie that reunited Jack Klugman and Tony Randall, the stars of that 1970s sitcom.In addition to his son Jon, Mr. Klane is survived by his wife, J.C. Scott; a daughter, Caitlin Klane; another son, David; a brother, Larry; and five grandchildren. Another daughter, Tracy Klane, died in 2011. His marriages to Linda Tesh and the actress Anjanette Comer ended in divorce.About 20 years ago, Mr. Klane worked with his son Jon on a script, set in a ski resort, that would have rebooted the “Bernie’s” franchise. It did not sell.“We wore out the carpet coming up with gags,” Jon Klane said. “It was my best memory of him. He would say, ‘It has to be a laugh a page, Jonny.’” More

    • 75 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Fear and Desire’: Kubrick’s First War

      by

      Stanley Kubrick’s called his first feature, which is getting a new run at Metrograph, “boring and pretentious.” Instead, it is a revelation.Seen in retrospect, a first feature by a major filmmaker can be a revelation particularly if, as with Stanley Kubrick’s low-budget war movie “Fear and Desire,” it concerns a career-long preoccupation — and even more so if the filmmaker has attempted to suppress it.An independent production which, although fictional, premiered in the documentary section of the 1952 Venice Film Festival, “Fear and Desire” is getting a weeklong run at Metrograph, 70 years after its release in the United States.Kubrick, 23, had left his job as a staff photographer for Look magazine when he undertook the project, crediting himself as director, photographer and editor, as well as producer. The means were modest; the story, written by a high-school buddy, Howard Sackler, was epic. A portentous voice-over locates the action “outside history.” Four universal — albeit obviously American — soldiers, trapped six miles behind enemy lines, battle their respective demons in an attempted return to base.In addition to its allegorical framework, the film partakes in then fashionable existentialism. The same actor (Kenneth Harp) is cast as both the squad’s loquaciously philosophical lieutenant and an equally introspective enemy general. The soundtrack is heavy with the men’s internal musings. The new digital restoration includes nine minutes, mostly post-dubbed dialogue, cut after Venice when the film’s title was changed from “The Shape of Fear” by the distributor Joseph Burstyn, the pre-eminent U.S. importer of Italian neorealist films who also released the independent classic “Little Fugitive” in 1953.However arty, “Fear and Desire” is squarely in the American B-movie tradition. The situation — a cutoff platoon — and the pragmatic use of close-ups suggest Samuel Fuller’s Korean War quickie “The Steel Helmet,” which opened in 1951. Instantly notorious for depicting an American war crime, it is a movie Kubrick might well have seen.In Fuller’s film, an enraged soldier shoots an unarmed North Korean prisoner of war. In Kubrick’s, an unbalanced recruit (the future director Paul Mazursky) abuses and ultimately kills a local woman (Virginia Leith) who, having stumbled upon the four soldiers, is bound to a tree, and left in his charge. The sequence which juxtaposes Mazursky’s babbling with the woman’s petrified silence is the movie’s heart of darkness. Although Leith has virtually no dialogue, her image was featured in the movie’s ads.“Fear and Desire” is clumsily dubbed but strikingly photographed. A.H. Weiler’s New York Times review was both sympathetic and supportive, crediting Kubrick and Sackler with “a moody, often visually powerful study” of men under stress. The movie was not, however, a success. Nor was it a fond memory for its maker.When “Fear and Desire” was revived at Film Forum in 1994, Kubrick had a Warner Bros. publicist bombard local critics with letters expressing Kubrick’s feeling that the movie was nothing more than a “bumbling amateur film exercise,” written by a failed poet (an unkind reference to Sackler, who some 25 years after “Fear and Desire” was awarded a Pulitzer for his play “The Great White Hope”).Kubrick characterized “Fear and Desire” as “a completely inept oddity, boring and pretentious.” While undeniably pretentious, the movie is neither inept nor boring. Its oddity lies in its being both a prelude and footnote to Kubrick’s remarkable career.Fear and DesireSept. 22-29, Metrograph in Manhattan, metrograph.com. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      The Girlies Know: ‘Oppenheimer’ Was Actually About Us

      by

      Yes, it’s a film about a famous middle-aged scientist. But it also captures the primal dissonance of being a young woman.R.I.P. to the “girlbosses” and “ladies” who dominated the internet of the 2010s. Now taking their place in the canon is the “girlie” — the tongue-in-cheek sobriquet used by so many young women chronicling their lives online. The summer that just blazed by belonged unequivocally to the girls and girlies, cultural archetypes who embodied, in their despondency and their delight, the incongruities of being young and female in America. Unlike the always-hustling girlboss, the girlies do not dream of labor. They pick at “girl dinners,” go on “hot-girl walks” or rot in bed with Sylvia Plath and Ottessa Moshfegh paperbacks. On TikTok, the incubator from which new varieties of “girl” emerge daily, they sort themselves into “city girls” (who know that romance is a game and make their peace with its cruelty) or “lover girls” (who are destined for eternal heartache but won’t let that deter them from searching for love). Their shared vision of tortured femininity and undefinable malaise is not constrained by age. You can be in your 20s or 30s and still very much one of the “girls.”Given that I myself am an extremely online woman in my 30s and thus the target audience for all forms of girl-discourse, it was predictable enough that I would find myself deeply moved by the most girl-coded movie I watched this summer. But that film was not “Barbie,” Greta Gerwig’s cinematic testament to the conundrums of womanhood. It was the other blockbuster released on the same July day: “Oppenheimer,” the three-hour Glum Nerd in Suspenders Destroying the World film that has been criticized for, supposedly, glorifying an oblivious white man who talks too much about the superiority of science and his intellect while building a weapon meant to cause mass death.This feeling of betrayal at the hands of the same system that once adulated you is not solely the domain of men.I have now been to the theater four times to watch J. Robert Oppenheimer manufacture and then wallow in his own unhappiness, and at some point along the way, I came to realize that this film is, as they say, “for the girlies.” At first, this was simply a private joke I enjoyed making to myself, counting up all the parallels between this midcentury scientist and the types of young women who treat Instagram stories like a literary medium. He is nicknamed Oppie. He reads metaphysical poetry. He wears impeccably tailored pants with fancy belt buckles and flirts with the unshakable confidence of a city girl who has never known rejection. (Misquoting Marx, being corrected and then smirk-shrugging, “Sorry, I read it in the original German” is, I’m afraid, peak hot-girl behavior.) Played by a cadaverous Cillian Murphy — who supposedly girl-dinnered on something like one almond each night to achieve optimum hollow-cheekboned haggardness — Oppenheimer first appears as he’s being mildly disciplined by a physics professor at Cambridge, to which he retaliates by trying to poison his professor’s apple with cyanide. Movie-Oppenheimer’s great malaise, we’re shown — between shots of him lying listlessly in his dormitory bed — is the burden of his own brilliance, lessened only as he coasts through the halls of great universities to finally find, in quantum physics, the challenge that all-consuming brilliance so desperately craves. His hero’s journey will eventually lead him to the building of the atomic bomb in New Mexico and the cover of Time magazine, though he will also find time to cheat on his wife and conduct a rather calisthenic sex life. From afar, the film has all the makings of a Bildungsroman, the coming-of-age form that depicts a passage from callow youth into maturity. But in Oppenheimer’s case, age arrived long before wisdom. A story by Murray Kempton in the December 1983 issue of Esquire describes how the real Oppenheimer was, as a precocious young man, so blessedly sheltered from the demands of real life — “protected from the routine troubles, discontents and worries that instruct even while they are cankering ordinary persons” — that he was “transported to his glittering summit innocent of all the traps that every other man of affairs has grown used to well before he is 42 years old.” It is only when Oppenheimer is already middle-aged, a man whose faith has only ever been in his own intelligence, that he gets his first reality check, at the hands of a once-adoring government bureaucrat named Lewis Strauss. This is an experience any self-identifying girlie will recognize: a profound betrayal from a friend-turned-frenemy.Here the girlhood parallels move beyond the facetious to acquire a darker quality, as shame begins to erode Oppenheimer’s sense of self. As he’s accused of being a Communist sympathizer and publicly ridiculed in a kangaroo trial, the once-venerated scientist finds each of his beliefs collapsing. The great Oppenheimer realizes that no amount of personal brilliance can counter the force of the state. He finally sees that he has devoted his intellect to a system that was rigged against him, one that took advantage of his brilliance and then punished him for it. The same man who once earnestly referred to himself as a prophet is now paralyzed by his inability to either have or act on any firm conviction; the veneer of his certainty in his own power has been stripped away. Near the film’s end, Oppenheimer silently reckons with visions of what his brilliance has wrought: unimaginable suffering and fire as the invention he fathered wipes out civilization itself. Even on my fourth viewing, the sight of Murphy’s frosty blue stare elicited in me a deep familiarity, making me recall a line from Annie Ernaux’s “A Girl’s Story”: “To have received the key to understanding shame does not give the power to erase it.” In theory, I have little in common with this man. But shame — living with it, drowning in reminders of it, never being free from your own inadequacy and failure — is a great equalizer. Being plagued by the squandering of your abilities, condemned to a lifetime of uncertainty, forever wondering where you went wrong or whether you were always set up to go wrong. This is the precondition of girlhood that “Barbie” tried to portray — the dual shock and dissonance of navigating a world that seems to vilify your existence, imbuing it with persistent and haunting shame while also demanding that you put on a show for the hecklers. But it was while watching a helpless Oppenheimer, stunned at being forced to participate in his own public degradation by the U.S. government, that I averted my eyes in dread and recognition. For a Great Man like him, it took the twin shames of the bomb’s destruction and public disgrace to have this life-altering yet basic realization about his own powerlessness. But this feeling of betrayal at the hands of the same system that once adulated you is not solely the domain of men who reach a certain age and come to the uncomfortable realization that after a lifetime of revolving around them, the world is now moving on, indifferent or even hostile to their existence. This is a rule and a warning that life has drilled into girls from age 13, if not sooner. The same powers that have displayed you like a trophy will not hesitate to spit you out the moment you have ceased to be useful.Oppie needed greatness to understand that. But the girlies? We have always known.Iva Dixit is a staff editor for the magazine. She last wrote a profile of the Jamaican dancehall star Sean Paul. Source photographs for illustration above: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures; Universal Pictures; Aidon/Getty Images; Joe Raedle/Getty Images; CoffeeAndMilk/Getty Images. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      Hollywood Strikes Send a Chill Through Britain’s Film Industry

      by

      Many U.S. studios’ blockbusters are filmed in Britain, so the walkouts by actors and screenwriters have caused thousands of U.K. film crews to lose work.What do “Barbie,” “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning” and “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” have in common? Besides being the summer’s big-budget movies, they were made in Britain, filmed in part at some of the country’s most esteemed studios.Big Hollywood productions are a critical part of Britain’s film and television industry. For years, they have brought in money, jobs and prestige, and helped make the sector a bright spot in Britain’s economy. But now, that special relationship has brought difficulty.The strikes by actors and screenwriters in the United States, which have ground much of Hollywood to a standstill, are also being strongly felt in Britain, where productions including “Deadpool 3,” “Wicked” and Part 2 of “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning” stopped filming. Throughout the late summer months, when the industry would be at its busiest to take advantage of the long days, soundstages at Pinewood, Britain’s largest studios, were instead nearly empty.Film crews, like camera workers and costume designers, are out of work after productions abruptly stopped. Bectu, the British union for workers in behind-the-scenes roles in creative industries, surveyed nearly 4,000 of its film and TV members and 80 percent said their jobs had been affected, with three-quarters not working.The British impact from the Hollywood strikes is mostly on productions using members of SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, which was picketing Universal Studios in August.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times“Irrespective of whether you think the studios are right or whether the unions are right, there are people who are suffering in the U.K.,” said Marcus Ryder, the incoming chief executive of the Film and TV Charity, which supports workers who are struggling financially.In August, the charity received more than 320 applications for hardship grants, compared with 37 a year earlier.Since the first “Star Wars” movie was filmed partly in a studio in England in the mid-1970s, British film studios have been a top destination for American productions, and that impetus gathered pace in the past decade thanks to generous tax incentives and moviemakers’ demand for experienced crews. More recently, Netflix, Amazon Prime and other streaming services have snapped up studio space so quickly they set off a boom in studio building.These big-budget productions employ thousands of local workers, and pour billions into the economy. Last year, a record 6.3 billion pounds ($7.8 billion) was spent on film and high-end TV productions in Britain, according to the British Film Institute. Nearly 90 percent came from American studios or other foreign productions.The number of films or television shows delayed in Britain since mid-July, when Hollywood actors joined the writers’ strike, is relatively small, maybe about a dozen, but they are the big productions that require lots of crew and support an ecosystem of visual effects companies, catering and other services. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      With Striking Actors Off-Limits, Directors Get Their Close-Ups

      by

      Since striking movie stars are not allowed to promote studio films, filmmakers unexpectedly, and in some cases uneasily, have the spotlight to themselves.For more than half a century, a coterie of critics and filmmakers has been making the case for what’s known as auteur theory: the idea that great directors are the central creative forces behind their films, shaping them just as authors shape their books.But outside a relatively small pantheon of great filmmakers, most directors have continued to be overshadowed, at least in the public eye, by their movie stars.The Hollywood strikes are changing that.With striking actors forbidden by their union from promoting studio films, directors suddenly have the spotlight largely to themselves, if somewhat reluctantly. They have been the main attractions at recent film festivals in Venice, Telluride and Toronto and on press tours that were once organized around A-list movie stars.Even star vehicles must be promoted without their stars. With Denzel Washington, one of the most recognizable names in Hollywood, and his co-star, Dakota Fanning, unable to promote the third installment of the “Equalizer” series, it fell to the director, Antoine Fuqua, to go on a one-man press tour.“It’s a strange time,” Fuqua told a TV news reporter ahead of the movie’s Sept. 1 premiere. “I would love to have them here.”At the Toronto International Film Festival, Q. and A. sessions after screenings typically involve actors and filmmakers, but this year, many of the directors — including Ava DuVernay and Richard Linklater — answered questions alone. Behind-the-scenes figures were suddenly in front of the cameras: As the red carpet at the festival opened, a staff member warned the press and onlookers not to be surprised if they didn’t recognize some of the people posing for photos, assuring them that they were associated with the films.Atom Egoyan, a Canadian filmmaker whose relationship with the Toronto festival goes back 40 years, said the focus on filmmaking over celebrity at this year’s event reminded him of the festival’s earlier years, before the increasing presence of studio films made high-profile Hollywood actors more of a central focus there.“Certainly for auteur filmmakers, it’s been a breath of fresh air,” said Egoyan, whose latest movie, “Seven Veils,” starring Amanda Seyfried, debuted in Toronto last week. “The industry is going through monumental transitions, and so this has been a nice little oasis.”And as the Venice International Film Festival closed earlier this month, the director Yorgos Lanthimos accepted the competition’s top prize for his surrealist comedy “Poor Things” without any of the film’s stars behind him.“Celebrity is always going to sell more than a director,” said David Gerstner, a professor of cinema studies at City University of New York. “But it is a moment in which directors are being given the opportunity to shine, to be the centerpiece. It’s just unfortunate that it’s under these circumstances.”The director David Fincher promoted his Netflix movie “The Killer” at the Venice International Film Festival. Kate Green/Getty Images, via NetflixIt is not necessarily a comfortable position for some of the directors, amid broad social pressure to stand in solidarity with unionized writers and actors against the major entertainment studios they are at odds with.And there are already bubbling tensions: When the union that represents Hollywood directors, the Directors Guild of America, made a deal with the studios in June, keeping them out of the labor unrest, it drew some criticism from striking screenwriters.Caught in the middle of the studios that fund their ambitions and the actors and writers who help realize them, directors tend to tread carefully when discussing the strike.“I can understand both sides,” the director David Fincher said earlier this month at a news conference for the Venice premiere of his movie “The Killer,” whose star, Michael Fassbender, was absent. “I think all we can do is encourage them to talk.”It is a particularly complicated moment for directors who are also actors or writers and hold multiple union memberships.Bradley Cooper, who both directs and stars in “Maestro,” about the conductor Leonard Bernstein, decided not to attend the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival.And Kenneth Branagh — who both directs the new Agatha Christie mystery movie “A Haunting in Venice,” which debuted in theaters this past weekend, and stars in it as the detective Hercule Poirot — has decided to leave interviews about the film to behind-the-scenes figures such as a top producer, the production designer and the composer.Between the multiple roles many artists hold, and the fact that some actors have been given permission by their union, SAG-AFTRA, to promote independent films, the landscape is a bit confusing.“It’s a little bit like the wild west,” said Peter Principato, chief executive of a Hollywood management production company that represents directors, actors and writers.People are making their own calculations, he said: Some are simply following the letter of the rules, which allows multi-hyphenates to promote movies in a director’s capacity, while others are more wary of taking active roles. In some cases, he said, directors are required by their contracts to promote their films.When “Poor Things” won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival, its director, Yorgos Lanthimos, was on hand but not its stars. Guglielmo Mangiapane/ReutersOf course, some directors are as much of a draw as their stars. Few directors attract as much natural interest as Martin Scorsese, whose highly anticipated, Apple-backed film “Killers of the Flower Moon” is slated for release in theaters next month, even if the movie’s stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, are unable to act as the magnets for press that they typically are.And Fuqua, the director of “The Equalizer 3,” has the kind of heightened profile — thanks to a varied career creating music videos for stars like Prince and Stevie Wonder, directing successful Hollywood thrillers, and making documentaries — that can make him a successful emissary for the film, noted Alan Nierob, a publicist for the director. Fuqua promoted the movie by speaking with “Good Morning America” about his career; with movie blogs about the trilogy; and with myriad other publications.The strike is also testing the accepted wisdom of movie marketing. Nierob noted that the limitations around promotion had not appeared to affect the movie’s release; it topped the U.S. box office its first weekend, earning just under $35 million. (Of course, Washington’s name on a movie poster or face in a trailer may do the promotional work as well as any interview.)But it is unusual to see directors carry so much of the promotional weight on their shoulders. With this summer’s Disney horror-comedy “Haunted Mansion” unable to rely on its big-name actors — LaKeith Stanfield, Owen Wilson, Danny DeVito and Jamie Lee Curtis among them — its director, Justin Simien, who is also a member of the Writers Guild, went on interviews alone. “I felt pulled at the seams,” he said in an interview with The New York Times.And to promote the superhero film “Blue Beetle,” which topped the box office last month, Warner Bros. sent the director Ángel Manuel Soto to England, Mexico and around the United States, including Puerto Rico, to host screenings and conduct an estimated 100 interviews.The director Ángel Manuel Soto toured England, Mexico and the United States to promote his film “Blue Beetle.”Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAt festivals, directors have been faced with questions that, in previous years, they would have sat back and let the actors answer.Lanthimos, whose film “Poor Things” generated buzz at Venice both for its Oscars potential and its many boundary-pushing sex scenes, was the only person at the festival’s news conference who could speak to the movie’s graphic nature and how its lead actress, Emma Stone, had handled it.“It’s a shame that Emma could not be here to speak more about it, because it will be coming all from me,” Lanthimos said at the news conference, where he was flanked by his cinematographer and one of his production designers. He later noted, according to Variety: “We had to be confident Emma had to have no shame about her body, nudity, engaging in those scenes, and she understood that right away.”And at the Telluride Film Festival last month, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, the directors of “Nyad,” the Netflix film about the marathon swimmer Diana Nyad, were not only without their stars, Annette Bening and Jodie Foster, but without the main subject of the movie, who also happens to be a SAG-AFTRA member.After the film’s first screening, the directors said they wished that Nyad and the movie’s stars could have been there to see it, and share their own perspectives with the audience.“It’s tough to have to try to speak for them,” Chin said.Mekado Murphy contributed reporting from Toronto and Nicole Sperling from Telluride, Colo. More

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      How “Bottoms” Reinvents the Coming-of-Age Fight Scene

      by

      The hero vs. bully template made famous in the ’80s gets subverted in this indie comedy, as well as in Hulu’s “Miguel Wants to Fight.”The director Emma Seligman narrates a sequence from “Bottoms,” featuring Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri.Orion Pictures Inc.You know the setup: one boy, the underdog, is forced to face off with a boy with more social clout — and, likely, more muscles. They’re in the gym, the hallway, or the schoolyard, and by the time the last punch is thrown, the underdog, our hero, has taken his first steps into manhood.For decades the school scrap was a prevailing coming-of-age trope in movies and TV. The ’80s produced some of the most memorable scenes, whether it was Clifford versus Moody in “My Bodyguard” or Ralphie versus Scut in “A Christmas Story.” Then in 1993, Richard Linklater gave us the memorable freshmen versus the paddle-swinging Fred O’Bannion and his cohort of sadistic seniors in “Dazed and Confused”; and in 2002, Sam Raimi offered Peter Parker decking Flash Thomspon in high school. Even SpongeBob has found himself caught in a boating school scuffle with a classmate.But teen brawling onscreen has since evolved to becoming more than just a metaphor for boys at the cusp of adulthood learning to assert their masculinity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the queer sex comedy “Bottoms,” which de-genders and subverts the boorish maleness of the school tussle as a male developmental milestone, ultimately making it about young women asserting their identities and pushing back against convention.PJ and Josie are best friends who start a female fight club at their high school, with the goal of losing their virginity to two popular cheerleaders. The entire premise of this delightfully absurd offbeat comedy is predicated on two young women using a narrative often tied to masculinity to their advantage. PJ specifically models the concept of the extracurricular on “Fight Club,” which also works as a meta-commentary: The girls in “Bottoms” are flipping gender in the same way “Bottoms” itself is reworking the testosterone-pumped, fist-bumping, male-targeted genre of fight movies like that much-worshipped film. (“I love David Fincher,” one of the girls gushes about the “Fight Club” director in passing as she walks into the first club meeting.)Rachel Sennott, Havana Rose Liu and Ayo Edebiri in “Bottoms.”Orion PicturesWhereas that Brad Pitt vehicle rewards the savagery of its virile men with sex, violence and destruction, their aggression brimming with homoerotic undertones, “Bottoms” offers its girls the same gratification, but with more comedy and explicit queerness.PJ and Josie take male posturing to the extreme, capitalizing on a rumor about their being hardened juvenile delinquents. Even when it seems they’ll be called on their bluff, they double down, as when, early in their charade, PJ goads Josie into punching her in front of the group of their peers and Josie ends up on the floor smiling, blood streaking down her chin. The girls’ popularity soars. So does their self-confidence. Somehow, these girls aimlessly bruise and bloody one another into a sense of camaraderie, even newfound strength.The movie’s wry gender subversions extend to its ridiculous depiction of PJ and Josie’s male peers, specifically the jocks, who spend the entire movie in their football uniforms. Despite these guys wearing the armor of masculine dude-bros — literally, protective shoulder pads included — “Bottoms” often makes them effeminate. They fit more squarely into a misogynist’s stereotype of women: They’re petty, sensitive, underhanded and, ultimately, the ones who need saving by the end of the movie. (The one notable exception is an example of the opposite extreme, masculinity gone wild in the form of a feral male student who spends his school days locked in a cage.)Tyler Dean Flores in “Miguel Wants to Fight.”Brett Roedel/HuluAnother recent film, “Miguel Wants to Fight,” on Hulu, also pokes holes in displays of violent masculinity, albeit with less of a payoff. Miguel is a teenage boy who also doesn’t really meet the criteria for the uber-masculine Tyler Durden type. He lives in a neighborhood where fighting is everything: Kids get into brawls on the regular, and guys who dominate in the boxing ring are revered as local heroes. Despite all this, and the fact that his father is a boxing coach, Miguel is the only one of his friends who hasn’t been in a fight. When Miguel learns his family’s moving in a week, he decides he must get into a fight before he leaves.But Miguel hesitates on the sidelines as his three buddies come to blows with another group of peers. The one scuffle he gets into involves more awkward embraces than punches. Miguel is more apt to make friends with an opponent than fight them. Even his fantasy fight sequences, in which he imagines himself as the star of his own anime or martial arts movie, sometimes end with him emasculated. In one, he wears a yellow tracksuit like Bruce Lee’s in “Game of Death” as he faces off against a bully; even after Miguel lands a strike the bully simply laughs and asks why he’s “dressed like the chick from ‘Kill Bill.’”Instead of framing the fight as Miguel’s great hurdle to self-assurance and maturity, the movie shows how Miguel’s obsession with fighting is misguided, just a distraction from the anxiety and sorrow he feels about moving away from his friends. The pressure Miguel puts on himself is all internal; he thinks his father wants a fighter son when his father just wants him to be happy and safe. Every fight scenario either causes Miguel embarrassment or ends with him selfishly alienating his friends. And when Miguel does finally get into a fight, it’s not the heroic, cinematic experience he imagined. In fact, he says to his buddy, “It sucked,” throwing in an expletive for good measure.This is the ultimate subversion that the two films pull off: While “Bottoms” ends with its female protagonists getting into a massive, bloody gladiator-esque battle and reigning victorious, the coming-of-age movie that’s actually about a boy getting into a fight ends with a 36-second tussle and a sweet reconciliation between bros.So perhaps that old saying is wrong: Fighting is sometimes the answer. It just depends on who’s throwing the punches — and what’s at stake. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Streaming Horror: ‘Marry My Dead Body,’ ‘Good Boy’ and More

      by

      This month’s picks will take you on a global tour of terror, with tales of a Taiwanese gay ghost and a Norwegian canine whose owner is a dog’s worst friend.‘Marry My Dead Body’Stream it on Netflix.There’s nothing remotely terrifying in this charming opposites-attract ghost comedy, a box office hit in Taiwan. Give it a shot if your taste in scary movies is the flavor of Horror Lite with a side of screwball romantic (ish) comedy.When Wu Ming-han (Greg Hsu), a homophobic police officer, picks up a red envelope on the street, he gets roped into the folk ritual of a ghost marriage, a wedding to a dead person. His betrothed is Mao Mao (Austin Lin), a gay man who was killed in a hit-and-run and who still carries a torch for his ex-boyfriend. Despite their differences, the husbands agree to stay married to complete the ritual and solve Mao’s death, and in the process they forge a sweet “Odd Couple”-like companionship.Cheng Wei-hao’s film is a comedy of many kinds — horror, queer, romantic, supernatural — that evolves from a gay panic farce into a slapsticky but heartfelt bromance about forgiveness and the singular power of coming out. Hsu and Lin are winsome leading men with a natural rapport that fuels the film’s goofy gay spirit, which lives somewhere between the endearing British comedy “Kinky Boots” and the cringey cop comedy “Partners.”‘Subject’Stream it on Screambox.On his way to prison, Willem (a terrific Stephen Phillips) gets intercepted by a government agent who offers him the chance to be part of a secret mind-monitoring experiment instead of doing time. Willem agrees, and gets placed in cramped quarters lined with cameras.As the film jumps between Willem’s suffocating present and his harrowing past as a drug-addicted father, it also moves between perspectives and camera styles, including surveillance, digital and even early-era video art. When a monstrous, mummy-like entity appears in an adjacent room and menacingly watches Willem through their shared window, this formally audacious film kicks into high gear as it careers toward a despairing finale.The director Tristan Barr and the writer Vincent Befi seamlessly blend science fiction, horror and psychological thriller as they explore the horrors of addiction and the dangers of a dystopian state. As shot through a low-fi and intensely claustrophobic lens, Befi’s script is both a disorienting cautionary tale and a fever dream. Are Willem’s living nightmares real, or are we watching his life as imagined in his increasingly besieged head? I still don’t know despite a post-credit coda that tries to explain it all — and that’s what makes this one of my favorite under-the-radar horror films of the year.‘Good Boy’Rent or buy on most major platforms.Christian (Gard Lokke) leads a privileged life. He’s loaded, lives on his dead parents’ estate and is blessed with model good looks. And he’s got a cute and devoted dog named Frank. I take that back: He doesn’t have a dog, because Frank is a guy in a dog costume who Christian treats as his full-time canine companion — a hardcore manifestation of puppy play, a dom-sub scenario popular in the kink community.Sigrid (Katrine Lovise Opstad Fredriksen), who Christian meets on Tinder, at first is weirded out by Frank. But eventually she comes around to the situation, and agrees to go with the two on a weekend getaway, where Christian convinces Sigrid to put away her phone. That’s when this Norwegian film takes a sinister twist I didn’t see coming.The writer-director Viljar Boe doesn’t go overboard during most of his entertaining and exploitation-like parable about power, privilege and punishment. But that reserve goes out the window as the film’s enthusiastically sordid final stretch reaches its climax with a symphony of spanking, heavy metal and primal screams. It’s a hoot.‘Insidious Inferno’Rent or buy on major platforms.I lost count of how many conventions — haunted house, demonic possession, supernaturalism, giallo — the writer-director Calvin McCarthy packs into his low-budget meditation on grief and loss. The result is both under and over baked. But it’s also unabatingly odd and enthusiastically macabre, with a soft uncanniness akin to what made the recent weirdo thrillers “Superior” and “Outpost” so darkly entertaining.Monica (Stephanie Leet), reeling from her father’s mysterious death, heads to his secluded cottage with her husband, Andre (Neil Green). There, she hears her father’s deathly screams, has nightmares in red and vomits up chunky blood. To get away from it all, Andre spends time jogging through the forest, where he keeps encountering a strange white-eyed woman (Chynna Rae Shurts, wonderful), whose dire warnings for Andre and Monica to leave the house he ignores with deadly consequences.Stylistically, McCarthy’s giallo touches — frenzied zoom-ins, gasps, saturated red and purple cinematography — are delicious. Bonus: McCarthy gives a loving shout out to Lucio Fulci’s “The Beyond,” one of my favorite giallo films.‘Tell Me a Creepy Story’Stream it on Freevee.Two great scares front load this anthology of four international horror shorts you can stream for free.The best comes first and from the U.K.: Paul Holbrook and Samuel Dawe’s “Hungry Joe.” The title character, played by several actors as he ages, won’t stop eating, and his appetite tests the patience of his increasingly resentful mother (an excellent Laura Bayston). As Joe grows into a feral man-child, his hunger, and the film, take a gruesome turn that asks a difficult question: What responsibilities does a mother have to her not-so-little monster? (All this in just 22 minutes.) ASMR makes my skin crawl, so I was extra creeped out by Joe’s incessant sucking, chomping and slurping.The second film is Félix Dobaire’s gorgeously shot evil vegetable movie “Myosotis.” In French but nearly wordless, it reiterated one of horror’s most important housekeeping life lessons: Never leave a knife in the dishwasher blade side up. More