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      Hoping to Draw Moviegoers and Filmmakers, Amazon Heads to Theaters

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      The streaming company released Ben Affleck’s “Air” on 3,500 movie screens this week, and it plans to open 10 to 12 films theatrically every year.It was a full house at the AMC Town Center in Las Vegas in September when Ben Affleck slipped into the darkened theater. He wanted to see how his new film, “Air,” would play with a test audience, some members of which might have shown up just to escape the scorching heat outside.To his amazement, the crowd went nuts for the movie, about Nike’s efforts in the 1980s to lure a young Michael Jordan to its struggling basketball brand. The viewers clapped when Chris Tucker appeared onscreen, and they hooted for Viola Davis.“People were cheering before they said a line,” Mr. Affleck said in an interview.And that left him feeling rather deflated. He exited the theater and called Matt Damon, his longtime collaborator and new business partner.“God, man, this is tragic,” Mr. Affleck recalled telling Mr. Damon. “I haven’t had a movie play in a theater like this in years. And it’s going on a streamer.”He added, “I felt like Charlie Brown with the football.”But a funny thing happened on the way to Amazon’s Prime Video service, which bankrolled the $130 million film. After similar raucous screenings in Los Angeles, Amazon decided the film would go to theaters first — opening on 3,500 screens in the United States this week, and more than 70 other markets worldwide. It will play for at least a month and is the company’s largest theatrical release since it began making movies in 2015.“Originally we thought, well, our customers are on Prime, so that’s where we need to deliver our movies, but we’re now thinking of the bigger audience and assuming that most of the United States are Prime members anyway,” Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon and MGM Studios, said in an interview. “So why wouldn’t you offer these movies theatrically and allow people to come back to that experience and then move directly to Prime afterwards?”She added, “It’s only the beginning for us.”Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon Studios, is a veteran TV executive and was initially wary of releasing films theatrically.Danny Moloshok/ReutersAmazon now says its ultimate goal is to release 10 to 12 movies a year in theaters. Not all will be on as many screens as “Air” or play as long. Rather, each theatrical strategy will be based on the perceived box office potential. And other films will still debut on Prime Video.The news is a huge victory for the beleaguered theatrical exhibition business, with year-to-date ticket sales down 25 percent from before the pandemic.“It’s not really about just playing ‘Air,’” said Greg Marcus, chief executive of the Marcus Corporation, a movie entertainment and lodging business in Milwaukee. “The bigger, more important story is its commitment to doing a theatrical slate so that some of it’s going to work and some of it won’t. Success should be judged over an entire slate and include all revenue generated throughout the life of the slate.”Between the advent of streaming and consumer habit changes brought on by the pandemic, Hollywood has been constantly re-evaluating how it thinks about movie theaters. The common wisdom over the past year is that superhero movies still draw crowds (even if the numbers are waning), as do films with wild spectacle (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) or established characters (“Creed III”).Less certain are the films that Mr. Affleck prefers to traffic in, especially when he’s behind the camera: adult dramas with touches of comedy and an earnest feel-good bent, like his Oscar-winning “Argo.” Recent Oscar contenders, like Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans,” disappointed at the box office.But a strong performance for “Air” could indicate to the industry that movies for adults are still viable in theaters. Apple, which previously eschewed theaters, already has plans to release both Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” and Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” theatrically this year.That could encourage other distributors to release more films in theaters, and filmmakers eager for streaming money but still yearning for their work to be seen on the big screen may look to Amazon. (“Air” brought in $3.2 million at the box office on Wednesday, and Amazon is expecting it to gross a modest $16 million through the weekend.)“I think there is a legitimate case to be made that some movies are better experienced in the theater with a group of people,” Mr. Affleck said. “If they can provide robust theatrical releases where the movies are well supported, then it will move Amazon to the front of the pack.”When Ms. Salke, a veteran television executive, took over Amazon’s studio in 2018, her knowledge of the movie business was cursory at best. She had spent years overseeing television at NBC, shepherding hits like “This Is Us.” At the beginning of her tenure, she plunked down close to $50 million for five movies at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. The films, including “Late Night,” and “Brittany Runs a Marathon,” underperformed.Suddenly, Amazon, which had been a friend to the theater business with its films “Manchester by the Sea” and “The Big Sick,” was no longer interested in the cutthroat world of box office receipts, where the entire industry knows if a movie is a success or a failure by Saturday morning of opening weekend.“It was like, why would we put ourselves through that step if it’s going to tear down the film and require us to double our investment in marketing to get to Prime to kind of turn that story around?” she said.When Amazon bought Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 2021, there was trepidation that the historic label would be reduced to a tile on the Prime website. MGM had recently been resurrected by Michael DeLuca and Pamela Abdy and had made theatrical commitments to filmmakers like Mr. Scott, Paul Thomas Anderson and Sarah Polley.Instead, Ms. Salke seems to have been influenced by the executives at MGM. She also saw how films Amazon acquired during the pandemic — like “Coming 2 America” and “The Tomorrow War” — did as streaming-first movies.“The performance of those films on the service already made us feel like we want to go bigger on the movie side,” she said. “Then we’re buying MGM and closing that deal. We have more movies.”While Mr. DeLuca and Ms. Abdy decamped for a job running Warner Bros., the MGM executives who remained had shown Amazon what a successful theatrical strategy could look like. It culminated in the early-March release of “Creed III,” which has grossed close to $150 million in North America, outperforming its predecessors.In the meantime, Ms. Salke has consolidated her power. The company’s new head of film, Courtenay Valenti, who will oversee both Amazon and MGM after a long career at Warner Bros., will report to her instead of to Mike Hopkins, Ms. Salke’s boss and the senior vice president of Prime Video, Amazon Studios and MGM. And Ms. Salke said she would not waver from her theatrical strategy no matter how “Air” performed.“We are committed,” she said.Matt Damon and Viola Davis star in “Air,” which tells the story of Nike’s pursuit of Michael Jordan.Amazon StudiosThere is no guarantee that Amazon’s strategy for “Air” will succeed. With many moviegoers requiring a spectacle before buying a ticket, a film that is shot primarily in office buildings and never actually shows the face of the actor playing Michael Jordan could be a difficult sell.Sue Kroll, the studio’s new head of marketing, argues that despite the setting and the talky nature of the film, “Air” has the makings of a crowd pleaser.“It really does take you to another place,” she said of the movie, which stars Mr. Damon as Sonny Vaccaro, a sad-sack basketball scout asked to find up-and-coming basketball stars to endorse Nike shoes.“It’s emotional. It’s funny. And it has a lot of heart,” Ms. Kroll added. “I think it can pave the way for a lot of other great movies out there that should be seen theatrically.”The company hopes so. At the end of April, it will release Guy Ritchie’s “The Covenant,” an MGM film that stars Jake Gyllenhaal as an Army sergeant ambushed in Afghanistan. On Sept. 15, it will release “Challengers,” an MGM movie that stars Zendaya as a tennis player turned coach. “Saltburn,” a film from the “Promising Young Woman” director Emerald Fennell, which Amazon acquired out of Cannes last year, will open sometime in the fall.Ms. Valenti, who started last month, is still putting her full schedule together. “There is fantastic development here, but movies don’t grow on trees,” she said, before adding that she thinks her job will be made easier because of Amazon’s commitment to marketing its films, wherever they land.“The only way you attract the best talent, the best filmmakers, the best storytellers to make their larger-than-life films here,” Ms. Valenti continued, “is because they have to know that their movies aren’t going to die in the quicksands of the service.” More

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      Michaela Watkins Shares A Few Photos from Her Phone

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      Seven PhotosThe Dog Days of Michaela WatkinsThe star of “Paint” contemplates work, canines, a coyote attack and mortality while bouncing between the coasts.April 7, 2023Michaela Watkins describes herself as an actress who doesn’t know where she’s going to be next week. That’s only a small exaggeration.“Paint,” the comedy loosely based on the painter Bob Ross and co-starring Owen Wilson and Wendi McLendon-Covey, will be her fourth film to open this year. It premieres the same day as “Tiny Beautiful Things,” a Hulu mini-series in which Ms. Watkins appears with Kathryn Hahn.“There’s nobody better,” Ms. Watkins, 51, said of Ms. Hahn. “The only person better is Julia Louis-Dreyfus.” Ms. Louis-Dreyfus and Ms. Watkins shared the screen this year in the film “You Hurt My Feelings.” (And in case you’re curious, Ms. Watkins’s other two films this year are “The Young Wife” and “History of the World: Part II.”)With her work taking her away from her home in Ojai, Calif., where she lives with her husband, Fred Kramer, and their two dogs, to New York, London and beyond, Ms. Watkins makes good use of her time off. When we caught up, she was thoroughly enjoying a mini-vacation in California’s wine country. “I probably could drink my own urine and be drunk,” she said. “I’ve just had so much wine in the last 48 hours.”Be that as it may, she was fresh-faced, sober and ready to talk through seven photos she had taken during her recent travels across the East and West Coasts.These are edited excerpts from the interview.This is one of my dogs, Wuzzabear. I call her “fatty bum bum,” thanks to one of my dear British friends. She’s our puppy we got during the pandemic, and she’s not perfectly socialized because of that, but she loves attention from other dogs. She’s so thirsty on the playground, and it’s really embarrassing.I’m suspicious of people who don’t let their dogs on their beds. That’s like 80 percent of why dogs are the best: just the “schnoogles,” the cuddling, the hot breath on your face, the weight of their body on you. If, God forbid, I have a terminal disease, just put me in a bed with 1,000 dogs and just let me waste away.When I was in New York, I did what I called the “aging parents tour.” We saw my mother-in-law and we saw my father and his wife. When I was visiting my father, he gave me these Depression-era glasses. They’ve been in his cabinet as long as I can remember. This idea that he says “I’m not going to need this” is very sad.My dad is really fit. He’s 86 and he’s active. He rides his bike, he kayaks, he hikes, he plays trombone in a band, he’s learning Italian, he’s teaching literacy. He’s phenomenal. But we went for a hike in the snow and he was having trouble. It really gets to him.I stopped by my friend Ari Graynor’s. She’s a fellow actress and she bought a farmhouse in upstate New York. Her partner, Michael, is an incredible chef. He does these incredible things called “Death Over Dinner,” where they have a nice dinner and talk about death.What better place to talk about dying than while we’re with people and experiencing really incredible joy with life? And to feel sated with food and drink, while you talk about the thing that you don’t want to talk about, which is our inevitable death. I do not like small talk, I just want to roll up my sleeves and get into it.This is my friend Aya Cash — she’s a phenomenal actress. I worked with her on a movie recently called “The Young Wife,” which just debuted at South By Southwest. She’s a peer, but in this movie she played my stepdaughter, which is weird. Whatever.This is her right after she performed in “The Best We Could.” It’s a beautiful play, and what I really loved about it is that Aya really fell in love with acting again. I’m a little afraid to do theater again. It’s been so long that I’m scared, which makes me think even more I should do it. For five years after I graduated from college, I did regional theater and I always had impostor syndrome. Even though I was getting parts, I felt like I didn’t truly deserve them.My dad’s wife said to me one-time, “You were so great in this play, and boy, you used to be terrible. We were really scared.” At least she was honest.This is at the premiere of “Tiny Beautiful Things,” which is Kathryn Hahn’s new show. In the middle is Cheryl Strayed, who is my hero. Cheryl saved my life. She used to have an advice column called “Dear Sugar,” and my friend Joey Soloway turned me on to her. I was going through a breakup, the death of a friend — a really awful time. I was super depressed and worried that I’d ruined my own life. Her letters breathed life into me and got me through a really hard time. I kept saying, “I feel like I know her.” I didn’t know her, but it turns out we both lived in Portland in the ’90s around the corner from each other. I don’t really fangirl, but when I meet her, my whole personality goes out the window. I just kind of sit there and smile and laugh too hard at everything she says.Tess Morris is a writer friend of mine. She’s in New York now writing on “Only Murders in the Building.” She and I became really good friends when she came out to Ojai and there was a coyote attack on my dog. All the dogs survived, but barely. And I survived, but barely. I was in the hospital for a few days with a bone infection. Anyway, it bonded us.When we were in New York, we went to the “Succession” premiere, which is my all-time favorite show. I think it’s the greatest comedy that’s ever been. We thought we both looked pretty spiffy, so she’s taking a picture of me and I’m taking a picture of her.This just pretty much sums up L.A. It’s a city that makes no sense. Somebody just randomly thought, I’ll put this beautiful flower pot here! And somebody just smashed their garbage bins up against it. And then this fence, which is like, Keep out! You don’t belong here! And, Smile! You’re on Camera. It’s a little snapshot of Los Angeles. More

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      ‘Joyland,’ an L.G.B.T. Pakistani Film, Is Celebrated Abroad

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      Saim Sadiq’s feature “Joyland,” which includes a transgender woman’s love affair, cannot be shown in Pakistan’s Punjab Province.Over the past year, the writer-director Saim Sadiq has garnered a series of unprecedented accolades for Pakistani cinema.Last May, his debut film, “Joyland,” out Friday, became the first production from Pakistan to compete in the official selection at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the jury prize in the Un Certain Regard sidebar. It was also the first entry from the country to be shortlisted for the best international feature film Oscar. And just last month, it emerged as the first Pakistani title to win at the Film Independent Spirit Awards in the same category.The project also counts among its executive producers the Nobel Peace Prize recipient Malala Yousafzai, the Oscar-winning British Pakistani actor Riz Ahmed and the Iranian American director Ramin Bahrani.But despite this international recognition and notable support, “Joyland,” which features characters defying traditional binary gender norms, remains banned in Sadiq’s hometown of Lahore, and in the entire Punjab Province, which houses the majority of Pakistan’s cinemas and about half of the Islamic nation’s entire population.“I wanted the film to play in Pakistani theaters more than anything else,” said an impassioned Sadiq, 32, during a recent interview at the Los Angeles home of the movie’s Indian-born producer, Apoorva Charan.Sadiq and Charan met while both were studying at Columbia University. It was during their time there that Sadiq began writing “Joyland,” a coming-of-age story told as an intricate ensemble piece, as a screenwriting class assignment.When Haider starts working as a backup dancer, he must keep his new source of income, and outlet for self-expression, a secret.Oscilloscope LaboratoriesWhen Haider (Ali Junejo), a mild-mannered young man in an arranged marriage, lands a job as a backup dancer for Biba (Alina Khan), a strong-willed transgender performer, his wife, Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq), quits her job against her will to help out with the domestic tasks Haider was doing before, including caring for his brother’s children.But Haider must keep his new source of income, and outlet for self-expression, a secret, as the couple live in an extended family household under the rule of Haider’s traditional elderly father. That Haider explores his sexuality with Biba further complicates his situation.To challenge the Hollywood notion of the sole protagonist, Sadiq said he wanted to understand “the collective human experience. It was very important to make this a very collectivist film, a film which was truly an ensemble film where the effect of one person’s actions on other people were also taken into account from their perspective.”That “Joyland,” among its many themes, includes a burgeoning romance between a trans woman and a straight-identifying man caused public outcry from Pakistan’s conservative factions on social media just a few days before the film’s scheduled November local release date.The seismic controversy led to the film’s ban, even after Sadiq had diligently obtained the required permits from each of the three separate censor boards in the country: those pertinent to the provinces of Punjab and Sindh, plus the federal board that covers the rest of the territory.In order to appease them, Sadiq had already compromised the artistic integrity of his work.Clockwise from upper left, Farooq, Junejo, Sadiq and Khan in Los Angeles in March.Elizabeth WeinbergFirst, the director was asked to remove two intimate scenes that the censors unsurprisingly deemed too risqué. Sadiq had anticipated these moments would not meet their parameters, so he had shot alternate versions so that the narrative could still run coherently in the eventual Pakistani version. However, more changes were demanded.“What I wasn’t prepared for was a bunch of laughably random cuts and dialogue omissions that were asked for by the federal and Punjab censor boards, which included blurring the shot of a platonic hug between a husband and wife on a rooftop,” Sadiq said.Censorship is unfortunately a cornerstone of Pakistan’s relationship with cinema, said Ali Khan, co-author of the book “Cinema and Society: Film and Social Change in Pakistan,” in a recent video interview.In 1954, “Roohi,” directed by W.Z. Ahmed, became the first film banned in an independent Pakistan for its perceived socialist agenda. Since then, and across the multiple political transitions the nation has undergone, creative freedom has often been hindered. Only about a dozen feature films, mostly commercial fare, are produced in Pakistan each year.“There are so many stories to tell from Pakistan, but how do you do that if everything is controversial?” Ali Kahn said. “It’s really unfortunate that we are not able to support our own films because of this paranoia over how the country is being depicted.”While some Pakistani productions may have had instances of subtle, implied queerness in the past, Sadiq believes there hadn’t been a film that overtly engaged with gender and sexual diversity in Pakistan before “Joyland.”Fortunately, the international attention “Joyland” had already received abroad, as well as a flood of vocal tweets from the filmmaker and his allies denouncing the decision, exerted enough pressure that the edited iteration was allowed to be screened in the Sindh province and the territory under the federal censor board (which includes the capital city of Islamabad).But the authorities in Punjab opted to uphold the ban.Junejo and Khan in a scene from the film. The plotline around their characters’ love affair caused public outcry from Pakistan’s conservative factions on social media.Oscilloscope LaboratoriesFor Khan, a dancer turned actress who first collaborated with Sadiq on the short film “Darling,” the news that her work wouldn’t be seen in Lahore was devastating.“I needed the film to play in my city so that the people who have wronged me there for being trans could see me in a more human light,” she said, speaking in Urdu with Sadiq acting as her interpreter. “And I wanted to show my community that it is possible for a trans person to make something out of their life.”Although Pakistan passed a bill protecting the rights of transgender citizens in 2018, violence, including murder, against trans people in the country remains an alarming issue. Since the law came into existence, homicides of transgender people have increased, with 14 people killed last year, according to the Trans Murder Monitoring project.The rest of Sadiq’s cast were also aware of the significance of the story they were sharing. Junejo, for example, came on board after other actors rejected the part because of its subject matter. Even the sensitive way Haider uses his body when dancing is cause for concern in an environment where masculinity is harshly policed.“It was important that we were making it in Pakistan because its patriarchal society demands certain roles from every one of its members, men included,” Junejo said.In turn, Farooq believes that one of the most remarkable outcomes of the film’s toilsome journey in Pakistan are the conversations that both detractors as well as defenders are having about the purpose of art in general and of filmmaking in particular.“Pakistani viewers who had for long been turned into passive consumers of TV or film were all of a sudden actively talking about the role of art in their lives,” Farooq said. “It’s not the job of films to placate you. Films can talk about things that are uncomfortable.”Months after the film’s partial theatrical release, heated online discussions over “Joyland” continue, especially when anyone of note in Pakistan publicly comments on it.For his part, Sadiq holds on to the film’s hard-fought victories in the face of the restrictions.Embattled as his work might be in the place of his birth, the director finds invigorating encouragement in learning that other people, in Pakistan and elsewhere, have embraced it.“Once the film was finished, I understood I had initially done it out of selfish reasons,” he said. “But now it means something to others, and it means something to the world even if in a small way, so I need to do right by it and push for it to be seen.” More

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      In 1993 ‘Super Mario Bros.’ Bombed; in 2023, It’s a Hit With a New Generation

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      A critical and commercial disaster in its day, the video-game adaptation was trashed even by its star, Bob Hoskins. But a reappraisal is underway.The new animated film “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” recreates the sunny spirit, effervescent action and confectionary aesthetic of the namesake video games, with the voices of Chris Pratt as Mario, Charlie Day as Luigi, Jack Black as Bowser, and Anya Taylor-Joy as Princess Peach. Expect periwinkle skies, green warp pipes and squeaky-voiced, mushroom-headed characters.The mustachioed Nintendo mascot has been on the big screen before — even though some of the people involved would prefer to forget about it.Way back in 1993, the popularity of Super Mario led to Hollywood’s first big-budget video game adaptation. The live-action “Super Mario Bros.” starred Bob Hoskins as Mario and John Leguizamo as Luigi, two down-on-their-luck plumber brothers picking up odd jobs in Brooklyn. Largely shot in an abandoned cement factory in North Carolina, the movie was mostly set not in the hyper-colored Mushroom Kingdom, but in a grody, dystopian alternate version of New York called Dinohattan, ruled over by the maniacal dictator King Koopa (Dennis Hopper). Sticky, elastic fungus plays a key role in the plot. It looked and felt nothing like the video games.To Rocky Morton, who directed the movie with Annabel Jankel, that was the point. Morton and Jankel were British music video filmmakers who also had been behind the creation of the pseudo-computer-generated TV show host Max Headroom. Morton and Jankel’s agent had sent them a Mario Bros. movie script by the “Rain Man” co-writer Barry Morrow. Dismissing that screenplay as too cute, Morton pitched another idea: a darker, grittier Mario Bros. origin story.“It felt like such a great opportunity,” Morton said in a recent phone interview, of turning the video game phenomenon into a movie. “It seemed like the obvious thing to do. And it would have a built-in audience. It was made in heaven.”The result was a critical and commercial disaster. Roger Ebert declared it “a complete waste of time and money.” (Though Gene Siskel allowed, “I like the Goombas,” referring to Koopa’s oversized henchmen.) Several of the actors spoke disparagingly about the production, with Hoskins calling the shoot a “nightmare.” It was game over for any sequel, and for the Hollywood careers of its directors too.In more recent years, millennial Nintendophiles who were put off by the movie in 1993 — or, like me, simply avoided it — have given it another chance.Today, “Super Mario Bros.” has been the subject of something of a reappraisal, achieving a surprising cult status in the process. Its listing on the cinephile movie rating site Letterboxd is accompanied by a host of passionate, discerning reviews. “Super Mario Bros.” is “film-literate, daring, political, and unapologetically insane,” wrote the user Zeke Knott. While awaiting the coming fan-made documentary, “Trust the Fungus: Bob-Omb to Cult Classic,” fans can listen to a podcast dedicated to a minute-by-minute dissection of the movie, or visit the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Texas, which is holding an exhibition on it. This month, Nitehawk Cinemas in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, will screen “Super Mario Bros.” as part of Re-Consider This!, a series showcasing misunderstood masterpieces.The excessive artistic license taken with the adaptation is part of the fun of it, said Desmond Thorne, a film programmer at Nitehawk. “In an age when we’re inundated with video game and comic book adaptations that take a more literal approach, it’s refreshing to look back at ‘Super Mario Bros.’ 30 years later,” he said. “You have to admire the huge swings that it took.” For “huge swings,” see, for example, the scene in which Dennis Hopper takes a mud bath with Fiona Shaw.But even the most ardent fans will admit that “Super Mario Bros.” is kind of a mess. Morton said the problems began after Disney purchased the distribution rights, demanding an extensive rewrite of the screenplay — less effects-heavy, more family-friendly — that arrived 10 days before principal photography began. (Disney was unable to locate anyone involved in the production for comment.)But it’s a fantastic and inspired mess with densely artificial sets concocted by the “Blade Runner” production designer David L. Snyder; cartoonish costumes by Joseph Porro (who most recently worked on “The Mandalorian”); and a lunatic score by the composer Alan Silvestri. Elsewhere, Patrick Tatopoulos’s creature designs anticipate his work on “Independence Day.”“The film is such a kitchen sink in terms of inspiration and execution,” the superfan Ryan Hoss said. “Practical sets, makeup, costumes, pyrotechnics, prosthetics, animatronics and puppets. It has tone issues, and too many cooks in the kitchen, but you can point to any part of the story of ‘Super Mario Bros.’ and it’s fascinating to someone on some level.”In 2007, when Hoss was in college, he created the website Super Mario Bros. The Movie Archive. “I felt that the conversation around the film just wasn’t what it deserved,” he said. The site was “a place to get as much of the background and history of the film out in the open.”Since then, Hoss, along with the site’s editor in chief, Steven Applebaum, has tracked down alternate versions of the script, set photos, and props, and published numerous interviews with crew members. Most recently, they uncovered and restored an early work print of the film, creating an extended edition available to watch online.They’ve also held screenings and other events for like-minded fans. “It’s one of the most enthusiastic and positive fandoms I’ve ever seen,” Hoss said.He added, “The biggest surprise has been getting to know so many of the talented cast and crew that worked on the film. They’ve all said that ‘Super Mario Bros.’ was one of the most memorable films of their career.”Leguizamo has said he’s proud to have been involved in the film. “I’m O.G.,” he told IndieWire recently, also praising Jankel and Morton for their commitment to diverse casting. They “fought really hard for me to be the lead because I was a Latin man,” he said. “It was such a breakthrough.”Today, Morton looks back at the whole experience as one of utter humiliation. “It was horrible, just a really horrible experience.” (Jankel did not respond to an interview request and apparently has not participated in any stories about the making of the movie. “It really did affect her,” said Morton.)The re-evaluation of “Super Mario Bros.” is “heartening,” said Morton. And yet, the fact that the once-reviled movie is being celebrated and enjoyed — without irony — doesn’t seem to have sunk in for its director. The day after our interview, he agreed to attend a Hollywood screening of the movie, his first time seeing it in about 20 years. “They wanted me to introduce it but I can’t think of anything positive to say.”As for the new film, if all goes well, it might signal the launch of yet another movie franchise, the Nintendo Cinematic Universe. Which, Morton admitted, is probably what audiences expected 30 years ago. “That’s the film that everybody wanted,” he said. “And they’ve got it now.” More

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      ‘Showing Up’ Review: Making Art in All Its Everyday Glory

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      In their latest movie together, Michelle Williams and Kelly Reichardt paint a portrait of an artist who’s a real and wonderful piece of work.The stubbornly independent filmmaker Kelly Reichardt makes small-scale movies rooted in specific worlds, both inner and outer; nearly all take place in Oregon, where she’s long lived and worked. She traveled back in time for her last movie, “First Cow,” a moving chronicle of love, land and capitalism set in the Oregon Territory in the 19th century. Reichardt is back on more familiar ground in her latest, “Showing Up,” a wonderful slice of life that’s set in present-day Portland and is about something that she knows intimately: making art.The movies love tortured artists, inflamed geniuses who thunder against the establishment, aesthetic conventions, their historical epochs, God or just the nearest warm body. No one rages or slashes a canvas in “Showing Up,” though a few characters do raise their voices. At one point, its stubbornly independent hero, Lizzy — a sculptor played by a revelatory, notably de-glammed Michelle Williams — leaves an angry message on a colleague’s voice mail, an expletive-laced tirade that she ends with a comical bleat: “Have a great night.”It’s a gently funny and true moment in a gently funny and true movie that perfectly captures Lizzy’s complicated interiority. By the time she makes that call, you know a great deal about her. You know that she makes sculptures in her home studio and works at an art school, though what she does there remains unclear. What’s more crucial is that over the course of this delicate, detailed movie you become familiar with the petulantly downward slope of Lizzy’s mouth, the welcoming disorder of her apartment, the tender care that she takes with her art. You also know that she rarely smiles and scarcely ever says please or thank you.Written by Reichardt and Jon Raymond, “Showing Up” is a portrait of an individual but the film is universal in the sense that it’s about a woman living in the concrete here and now. Reichardt is interested in abstract ideas and everyday intangibles, but her filmmaking is precisely grounded in the material world, and so is Lizzy. If she has aesthetic principles, for instance, she doesn’t voice them. Reichardt, though, speaks volumes about art and the artistic process in this movie, which focuses on Lizzy as she prepares for a fast-approaching exhibit — a quietly fraught few days filled with painstaking creative labor as well as testy and comic interactions.When “Showing Up” opens, Lizzy is putting the finishing touches on the textured, small-scaled figurative sculptures that she molds from clay and then paints before having them fired in a kiln at the school. (The kiln operator is played by André Benjamin, making the charming most out of a modest role.) The figures are of women captured in well-defined poses, with some mounted with rods on wood bases. Several of these little women are erect, and others are recumbent; one stands on her head while a few look like they’ve been captured in mid-leap. A figurine with downcast eyes and a tiny, private smile looks a bit like Reichardt.As Lizzy works on her sculptures, their shape, details and distinct personalities emerge as do she and this wispy story. Things happen in Reichardt’s movies — minor, fleeting and profound things, just like in life. Story can seem both too grand and too impoverished a word to describe the personal, richly inhabited and realistic worlds she creates from faces and bodies, poses and gestures, rituals and habits, and her very specific grasp on time and place. But of course there’s always a story in how human beings navigate one another and sometimes try to bridge — and hide out in — that bristling, ineffable space between us.That space swells and contracts, by turns narrowing and expanding until it seems as vast and impassable as the Grand Canyon. Lizzy doesn’t make it easy to bridge; it’s instructive that she’s more openly affectionate with her cat than with her mother (Maryann Plunkett), who’s her boss at the school, or with her gruff father (a lovely Judd Hirsch). Yet while Lizzy works on her art in solitude (the cat comes and goes), she’s rarely alone for long, and the movie is filled with people, a vivid, eccentric and amusing collection that includes Jo (an essential Hong Chau), a vivacious artist who’s Lizzy’s landlord and the recipient of her angry phone call.Lizzy has reason to be irritated at Jo, who’s taking her time with fixing her broken water heater. But Jo is more than carelessly inattentive. A jolt of energy with a pickup truck and long, sweeping hair, Jo is sexy and popular, the very picture of the hip, hot artist and the apparent polar opposite of Lizzy, with her bob and frumpy look. Jo too is readying a new exhibit, but her gallery is bigger than Lizzy’s and her show more prestigious: It will have a catalog! The women get under each other’s skin, but like everyone else in Lizzy’s life — her family, her colleagues, the art students, her cat and a pigeon who swoops in and stays awhile — Jo sustains her.For Lizzy, making art is an act of self-creation, but it is also and always an act of communion, a way of being in the world and with other people. That makes “Showing Up” a somewhat reflexive self-portrait, one that owes much to Reichardt and Williams’s beautifully synced collaboration. This is the fourth movie that they’ve done together (their first was “Wendy and Lucy”), and it’s a joy to witness how perfectly aligned their work has become. Together, Reichardt and Williams — with little dialogue and boundless generosity — lucidly articulate everything that Lizzy will never say and need not say, opening a window on the world and turning this wondrous, determined, gloriously grumpy woman into a sublime work of art.Showing UpRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘On a Wing and a Prayer’ Review: Faith as Flight Insurance

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      A family receives impromptu flight lessons when their pilot dies in the middle of a chartered flight in this spiritually insincere action film.Doug White (Dennis Quaid) is a person whose happiness has grown from deep roots. He possesses a steady Christian faith. He has a warm and loving partnership with his wife, Terri (Heather Graham), and together, they are the proud parents of two teenage daughters. But when Doug’s beloved brother suddenly dies, Doug’s faith in a higher power is shaken. And his spiritual crisis is amplified when Doug charters a small plane to return from his brother’s funeral.The action-driven drama “On a Wing and a Prayer” is based on a true story of the ordeal that the White family faced when they entered the air in 2009. Their pilot suddenly died of a heart attack in the cockpit, leaving the severely inexperienced Doug to guide the plane to a safe landing. The movie follows Doug and his family as they work and pray to defy the odds stacked against their survival, with remote assistance from air traffic controller‌s and flight instructors.The director Sean McNamara includes plenty of computer-generated action, with the plane darting through storm clouds, and narrowly swerving away from the ground. The images portray a weightless crisis, and the film’s emotional narrative feels similarly insincere, with the balance of fate seeming to sway on the placement of a well-timed prayer. Doug and his family call upon their faith as a kind of invisible parachute, a deus ex machina that can always save them from harm. It’s a cynical view of faith, one which removes the mystery and terror from life’s unforeseen calamities, and instead frames survival as a matter of calling into the correct belief system.On a Wing and a PrayerRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      ‘What If? Ehud Barak on War and Peace’ Review: An Israeli Leader’s History

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      Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak discusses his career in power in this lifeless, often confusing documentary.In “What If? Ehud Barak on War and Peace,” the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak comments on the key military and diplomatic events that took place from his early years as an army commander through his tenure as head of state, from 1999 to 2001. Directed by Ran Tal, this lifeless documentary plays like a cable-TV special slapped together from one long interview with Barak, then fattened up with archival footage and bottom-shelf explanatory graphics.Those unfamiliar with the general beats of the Israel-Palestine conflict beware: This doc assumes you are, and it skips back and forth in time with little explanation. Barak is the film’s only talking head, so his insights into specific events, often presented with minimal context, are the movie’s primary focus. For instance, the war that broke out around Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948 is explained in terms of military strategy, with Barak recollecting conversations he had with leaders at the front lines during that time.Early on, Barak discusses his childhood years living in a kibbutz; his Zionist upbringing; and, toward the end, the 2000 Camp David Summit, where he tried and failed to negotiate a peace plan with Palestine.Barak is a divisive figure, tough on matters of national security and ultimately forced to resign from office after the Camp David talks led to the breakdown of his government. (Since then, Barak has held multiple government positions and has challenged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he has long criticized.)The latter part of the movie’s title is a reference to Tolstoy, who rejected the idea that exceptional individuals determine the outcomes of history and empathized with leaders who took action when confronted with impossible decisions. Sure. Though even if Barak’s scattered play-by-play reminds us of this truism, it fails to demystify the man and his legacy.What If? Ehud Barak on War and PeaceNot rated. In Hebrew, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Ride On’ Review: Jackie Chan, Back on the Horse

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      Chan, playing a former stuntman, has a few good trademark fight scenes, but the film is too busy stuffing sentimental elements into its lowbrow comedy premise.One doesn’t necessarily expect much going into a slapstick stunt animal comedy, and yet even by these softened standards, the director Larry Yang’s “Ride On” cooks up an egregiously, almost comically bad movie. Starring Jackie Chan as Luo, a washed-up former stuntman who trains his horse, Red Hare, to become his partner, this film from China is a consistently awkward, over-the-top mess, attempting to infuse a cheaply written, sentimental father-daughter (and father-horse) story into its lowbrow laughs.After being out of work for years, Luo catches a lucky break that leads him back into the movie business, with Red Hare by his side. Yet, amid his newfound success, Luo finds himself in a legal battle over ownership of Red Hare, forcing him to go to his estranged daughter for help.As the two slowly reconcile their strained relationship, seemingly every other scene is populated by a new tear-jerker back story or moment of triumph, signaled by a maudlin score that relentlessly hammers away at the viewer. The film is so graceless and bizarre in its attempts at tugging at the viewer’s emotions that it often feels like a work of parody.Chan has a few trademark fight scenes, as a gang keeps chasing him down for money owed, though it’s clear that the 68-year-old actor naturally doesn’t bear the same kind of comic physicality he once did. In a way, one could see the film as both a potential tribute to his remarkable and decades-long career doing real, often dangerous stunt work and a consideration of his sunset years as a performer. But that hope is quickly buried underneath a cynical film that has nothing to offer by way of charisma, comedy or the like, outside of Chan’s name itself.Ride OnNot rated. In Chinese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More