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      ‘Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical’ Review: Youth in Revolt

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      This musical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel is a jolt of sour candy guaranteed to make you grin.Bitterness never tasted so sweet as it does in “Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical,” a jolt of sour candy guaranteed to make you grin. Roald Dahl was 72 when he published his tale of a telekinetic girl genius avenging herself upon on a school headmaster who shot-puts kids out of the classroom window. The novel was Dahl’s righteous payback for his own British boarding school education where the instructors freely beat the students and slipped slivers of soap into boys’ mouths at night if they snored.His writing forever burned with a youthful sense of injustice, and among the many smart decisions the director Matthew Warchus and the writer Dennis Kelly have made in adapting “Matilda” for the stage, and now screen, is reimagining their title character, played with empathetic ferocity by Alisha Weir, as a bit of a proto-Dahl herself, a bright child bursting with stories that take aim at the adults who try to trod on her intelligence. When Weir, just 11 when she filmed the movie, narrows her blue eyes and sings, “Sometimes, you have to be a little bit naughty,” you believe she’s capable of conquering anyone who blocks her path.Matilda’s parents (Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough) are dimwits and cheats. Her school’s motto is “Bambinatum est magitum” — “Children are maggots” — and its headmistress, Agatha Trunchbull (a go-for-broke Emma Thompson), is the type of monster who gets introduced chin hair first, the camera then tiptoeing backward to gawk at her broken capillaries and drab olive dress, padded at the shoulders and bosom until she resembles a tank. “Discipline! Discipline! For children who aren’t listening!” Trunchbull croons into a bullhorn while forcing her charges through a muddy obstacle course littered with barbed wire and explosives. The only moments of cross-generational kindness come from one teacher (Lashana Lynch), who is too tremulous to stand up to her boss, and from a traveling librarian (Sindhu Vee), who allows Matilda to spin fictions instead of entrusting her with her fears.The songs, written by Tim Minchin, are marvelously witty, and Warchus directs them at a clip. The seven-time Tony nominee, who also serves as the artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London, is clearly overjoyed to be able to send his cinematographer, Tat Radcliffe, sprinting down school hallways in pursuit of his ensemble of skilled young actors as they skulk through Ellen Kane’s sharp-elbowed choreography, which seems influenced by movements as varied as zombie hordes and dressage.For a film that takes this much glee in cruelty — Matilda is called “a brat,” “a bore,” “a lousy little worm” and “a nasty, little troublemaking goblin” in her first three minutes onscreen — it also includes scenes of genuine loveliness: a hushed number set in a hot-air balloon above the clouds, a jazzy sequined show of support for a tortured fellow classmate, and even a soft focus fantasy sequence where Trunchbull imagines a better life for herself. The children disappear, a herd of white horses gallop into frame, and for one moment, our villain is no longer the tyke tyrant, but a woman who wishes she could let her hair down and smile.Roald Dahl’s Matilda the MusicalRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: Kennedy Center Honors and New Year’s Eve

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      This year’s Kennedy Center Honors ceremony airs on CBS. And various networks offer New Year’s Eve festivities.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Dec. 26-Jan. 1. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE YEAR: 2022 9 p.m. on ABC. For over a decade, ABC and its anchors have offered an annual retrospective look at the year’s biggest news stories. (Of course, whether a look back at the past year sounds like a gift or a nightmare is something viewers will have to decide for themselves.) The 2022 program includes segments on pickleball, Taylor Swift’s Ticketmaster saga and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.TuesdayHalle Berry, left, and Patrick Wilson in “Moonfall.”Reiner Bajo/LionsgateMOONFALL (2022) 9 p.m. on HBO. You know you’re in for a particular kind of movie when its trailer shows characters yelling “Hang on!” in three different scenes. And you know you’re in for the “hang on” kind of movie when it’s directed by Roland Emmerich (“Independence Day,” “The Day After Tomorrow”). Both things are true of “Moonfall,” a sci-fi disaster flick about two former astronauts (Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson) who join forces to save the planet after a geeky amateur researcher (John Bradley) discovers that the moon is heading for a collision with Earth. In a New York Times review, Ben Kenigsberg wrote that the movie’s off-planet element “flirts with the transcendently goofy,” but that “Emmerich spoils it by crosscutting to a useless narrative thread on Earth.”AMERICAN MASTERS: GROUCHO & CAVETT 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). “If Groucho never existed, we would sense a lack in the world of comedy, like the planet in the solar system that astronomers say ought to be there.” Those words, attributed to the TV host Dick Cavett, kick off this feature-length documentary, which looks at the friendship — and mentorship — between Cavett and the pioneering comic Groucho Marx. Through new interviews with Cavett and archival footage of Marx (who died in 1977), the documentary follows Marx and Cavett’s relationship from their first meeting, at the funeral of the playwright George S. Kaufman in 1961, until Marx’s death, and looks at how their friendship was a bridge between two generations of comedy.WednesdayTHE 45TH ANNUAL KENNEDY CENTER HONORS 8 p.m. on CBS. This year’s Kennedy Center Honors recognized a multigenre, multigenerational group of artists: the singer Gladys Knight; the actor and filmmaker George Clooney; the rock band U2; the singer-songwriter Amy Grant; and the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Tania León. The ceremony earlier this month, footage of which will debut on CBS on Wednesday, featured tributes to the honorees from an array of familiar faces, including Garth Brooks, Mickey Guyton, Ariana DeBose, Matt Damon, Sheryl Crow, Jason Moran, Alicia Hall Moran and Eddie Vedder.REAR WINDOW (1954) and THE WINDOW (1949) 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. on TCM. Here’s a novel midcentury-mystery pairing: Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” and “The Window,” a 1949 film noir directed by Ted Tetzlaff, who a few years earlier was the cinematographer on Hitchcock’s “Notorious.” These two movies also have somewhat similar setups. The classic “Rear Window” casts James Stewart as housebound photographer who believes there has been a murder at a neighboring home; “The Window” centers on a nine-year-old boy (Bobby Driscoll) who suspects the same.ThursdayREADY PLAYER ONE (2018) 11 p.m. on TBS. To see two wildly different sides of Steven Spielberg, consider pairing his semi-autobiographical period drama, “The Fabelmans” (now in theaters), with his sci-fi bonanza “Ready Player One,” a movie that manages to be nostalgic despite being set in 2045. That’s because its dystopian world uses late 20th- and early 21st-century pop culture as its building blocks. The story, adapted from Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel of the same name, centers on a young man (Tye Sheridan) searching for treasure left behind by a dead virtual-reality world-builder (Mark Rylance).FridayRosamund Pike and Ben Affleck in “Gone Girl.”Merrick Morton/20th Century FoxGONE GIRL (2014) 7:25 p.m. on HBO. The musicians Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, of the band Nine Inch Nails, composed the scores of two movies playing in theaters right now: Luca Guadagnino’s “Bones and All” and Sam Mendes’s “Empire of Light.” For an earlier example of their movie music, see this thriller from David Fincher, about a husband and wife (played by Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike) whose lives derail when the wife, Amy, goes missing, and the husband, Nick, becomes a suspect in her disappearance.A SOLDIER’S STORY (1984) 8 p.m. on TCM. The playwright Charles Fuller won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1982 for “A Soldier’s Play,” about an investigation into the murder of a Black Army sergeant on a segregated Louisiana military base in the 1940s. And he wrote the screenplay of this film adaptation, which was directed by Norman Jewison and scored by Herbie Hancock. Fuller died in October, which makes the end of the year a poignant time to revisit the film.SaturdayNew Year’s Eve decorations in Times Square earlier this month.Justin Lane/EPA, via ShutterstockNEW YEAR’S EVE SHOWS on various networks. How do you take your New Year’s Eve programming? With sugar? See MILEY’S NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY, hosted by Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton, at 10:30 p.m. on NBC. With extra twang? How about NEW YEAR’S EVE LIVE: NASHVILLE’S BIG BASH, hosted by the singers Jimmie Allen and Elle King and the anchor Rachel Smith, at 10:30 p.m. on CBS. With a Times Square neon glaze? Try DICK CLARK’S NEW YEAR’S ROCKIN’ EVE WITH RYAN SEACREST 2023 at 10:30 p.m. on ABC. For those without cable TV, or who just want to watch the New York ball drop with minimal fuss, there’s a free livestream of the Times Square scene at timessquarenyc.org.SundayDIONNE WARWICK: DON’T MAKE ME OVER (2023) 9 p.m. on CNN. This new documentary about the singer Dionne Warwick’s art and activism pairs archival materials with an impressive slate of interviewees that includes Quincy Jones, Gladys Knight, Olivia Newton-John, Smokey Robinson, Elton John, Snoop Dogg, Gloria Estefan and Alicia Keys. The doc picked up solid reviews when it opened at the Toronto International Film Festival last year; it makes its wider debut on Sunday. More

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      ‘Babylon’ and the Case of the Missing Bob Haircut

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      Margot Robbie’s 1920s silent-screen star wears her locks long and frizzy — and that’s by design, as the director Damien Chazelle and hairstylist explain.At the start of the epic “Babylon,” Margot Robbie’s character, a rising silent-film star named Nellie LaRoy, quite literally crashes into a Hollywood bigwig’s party — her car hits a statue — and then proceeds to take over the dance floor, her voluminous hair whipping back and forth as she headbangs to a jazz score. In a sea of the kind of bobbed hairstyles usually associated with the 1920s, Nellie’s long frizzy mane stands out as Robbie wields it almost like another appendage.The hairstylist Jaime Leigh McIntosh was terrified. “I will be honest, it was freaking me out,” she said in a recent interview via video. “I was just like, I’m going to be stoned in the village square. My fellow hair stylists are going to be like, ‘That’s not period correct.’”But McIntosh and the film’s writer-director, Damien Chazelle, also made sure that as anomalous and modern as Nellie’s hair might seem for the 1920s, there was historical precedent for it. What results is a look that evokes both Clara Bow and Janis Joplin with a bit of the Bible’s Samson thrown in. “I wanted it to be like someone just took her from the woods,” Chazelle said.The wild Nellie symbolizes the ethos of the sprawling movie, which takes the classic narrative of a starry-eyed ingénue and adds a layer of excess and scatological humor. Chazelle was intent on creating a portrait of the 1920s that didn’t look like the one audiences knew from, say, “Great Gatsby” adaptations. “He was just like, ‘There’s got to be another ’20s out there,’” McIntosh recalled. “‘We just keep kind of regurgitating the same looks and the same fashion, and there must have been other things happening.’”In the months before shooting began, she and Chazelle sent reference photos back and forth. He gave her a list of films and documentaries to watch, but the production team was also on a hunt for images of people not filtered through a movie lens. She and the makeup artist Heba Thorisdottir leafed through the book “Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots” for examples of what unvarnished people of the era might look like. Chazelle in particular was drawn to images from portrait studios. “Like Man Ray portraits, but less famous than that,” he said.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.“There’s only so much of what you would call documentary photography, candid camera stuff, but there’s a lot of really out-there, wild, transgressive studio photography that wound up inspiring a lot of the costumes, too, where people would put on crazy, crazy stuff that even the pre-Code movies of the time would never allow you to put on,” Chazelle said, referring to the Hays Code, which imposed morality restrictions on film starting in the 1930s. It was not just the hairstyles that caught his eye, he added, but also the “risqué-ness that was accepted in the wardrobe both of men and women at the time.”Anything that bucked conventional wisdom about the time sparked inspiration. McIntosh cited footage she found of women at a long hair competition and an image of Miss Philadelphia 1924, her hair a mess of frizz around her face before falling into long ringlets. Chazelle looked to the silent film star Clara Bow — “Margot and I both loved just how bird’s nest-y Clara Bow’s hair could get,” he said — but also the less well known Lili Damita, who sometimes appeared with a big curly mop. “I just kept coming back to photos I would find of women of the time with long hair, with wild long hair,” Chazelle said. “I just couldn’t get over those photos because of how un-1920s they felt. They felt so counter to expectations.”As Chazelle and McIntosh found — and as Rachael Gibson, who bills herself as the Hair Historian — confirmed, it was a misconception to think that all women in the 1920s wore their hair short. “We just kind of think, ‘Oh everyone had this hair,’” Gibson said. “But that’s not the reality.”Still, the images Gibson has seen of Nellie struck her as incongruous. (At the time of the interview, she had not yet seen the movie.) “It’s not superlong and it’s kind of got this natural wave to it, and it’s really unlike anything else that we associate with that era,” she said.That too was the point. One of the words Chazelle kept using, McIntosh said, was “timeless.” As he identified Nellie’s historical counterparts, Chazelle also kept in mind “spirits” he wanted her to evoke. Those included the musicians Joplin and Courtney Love and the actresses Jean Harlow and Julie Christie. Chazelle felt Nellie needed to “always have a foot in a different era as though she sort of came from the future,” and used ’80s punk culture as a reference, too.To determine the specific length and style, McIntosh and Chazelle went through multiple rounds of tests, putting Robbie in various wigs to see not just how they looked but eventually how they moved as she walked and danced. “I never expected it to be as complicated as it wound up being,” Chazelle said. “We locked it down right in the nick of time.”Once they settled on her long locks, Robert Pickens built a wig that could both withstand Nellie’s thrashing and convey the “grittiness” of the era. Without air conditioning, Pickens said, “people are sweating. To communicate all that through hair we went with a really fine texture.”Going into filming, McIntosh was still nervous. It wasn’t until she saw Robbie shoot the opening dance number that she suddenly realized, “‘It all makes complete sense. This is genius.’ It took me a while. I was a little stubborn but I got there.”Later in the film, Nellie’s hair is cut into a more recognizably period finger-wave bob as she tries to rehabilitate her flailing career by fitting in with high society. It looks awkward. Her power has been sapped from her, almost like Samson’s when his hair was cut.“I was just like, ‘Oh, my God, what have we done to her?’” McIntosh said. “Which is so funny because normally you’d be like, ‘Oh, wow, look at this beautiful finger wave,’ but because it was on Nellie it was so wrong.” More

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      How Angela Lansbury and Stephen Sondheim Came to Appear in ‘Glass Onion’

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      A fan of musical theater, Rian Johnson had long hoped to land the two stars. But he was already in the editing phase when they agreed to take part.When “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” isn’t setting up its actors to look like the possible perpetrators of a devious crime, the comic caper is reveling in its star-studded ensemble.There are of course the A-listers who populate the principal cast, including Daniel Craig, Janelle Monaé, Edward Norton and others. And there are the fleeting, unheralded appearances from famous faces like Ethan Hawke, Serena Williams and Yo-Yo Ma that function as rapid-fire visual gags.But a couple of these cameos now carry an unexpected poignancy. In the prologue of the film, which was released on Netflix on Friday, the sleuth Benoit Blanc (Craig) is in a melancholic funk, looking for ways to keep his brain engaged at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.We see Blanc relaxing in his bathtub, playing the multiplayer video game Among Us with a squad of online celebrities that includes Natasha Lyonne and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.The other two members of Blanc’s eclectic gaming group are Stephen Sondheim, the renowned composer of musicals like “Company,” “Into the Woods” and “A Little Night Music,” and Angela Lansbury, the decorated stage and screen actor from “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “Murder, She Wrote.”Both stars have died since work was completed on “Glass Onion” — Sondheim in November 2021 at age 91 and Lansbury this past October at age 96 — and the film may well be the final screen appearance for each of them.It’s a bittersweet occasion for their fans, a group that includes Rian Johnson, the writer and director of “Glass Onion” and creator of the “Knives Out” series. As Johnson explained in a recent video interview, he wanted the Sondheim and Lansbury cameos to stand as tributes to two of his favorite artists — and to give him an excuse to interact with these cultural greats whose paths he might not otherwise have crossed.Remembering Stephen SondheimThe revered and influential composer-lyricist died Nov. 26, 2021. He was 91.Obituary: A titan of the American musical, Sondheim was the driving force behind some of Broadway’s most beloved shows.Final Interview: Days before he died, he sat down with The Times for his final major interview.His Legacy: As a mentor, a letter writer and an audience regular, Sondheim nurtured generations of theater makers.New Books: The year since Sondheim’s death has seen an array of books offering further glimpses into his life. We look at some of them.Now, Johnson said, his experience in securing the involvement of his personal heroes has taught him never to take such opportunities for granted. “One thing I’ve learned is that every moment you get with somebody that you respect, savor that time,” he said, “and put yourself in that situation as often as possible.”While Johnson’s affection for Sondheim may not be immediately evident from his résumé — the filmmaker’s credits include “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” and the time-travel thriller “Looper” — Johnson grew up a fan of musical theater, and included a shout-out to Sondheim in the original “Knives Out”: a scene of Craig lost in thought as he sings along with “Losing My Mind,” from the Sondheim musical “Follies.”Sondheim was also a lover of wordplay, games and crossword puzzles, and he enjoyed orchestrating murder-mystery parties with his friend Anthony Perkins. He and Perkins wrote the screenplay for the 1973 whodunit “The Last of Sheila,” which starred James Coburn, Dyan Cannon, Raquel Welch and Ian McShane, and which Johnson proudly cited as a source of inspiration for his “Knives Out” films.Sondheim’s ties to the mystery genre go deeper still: his only nonmusical Broadway production was the play “Getting Away With Murder,” which he wrote with George Furth and which ran for just over a month in 1996. In an interview with The New York Times that year, he recounted how Laurence Olivier had told him he’d used Sondheim as his model for the game-loving mystery author he played in the 1972 movie “Sleuth.” (In the same interview, Anthony Shaffer, the author of “Sleuth,” denied a longstanding rumor that he had originally titled it “Who’s Afraid of Stephen Sondheim?”)Through his love of Sondheim’s musicals, Johnson was introduced to Angela Lansbury, who played Mrs. Lovett in the original Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd,” as well as a filmed version that played frequently on Johnson’s television. That is, when Johnson wasn’t glued to “Murder, She Wrote,” the cozy CBS series that cast Lansbury as the crime-solving author Jessica Fletcher. For children of the 1980s, that show “was actually pretty pivotal in installing a love of whodunits and murder mysteries into all of our brains,” said Johnson, who also slipped a few seconds of a Spanish-dubbed “Murder, She Wrote” episode into the original “Knives Out.”Ram Bergman, Johnson’s producing partner, said that Sondheim’s and Lansbury’s cameos were recorded during the editing of “Glass Onion,” as he and Johnson tried to reach them, working every connection they had.In Sondheim’s case, Bergman said, “I wasn’t really sure how to get to him. But then I was on a call with Bryan Lourd, our agent, and it somehow came up. I said, we really would love Stephen to do this. And I swear, five minutes later, he emailed me: he’s going to do it.”Bergman added, “Rian was in heaven, and I was in heaven because I knew how much he meant for Rian.”Sondheim performed his contribution on a recorded Zoom call. In that conversation, Johnson said, “I mentioned to him that we were trying to get Angela Lansbury. And he said, ‘Oh, Angie — I’m friends with her. Tell her I’m doing it. She’ll do it.’”Later on, Johnson went to Lansbury’s home in Los Angeles and recorded her portion on his laptop computer.“She couldn’t have been lovelier and more generous,” Johnson said, adding that Lansbury was perfect for the scene in every way except one: “Not a gamer,” he explained. “And so she was very patient in letting me describe the rules of Among Us, up to a point. At which point she just said, ‘You know what? Just tell me what the lines are. I’ll trust you.’”Those were Johnson’s only interactions with Sondheim and Lansbury before they died. In each of his conversations, Johnson said, he wasn’t ashamed of sharing his admiration for them.“I allowed myself to have that little awkward moment of saying to them what I’m sure every person who meets them says,” he said. “But still, it felt really nice to tell them that I wouldn’t be here doing this if it weren’t for them.”Getting to pay this kind of posthumous homage to his idols is a bittersweet distinction, Johnson said: “It’s sad, because as a fan, I wish they were still around and making stuff,” he said. “I hope they would have enjoyed the little scene and gotten a laugh out of it.”Natasha Lyonne did not get to interact directly with Lansbury or Sondheim but is no less proud to be part of it.Asked what it was like to have played even a minor role in their curtain calls, Lyonne replied in the arch spirit of a “Knives Out” movie: “Honey, I know what you’re getting at and it wasn’t me,” she said. “I have alibis for both.”Then, with more sincerity, she continued, “It goes without saying that they were giant losses of two incredible lives well lived. I guess we’ll only know if I make it to 90, if I was actually worthy of being up there with them.” More

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      A Guide to the ‘Babylon’ Cast and Their Real-Life Counterparts

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      The Damien Chazelle epic is set in 1920s Hollywood and draws on figures from that time, including “the ‘It’ Girl,” Clara Bow.Crossing “Singin’ in the Rain” with “Boogie Nights,” Damien Chazelle’s fictional “Babylon” draws on just enough real film history to flatter cinephiles and to risk their ire. Here are some of the underpinnings of Chazelle’s three-hour opus.Clara BowWhen you hear that a movie star has “it” — whatever that means — you can thank Brooklyn’s own Clara Bow, advertised as “the ‘It’ Girl” for, well, “It,” a smash 1927 adaptation of a novel by Elinor Glyn. Chazelle told The New York Times in November that much of Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), the live wire who shoots to stardom in “Babylon” only to flame out in the sound era, was inspired by Bow. David Stenn’s well-regarded biography “Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild” suggests many similarities: Bow’s humble origins were a source of insecurity. She was said to be unusually good at crying on command. Doctors thought her mother, who died just as Bow was getting her start, suffered from a nervous disorder (which was in fact epilepsy). And her exploitative father took it upon himself to be her business manager.Douglas Fairbanks, John Gilbert and Rudolph ValentinoBrad Pitt has said he modeled his character, Jack Conrad, on Fairbanks, Gilbert and Valentino. Valentino exists in “Babylon” (his death in 1926 is mentioned), and unlike Jack, who sometimes pretends to be Italian, Valentino was born in Italy. Fairbanks and Gilbert are commonly cited as great silent leading men whose popularity petered out with sound, but there are sound movies in which they appear perfectly comfortable. (When Gilbert played opposite Greta Garbo in “Queen Christina” in 1933, the New York Times critic Mordaunt Hall praised him as “far more restrained” than in silents.) Both men died young, although their fates differed from Jack’s.Anna May WongThere’s no mistaking the inspiration for Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li). It’s Anna May Wong, the groundbreaking Asian American actress and daughter of a laundryman who for a time moved to Europe, though a little earlier than Fay does. The film groups Wong, who, like Fay, was rumored to be a lesbian, with casualties of the advent of sound. Wong’s best-known movie from Europe — the extravagant, London-set “Piccadilly” (1929) — was silent. By 1932, Wong was back in Hollywood appearing in Josef von Sternberg’s “Shanghai Express” with Marlene Dietrich.But Wong did lose work because her image didn’t fit with the times, as “Babylon” suggests, understating the role that racism played. Often typecast in supporting roles, Wong was considered a possibility for the lead in “The Good Earth” (1937), but there were concerns that casting her opposite the white actor Paul Muni would suggest miscegenation. The film was one of the last made by the producer Irving Thalberg (Max Minghella), one of a handful of figures in “Babylon” to use real names.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.The Transition to Sound“Babylon” alludes to the piecemeal nature of the transition to sound. Informed that the new Al Jolson sound picture at Warner Bros. is going to be big, Jack asks if it’s “like ‘Don Juan’”— a 1926 film that had synchronized music but no talking. In fact, the Jolson film is “The Jazz Singer” (1927), which, contrary to its popular reputation, was not the first sound film or even a full-fledged sound film. (Long stretches are silent.) But it was financially successful enough to indicate that talkies had a future.Bow in “The Wild Party,” an inspiration for a fictional film in “Babylon.”via The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills ArchiveClara Bow and Sound“The Dame and the Dean,” Nellie’s first sound film in “Babylon,” directed by Ruth Adler (Olivia Hamilton), is quite clearly inspired by Bow’s first sound film, “The Wild Party” (1929), directed by Dorothy Arzner. Nellie’s problems with sound begin with her entrance, when she declares, “Hello, college!,” and a technician cries that “she blew the valves.” A similar anecdote appears in Kenneth Anger’s dubious book “Hollywood Babylon.” Nevertheless, the movie fairly captures the restrictions of the early sound era, like the need to encase the noise-making camera in a booth.Though Nellie’s Jersey-accented tones are likened to a dying pig’s, Bow’s Brooklyn delivery played well enough. “Miss Bow’s voice is better than the narrative,” Hall wrote of “The Wild Party” in 1929. Seen today, it is a fun romp with an undercurrent of seriousness, and Bow is the best thing in it.Kenneth Anger’s ‘Hollywood Babylon’In 1959, the experimental filmmaker Anger (“Fireworks”) published “Hollywood Babylon,” which cataloged, with a tongue-clucking tone, the supposed details of deaths, drug habits and sex lives of members of the movie industry. Serious film historians regard it as pernicious nonsense and have been trying to correct its claims ever since.While Anger’s “Babylon” is not the official source for Chazelle’s “Babylon,” the connection is tough to ignore. When Nellie is trailed by University of Southern California football players after beating them at craps, the scene evokes Anger’s assertion that Bow played “party girl” to the entire U.S.C. football team “during beery, brawly, gangbanging weekend parties.” (Nellie’s overalls-and-nothing-else outfit, on the other hand, resembles a widely circulated photo of Bow’s contemporary Bessie Love.)In his biography, Stenn traces the rumor to Bow’s true-enough habit of hosting the U.S.C. Trojans on Saturday nights at her Beverly Hills bungalow. But Stenn, who interviewed players, concluded that “even the wildest party, which ended in a 4 a.m. game of touch football on Clara’s front lawn, was tame.”‘Singin’ in the Rain’Throughout “Babylon,” Chazelle nods to “Singin’ in the Rain,” which memorialized the transition to sound from the standpoint of 1952. But in “Babylon,” you’ll hear the song “Singin’ in the Rain” in a scene that takes place decades earlier: Chazelle shows the shooting of “The Hollywood Revue of 1929,” a characteristically stiff, celebrity-packed musical that featured Gilbert. The song is staged twice in “Hollywood Revue,” and Chazelle re-creates the reprise — the film’s Technicolor finale, in which cast members bob along to the tune on rock-shaped risers in front of a Noah’s Ark set. In “Babylon,” Jack is among them.Black Jazz GreatsDuring the “Singin’ in the Rain” shoot, the trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) tells the rising studio executive Manny Torres (Diego Calva) that the camera is pointed in the wrong direction. Soon Sidney and his band are starring in films, until he quits after being asked to don blackface to darken his skin.Chazelle took inspiration from Black musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, who appeared onscreen in the early sound era. And like Sidney, Armstrong and Ellington contended with degrading scenes. In “A Rhapsody in Black and Blue” (1932), Armstrong performed two numbers “dressed as an African savage in a sparsely cut leopard skin,” Thomas Brothers writes in “Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism.” In “Check and Double Check” (1930), a film version of the “Amos ’n’ Andy” radio show, lighter-skinned members of Ellington’s band “were ordered by the studio to wear dark makeup for a ballroom scene, a stipulation that was covered as news by the Black papers,” according to Terry Teachout’s biography “Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington.”Latino Success in 1920s HollywoodChazelle has cited multiple models for Manny, who eventually becomes an influential player in the early sound era. Those semi-analogues include René Cardona, a Cuban-born director with more than 100 credits, and the cinematographer Enrique Juan Vallejo. But his most interesting choice of model may be Joselito and Roberto Rodríguez, Mexican brothers who went to Hollywood and developed a sound recording system. Manny gets invited to become a studio’s head of sound, and like Joselito, he is an electronics expert. More

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      Zoey Deutch Enjoys ‘The Joy of Cooking’ and the Occasional Tracksuit

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      The actor, now in the movie “Something From Tiffany’s,” thrives on regular readings of “Our Town,” discussions of “Sapiens” and whiffs of her dog’s paws.Zoey Deutch wanted to be honest. “Rarely am I drawn to super joyful material,” she said. “I have, at least in the last couple of years, been interested in darker, tonally strange pieces.”An influencer who fakes surviving a terrorist attack in “Not Okay.” An F.B.I. informant in “The Outfit.”But four years ago, she recalled, Reese Witherspoon tweeted that she’d seen and loved Deutch in “Set It Up,” about a couple of overworked assistants who try to create some breathing room by getting their bosses together.The two women started talking, which resulted in Melissa Hill’s novel “Something From Tiffany’s” being sent to Deutch. That led to their collaboration on the Amazon Prime Video adaptation (Witherspoon as a producer, Deutch as the star and an executive producer) about mixed-up Tiffany’s bags, a zingy New York baker (Deutch) stunned by an engagement ring from the boyfriend she’s not sure about, and a captivating widower (Kendrick Sampson) whose proposal is sabotaged when his girlfriend opens her own blue box — and the ring isn’t there.Rarely has so much bread been consumed onscreen in pursuit of diamonds and love.“So now we get to share our great, feel-good romantic movie,” Deutch said, not sounding remotely dark on a video call from her home in Los Angeles, before elaborating on the deliciousness of her dog’s paws, the significance of her grandmother’s paintings and the lessons to be found in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.1. “The Book of Symbols” It was brought into my life by my Alexander technique teacher many years ago when I was preparing for a movie. One of the reasons he gave it to me is because when we’re working on a new character or a new project, we like to pick animals and colors and symbols and create a visual board for the character. This became sort of a guiding light. I have a million copies downstairs because I always give them to people.2. Farmers’ Markets I went to an acupuncturist once who said something that stuck with me: that it’s so important, especially in this day and age when we get our groceries sent to our house, to go to the grocery store or to the farmers’ market and look at the food, because we are going further and further and further away from our instincts. And we have great instincts about what our bodies need if we listen to them. The more I started to grow and pick out my own food, the more I realized that things looked good to me not just because they were necessarily pretty, but because my body was craving them and needed those specific nutrients.3. My Dog’s Paws You know that specific smell of dogs’ paws when they’re asleep? They smell like corn chips, like Fritos. It’s actually a thing. They have some sort of bacteria in their paws and the odor smells similar to corn chips and it’s released when they’re asleep.4. “The Joy of Cooking” The basics in there are really fantastic. I put my own spin on things, but I always go back to that roast chicken recipe with just butter and salt.5. Grandma’s Paintings My grandma was an amazing, prolific artist and a spiritual, eccentric woman. She has inspired me in every way, and I carry her with me always. Specifically, I carry with me a painting I have above my fireplace that I designed my whole house around. She painted a lot of abstract stuff, but oddly this one is a naked woman on a red background. It feels right to be able to see her work every day.6. “Our Town” I prefer reading plays to books or scripts. It’s very soothing for me. I read “Our Town” for the first time when I was 14 or 15, and I’ve read it every two years since. It’s just a heartbreaking, beautiful story that gets me every time. It’s about how little we appreciate the simple joys of life and don’t understand the value of life while we’re living it.7. Ceramics My love of ceramics began with my great-grandmother, who had a small box of Atomic Starburst, a dinnerware that’s kind of famous. I saw that in my mom’s garage and I loved them. Then I started collecting them and now I have a whole set. I think the hunt is very fun, with that one specifically, because I know exactly what I’m looking for. And I have started collecting ceramics in Ischia, in Ravello, in Oaxaca.8. “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari The way he explains things works for my brain. It’s like the intersection between natural sciences and social sciences. It’s very stimulating. It’s also very fun to discuss — dinner-table conversations that are very, like, “Whoa, I never thought about it that way.”9. Matching Tracksuits As a little girl I had aspirations of both being an actress and a fashion designer. So it sounds a little counterintuitive to say I love matching tracksuits, which are essentially just pajamas that you wear out. But after spending half of my life in fittings for jobs or events or whatever, the last thing I want to do is try on clothes. I just want to be comfortable.10. Adventure My parents worked so hard when we were growing up and didn’t really take a lot of time for themselves. And what happened as a result is I became obsessed with traveling and planning and doing things and enjoying the fruits of my labor and experiencing the world and having a really full life. It’s hard not to feel guilty because I have the part of my brain that’s like, “Work all the time.” And then I have to go to the other part of my brain, which is, “Enjoy your life.” I’m trying to reframe my American mind-set of live to work, not work to live. In the spirit of “Our Town,” you never know how good it is until it’s gone. More

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      How Well Do You Know Your Holiday Movies?

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      Between a murderous Santa wielding a sledgehammer and an elf throwing a rave in a corporate mailroom, Christmas movies seem to get more outlandish every year. How well do you know your festive films?
      Image credits: Hallmark Channel (“A Royal Corgi Christmas”); Bettmann/Getty Images (Queen Elizabeth II); Michael Reynolds/EPA, via Shutterstock (the Bidens); Pool photo by Jonathan Buckmaster (Muick and Sandy mourning the Queen’s death); Netflix (“The Princess Switch”); Universal Pictures (“Violent Night”); Hallmark Movies & Mysteries (“Christmas in Montana”); Hulu (“Happiest Season”); Netflix (“Falling for Christmas”); Paramount Pictures (“Mean Girls”); Disney (“The Parent Trap”); Paramount Pictures (“Once Upon a Christmas”); Disney (“Noelle”); Hallmark Channel (“Hanukkah on Rye”); Universal Pictures (“Last Christmas”).
      Produced by Tala Safie and Josephine Sedgwick. More